meta-roj

ever afraid to approach a problem from a different perspective, and with the consumer electronics show behind us, it’s time to announce the latest vaporware from the people that love you at rojisan.com (me).

if you’ve been paying especially close attention to this space, you may recall that i’m a big fan of the pitracer, and that’s the approach that i’m taking with my ipod killer. i also grew up in the 80’s music saturation, with a keen interest in the coolest audio widgets, which often came from b&o. i couldn’t afford the really good stuff, but i still had a pretty swanky walkman with neat-o features (cassette form-factor radio module).

so, without further ado, it’s time to reveal the specifications for the podtracer. or rojpod. or zentracer. erm. i’ll get back to you on that once marketing has done some focus groups. anyway, whatever i’m gonna call it, i know what it’s going to include.

the rojpod is about music. keep that in mind.

first, mp3 is out. ogg is out. wma is out. compressing music is bad for music. so the rojpod only plays uncompressed music. not just uncompressed music, but up-converted uncompressed music. using a completely original d/a path, the rojpod won’t play anything that doesn’t have enough bits. i think 512KHz should do (11.6 times cd quality), and nothing less than 128 bits per sample (8 times cd quality). i’ll go ahead and do that math for you – it’s a 65536Kbps and nearly 100 times better than a cd. of course, that also means that your standard cd will only hold about .74 minutes of music.

second, convergence is out. sure, you can get your mp3 player in a phone, or in a video camera, or bolt on a photo display or video player or all of the above and then some, but that’s not about music, and, as you’ll recall, the rojpod is about music. it only plays music.

third, moving parts are out. solid-state redundant storage is the way of the rojpod. with the new format, the typical 4 minute song is going to take about 3.5 gigabytes of storage. double that to catch any errors (redundant), and the 20 gig rojpod holds 2.9 songs.

fourth, it’s going to come with a bone-conduction sub transducer and real headphones (no earbud for the rojpod, please). it’ll be a big headband arrangement that has great earpieces with a thumper on the back that sits at the base of your skull.

so, there you have it. the rojpod ipod killer. shouldn’t cost much more than $10 grand or so – retail. but for you…. $9500.

and don’t give me any trouble about the limited playing time. pick a couple songs you really like and listen to them until you don’t like them anymore. radio’s been doing that to you for years now.

b3

since i haven’t been blogging much of late (life intrudes and all that…), with the exception of the memorial pages, i thought i should take the few extra moments necessary to make them more useful. memorial pages will include links to wikipedia where articles are available.

a good man

doobie drummer

evolutionary biologist

civil rights (oh, and some acting and stuff)

dean wormer

White House-friendly reporter under scrutiny [boston globe, february 2, 2005]

The Bush administration has provided White House media credentials to a man who has virtually no journalistic background, asks softball questions to the president and his spokesman in the midst of contentious news conferences, and routinely reprints long passages verbatim from official press releases as original news articles on his website.

…

Now, the question of how Gannon gets into White House press conferences is coming under intense scrutiny from critics who contend that Gannon is not a journalist but rather a White House tool to soften media coverage of Bush. The issue was raised by a media watchdog group and picked up by Internet bloggers, who linked Gannon’s presence in White House briefings to recent controversies over whether the administration manipulates the flow of information to the public.

i, of course, have missed the bloggers simmering on this story, but, now that it’s made the boston globe, it’s probably worth mentioning (add my blog to the fire). at the moment, technorati is reporting 362 links from 272 sources. so, as one measure of the blogosphere’s ability to influence mainstream media, less than 300 bloggers can drive a story into the boston globe (it’s actually much less, since several dozen of the posts appear after the globe article).

oddly enough, you can find a citation for talon news (gannon’s mouthpiece), even here on the meta-roj blog. back in july, i wrote about the ketchup wars, and left it in the humor category. now, i’ll be the first to say that i hope the whitehouse would credential anyone that’s not a threat. that is, oddly enough in this time of perpetual war, part of the first amendment.

sadly, i’m not surprised that gannon gets called on a lot, particularly when the official white house mouthpiece or the president gets uncomfortable questions.

rather than write this up myself, i dropped it into someone else’s brain, and watched while a blog post came out. so, in this case, i guess i’m proxy-blogging through my favorite welsh-promoting briton.

Remove brain before opening wallet

update: i was dreaming when i wrote this. i fixed the language.