Wow.

This morning, on my way to work, the local jazz station played a new recording by Cynthia Felton: an interesting bass-and-vocal duet of Duke Ellington's "In a Mellow Tone."

And I said to myself, I said, "Wow."

Then I found her new album on CDBaby and listened to the previews of the other tunes (all of which are from the Ellington songbook).

And I said, "Wow."

This is high praise from me, as I generally don't enjoy listening to female jazz singers, with the notable exceptions of Diana Krall, Jane Monheit & Stacey Kent. Well, add another name to that list of mine, and probably at the very top. Well, she & Diana can duke it out.

Much praise has been lavished on this new recording, so I'll leave it to the professional reviewers to give more in-depth analyses. My recommendation: just buy it.

Wow.

iPhone 3.0 (3GS) Voice Control problems

OK, so I really like the new iPhone. However, its Voice Control feature is really not up to snuff.

Firstly, if I want to dial the phone by voice, I have to take the phone out of my pocket and speak into it—even if I've got a Bluetooth headset connected. My old RAZR let me voice dial into the headset by pressing the button; why won't the iPhone? The headset button just makes the iPhone redial your last outgoing number, and only if you hold it down for a couple of seconds.

Secondly, if I have a playlist containing only podcast episodes, Voice Control won't play it. Apparently Voice Control will only play songs for some reason. I've got multiple podcast playlists (one for the short daily ones that I want to listen to first, and another for the other longer ones that come out less frequently), so when I want to switch between them I have to glance down at the screen.

Thirdly, and probably most important to me, there's no way to use Voice Control to start a playlist in shuffle mode—which, once my podcasts are finished, is exactly what I want to do. I have to start a playlist, then separately issue a "shuffle" voice command or shake the phone (if 'shake to shuffle' is enabled). While this could a serviceable enough option, it adds one to the Skip Count of the first item in the playlist! I haven't skipped the song; I just wanted to start the playlist in shuffle mode. This throws off my smart playlists, some of which use Skip Count and Last Skipped Time to determine which songs should be included.

The worst part of this two-steps-to-shuffle bit, however, is how long it takes—especially while I'm driving the car. I should be able to issue a single voice command, not go through the whole rigmarole twice just to end up how I want it. Not to mention that it takes nearly 3 seconds of holding the button down just to start Voice Control each time, and then it may or may not understand my command properly the first time anyway.

Actually, in the process of writing this post, I discovered way to get a playlist going in shuffle mode without incrementing any songs' Skip Counts, but it takes three steps! First, issue the Voice command "shuffle", then it says "no music is playing; do you want to play music now?" So then you have to wait for the beep and say "yes," which starts playing your whole library in shuffle mode. Then you can start Voice Control again and tell it to play a particular playlist, which will then start in shuffle mode.

Apple, please think of the people who are using your products in the car! Make it simple to place calls and initiate shuffled playlists without looking at the device! There's a "shuffle" button at the top of every playlist in the visual interface; shouldn't that be an option in the spoken interface as well?

I realize that, at iPhone OS 3.0's introduction, they said that Voice Control wasn't totally complete. However, its inclusion at all was one of the big things that convinced me to finally get one, so I'm a bit disappointed that it was added on without the usual polish of most Apple products.

Shiny New Toy

Recently the Netflix DVD-rentals-by-mail service introduced a new product, a set-top box that lets you stream movies from the Internet directly to your television.

They've had the "Instant View" capability for quite a while now, but you needed to watch the movies on a Windows PC. Now, though, they've teamed up with media-device company Roku to produce the Netflix Player to put those movies from the Internet onto your TV screen.

When I first heard about the Player, it seemed interesting, but I doubted that it would be worth it in my home. First of all, my wife and I cancelled our Netflix subscription back in 2005 after only about three months with the service. While it's a great service, we found ourselves feeling that we had to watch the DVDs as soon as possible and send them back for new ones so that we were getting our money's worth. Those red envelopes consumed nearly all of the free time we had (especially since we were on the plan that let us have three movies at a time).

However, I read a blog post by a fellow member of the local Linux Users' Group that changed my mind. He wrote about opening and setting up the machine, and I was really intrigued; especially by the mention of the television shows that were available for viewing with this method.

I looked around on the Netflix site to see how the pricing works, and it turns out that even the $9/month plan allows for unlimited Instant Viewing on the device (the plan includes one DVD in your home at a time). Well, that's barely more than the price of two Blockbuster rentals. Regardless of whether we went through the physical DVDs quickly, we could definitely get a good bang for our subscription buck with the Netflix Player. Granted, the device itslef costs $100, but we hadn't put any of our tax rebate into the US economy yet...

So I restarted our Netflix subscription a couple of weeks ago and ordered the Player. It was delivered by FedEx last Friday, and I've been really impressed by it. The only difficult part was entering the 64-character randomly-generated strong password for our wireless network on the little 9-button remote control. However, the onscreen keyboard was versatile enough to provide all the characters I needed, and the box downloaded my Instant Queue list immediately and was ready to start playing movies.

You have to choose the movies for your Instant Queue list by visiting the Netflix website on a computer, and then your only options on the Player itself are to change a few settings or play one of the movies you've pre-selected online. Most of the titles available are fairly old, though there are some newer movies. In a really cool twist, some recently-aired NBC shows (Heroes, 30 Rock, The Office) are already available for Instant Viewing. If more television gets added to the list in such a timely manner, we might even be able to cancel cable.

All in all, this is a great device that I recommend to anyone with a decently-fast Internet connection. Check it out!

My interest in Grisham novels: an obituary

For some time now, my “guilty pleasures” have been found in reading the novels of John Grisham. I'm almost embarrassed to partake in them: the writing is itself not spectacular, and I’m sure that any resemblance to the reality of practicing law in America is of the sort found by comparing Timothy Dalton’s portrayal of James Bond to the actual operations of the British secret service.

Nonetheless, I have found joy in much of his writing. In large part, it has been due to the obviously-invented intricacies in the plot lines: the mysterious informant in The Pelican Brief, the terror-stricken life of The Broker, and (of course) the web of lies exposed by the naïve law-school graduate who finds himself hired by The Firm. Many of his books have also made excellent movies, though of course Hollywood’s abbreviated version never truly does justice to the 300-plus-page written story.

I’ve actually read almost all of his books. I never got around to Skipping Christmas, and I just saw on his Web site that last year he published a new football story called Playing for Pizza, but I’ve managed to find and devour every “legal thriller” he’s concocted. Lately, though, I’ve been less than thrilled. A couple of years ago he wrote a non-fiction account of a baseball player’s legal troubles in The Innocent Man. Don’t ask me how that one turns out; I quit reading after just a few chapters due to his obvious and blatant bias toward one perspective of the story.

And today I finished reading his most recent work of fiction, The Appeal. Suffice it to say that I’m no longer a fan. My interest in his writing has dramatically waned, mainly stemming from the fact that I now find him bludgeoning me over the head with his personal point of view. When I read fiction, it’s for fun; I don’t want my entertainment to be wrapped around a heavy dose of someone else’s ideology. Whether I agree with his moral stance is immaterial: I’d rather be entertained by suspense, drama, and intrigue than be immersed in the intricate details of litigating and political campaigning from either side of the fence.

In short, I don’t think I’ll be anxiously awaiting Grisham’s next novel. Whether he goes the fiction or non-fiction route, I’m not enjoying the road he’s taking. And since I had been turning to his writing explicitly for the enjoyment of it, all reason for partaking in this “guilty pleasure” is now gone.