WombatNation

I went to the gorgeous Grand-Lake Theatre in Oakland tonight with wife and friends to see Quantum of Winter Solstice. I was totally expecting an educational film on astronomy, so the guns, car chases and boring villains were quite the surprise. However, I did take solace in the kick-out-the-jams performance of the organ player who rises up from the orchestra pit with his Mighty Wurlitzer Organ and then descends again just before the movie starts. That’s something you don’t get at the 38-screen multi-megaplex at the suburban mall.

Spoiler Alert:

I accidentally wrote Soiler Alert, at first. But that would be more apropos to the Baby Brigade at the Parkway Speakeasy.

Bond movies often have intriguing villains and well thought out storylines that meaningfully build to a climactic conclusion. Well, before the bit where Bond gets busy with the beauty pageant contestant, martial arts expert, nuclear physicist, gun/knife toting woman he’s been fighting/flirting with for most of the movie. Quantum Solace, in contrast, seemed to primarily be about Bond’s quest for revenge over a dead girlfriend being played out indirectly against a poorly explained pack of bad guys who seemed to be wedged sideways into the plot because there simply “has” to be an evil cabal in every Bond flick.

And usually the axis of evil has cooked up some plan that will result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people unless they get paid a huge ransom. Or will simply result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people because the bad guys are unrepentant misanthropes. However, Dominic Greene of the bashful evil supergroup Quantum has his sights set a bit lower. In the midst of arranging for a military coup in Bolivia, he tricks the new dictator into agreeing to pay double the going rate for municipal water.

WTF??? That’s the frickin’ evil plan? Is Quantum the secret name of EBMUD? After all, they raised our rates. I don’t think it was double, though. Heck, the real life Aguas del Tunari consortium in Bolivia raised rates by 35% after taking control of the water supply.

There’s has been a long history of water issues in Bolivia. In fact, when the little bit of a plot that was there played out and revealed a dictator trying to come back to power, I immediately thought of General Hugo Banzer.

An amusing aside for me was that Greene ends up being left by Bond to die in the Atacama desert (footage was shot in Chile rather than Bolivia) with a can of motor oil to drink when he gets thirsty. Many years ago Sandra and I were stranded in the Atacama desert when the truck that our guide was driving completely broke down before dawn on the way to the geysers near San Pedro de Atacama. Fortunately, the driver’s thermos of hot tea was more refreshing than motor oil. We also had to walk only about 7 miles before being picked up and brought back to town.

Went to Lucky Ju Ju Pinball in Alameda Monday night with the sales team at work. Lucky Ju Ju has a fantastic collection of vintage pinball machines, plus a few choice recent machines, including two of my all time favorites The Addams Family and Twilight Zone. Growing up I spent a lot of quarters on Xenon, which Lucky Ju Ju also had. The only machine they didn’t have that I had played a lot before was Eight Ball Deluxe.

They had a really freaky pinball machine called Orbitor 1. The play field is three dimensional with large hills and valleys. It’s very difficult to predict the path of the ball, especially because of the spinning magnetic bumpers in the middle. Without a doubt, Orbitor 1 is the strangest pinball machine I’ve ever played.

Another unusual machine they have is Flipper Football. It’s intended for two teams of 1-3 players, with each team getting to play for one half of the game. Each team also gets to choose which country they will be representing. You score a goal for each ball you put through the gap at the top after knocking down enough drop targets for the ball to slip through. The other team scores a goal for every ball you drain during your team’s half.

If you plan to see Control, the biopic of Ian Curtis from Joy Division, read no further if you don’t want any spoilers, other than to know that I highly recommend the movie.

After writing and recording a few incredible albums, Curtis hanged himself at the age of 23 in 1980. Years later when I read brief news articles about his death, I learned little more than that he was a depressed musician. Control (which was co-produced by his wife Debbie Curtis) clears up a lot of the mystery. Afflicted with epilepsy, Curtis was also trapped in a love triangle with a wife that he married while quite young and with an employee at the Belgian Embassy who wants to interview bands. He loved his wife and child too much to completely walk away from them, but he also loved Annik too much to leave her, even though he knew that the relationship was destroying his marriage.

Of course, one hopes Curtis’s wife didn’t just take the opportunity to rewrite history to make herself look better. In general, she did come across pretty well in the movie, although her husband’s mistress was also portrayed as a decent person who was scared of falling in love with Ian.

