Fnord.

The much-anticipated new BlackBerry ‘Pearl’ 8100 is out, thinner than a Motorola Razr, finally added a 1.3 megapixel camera, SureType (half-qwerty + software) keyboard, 2.0 Bluetooth, media player too.

List on the T-Mobile site as $199 with rebates, damned reasonable really.

Off to call the retention rep at T-mobile to see if they’ll cut me a deal!

Update: Nope, lame. 238 shipped, or the same basic 200 dollar deal. Hmm. I suspect this will be free soon on Amazon, with new activation. Wonder if I should drop and re-enroll?

…and games for the iPod, and this tasty morsel:

The new shuffle.

Now checking out the itunes update - it’s cranking through my library and ‘Determining gapless playback’… I have Large Hopes, here!

From Lifehacker, a neat trick - highlight a word and press Apple-Control-D, and a dictionary pops up.

Very, very, cool.

This one is for Larry.

Some people wonder why I like Slayer so much. Then I got to wondering the same thing myself, and while wondering this I started thinking about William Gibson’s microsofts (again).

Here is my theory: Slayer’s music acts just like a microsoft. It plugs directly into the part of your brain that takes over when you’re running from a sabertoothed tiger. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and your heart race. Three hundred thousand years of evolution peeled back by the Slayer microsoft.

This is why I think Slayer is so revered by so many. They have figured something out that no other musical act has - how to plug directly into the lizard brain.

I have to agree somewhat, although for me slayer is guilty pleasure due to their politics.

Via Rimarkable, the news that the Magmic Sudoku game is now free from point-the-bb-browser to mobile.blackberry.com

I never got addicted, but I suspect a lotta other ‘berry users will find this to be very good news indeed.

Worth dealing with the Salon registration/ad-watching crap, this article is excellent:

In addition to the cerebellum, music taps into the frontal lobes (a “higher-order” region that processes musical structure), and it also activates the mesolimbic system, which Levitin explains is “involved in arousal, pleasure, the transmission of opiods and the production of dopamine.” This is why certain music can feel so pleasurable, producing such deep emotions — it’s simultaneously operating on various parts of our brains, and the response is something on the order of taking a hit of heroin.

Clearly, though, we don’t all find pleasure in the same music — and what determines whether we end up loving Billy Corgan, Billy Idol, Billie Holiday or Billy Shatner is mostly a matter of what we listen to when when we’re young. Studies suggest that we start listening to and remembering music in the womb (but playing Mozart to your baby, and indeed playing Mozart to yourself, will not make you smarter — studies showing that famous effect have largely been debunked). Humans prefer music of their own culture when they’re toddlers, but it’s in our teens that we choose the specific sort of music that we’ll love forever. These years, Levitin explains, are emotional times, “and we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to ‘tag’ the memories as something important.” In addition, our brains are undergoing massive changes up until the teen years — after that, the brain structure becomes more fixed, and it begins to prune, rather than grow, neural connections. Consequently it’s in our teens that we’re most receptive to new kinds of music (in much the same way it’s easier to learn a new language when you’re young than when you’re old). After that, you can of course find new stuff to love — but there is a reason that there’s such a thing as “your parent’s music,” and why, even though I can’t get enough Paul Simon, I’m far more emotionally attached to my generation’s music.

It’s a book called This is Your Brain on Music (amazon link) that looks pretty interesting.

 mdadm -Cv /dev/md0 -l5 -n3 -x0 /dev/sd{b,c,d}1

is the magic required to create a RAID-5 array, no spares, from devices sdb, c and d, partition 1, type flag 0xFD of course.

Earlier this year, my siblings and I got together to get my younger brother a nice watch for his college graduation. I did some research, and pulled one out of my “I’d love to own this watch” queue, the Christopher Ward Malvern C5 automatic in stainless steel, mostly based on this review on TimeZone. Using a pic from that review, you can see that it’s a real beauty:

(Picture links to the review)

The Malvern is both gorgeous and amazing value for the money, please read the review and then return here…

Charles loves the watch, as does his style-conscious Italian wife, so I figure we succeeded. He’s just starting in the financial industry, so it’s just about perfect. It’s an Elabore-grade (more on this later) ETA 2824-2, so it’s accurate, reliable and inexpensive to service.

I really liked the Malvern, but prefer watches with better readability (i.e. larger, wider hands) and luminosity so I can read them when I wake up at night. Yeah, I’m strange. So the Malvern was moved to my “maybe someday if I get a real job where I have to dress better” list. Which is quite short. One watch long.

And then… TimeZone hit me with this:

(Pic links to review, a must-read)

Ooooh, I do like! Less bling than the Malvern (satin vs polished case, indices are less reflective, black face), SuperLuminova (the good stuff) for lume, and the sort of fine visual care and detail that I’m coming to expect from Christoper Ward. The pilot theme is nice too. Stainless 316L case, domed anti-reflective-coated sapphire crystal too. The crystal in particular is something I’ve been looking for, as I’ve learned that uncoated sapphire often makes an excellent mirror.And it gets better. I emailed him, asking which grade of ETA movement he used. Although he had to fight through my work spam filter, he perservered with this reply:

The movements in our two Malvern’s are Elabore, although there are other differences. Whilst the watch your brother has is essentially a standardized finish with gold gilt, the aviator is of a higher spec, being Rhodium finish and with a skeletonised rotor, cdg polish (not clear on photo below…but it is there)and pearlised plates.

If you want more detail, follow this link on movement grades, here’s the spec snipped from it:

Elaboré (regulated in three positions Dial up, 6H and 9H)
Mean daily rate +/- 7 s/d
Max variation across 5 positions: 20 s
Isochronism: +/- 15 s/d

Not bad at all, and a hell of a lot better than my Seiko. (See this post for Seiko vs CW).

Check out this closeup, also from the TZ review:

You can see the perlage, Etachron fine regulator, skeletonized rotor, and just a hint of the Cote du Geneve polish. Gorgeous!The ETA 2824-2 is a nice movement, available in five grades. It’s used everywhere, in watches costing up to five figures. In top grade, its a COSC-certifiable chronometer, and even in Elabore a nice movement. CW wants 165 pounds (appx 270 USD) for it. By way of comparison, a low-end Fortis with the base-grade 2824-2 is $600!I want this watch. Now I just have to finance it.

More information

Read, learn, be educated. This list took me two weeks to assemble! CW does not advertise, so reviews and such are hard to find.

1. Product page (Does not render correctly except for in IE, sigh)
2. Review of the ETA 2824-2 movement
3. More on ETA 2xxx series
4. Discussion on WatchUSeek about the ETA
5. Comparison vs Seiko 7S26
6. Table of which watchmakers use which ETA movements or ebauches
7. Second page of table
8. Nice discussion at Watch Rap on the 2824 movement
9. Christoper Ward forum

Wrapup

About the only things I would change would be lume on the second hand, and maybe a version with the ETA 2893 GMT. For a real pilot’s watch, GMT is a must-have. Still and all, this is at the top of my list. Time to sell some watches!

UPDATE 9/5/06: Ordered! Found some unused computer gear that I can ebay off…
UPDATE 11/20/06: Added link to CW forum when Highstreet added a comment.
UPDATE 8/6/07: As per a comment, here’s the page explaining how to regulate (adjust) an ETA 2824. This is what I did on the Fortis as well.

UPDATE 9/26/07: More information on the Aviator:

1. Almost here…
2. My Malvern Aviator review
3. Why CW and not Seiko?
4. Aviator update
5. CW versus Fortis Flieger

Via the big picture: