Making its Canadian debut, the 2014 Acura MDX Prototype evokes strength and excitement and once again raises the bar in the luxury SUV category it created. Utilizing "Aero Sculpture" design language impacting form and function, the 2014 MDX Prototype features alluring proportions with smooth, arching body lines matched to an efficient architecture. The new MDX will feature a new direct-injected 3.5 litre V-6 engine that will deliver improved torque and expected class-leading fuel economy.
"Since its introduction, and with every new generation, the MDX has redefined what an SUV can be," said Jerry Chenkin, executive vice president, Acura Canada. "In true Acura fashion, this next model will take the current MDX's inspired performance and move the needle further by improving fuel economy, luxury and comfort. It's a very exciting time for the Acura brand and we're looking forward to continuing the momentum from 2012 into 2013."
Also making its first Canadian appearance was the all-new 2014 Acura RLX - the most powerful, spacious, and technologically-advanced Acura sedan ever. Utilizing an all-new direct-injection engine, lightweight body structure and the first-ever application of Acura Precision All-Wheel Steer, the 2014 RLX delivers a new and dynamic driving experience unlike that of any other luxury performance sedan. Inside, the RLX also features the Canadian introduction of the AcuraLink connectivity system, which delivers a wealth of communication and entertainment features.
The "Aero Sculpture" styling of the 2014 MDX Prototype pursues the direction of a strong, bold, and premium appearance with low, wide and sleek proportions; clean, efficient and uncluttered design; and elegant, premium detailing, including the next-generation Acura grille design and signature Acura Jewel Eye LED headlights. This "aero" image also reflects significant gains in aerodynamic efficiency, up 16 percent compared to the outgoing 2013 MDX, achieved through extensive testing in Honda R&D Americas' new wind-tunnel laboratory in Raymond, Ohio - where the vehicle is being created.
The 2014 MDX Prototype's sculpted exterior and arcing roofline (35 mm lower than the outgoing model) encase what will be an even more spacious and versatile cabin compared to the outgoing 2013 MDX. The 2014 MDX Prototype features a longer wheelbase that enhances ride quality, increases second-row legroom, and improves third-row seat access.
The 2014 MDX will also feature an all-new, more rigid and lightweight chassis, including new front and rear suspension designs that deliver a more refined, confidence-inspiring, and sporty driving character. An all-new, direct injected 3.5-litre i-VTEC SOHC V-6 powerplant with Variable Cylinder Management (VCM) provides more spirited performance while realizing a significant increase in fuel economy to class-leading levels. Special attention was also paid to improving cabin quietness, which is greatly enhanced by the vehicle's all-new chassis and body design and new sound-deadening techniques.
The RLX interior features premium, soft touch materials throughout, with the tasteful application of premium metal and wood-grain accents. A stitched leather instrument panel, centre console and steering wheel, along with available Milano perforated leather seats, communicate a new level of craftsmanship and refined luxury appeal in Acura's top-of-the-line sedan.
Luxury form and function are intelligently integrated in the RLX's new centre console, featuring dual screens - an 8-inch navigation screen and a 7-inch On-Demand Multi-Use Display touch screen - that provide easy and direct one-touch access to key functions, including audio, climate control, navigation, and text-to-voice SMS text message functionality. The sliding, leather-trimmed armrest conceals a dual-hinged centre storage compartment with easy access for both the driver and front passenger to USB connectivity, 12-volt accessory power outlet and space to store tablets and other electronic devices.
Santa Fe County’s only public access to the Rio Grande would undergo environmental restoration and get improved facilities if a proposed project gets the green light from federal officials this spring.
A pair of nonprofits called the New Mexico Wildlife Federation and Rio Grande Return already have spent about $200,000 of private and public money on plans for what it calls the Rio Grande Corridor at Buckman.
The aim, said project manager Alan Hamilton, is to help the local community re-establish its connection to the river on land that is already in the hands of the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
“Let’s ensure that the place is cleaned up and make it a place where people can go and learn about the geology and the hydrology and the history and the culture and the environment,” Hamilton said. “This river is the lifeblood of this state.”
Another main goal of the project, he said, is to cut down on litter from visitors who use the area as a party spot. Early meetings about the proposal revealed that some people don’t visit the area because of its reputation for beer drinking and gun shooting. A volunteer cleanup this fall of a small area yielded 2.5 tons of garbage, most of it broken bottles and discarded tires.
“We want to give it some love and make it look like it’s being taken care of,” Hamilton said. “We’d like to discourage irresponsible kinds of users.”
Planned amenities are intended to help hikers, rafters, rock climbers, horseback riders and others who want to enjoy the natural world with minimal impact.
At Diablo Canyon, plans call for designated camping areas and a gravel parking lot to replace a sandy network of places where motorized vehicles have torn up the landscape near the mouth of the canyon. A kiosk for trail maps and other information would be constructed. Restoration in the canyon itself would include removing invasive species from near natural springs there, and rearranging boulders to provide erosion control and to protect the canyon from all-terrain vehicles.
At the area near the Buckman Direct Diversion intake for Santa Fe’s community water system, access roads would end at another gravel parking lot, and a boat launch would be installed. About 18 acres of riparian bosque area would see habitat restoration, including planting of native cottonwood trees and willows, and removal of salt cedars, elms and Russian olives.
In addition to restoring land it would lease from the federal agencies, the New Mexico Wildlife Federation also would complete restoration around the diversion site, which was required when officials granted the city and county permission to build the facilities for drawing and treating surface water from the river.
Rick Carpenter, who serves as the city project manager for the $250 million Buckman water supply pipeline and treatment plant, said the restoration partnership is good because it creates a larger area that will get environmental improvements. Another reason to support the effort is to cut down on illegal activities, he said, noting that the water project board hired private security guards to patrol the area near the diversion.
Federal officials gave environmental clearance for the restoration and amenities last year, but just before the end of an appeal period for the final approval, a group called Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety objected.
The appeal centers on two issues: whether sediment containing nuclear waste will be disturbed during the project and jeopardize workers and future visitors, and whether herbicide proposed to control regrowth of invasive species should be used.
Materials the group circulated to publicize the appeal refer to the area as “Plutonium Park.” At a recent meeting of the Buckman Direct Diversion Board, several people asked local officials to intervene.
“There is nuclear bomb waste buried 3 to 6 feet deep within 8 acres upriver from the Buckman Direct Diversion within the recreation areas,” said Elena Sue St. Pierre. “We continue to ask that these facts be incorporated into the public information for construction workers, park staff safety and pregnant women and babies if this plan proceeds.”
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Silver Lake Hydro Project, a great winter hiking destination
On a late midwinter afternoon the 3,000 foot-plus peaks of the Green Mountain ridge above Lake Dunmore-Moosalamoo, Worth, Monastery, and Romance mountains-glow frosty-white against a pale pink sky. Golden sunlight slants through the stands of mature pines and hemlocks along the trail, contrasting dramatically with the blue sky light pouring down onto whipped-cream mounds of snow. To the left, the black waters of Sucker Brook plunge downhill between caps of snow and submerged boulders.
This is the Silver Lake Trail, which winds up the steep escarpment to Silver Lake in the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area.
The Silver Lake Trail parallels the scenic Falls of Lana, but this cascade was not named for someone's lost love. During the patriotic fervor that accompanied the Mexican War of 1848, the cascade was christened in tribute to General John E. Wool, a war hero of that conflict. ("Lana" means wool in Spanish-much more romantic than Sucker Brook!) The trail traces the 1878 carriage road that once brought fashionable guests to the religious retreat known as Silver Lake House-a self-sufficient compound that included a rambling, three-story building, boathouses, and 2,500 acres of fields, orchards, and woods.
Silver Lake House was the divinely-inspired dream of Frank Chandler, who envisioned uplifting camp meetings at Silver Lake, which he had inherited. Silver Lake House's glory days lasted into the 1920's, when financial woes and ill health forced Chandler to move into town. The unoccupied building burned to the ground in 1938, possibly during a Middlebury College fraternity hazing party. In 1949 Frank II deeded the hotel's lands to the Green Mountain National Forest.
All that remains of the hotel are a few half-buried foundation stones and the beach itself. Today, the site is free and open to the public for camping, swimming, canoeing, and picnicking, although it is closed to motorized vehicles below the parking area on Silver Lake Road off the Goshen-Ripton Road.
One hundred years ago, Silver Lake was at the heart of an ambitious hydroelectric project of the Hortonia Power Company. This homegrown system was an impressive feat of engineering at the time. The vertical elevation between a reservoir and the generating station is known as the "head" - the higher the head, the stronger the force of the water that drives the turbines at the bottom. At the time of the system's construction in 1916-1917, Silver Lake's 676-foot head was the highest one east of the Mississippi, and it is still the highest in Vermont.
Then, as now, a mile-long, 3-4' diameter tube called a penstock carried water to the tiny brick power station on the shore of Lake Dunmore. The Silver Lake Trail passes under the impressive, elevated penstock, which hums faintly, like a distant beehive. The tall water tower at Silver Lake absorbs temporary spikes or "burps" in water pressure due to seasonal fluctuations in stream flow. With another mountain stream, Dutton Brook, added more recently to the water supply, the expanded Silver Lake system draws from a watershed of 10 square miles.
Eventually needing to access more water, Hortonia began construction on the Goshen Dam, which bankrupted the little utility company in 1923. At that point Central Vermont Public Service Corporation (CVPS) acquired the system. They finished, the Goshen Dam created Sugar Hill Reservoir on Sucker Brook, resulting in a 3-tier gravity-feed system. This system has remained in place since then, with some modernization and upgrades. It qualifies for the National Register of Historic Places.
With more folks getting into the backcountry for recreation, and with the recent creation of the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area, Silver Lake and Goshen Dam have become popular destinations to access whether by bicycle, snowmobile, or foot power.
Today, Green Mountain Power (formerly CVPS) and the USDA Forest Service partner to offer a network of trails, fishing, swimming, picnicking, and camping within the setting of a clean, perpetual energy resource. Generation Asset Manager Mike Scarzello considers providing safe public recreation at these sites, the "fun part" of his job.
The Silver Lake station is one of twenty hydro plants that contribute about 6.5 percent of GMP's total power production throughout Vermont. Mike Scarzello says that the Silver Lake station can handle 60-70 cubic feet of water per second and operates 12-16 hours per day, depending on seasonal stream levels. An upgrade in 1988 enabled remote operation from GMP's Rutland headquarters. Its generator produces 5.3 million k.w.h. annually, or "enough to turn on at least 50,000 100-watt light-bulbs," according to Beth Eliason, environmental engineer at GMP. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) estimates that the same output by other means would cost an extra $62,500 per year.
The Silver Lake station is licensed by FERC, which imposes rigorous permitting requirements, including a Historic Properties Management Plan. Biology, aesthetics, water chemistry and quality all go into the mix. In addition, Silver Lake is certified as a small, low-impact project by the Low-Impact Hydropower Institute, a non-profit organization that oversees environmental issues involving hydropower production.
Silver Lake itself is a 110-acres serene water at 1,300-foot elevation. It's a known site of previous Native American activity-many artifacts have been discovered here.
On this particular day, snowmobilers picnicking at the dam built a snowman and watched as pools of water formed on the ice on Sugar Hill Reservoir through the afternoon. A group of cross-country skiers from nearby Blueberry Hill Inn dropped by to admire the view. Earlier, a lone moose had wandered across the access road, made a loop, and wandered back. Porcupine, raccoon, bobcat and bear make their homes here, as well as grouse, owl, hawk, and hosts of migratory birds.
This is the Silver Lake Trail, which winds up the steep escarpment to Silver Lake in the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area.
The Silver Lake Trail parallels the scenic Falls of Lana, but this cascade was not named for someone's lost love. During the patriotic fervor that accompanied the Mexican War of 1848, the cascade was christened in tribute to General John E. Wool, a war hero of that conflict. ("Lana" means wool in Spanish-much more romantic than Sucker Brook!) The trail traces the 1878 carriage road that once brought fashionable guests to the religious retreat known as Silver Lake House-a self-sufficient compound that included a rambling, three-story building, boathouses, and 2,500 acres of fields, orchards, and woods.
Silver Lake House was the divinely-inspired dream of Frank Chandler, who envisioned uplifting camp meetings at Silver Lake, which he had inherited. Silver Lake House's glory days lasted into the 1920's, when financial woes and ill health forced Chandler to move into town. The unoccupied building burned to the ground in 1938, possibly during a Middlebury College fraternity hazing party. In 1949 Frank II deeded the hotel's lands to the Green Mountain National Forest.
All that remains of the hotel are a few half-buried foundation stones and the beach itself. Today, the site is free and open to the public for camping, swimming, canoeing, and picnicking, although it is closed to motorized vehicles below the parking area on Silver Lake Road off the Goshen-Ripton Road.
One hundred years ago, Silver Lake was at the heart of an ambitious hydroelectric project of the Hortonia Power Company. This homegrown system was an impressive feat of engineering at the time. The vertical elevation between a reservoir and the generating station is known as the "head" - the higher the head, the stronger the force of the water that drives the turbines at the bottom. At the time of the system's construction in 1916-1917, Silver Lake's 676-foot head was the highest one east of the Mississippi, and it is still the highest in Vermont.
Then, as now, a mile-long, 3-4' diameter tube called a penstock carried water to the tiny brick power station on the shore of Lake Dunmore. The Silver Lake Trail passes under the impressive, elevated penstock, which hums faintly, like a distant beehive. The tall water tower at Silver Lake absorbs temporary spikes or "burps" in water pressure due to seasonal fluctuations in stream flow. With another mountain stream, Dutton Brook, added more recently to the water supply, the expanded Silver Lake system draws from a watershed of 10 square miles.
Eventually needing to access more water, Hortonia began construction on the Goshen Dam, which bankrupted the little utility company in 1923. At that point Central Vermont Public Service Corporation (CVPS) acquired the system. They finished, the Goshen Dam created Sugar Hill Reservoir on Sucker Brook, resulting in a 3-tier gravity-feed system. This system has remained in place since then, with some modernization and upgrades. It qualifies for the National Register of Historic Places.
With more folks getting into the backcountry for recreation, and with the recent creation of the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area, Silver Lake and Goshen Dam have become popular destinations to access whether by bicycle, snowmobile, or foot power.
Today, Green Mountain Power (formerly CVPS) and the USDA Forest Service partner to offer a network of trails, fishing, swimming, picnicking, and camping within the setting of a clean, perpetual energy resource. Generation Asset Manager Mike Scarzello considers providing safe public recreation at these sites, the "fun part" of his job.
The Silver Lake station is one of twenty hydro plants that contribute about 6.5 percent of GMP's total power production throughout Vermont. Mike Scarzello says that the Silver Lake station can handle 60-70 cubic feet of water per second and operates 12-16 hours per day, depending on seasonal stream levels. An upgrade in 1988 enabled remote operation from GMP's Rutland headquarters. Its generator produces 5.3 million k.w.h. annually, or "enough to turn on at least 50,000 100-watt light-bulbs," according to Beth Eliason, environmental engineer at GMP. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) estimates that the same output by other means would cost an extra $62,500 per year.
The Silver Lake station is licensed by FERC, which imposes rigorous permitting requirements, including a Historic Properties Management Plan. Biology, aesthetics, water chemistry and quality all go into the mix. In addition, Silver Lake is certified as a small, low-impact project by the Low-Impact Hydropower Institute, a non-profit organization that oversees environmental issues involving hydropower production.
Silver Lake itself is a 110-acres serene water at 1,300-foot elevation. It's a known site of previous Native American activity-many artifacts have been discovered here.
On this particular day, snowmobilers picnicking at the dam built a snowman and watched as pools of water formed on the ice on Sugar Hill Reservoir through the afternoon. A group of cross-country skiers from nearby Blueberry Hill Inn dropped by to admire the view. Earlier, a lone moose had wandered across the access road, made a loop, and wandered back. Porcupine, raccoon, bobcat and bear make their homes here, as well as grouse, owl, hawk, and hosts of migratory birds.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
$420 million TSA program doesn't work
The beleaguered Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, known by the initials TWIC, has been dealt a serious blow with a determination by the Department of Defense that it doesn’t meet DoD standards, and won’t be recognized for department purposes.
“Starting January 29, 2013, TWIC certificates cannot be accepted by ETA [Electronic Transportation Acquisition] … All current TWIC holders accessing an application within ETA will need to purchase an External Certificate Authority (ECA) prior to January 29, 2013. ”
The register entry essentially says that the TWIC program cannot be used to authenticate users for access to DoD computer systems and networks. The Department of Defense will require additional credentials of TWIC holders, who need access to certain defense computer networks starting at the end of the month.
The TWIC program was started as a joint initiative between Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Coast Guard. The purpose of the program is to provide a biometric credential to workers who need to enter “secure areas” of port facilities and vessels that fall under the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002.
Under the program, access to these areas is still allowed to those individuals, but they have to be escorted by someone currently holding a valid card. Individuals without those valid cards have to be kept within sight at all times.
TSA has spent $420 million on TWIC, and it has been estimated that the federal government and private sector may spend as much as $3.2 billion on TWIC during the next 10 years, not including the card readers themselves.
More than 1.9 million U.S. workers have enrolled in the TWIC program with a cost of $132.50 per enrollment.
The TWIC program has been problematic from the start. The TWIC application is a two-step process. A person has to go to an authorized TWIC Enrollment Center to apply for the card and then has to return to pick up the card and provide biometric information. This is not a problem if one lives close to a port city such as New York or Los Angeles. However, some of the facilities that fell under the jurisdiction of the TWIC program are far from the centers. In some cases, a person has to travel six to eight hours to apply for the card, and then repeat the process six weeks later to pick it up. For small facilities under the program, this caused quite a burden.
The cards themselves had a good security design, using standard “Two-factor Authentication,” an authentication method that consists of two or more of the three authentication factors: “something the user knows” (a password), “something the user has” (the TWIC card itself), and “something the user is” (their fingerprint).
To gain entry to a facility or system, the goal was for a person to present their card (something they own) for reading, enter their password (something they know), and have their fingerprint scanned and compared to the fingerprint information embedded in the card’s computer chip (something they are).
One problem that arose early on was that there were no card readers for the cards. The card’s computer chip, known as an Integrated Circuit Chip, stores the holder’s information and biometric data. The chip was supposed to be read by inserting it into a reader or holding it near a “contactless” reader.
Once the card was read, the card holder’s name was to be checked against a list of people who were to be barred from entering the facility. The list was to be updated almost in real time so that if a person was recently added to the list, they could be identified quickly and denied entry.
The problems with the card readers had been so profound that covered workers are allowed to extend their expiring TWIC cards by three years at a reduced price because federal officials are facing delays in deploying the readers.
This latest development with the DoD was not surprising since the program was already plagued by delays, cost overruns and false starts.
In December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration said that the 26,000 already issued TWIC cards were missing a digit in the “Federal Agency Smart Credential Number.”
In another case, TSA lost the passwords that were associated with the card and a user had to apply for a new TWIC card if they ever needed their password.
Not that it would matter since the bug-ridden card reader program reduced the TWIC card to merely a “flash card” at most ports as the card reader program has been riddled with glitches and continues to lag behind its implementation schedule.
The future of the program seemed suspect when the Transportation Security Administration opted this year to extend the expiration dates of some of the current cards. With the first round of five-year expiration dates bearing down on TWIC holders, the TSA offered a three-year extension. U.S. citizens with current TWICs that are to expire on or before Dec. 31, 2014, can opt to pay $60 to extend the expiration date for three years.
This latest announcement is making people covered by the TWIC program wonder why a program deemed not suitable for security in the U.S. Army Supply Chain is still being used for security in protecting civilian freight transportation venues from terrorist attack.
According to a December 2012 statement issued by Todd Spencer, the executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, “At one time we thought TWIC would be it, but it does not appear so now. The promise of secure credentials to identify truckers authorized to work the ports is no closer to reality than ever.”
“Starting January 29, 2013, TWIC certificates cannot be accepted by ETA [Electronic Transportation Acquisition] … All current TWIC holders accessing an application within ETA will need to purchase an External Certificate Authority (ECA) prior to January 29, 2013. ”
The register entry essentially says that the TWIC program cannot be used to authenticate users for access to DoD computer systems and networks. The Department of Defense will require additional credentials of TWIC holders, who need access to certain defense computer networks starting at the end of the month.
The TWIC program was started as a joint initiative between Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Coast Guard. The purpose of the program is to provide a biometric credential to workers who need to enter “secure areas” of port facilities and vessels that fall under the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002.
Under the program, access to these areas is still allowed to those individuals, but they have to be escorted by someone currently holding a valid card. Individuals without those valid cards have to be kept within sight at all times.
TSA has spent $420 million on TWIC, and it has been estimated that the federal government and private sector may spend as much as $3.2 billion on TWIC during the next 10 years, not including the card readers themselves.
More than 1.9 million U.S. workers have enrolled in the TWIC program with a cost of $132.50 per enrollment.
The TWIC program has been problematic from the start. The TWIC application is a two-step process. A person has to go to an authorized TWIC Enrollment Center to apply for the card and then has to return to pick up the card and provide biometric information. This is not a problem if one lives close to a port city such as New York or Los Angeles. However, some of the facilities that fell under the jurisdiction of the TWIC program are far from the centers. In some cases, a person has to travel six to eight hours to apply for the card, and then repeat the process six weeks later to pick it up. For small facilities under the program, this caused quite a burden.
The cards themselves had a good security design, using standard “Two-factor Authentication,” an authentication method that consists of two or more of the three authentication factors: “something the user knows” (a password), “something the user has” (the TWIC card itself), and “something the user is” (their fingerprint).
To gain entry to a facility or system, the goal was for a person to present their card (something they own) for reading, enter their password (something they know), and have their fingerprint scanned and compared to the fingerprint information embedded in the card’s computer chip (something they are).
One problem that arose early on was that there were no card readers for the cards. The card’s computer chip, known as an Integrated Circuit Chip, stores the holder’s information and biometric data. The chip was supposed to be read by inserting it into a reader or holding it near a “contactless” reader.
Once the card was read, the card holder’s name was to be checked against a list of people who were to be barred from entering the facility. The list was to be updated almost in real time so that if a person was recently added to the list, they could be identified quickly and denied entry.
The problems with the card readers had been so profound that covered workers are allowed to extend their expiring TWIC cards by three years at a reduced price because federal officials are facing delays in deploying the readers.
This latest development with the DoD was not surprising since the program was already plagued by delays, cost overruns and false starts.
In December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration said that the 26,000 already issued TWIC cards were missing a digit in the “Federal Agency Smart Credential Number.”
In another case, TSA lost the passwords that were associated with the card and a user had to apply for a new TWIC card if they ever needed their password.
Not that it would matter since the bug-ridden card reader program reduced the TWIC card to merely a “flash card” at most ports as the card reader program has been riddled with glitches and continues to lag behind its implementation schedule.
The future of the program seemed suspect when the Transportation Security Administration opted this year to extend the expiration dates of some of the current cards. With the first round of five-year expiration dates bearing down on TWIC holders, the TSA offered a three-year extension. U.S. citizens with current TWICs that are to expire on or before Dec. 31, 2014, can opt to pay $60 to extend the expiration date for three years.
This latest announcement is making people covered by the TWIC program wonder why a program deemed not suitable for security in the U.S. Army Supply Chain is still being used for security in protecting civilian freight transportation venues from terrorist attack.
According to a December 2012 statement issued by Todd Spencer, the executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, “At one time we thought TWIC would be it, but it does not appear so now. The promise of secure credentials to identify truckers authorized to work the ports is no closer to reality than ever.”
'Smart' appliances are stupid
Smart appliances get no love. Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s gadget makers unveil a slate of refrigerators, ovens, and washer-dryers that they insist have been infused with superior intelligence.
And every year, everyone scoffs. That’s because smart appliances’ smarts are usually pretty stupid and never worth the price. This year Samsung showed off a $4,000 fridge called the T9000.