Some people have criticized Control because it didn’t focus enough on the band. Control isn’t the Joy Division movie, though. It’s a movie about the life of Ian Curtis.

I recommend also watching 24 Hour Party People for another perspective on Ian Curtis and Joy Division, although Curtis is portrayed more as an abrasive jerk in that movie.

One amusing bit of trivia mentioned at IMDB is that the actor who played Curtis also played the lead singer for The Fall in 24 Hour Party People. This is amusing, because in Control, Joy Division’s manager tells Curtis that things could be worse, he could be the lead singer for The Fall.

If you have a twisted sense of humor and haven’t yet watched the Emmy award winning (no joke) Robot Chicken, for your own sake please read the Wired article on Robot Chicken, watch a episode on Adult Swim, and then come back to thank me for hooking you up with the best show on TV for people with a twisted sense of humor.

The “Trapped in the Closet” episode of South Park that parodies Scientology, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and R. Kelly is available from Xenu.tv.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have an HD over-the-air receiver, you may have run into problems in the last week if you tried to watch the Olympics in HD on NBC 11. Instead of getting a nice, crisp HD image of people moving quickly across the white stuff, you would have seen an unusually poor SD image of NBC weather on 11.1 and nothing on 11.2. Even worse, there was no crawl text along the bottom of the screen to explain the problem.

My wife did some searching on the Web and finally managed to track down the phone number of the newsdesk at the station. They explained that they had installed some new equipment just a week before and that this resulted in many HD receivers not being able to immediately lock onto the signal from the new equipment. If you dig around on their website, you can find the explanation there.

The fix is to force your HD OTA receiver to rememorize/reacquire KNTV’s digital channels at 11.1 and 11.2. If your receiver is like ours, it’s easiest to have it just reaquire all the channels.

While I’m not exactly up to date on the state of the art in puppet manipulation, I thought this video of a street vendor making a skeleton puppet dance was pretty amazing. The puppet master does a very nice job at the end of drawing attention to the donation hat. The video is pretty long, but it’s quite entertaining.

Also, it’s a WMV file, so if you’re using Linux, make sure you have the essential codecs installed for a player like MPlayer.

I finally got around to watching The Triplets of Belleville. Before the film started, all I knew was that it had been nominated for Oscars for best animated feature and original song, was French-made, and was kind of quirky. I had absolutely no idea what the plot was. If I had only known just how quirky the movie was, and that the Tour de France was involved, I would have seen it long ago.

I absolutely loved the film. How could I not like a movie with a caricature of Jacques Anquetil and a cameo appearance by Einstein’s Field Equations? This film blew me away in a similar fashion as did The City of Lost Children.

Although ostensibly a French film, there is so little dialogue that subtitles were not necessary. As the movie was starting, I was finishing off a veggie burrito. This resulted in two mistakes. First, the veggie burrito wasn’t nearly as good as the carnitas burrito that I normally get at Taqueria Los Comales. Second, between the facinating visuals and the lack of dialogue, I found it hard to take my eyes off the film for even a couple of seconds to finish my dinner. I know this is a small point, but I recommend you not try to eat or attempt any other form of misguided multitasking while watching this film.

About two weeks ago, I posted about the MGM DVD Class Action Settlement. As in my last post, this one will be half about MGM DVDs and half about speech applications. And if you are looking for a really meaningful discussion of the technical details behind the settlement, you should stop reading my blog immediately and go to The Digital Bits.

Yesterday, I received the Proof of Claim. It’s pretty simple to fill out. After providing some basic contact info, you enter the number of DVDs you are returning and you check the box next to the titles. You can return only one copy of each title. The Proof of Claim comes with a prepaid shipping label.

You then choose whether to receive $7.10 for each DVD or an equal number of replacement DVDs from a list of about 330 DVDs. No mixie-matchie. It’s either all cash or all new MGM DVDs.

While I have four DVDs from the trade-in list that were purchased during the relevant time period, I really didn’t see anything from the Exhibit “A” list that I wanted more than what I already have. Sure, both “Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo” and “Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh” were major hits at Sundance and Cannes. Also, Lambada and Showgirls have a lot going for them, but, dammit, I do like my copy of “24 Hour Party People”. After all, I did buy these DVDs for a reason.

