High-Fidelity Stereoscope

U2 3DYou could describe me as a somewhat reluctant fan of the Irish rock band U2. I was a big fan as a kid, but these days I only sporadically enjoy their music, and as they get older the band members’ penchant for dressing like dads just escaped from a Hot Topic store makes me cringe more and more. Still, I buy every new album they put out. I don’t really listen to them all that much, but I buy them. It’s something I do mostly out of habit and some vague idea that I may as well own all of their albums; I bought my first U2 record (cassette tape, actually) when I was fifteen or sixteen, I think. Oof. That’s twenty years of forking money over to these clowns.

Last night I threw another sixteen dollars on that pile when I went to see “U2 3D” at the IMAX theater at Lincoln Plaza. As an entertainment product, this movie is exactly as advertised: the Irish rockers filmed in concert, projected in three dimensions hugely against IMAX’s signature concave screen.

It’s not an unentertaining film, I’ll admit, though there was certainly more than enough of Bono’s hammy gestural histrionics to make me glad it only ran about ninety minutes long. I guess it helped that I knew all of the songs, too, but the real attraction — the only reason I was tempted enough to travel all the way uptown on a Monday for it — was the buzz I’d heard about this movie being a visual breakthrough.

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Not by Southwest

Unfortunately, I have bad news for the many friends I was hoping to see at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin: I won’t be attending this year. Not that my three-year attendance streak was much to brag about, but I was really looking forward to showing up there for a fourth year. In spite of my criticisms about last year’s show, I still had a great time, learned a lot and left Austin wanting to come back.

However, I have pretty good reasons for why I had to cancel. First, I’m heading to San Francisco in mid-March for a business trip. At the end of my trip, I’m going to take my eleven year old nephew with me for a trip to Paris to see my dad. It’ll be his first trip abroad, which is exciting for him and exciting for me, too. We’ll be there for a week at the end of March, so if you have any recommendations on how to entertain a pre-teen in the City of Lights (or its environs), please let me know.

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The Host with the Most

Among the problems in my life that I’d like to do something about sooner or later is server performance for Subtraction.com and the various domains that I host along with it, including A Brief Message. These are all hosted over at DreamHost which, as I and many people have mentioned before, is less than ideal; it’s slow, slow and slow.

I’m told, though, that the performance I get from DreamHost is unfortunately about the level of performance I should realistically expect from any shared hosting plan. It’s consumer hosting, after all, and even if I move up-market a bit and pony up more money, consumer-grade hosting is never going to be as responsive as my fondest daydreams hope it can be.

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Bought and Paid For

Um, did no one notice that, in my post about Adobe Creative Suite 3 that I mentioned that I had purchased that software package? Like, I bought it for myself, with my own hard-earned money. I didn’t “borrow” the installation discs from a friend or a business, which I’ve done in the past, ahem. (Not that using installation discs owned by some other party is particularly easy these days given Adobe’s anti-piracy measures.) But neither did I go looking for so-called cracked copies of the software on the Web, though they’re readily available, I’m sure.

It’s no doubt a function of the respectable, grown-up’s salary that I’m now lucky enough to bring home, but looking over the software on my hard drive, fully ninety-eight percent of it is legitimately mine (there are a couple of unpaid-for shareware utilities in there — I may be on the straight and narrow, but I’m a procrastinator, too). Meaning, I paid for it, and if you launch the software and invoke its registration screen, it will say “Registered to Khoi Vinh,” or something to that effect.

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