It’s got an LCD touch screen and a wireless connection to the Internet. That’s the sine qua non of intelligence according to gadget makers—slap a touch screen and Wi-Fi on a fridge and voilà, you’ve got yourself an icebox with an IQ to rival Einstein’s!
Why do you need a touch screen and Wi-Fi on your fridge? Is it better for your cucumbers? That’s where the whole argument breaks down.
The T9000 will show you a clock, news headlines, and let you use apps like Evernote right on the door. Apparently you can add an item to your grocery list by tapping it into the fridge then have it available to you on your phone later on.
Why wouldn’t you just type it into your phone in the first place? Or on one of the four iPads you’ve likely got lying around, considering that you’re rich and dumb enough to drop $4,000 on a ridiculous fridge? I haven’t got a clue.
And neither do any of the companies pushing smart devices. What’s the point of an Internet-connected washing machine and dryer? To check the status of your washing from anywhere in the world, obviously! You’ll never again find yourself panicked about your whites while you’re partying with your bros.
You can also “start a load of laundry while driving home from work,” an executive from LG boasted in a press release. That sounds great until you remember that LG’s machine can’t load itself.
To do your laundry on the go, you had to have filled it with dirty clothes and added soap, just like with any cheapo machine, and then brazenly left the house without starting the washer. Smart!
LG didn’t announce the price of its new washer-dryers, but its old smart washing machines and dryers were priced at $1,600 each.
That’s about $1,000 more than you’d spend on a run-of-the-mill model. If starting your laundry from your car is that important to you, knock yourself out, but understand that you’re basically throwing your money away.
Some critics argue that the self-evident stupidity of these smart gadgets shows that the entire pursuit of intelligence in our appliances is misguided. “Maybe I'm just a snob who just wants a fridge that keeps food cooled and makes good ice,” says Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz.
But I don’t quite agree that we should keep our appliances dumb and simple. The real problem with smart devices isn’t that they’re trying to be smart but that they’re not nearly smart enough. I would love to have a refrigerator that was legitimately intelligent, not one that put on airs because it got gussied up with a touch screen.
What’s a legitimately smart fridge? Well, how about one that automatically keeps track of everything I put in it so that I can check to see if I’ve got any Dijon mustard left while I’m at the store?
Or maybe it could figure out that my four carrots, three ribs of celery, and last night’s chicken leftovers will add up to a great stock—and then flash a recipe on its screen when I go get a Coke.
Or take my stove: What if it could determine when the sauce that’s been reducing on the back burner has just reached the proper consistency—and then shut off the burner all by itself?
See what I’m getting at? I want smarts that improve and automate the performance of my appliances, not just let me control them with my phone. But none of the smart appliances on the market today are smart enough to do this sort of thing.
And it’s not really their fault. The real problem is the stuff in the rest of the world—the food, pots, and clothes that interact with our appliances—don’t have any sort of intelligence embedded in them.
Smart appliances are stupid because the world is holding them back.
Take, for instance, my dream of a refrigerator capable of keeping track of its contents. That would only work if every food item that I put into my fridge were marked with an RFID tag that told my fridge what it was.
Also, every shelf in the fridge would need to be able to register each item’s weight—this would let the fridge determine that my mustard jar contained only a few spoons of mustard, then text me urgently when I’m at the store.
What about the leftovers? How would your fridge know the contents of your Tupperware and whether it was close to spoiling? Maybe Tupperware of the future could be embedded with the spoilage sensor technology that commercial food packagers are now developing.
Let’s get to your stove and oven. Adding RFID and weight sensors to the burner plates on a stove would make it pretty smart. If all your saucepans were RFID tagged, your stove would know how much each pot weighed when empty.
Then, with the weight sensor, it could determine the starting weight of your sauce. Now you tell the stove to cook slowly until the sauce reduces by half. (Obviously it has a natural language speech engine, so you just bark out your command, as you would to your sous chef.)
By monitoring how the weight of the pot changes as the liquid evaporates, your stove could determine exactly when to turn off the burner.
The same idea would work for washing and drying your clothes. If your clothing were radio tagged, you wouldn’t need to set the cycle on your machine; it would know when to use hot water for whites and go easy on your delicates.
Of course, the biggest headache of washing and drying your clothes is all the physical labor—the sorting, the folding, etc. The only real way to get around this is with robotics. If your washer came equipped with a smart arm that could load itself, and your dryer came with another arm that could fold all your clothes—well, that’d be something to crow about.
Considering the many hours of folding time it would save your household, paying even a few thousand dollars more for that kind of intelligence might be worth it.
But I’m getting away from myself. As you can see, truly smart appliances would require a kind of ubiquitous infrastructure of intelligence, which I’d bet is a long, long time away.
It’s so far away that a lot of what I’m suggesting here might sound like science fiction. Maybe even magic. But that’s not a bad thing. Intelligence is a high bar; if we’re going to call something “smart,” let’s make sure it actually is.
And one last thing: Adding touch screens to home appliances is sure to ruin them. Touch screens work great on general-purpose devices like phones and tablets, but on a machine that does only a few things, tactile controls are better.
And every year, everyone scoffs. That’s because smart appliances’ smarts are usually pretty stupid and never worth the price. This year Samsung showed off a $4,000 fridge called the T9000.
It’s got an LCD touch screen and a wireless connection to the Internet. That’s the sine qua non of intelligence according to gadget makers—slap a touch screen and Wi-Fi on a fridge and voilà, you’ve got yourself an icebox with an IQ to rival Einstein’s!
Why do you need a touch screen and Wi-Fi on your fridge? Is it better for your cucumbers? That’s where the whole argument breaks down.
The T9000 will show you a clock, news headlines, and let you use apps like Evernote right on the door. Apparently you can add an item to your grocery list by tapping it into the fridge then have it available to you on your phone later on.
Why wouldn’t you just type it into your phone in the first place? Or on one of the four iPads you’ve likely got lying around, considering that you’re rich and dumb enough to drop $4,000 on a ridiculous fridge? I haven’t got a clue.
And neither do any of the companies pushing smart devices. What’s the point of an Internet-connected washing machine and dryer? To check the status of your washing from anywhere in the world, obviously! You’ll never again find yourself panicked about your whites while you’re partying with your bros.
You can also “start a load of laundry while driving home from work,” an executive from LG boasted in a press release. That sounds great until you remember that LG’s machine can’t load itself.
To do your laundry on the go, you had to have filled it with dirty clothes and added soap, just like with any cheapo machine, and then brazenly left the house without starting the washer. Smart!
LG didn’t announce the price of its new washer-dryers, but its old smart washing machines and dryers were priced at $1,600 each.
That’s about $1,000 more than you’d spend on a run-of-the-mill model. If starting your laundry from your car is that important to you, knock yourself out, but understand that you’re basically throwing your money away.
Some critics argue that the self-evident stupidity of these smart gadgets shows that the entire pursuit of intelligence in our appliances is misguided. “Maybe I'm just a snob who just wants a fridge that keeps food cooled and makes good ice,” says Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz.
But I don’t quite agree that we should keep our appliances dumb and simple. The real problem with smart devices isn’t that they’re trying to be smart but that they’re not nearly smart enough. I would love to have a refrigerator that was legitimately intelligent, not one that put on airs because it got gussied up with a touch screen.
What’s a legitimately smart fridge? Well, how about one that automatically keeps track of everything I put in it so that I can check to see if I’ve got any Dijon mustard left while I’m at the store?
Or maybe it could figure out that my four carrots, three ribs of celery, and last night’s chicken leftovers will add up to a great stock—and then flash a recipe on its screen when I go get a Coke.
Or take my stove: What if it could determine when the sauce that’s been reducing on the back burner has just reached the proper consistency—and then shut off the burner all by itself?
See what I’m getting at? I want smarts that improve and automate the performance of my appliances, not just let me control them with my phone. But none of the smart appliances on the market today are smart enough to do this sort of thing.
And it’s not really their fault. The real problem is the stuff in the rest of the world—the food, pots, and clothes that interact with our appliances—don’t have any sort of intelligence embedded in them.
Smart appliances are stupid because the world is holding them back.
Take, for instance, my dream of a refrigerator capable of keeping track of its contents. That would only work if every food item that I put into my fridge were marked with an RFID tag that told my fridge what it was.
Also, every shelf in the fridge would need to be able to register each item’s weight—this would let the fridge determine that my mustard jar contained only a few spoons of mustard, then text me urgently when I’m at the store.
What about the leftovers? How would your fridge know the contents of your Tupperware and whether it was close to spoiling? Maybe Tupperware of the future could be embedded with the spoilage sensor technology that commercial food packagers are now developing.
Let’s get to your stove and oven. Adding RFID and weight sensors to the burner plates on a stove would make it pretty smart. If all your saucepans were RFID tagged, your stove would know how much each pot weighed when empty.
Then, with the weight sensor, it could determine the starting weight of your sauce. Now you tell the stove to cook slowly until the sauce reduces by half. (Obviously it has a natural language speech engine, so you just bark out your command, as you would to your sous chef.)
By monitoring how the weight of the pot changes as the liquid evaporates, your stove could determine exactly when to turn off the burner.
The same idea would work for washing and drying your clothes. If your clothing were radio tagged, you wouldn’t need to set the cycle on your machine; it would know when to use hot water for whites and go easy on your delicates.
Of course, the biggest headache of washing and drying your clothes is all the physical labor—the sorting, the folding, etc. The only real way to get around this is with robotics. If your washer came equipped with a smart arm that could load itself, and your dryer came with another arm that could fold all your clothes—well, that’d be something to crow about.
Considering the many hours of folding time it would save your household, paying even a few thousand dollars more for that kind of intelligence might be worth it.
But I’m getting away from myself. As you can see, truly smart appliances would require a kind of ubiquitous infrastructure of intelligence, which I’d bet is a long, long time away.
It’s so far away that a lot of what I’m suggesting here might sound like science fiction. Maybe even magic. But that’s not a bad thing. Intelligence is a high bar; if we’re going to call something “smart,” let’s make sure it actually is.
And one last thing: Adding touch screens to home appliances is sure to ruin them. Touch screens work great on general-purpose devices like phones and tablets, but on a machine that does only a few things, tactile controls are better.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Can this man save pinball?
The last guys who tried to save pinball bet all their quarters on a bunch of 3-D aliens. With sales of new machines dwindling in the late 1990s, the top execs at Williams, the company that controlled 80 percent of the worldwide market, called on their designers to reinvent the game. They emerged with an arcade centaur — the head of a video game on the body of a pinball machine — in which pixilated, holographic-looking Martians marauded among the mechanical gewgaws. Pinball 2000 was a technological marvel. It also nearly killed pinball forever.
In October 1999, not long after Williams introduced Pinball 2000 in a promotional video featuring clips of the moon landing and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the company shuttered its pinball division. As the excellent documentary "Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball" explains, Revenge From Mars, the initial Pinball 2000 title, sold well, but a Star Wars Episode I-themed follow-up got less traction with the Jar Jar-hating masses. Rather than prop up its declining pinball operation, Williams chose to focus on a more promising line of business: slot machines.
Thirteen years after this failed holographic experiment, pinball is just barely alive. A single company, Stern Pinball, holds a virtual monopoly on new equipment. What was once a quintessential American pastime has been exiled from its natural habitats — bars, diners, and even arcades.
For Jack Guarnieri, pinball's decline brought on an existential crisis. Guarnieri has held most every job that has to do with flippers: repairman, game operator, reseller, inventor. With his livelihood and life's passion in peril, he figured there was only one thing to do: Create history's greatest pinball machine, one that would introduce a new generation to the pleasures of a well-struck ramp shot. Three-dimensional aliens couldn't save pinball. Can a small-business man in New Jersey?
In the Jersey Jack Pinball factory, history is covered in bubble wrap. A handful of simple, gorgeously illustrated 1960s-era games — Flipper Clown, King of Diamonds, Road Race — stand in a back corner, ready to ship to a nostalgia-minded connoisseur. The rest of this workshop in Lakewood, N.J., has been given over to a brand-new game with an old-timey theme, the machine Guarnieri believes will rocket pinball into its next golden age: the Wizard of Oz.
Each Oz pinball machine is the size of a casket built for a member of the Lollipop Guild. On this day in early fall, millions of dollars of parts — LED lights and emerald-green legs and a forest's worth of anthropomorphic plastic trees — are sitting in cardboard boxes, waiting to be fished out by arcade-world craftsmen. On one assembly line, they'll put together the machine's heart, adding rails, rollover buttons and magnets to the yellow-brick-road-laden playfield. They'll also add the brains, stuffing the PC board, power supply, and other electronics inside the Wizard of Oz's exterior shell.
In addition to the parts and labor, building a new pinball company takes courage, plus a light messianic streak. The 55-year-old Guarnieri, who's got a lot of his native Brooklyn in his tireless voice, is the best kind of salesman. He talks fast but means everything he says, remembers every detail of anything that has to do with arcades, and doesn't take himself too seriously — while still treating the quest for pinball supremacy as a noble, essential mission.
In Guarnieri's view, this humming factory is proof of all you can accomplish when you love what you do. Bean-counter types have "said some sh--ty things" about his arcade ambitions, he says, telling him he's crazy to throw his money into the shrinking ball-and-flipper market. Perhaps it's true that irrational exuberance can lead you to bankruptcy. But it's also the only way to make something great from absolutely nothing, just as Guarnieri's role models did. "What overcomes doubt," he says, "is the resolve and the passion and determination of people like Steve Jobs and Sam Walton, whether it's going over the hill in Normandy or whether it's building a freaking pinball machine."
Pinball first captivated the spare-change-having masses during the otherwise unamusing Great Depression, then surged again after World War II with the game-changing advent of the flipper. The pinball wizardry chronicled in the Who's "Tommy" launched a silver-ball renaissance in 1969, and the development of bell-and-whistle-larded computerized machines in the 1970s kept those balls rolling. New York City also ended its three-decade-plus pinball ban in 1976 — Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had believed it was "a racket dominated by interests heavily tainted with criminality" that pilfered from the "pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money" — further clearing the way for the game's cultural ascension.
It was right around that time that Guarnieri got into the business, taking a job as a pinball mechanic after graduating from high school in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s. Soon after, Pac-Man came along and chomped up all the coins. In 1979, pinball manufacturers sold more than 200,000 machines in the United States; three years later, they sold 33,000. During that same period, video games went from collecting around $1 billion per year in quarters to a high of $8 billion, with 1980's Pac-Man reportedly earning more than $1 billion in coins in its first year on the street.
As silver balls lost their capacity to thrill in the 1980s, Guarnieri rode the video game wave. At his peak as an arcade operator and service person, he oversaw 400 video games in and around New York City, in pizzerias and hardware stores and barber shops, as well as the Waldorf-Astoria and the World Trade Center's Skydive Restaurant. For a time, Guarnieri says, the joystick tycoon's biggest concern was excessive profitability — once in a while, a massively popular game like Asteroids would jam up with quarters, rendering it inoperable.
But around 1986, the arcade bubble burst. And though pinball had a brief resurgence a few years later — 1992's "The Addams Family," the game I played obsessively in my college rec center, sold more than 20,000 units, making it the most-popular machine since the 1930s — that market collapsed again in the mid-1990s, leading the majority of manufacturers to abandon the business for good.
Pinball succumbed to the same forces that killed the video arcade. In the 1970s, arcade games far outclassed the entertainment competition, which consisted primarily of three channels of lousy network television, staring contests and throwing rocks at cars. But with the spread of home consoles and cable TV (and eventually ubiquitous Web access and smartphones), paying to play video games at some retail establishment felt inconvenient and outdated, like carrying a boombox on your shoulder or using an outhouse.
In October 1999, not long after Williams introduced Pinball 2000 in a promotional video featuring clips of the moon landing and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the company shuttered its pinball division. As the excellent documentary "Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball" explains, Revenge From Mars, the initial Pinball 2000 title, sold well, but a Star Wars Episode I-themed follow-up got less traction with the Jar Jar-hating masses. Rather than prop up its declining pinball operation, Williams chose to focus on a more promising line of business: slot machines.
Thirteen years after this failed holographic experiment, pinball is just barely alive. A single company, Stern Pinball, holds a virtual monopoly on new equipment. What was once a quintessential American pastime has been exiled from its natural habitats — bars, diners, and even arcades.
For Jack Guarnieri, pinball's decline brought on an existential crisis. Guarnieri has held most every job that has to do with flippers: repairman, game operator, reseller, inventor. With his livelihood and life's passion in peril, he figured there was only one thing to do: Create history's greatest pinball machine, one that would introduce a new generation to the pleasures of a well-struck ramp shot. Three-dimensional aliens couldn't save pinball. Can a small-business man in New Jersey?
In the Jersey Jack Pinball factory, history is covered in bubble wrap. A handful of simple, gorgeously illustrated 1960s-era games — Flipper Clown, King of Diamonds, Road Race — stand in a back corner, ready to ship to a nostalgia-minded connoisseur. The rest of this workshop in Lakewood, N.J., has been given over to a brand-new game with an old-timey theme, the machine Guarnieri believes will rocket pinball into its next golden age: the Wizard of Oz.
Each Oz pinball machine is the size of a casket built for a member of the Lollipop Guild. On this day in early fall, millions of dollars of parts — LED lights and emerald-green legs and a forest's worth of anthropomorphic plastic trees — are sitting in cardboard boxes, waiting to be fished out by arcade-world craftsmen. On one assembly line, they'll put together the machine's heart, adding rails, rollover buttons and magnets to the yellow-brick-road-laden playfield. They'll also add the brains, stuffing the PC board, power supply, and other electronics inside the Wizard of Oz's exterior shell.
In addition to the parts and labor, building a new pinball company takes courage, plus a light messianic streak. The 55-year-old Guarnieri, who's got a lot of his native Brooklyn in his tireless voice, is the best kind of salesman. He talks fast but means everything he says, remembers every detail of anything that has to do with arcades, and doesn't take himself too seriously — while still treating the quest for pinball supremacy as a noble, essential mission.
In Guarnieri's view, this humming factory is proof of all you can accomplish when you love what you do. Bean-counter types have "said some sh--ty things" about his arcade ambitions, he says, telling him he's crazy to throw his money into the shrinking ball-and-flipper market. Perhaps it's true that irrational exuberance can lead you to bankruptcy. But it's also the only way to make something great from absolutely nothing, just as Guarnieri's role models did. "What overcomes doubt," he says, "is the resolve and the passion and determination of people like Steve Jobs and Sam Walton, whether it's going over the hill in Normandy or whether it's building a freaking pinball machine."
Pinball first captivated the spare-change-having masses during the otherwise unamusing Great Depression, then surged again after World War II with the game-changing advent of the flipper. The pinball wizardry chronicled in the Who's "Tommy" launched a silver-ball renaissance in 1969, and the development of bell-and-whistle-larded computerized machines in the 1970s kept those balls rolling. New York City also ended its three-decade-plus pinball ban in 1976 — Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had believed it was "a racket dominated by interests heavily tainted with criminality" that pilfered from the "pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money" — further clearing the way for the game's cultural ascension.
It was right around that time that Guarnieri got into the business, taking a job as a pinball mechanic after graduating from high school in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s. Soon after, Pac-Man came along and chomped up all the coins. In 1979, pinball manufacturers sold more than 200,000 machines in the United States; three years later, they sold 33,000. During that same period, video games went from collecting around $1 billion per year in quarters to a high of $8 billion, with 1980's Pac-Man reportedly earning more than $1 billion in coins in its first year on the street.
As silver balls lost their capacity to thrill in the 1980s, Guarnieri rode the video game wave. At his peak as an arcade operator and service person, he oversaw 400 video games in and around New York City, in pizzerias and hardware stores and barber shops, as well as the Waldorf-Astoria and the World Trade Center's Skydive Restaurant. For a time, Guarnieri says, the joystick tycoon's biggest concern was excessive profitability — once in a while, a massively popular game like Asteroids would jam up with quarters, rendering it inoperable.
But around 1986, the arcade bubble burst. And though pinball had a brief resurgence a few years later — 1992's "The Addams Family," the game I played obsessively in my college rec center, sold more than 20,000 units, making it the most-popular machine since the 1930s — that market collapsed again in the mid-1990s, leading the majority of manufacturers to abandon the business for good.
Pinball succumbed to the same forces that killed the video arcade. In the 1970s, arcade games far outclassed the entertainment competition, which consisted primarily of three channels of lousy network television, staring contests and throwing rocks at cars. But with the spread of home consoles and cable TV (and eventually ubiquitous Web access and smartphones), paying to play video games at some retail establishment felt inconvenient and outdated, like carrying a boombox on your shoulder or using an outhouse.
Can Jurassic Park bite back?
It is also worth noting how long ago the previous film was (and yes, it does make you feel old) - it was 2001. Over 12 years ago! I can imagine that, rather than a plot that 'continues' the story, it is going to become more of a fun 'revisit' to the island; almost a tongue-in-cheek adventure movie rather than anything continuing the series. More like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and American Reunion. In this time of 'vintage' and 'retro' products, films like nothing more than glorifying a film as soon as possible - and you can see it now, characters quoting lines in different manners, almost identical to the first film - even the whole 'science' argument becoming 'revamped' with a snarky social-media comment from a brain-box in some vain attempt to modernise the story. They could also imagine a world whereby, 12 years since Jurassic Park III, things have changed. Maybe a montage of small parks opening up all over the world - and the film shows, on the mainland, "nature finding a way". Or perhaps an opening montage showing parks opening up across America, and then falling down and unleashing the dinosaurs upon the world - and the film is set in a world whereby humans are already the prey and we follow a small band of characters as they try and survive in a post-apocalyptic world. There is real scope to play with the "12 years since..." dynamic.
In all fairness, we are in a time where, for better of worse, Hollywood generally seem to understand how to make good sequels - they understand what audiences expect to see from a sequel. In 2001, they were still a little unsure ("Lets get a dinosaur bigger and better than the T-Rex!" - eugh), but now with the continuity of comic book films, they know we want to see characters - and actors - returning, at the very least for a cameo. We want to see a respect for the series - and crucially the first film. Part of the problem of The Lost World: Jurassic Park was the completely different location - I wanted to see the torn up visitors centre and those green-and-yellow cars twisted and destroyed. Indeed, in Jurassic Park IV they truly could do this.
I'll be keeping an eye on the films development - but rest-assured, if it starts to go south, I think we can all sleep easy and just place the film alongside Jurassic Park III and the 'dino-human' plot that was thrown on the scrap heap. Jurassic Park remains an important film - and a fourth one won't take anything away from that.
Recently I had a chat with Ken Ostini, CEO/president of the Lompoc Valley Chamber of Commerce and we talked about how people wait around until someone else does something that needs doing.
We know what needs to be done, but we usually wait to see who is going to finally do it. The other thing we discussed is that we should be working together to take advantage of all the natural and manmade assets that we have here in Lompoc.
I thought of these same issues when I sat down with Teddy Grossini of Sweet Repeats on West Ocean Avenue. I’ve never spent much time in antique stores. I should, because I’ve always like things from the past and I collect old plastic model kits of airplanes, tanks and ships. I’ve been hearing a lot about what a great place Sweet Repeats is so I just had to talk to Teddy.
The other thing that made me stop and take notice was how this whole antique sector of our economy just kind of popped up. To be truthful, it did not just pop up, antique stores have been around a long time in Lompoc.
However, when I thought of economic development and of taking advantage of what we already have, like the murals, the flowers and wine, I never once thought of our antique shops.
Over the years when I’ve talked economic development with others, no one else ever mentioned this part of the economy. And then, bam, it seems that when Sweet Repeats opened up, people started to notice. It could have been that Teddy’s store helped us get to a critical mass of these types of businesses that forced people to wake up.
I asked Teddy why he started the business; it was real simple, he just did what his wife Teresa told him to do.
Teddy operated heavy machinery and during the winter he would be laid off. During this off time he would buy items from estate sales, swap meets and storage lockers and sell them.
Well, he got pretty good at this and Teresa told him to stay home and do it full time and that was that. They first opened a store at 219 W. Ocean Ave., outgrew that and finally ended up at their current location which consists of 104,110 &118, also on West Ocean Avenue.