Actually, the DVDs on the exchange list aren’t that bad. Choices include:

1. 12 Angry Men
2. Elmer Gantry
3. Henry V [gets my vote for best film with English as a foreign language]
4. Mississippi Burning
5. Ronin
6. How to Stuff a Wild Bikini

Er, uh, maybe I should have stopped at five. There are a few other good movies on the list (though not many good ones from after 1995), but it’s mostly slim pickins (though I don’t think any Slim Pickens).

And now about that speech app. Like I posted before, the speech app did not try to automatically capture my address. Lo and behold, and I have to say that I told you or somebody else so, the “make a recording and have someone transcribe it later” trick didn’t work so well. While I obviously did receive the letter, the address wasn’t correct.

The street I live on has two f’s. The address on the envelope replaced the f’s with s’s. There is no Tissin road in Oakland. Any decent address verification algorithm should have picked that up, especially since they captured the zip code properly. While you might not think that an automated speech application would be very good at capturing addresses, they actually can be extremely good at it.

For the applications we develop at work, we use a USPS database for all addresses in the US. Our speech apps are very good at taking an ambiguous utterance from a caller and very quickly examining a large number of possible matches. If a person were performing this work, it would be such a mind numbing task that errors would very likely creep in. But, speech apps don’t get tired or bored. Since the app already has the text of what was recognized, validating that address against streets in the zip code is very easy. And, if it turns out not to be valid or if it gets multiple matches, the app can easily and quickly reprompt the caller for more info. Yes, I, for one, welcome our new speech application overlords.

As seen recently on Slashdot, MGM recently settled a class action suit involving the image quality of DVDs they sold under the classification of “widescreen”. The claim is that the image width of the alleged widescreen versions was no different than for the standard versions. As per normal class action settlement verbiage, MGM denies any wrongdoing.

The website has a link to a five-page PDF containing a long list of the movies in question. If you purchased any of these movies between December 1998 and 8 September 2003, you can trade in each one for either $7.10 or a new DVD from a list of 325 titles. You have to submit a request for a claim form before you get to see the list of 325 titles.

I very quickly scanned the list and found at least four titles that I had purchased or received as a gift potentially during that time period – 24 Hour Party People, Powaqqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, and This Is Spinal Tap. So, I called the toll free number to obtain a claim form. As I was calling, of course, I was thinking about how an automated speech application would be a perfect solution for collection the information for the claim request.

I wasn’t surprised to discover that the “claims administrator”, The Garden City Group, had come to the same conclusion. They have a call center in Sarasota, Florida, and have an IVR system or systems that they claim can handle 380 simultaneous calls. The website didn’t distinguish between how many were DTMF-only ports and how many were speech-enabled ports.

The app wasn’t that great, but they might not have that much experience building speech apps. Unless you’ve had the chance to build a lot of speech apps, it’s hard to develop the expertise required to design a highly conversational app. While there are a lot of good, experienced website designers available, there aren’t very many good, experienced speech application designers.

Back to the app. The good news is there was no need for text to speech, because of the fairly static nature of the app. Of course, the reason it was static is that it didn’t do very much. Only one part of the dialog used speech recognition – the part where are you asked to name a DVD you purchased that you believe is covered by the specifics of the settlement. Since the female voice talent was able to record all the DVD titles in advance, her response included her saying the name of the movie back to you. Unless of course, the movie title wasn’t on the list. Their strategies for handling no matches and mismatches left a lot to be desired.

After the app either recognized a movie you said as being on the list or gave up after three or so no matches or misrecognitions, it proceeded to collect your name and address. Unfortunately, it did this by recording you while you said and spelled the requested information. Presumably, they then had a person transcribe the info. While this is cheaper than having live agents waiting to handle calls 24×7 (especially if they then outsource the transcription to a low wage country), it would be even cheaper if they used the speech recognition engine and a suitable interface to a database of names and addresses. We’ve developed a system like that at work, and it works great for automating the transcription. Our solution is built right into the app, so we can do the transcription in realtime and play it back to the caller for confirmation. If a live agent is confused by the recording of the address (whether due to accent, a poor cell phone connection, dogs barking, etc.), the caller is no longer on the line to ask for confirmation. Also, while automated speech recognition isn’t perfect, human speech reco and transcription isn’t exactly perfect either. Whether the agent misunderstood what I said or merely made a typo when entering the info, many times I’ve had my name or address transcribed incorrectly by a live call center agent.