Business has been good, which is why Teddy had to expand. Basically, he sells everything on consignment and has about 84 vendors. I asked him where some of his customers are coming from and he said all over.
Teddy’s website tracks the number of visits, one month logging more than more than 400 hits. When he talks to his customers he is finding that they are not only coming to look for antiques but also to try the local wines and look at the murals.
OK, so now let’s get back to the working together to take advantage of what Lompoc has to offer idea. When people tell Teddy that they are coming to look at antiques and murals and drink some wine, like a good businessman and proud Lompocan, he is thinking about how to make it easier for these folks to do that.
The question we both had was if the city, the chamber and the local business owners are doing enough to make us even more of a tourist destination. I remember when I first noticed the tourist buses at the hotels on North H and I would see the tourists walk around trying to find a place to eat. I wondered what we were doing to help these poor lost souls spend their money. That was about four years ago and I still don’t think we have any organized effort to get these folks downtown.
In all fairness, we are in a time where, for better of worse, Hollywood generally seem to understand how to make good sequels - they understand what audiences expect to see from a sequel. In 2001, they were still a little unsure ("Lets get a dinosaur bigger and better than the T-Rex!" - eugh), but now with the continuity of comic book films, they know we want to see characters - and actors - returning, at the very least for a cameo. We want to see a respect for the series - and crucially the first film. Part of the problem of The Lost World: Jurassic Park was the completely different location - I wanted to see the torn up visitors centre and those green-and-yellow cars twisted and destroyed. Indeed, in Jurassic Park IV they truly could do this.
I'll be keeping an eye on the films development - but rest-assured, if it starts to go south, I think we can all sleep easy and just place the film alongside Jurassic Park III and the 'dino-human' plot that was thrown on the scrap heap. Jurassic Park remains an important film - and a fourth one won't take anything away from that.
Recently I had a chat with Ken Ostini, CEO/president of the Lompoc Valley Chamber of Commerce and we talked about how people wait around until someone else does something that needs doing.
We know what needs to be done, but we usually wait to see who is going to finally do it. The other thing we discussed is that we should be working together to take advantage of all the natural and manmade assets that we have here in Lompoc.
I thought of these same issues when I sat down with Teddy Grossini of Sweet Repeats on West Ocean Avenue. I’ve never spent much time in antique stores. I should, because I’ve always like things from the past and I collect old plastic model kits of airplanes, tanks and ships. I’ve been hearing a lot about what a great place Sweet Repeats is so I just had to talk to Teddy.
The other thing that made me stop and take notice was how this whole antique sector of our economy just kind of popped up. To be truthful, it did not just pop up, antique stores have been around a long time in Lompoc.
However, when I thought of economic development and of taking advantage of what we already have, like the murals, the flowers and wine, I never once thought of our antique shops.
Over the years when I’ve talked economic development with others, no one else ever mentioned this part of the economy. And then, bam, it seems that when Sweet Repeats opened up, people started to notice. It could have been that Teddy’s store helped us get to a critical mass of these types of businesses that forced people to wake up.
I asked Teddy why he started the business; it was real simple, he just did what his wife Teresa told him to do.
Teddy operated heavy machinery and during the winter he would be laid off. During this off time he would buy items from estate sales, swap meets and storage lockers and sell them.
Well, he got pretty good at this and Teresa told him to stay home and do it full time and that was that. They first opened a store at 219 W. Ocean Ave., outgrew that and finally ended up at their current location which consists of 104,110 &118, also on West Ocean Avenue.
Business has been good, which is why Teddy had to expand. Basically, he sells everything on consignment and has about 84 vendors. I asked him where some of his customers are coming from and he said all over.
Teddy’s website tracks the number of visits, one month logging more than more than 400 hits. When he talks to his customers he is finding that they are not only coming to look for antiques but also to try the local wines and look at the murals.
OK, so now let’s get back to the working together to take advantage of what Lompoc has to offer idea. When people tell Teddy that they are coming to look at antiques and murals and drink some wine, like a good businessman and proud Lompocan, he is thinking about how to make it easier for these folks to do that.
The question we both had was if the city, the chamber and the local business owners are doing enough to make us even more of a tourist destination. I remember when I first noticed the tourist buses at the hotels on North H and I would see the tourists walk around trying to find a place to eat. I wondered what we were doing to help these poor lost souls spend their money. That was about four years ago and I still don’t think we have any organized effort to get these folks downtown.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
New inn in Canandaigua
While the opening of the Holiday Inn Express hotel in Canandaigua is a plus for the town, it will also have a positive impact on Ontario County, said Canandaigua Town Supervisor Sam Casella.
“From a economic development standpoint, this means less for the town, and more for the community,” Casella said. He added that the new hotel — in addition to existing lodging in the area — will help boost the sales tax revenue, and will help other businesses in the area.
The Holiday Inn Express is located at 4420 Routes 5 and 20 in the Town of Canandaigua, next to the Super 8 Hotel, and across the road from Wegmans. It features 75 rooms, a swimming pool, fitness center and a business center. According to General Manager Karen Antosh, the rooms are currently priced at $99 a night — $105 a night for the larger “king executive” rooms. She said those prices vary depending on the time of year, with summer prices being typically higher.
The planning process for the hotel began more than a year ago, said Rakesh Patel, the vice president of operations. Construction started in March, and the hotel opened Nov. 29.
Hotel staff, along with the Canandaigua Chamber of Commerce, celebrated that opening Wednesday with an open house and ribbon-cutting event.
“We’re real excited,” Operations Manager Manoj Patel said of the hotel’s opening. “The community has been real receptive.”
He added that they choose that specific location because of its proximity to attractions such as Canandaigua Lake, as well as Finger Lakes Community College.
About two-thirds of the way through Hill Street Blues’ first episode, 1981’s “Hill Street Station,” officers Bobby Hill and Andy Renko—played by Michael Warren and Charles Haid—walk into a boarded-up tenement, looking for a telephone so they can report a stolen patrol car. Instead, they stumble onto a circle of junkies, who get spooked and start firing guns before the cops can respond. When the episode begins, Hill and Renko look like they might be Hill Street Blues’ breakout characters. One’s a level-headed, handsome African-American; the other’s his goofy, hot-tempered cowboy partner. But when the episode ends, it’s unclear whether either man will survive.
Twelve years later, Hill Street Blues producer Steven Bochco debuted another cop show, NYPD Blue, and about halfway through its pilot episode, another major character gets gunned down. Dennis Franz’s alcoholic, combative Detective Andy Sipowicz walks out of the squad room after getting suspended for beating up a mobster, and heads straight into a bar, where he picks up a prostitute, who lures Sipowicz to a hotel room where that mobster is waiting, with vengeance in mind. Unlike Warren and Haid, Franz was a fairly well-known actor before NYPD Blue premièred—he’d been on Hill Street Blues for years, as well as its spin-off series Beverly Hills Buntz—but in its first episode, NYPD Blue focused more on Sipowicz’s partner, John Kelly, played by David Caruso. So right up to the final scene, where a comatose Sipowicz squeezes Kelly’s hand in intensive care, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Bochco could kill off Franz’s character. Because while Bochco was never a journalist, somewhere along the line, he seems to have learned the first rule of the news business: If it bleeds, it leads.
Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were credited for revolutionizing television in their respective decades, and for similar reasons. Both shows’ first episodes are immersive experiences, thrusting audiences directly into fast-paced, dangerous, at times blackly comic worlds, populated by so many jaded lawmen and vicious criminals that at first, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Both then expand out to include glimpses of the cops’ complicated home lives, while still finding time to show the police interfacing with the other side of the criminal justice system, where state’s attorneys and defense lawyers are slugging it out. Throughout their respective runs—1981-87 for Hill Street Blues on NBC, 1993-2005 for NYPD Blue on ABC—both shows explored the edges of what broadcast censors and the FCC would allow, in an overt attempt to compete with other media. Hill Street Blues looked to be as sophisticated and adult as contemporary cinema, which was in the middle of a heyday of R-rated maturity. NYPD Blue was looking to draw people away from cable TV, which at the time was luring viewers with the promise of nudity and profanity, even though its original programming wasn’t yet up to the networks’ best standards.
Most importantly, both shows’ first episodes were genuinely surprising, setting up many, many hours of stories to come. The shootings aren’t their only twists. Throughout “Hill Street Station,” Captain Frank Furillo spars with public defender Joyce Davenport, who protests the police’s incompetence and abuse of power. At the end of the episode, the audience learns that Frank and Joyce are actually lovers. In NYPD Blue, Detective Kelly flirts with his lawyer ex-wife, Laura, but ends up having sex with uniformed officer Janice Licalsi , who at the end of the pilot is revealed to be working for the mob, on a mission to kill Kelly. Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were partly about the tangled relationship between crooks, cops, civilians, and the legal system, so it made sense for both to carry that idea forward via scenes of its lead characters literally sleeping with the enemy. But even beyond the metaphorical implications, the sexual relationships let viewers know that they had plenty of intrigue in store.
Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue shared key personnel besides Bochco. Gregory Hoblit was a producer and director on both shows, and helped establish NYPD Blue’s jittery, handheld, swish-pan-heavy look. (On the commentary track to “Hill Street Station,” Bochco says he considered employing a similar style for Hill Street Blues, but decided to use handheld cameras sparingly, figuring that wall-to-wall docu-realism would exhaust the audience, especially since so many of Hill Street Blues’ scenes are long, and set in one location.) NYPD Blue co-creator David Milch got his start as a TV writer in the early days of Hill Street Blues—later becoming its showrunner—and his personality is embedded in both shows as much as Bochco’s. In interviews, Bochco comes across like a Frank Furillo type: calm and cerebral. Milch is more of a Sipowicz: irascible yet perceptive.
Actors who worked with Milch on his later shows Deadwood and Luck sometimes talk about Milch’s strangely effective methods, which involve him walking onto a set, making a few tweaks in the staging, and delivering an offhand comment that clarifies exactly what the scene’s really about. On a featurette included on the NYPD Blue season-one DVD set, this “Milch touch” is evident in the way he describes the cops on the show as wayward Catholic boys, who serve institutions as a way of assuaging their guilt at being sinners. Bochco had a standing deal at ABC when he and Milch were developing NYPD Blue, but the network stalled on picking up the show, which gave Milch an extra year to do research with real-life NYPD cop Bill Clark. In that time, Milch picked up tips not just about how cops behave, but why.
“From a economic development standpoint, this means less for the town, and more for the community,” Casella said. He added that the new hotel — in addition to existing lodging in the area — will help boost the sales tax revenue, and will help other businesses in the area.
The Holiday Inn Express is located at 4420 Routes 5 and 20 in the Town of Canandaigua, next to the Super 8 Hotel, and across the road from Wegmans. It features 75 rooms, a swimming pool, fitness center and a business center. According to General Manager Karen Antosh, the rooms are currently priced at $99 a night — $105 a night for the larger “king executive” rooms. She said those prices vary depending on the time of year, with summer prices being typically higher.
The planning process for the hotel began more than a year ago, said Rakesh Patel, the vice president of operations. Construction started in March, and the hotel opened Nov. 29.
Hotel staff, along with the Canandaigua Chamber of Commerce, celebrated that opening Wednesday with an open house and ribbon-cutting event.
“We’re real excited,” Operations Manager Manoj Patel said of the hotel’s opening. “The community has been real receptive.”
He added that they choose that specific location because of its proximity to attractions such as Canandaigua Lake, as well as Finger Lakes Community College.
About two-thirds of the way through Hill Street Blues’ first episode, 1981’s “Hill Street Station,” officers Bobby Hill and Andy Renko—played by Michael Warren and Charles Haid—walk into a boarded-up tenement, looking for a telephone so they can report a stolen patrol car. Instead, they stumble onto a circle of junkies, who get spooked and start firing guns before the cops can respond. When the episode begins, Hill and Renko look like they might be Hill Street Blues’ breakout characters. One’s a level-headed, handsome African-American; the other’s his goofy, hot-tempered cowboy partner. But when the episode ends, it’s unclear whether either man will survive.
Twelve years later, Hill Street Blues producer Steven Bochco debuted another cop show, NYPD Blue, and about halfway through its pilot episode, another major character gets gunned down. Dennis Franz’s alcoholic, combative Detective Andy Sipowicz walks out of the squad room after getting suspended for beating up a mobster, and heads straight into a bar, where he picks up a prostitute, who lures Sipowicz to a hotel room where that mobster is waiting, with vengeance in mind. Unlike Warren and Haid, Franz was a fairly well-known actor before NYPD Blue premièred—he’d been on Hill Street Blues for years, as well as its spin-off series Beverly Hills Buntz—but in its first episode, NYPD Blue focused more on Sipowicz’s partner, John Kelly, played by David Caruso. So right up to the final scene, where a comatose Sipowicz squeezes Kelly’s hand in intensive care, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Bochco could kill off Franz’s character. Because while Bochco was never a journalist, somewhere along the line, he seems to have learned the first rule of the news business: If it bleeds, it leads.
Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were credited for revolutionizing television in their respective decades, and for similar reasons. Both shows’ first episodes are immersive experiences, thrusting audiences directly into fast-paced, dangerous, at times blackly comic worlds, populated by so many jaded lawmen and vicious criminals that at first, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Both then expand out to include glimpses of the cops’ complicated home lives, while still finding time to show the police interfacing with the other side of the criminal justice system, where state’s attorneys and defense lawyers are slugging it out. Throughout their respective runs—1981-87 for Hill Street Blues on NBC, 1993-2005 for NYPD Blue on ABC—both shows explored the edges of what broadcast censors and the FCC would allow, in an overt attempt to compete with other media. Hill Street Blues looked to be as sophisticated and adult as contemporary cinema, which was in the middle of a heyday of R-rated maturity. NYPD Blue was looking to draw people away from cable TV, which at the time was luring viewers with the promise of nudity and profanity, even though its original programming wasn’t yet up to the networks’ best standards.
Most importantly, both shows’ first episodes were genuinely surprising, setting up many, many hours of stories to come. The shootings aren’t their only twists. Throughout “Hill Street Station,” Captain Frank Furillo spars with public defender Joyce Davenport, who protests the police’s incompetence and abuse of power. At the end of the episode, the audience learns that Frank and Joyce are actually lovers. In NYPD Blue, Detective Kelly flirts with his lawyer ex-wife, Laura, but ends up having sex with uniformed officer Janice Licalsi , who at the end of the pilot is revealed to be working for the mob, on a mission to kill Kelly. Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were partly about the tangled relationship between crooks, cops, civilians, and the legal system, so it made sense for both to carry that idea forward via scenes of its lead characters literally sleeping with the enemy. But even beyond the metaphorical implications, the sexual relationships let viewers know that they had plenty of intrigue in store.
Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue shared key personnel besides Bochco. Gregory Hoblit was a producer and director on both shows, and helped establish NYPD Blue’s jittery, handheld, swish-pan-heavy look. (On the commentary track to “Hill Street Station,” Bochco says he considered employing a similar style for Hill Street Blues, but decided to use handheld cameras sparingly, figuring that wall-to-wall docu-realism would exhaust the audience, especially since so many of Hill Street Blues’ scenes are long, and set in one location.) NYPD Blue co-creator David Milch got his start as a TV writer in the early days of Hill Street Blues—later becoming its showrunner—and his personality is embedded in both shows as much as Bochco’s. In interviews, Bochco comes across like a Frank Furillo type: calm and cerebral. Milch is more of a Sipowicz: irascible yet perceptive.
Actors who worked with Milch on his later shows Deadwood and Luck sometimes talk about Milch’s strangely effective methods, which involve him walking onto a set, making a few tweaks in the staging, and delivering an offhand comment that clarifies exactly what the scene’s really about. On a featurette included on the NYPD Blue season-one DVD set, this “Milch touch” is evident in the way he describes the cops on the show as wayward Catholic boys, who serve institutions as a way of assuaging their guilt at being sinners. Bochco had a standing deal at ABC when he and Milch were developing NYPD Blue, but the network stalled on picking up the show, which gave Milch an extra year to do research with real-life NYPD cop Bill Clark. In that time, Milch picked up tips not just about how cops behave, but why.
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