Buzz Me

When I first heard about Batter Blaster spray-on pancake mix, I was pretty fired up. And even if tree-huggers think it’s a waste of packaging, the sad truth is that, yes, making pancakes and waffles from scratch (and especially waffles) is a chore, and even making pancakes from a mix is a mess. And also, in terms of food innovations, I think this is genius. Plus, unlike a lot of pancake mixes, it doesn’t contain any transfat, and it’s organic, as in, I recognized most of the ingredients. So, I tried it out. Pardon the obscene length of this video (I just wanted to take Windows Movie Maker for a test-run, and it doesn’t crop).

So, verdict? Yeah, it’s awesome. We made and ate five pancakes in about 15 minutes, and then I just wiped off the griddle with a paper towel and put the BB in the fridge. As I went along, I learned that I don’t need to do the swirly move I did in the video — just point down and spray and the pancake forms itself. I’m excited to try it with my waffle maker, too. Two thumbs up for Batter Blaster. I saved so much time, I’ve decided to go bake some homemade banana bread.

I really wanted to love my 80GB Zune. I’d heard good things about its WiFi and its FM radio, its software, the Zune Marketplace, its easy navigation, and its non-iPod-ness. But then I got it, and now I hate it. And here’s why, in ascending order of annoyance.

5. The software and music categorization

The Zune software (its equivalent of iTunes) is slow and super-unintuitive. When I first started using it, I literally could not figure out how to start adding songs. I had to look it up, and discovered it’s a common bug when you use the device and software for the first time, so I had to unplug the Zune, restart the software, and then I could drag and drop songs onto the device. It’s also nowhere near as good at categorizing music as iTunes. In fact, when I imported my iTunes library into the Zune software, it couldn’t figure out the difference between album and artist for most songs, so browsing the collection on the device is a total nightmare.

In the software itself, there are way too many menu options — without the Zune plugged in, there’s a two-line menu with five separate options: Collection, Device, Marketplace, Social, and Disc on the top line, and then Music, Playlists, Videos, Pictures, Podcasts on the second line. Plug the device in, and there’s one MORE menu option once you click Device (Status).

Plus, the software and device don’t seem to respond to my settings choices. I asked the Zune, under Settings, to “Let me choose” to sync music, video, pictures, and podcasts — but whenever I plug in the Zune, it auto-syncs. Eh? Worse, settings in the software menu (like, “Keep 3 episodes of each podcast”) override the already-overridden “let me choose” option on the Zune, so the software ends up taking podcasts off the Zune when I don’t want it to. But that’s hardly the worst sync sin the Zune performs. More on that later.

Note: I did not subscribe to the Zune Marketplace, because I’m not even remotely interested in a heavily DRM’d subscription service, so I have not taken advantage of the joys of Squirting Songs or anything like that. However, since I’ve never encountered another Zune user in the wild, I haven’t felt like I missed out.

4. The headphones

The Zune’s headphones were, at first blush, one of the best things about it. They’re nice, in-ear headphones with really good quality sound. They look good and fit comfortably, and the ends of the earbuds are magnetic, so they can hang around your neck without falling off. But here’s the thing. The headphone cord is fabric, instead of the plastic-coated cable of iPod headphones or their ilk. And fabric, which is basically string, is one big knot waiting to happen. Combine the knotting tendencies of string with the magnetic ends of the earbuds, and the headphones are constantly in a state of tangle that you cannot even believe. It’s a 10-minute endeavor to untangle them every time I pull them out of my bag. My bus ride is only 25 to 30 minutes long. It’s just not worth it.

3. The player interface

Yes, the iPod makes navigation easy. And at first blush, so does the Zune. I love the big menu items on the home screen for Music, Videos, Pictures, Social, Radio, Podcasts, and Settings. But there are just way too many clicks required to play a song, way too many to add a song to a playlist on the fly, and way too many menu items that aren’t songs at the top of the Quick List playlist.

Playing an album is pretty easy — you just side-scroll to Albums, choose it, click the Album title, and choose Play All (other options are “add all to quick list” or “send”). On this screen, you’ll actually see a list of all the songs on the album.

But to find and then play a song by a specific artist (which I usually do, because artist names are easier to remember than album names), you first find the name of the artist, then click it. Now, you’ll see “Play all” and “add all to quick list,” but no “send” option. Annoying interface consistency issue. Anyway. Under that, there’s the album cover and the album title — but no list of songs. So, if I want to play the first song on the artist’s album, I then have to scroll down to the album name, click that, then scroll past “play all,” “add all to quick list,” and “send” to the song name, and click the song name.

But that does not start playing the song. At this point, I go to yet another screen, where I can “play,” “add to quick list,” or “send.” After a few weeks of use, I had added pretty much every song on the device to the Quick List, which kind of defeated the purpose, you know?

Also, and this is nit-picky, but the Zune has a huge screen. In most cases, that’s great. But does it really have to display the album art for what you’re listening to at the full size of the display? Because I don’t really need everyone on the bus to see that I’m having a Carrie Underwood moment, know what I’m sayin’?

2. The wireless is worthless

What is the point of the Zune having WiFi? Seriously? All it can do is sync music wirelessly on my home network. That’s a neat trick, but it’s not that much of an advantage over plugging it in, considering that my laptop lives in a tangle of connector cords on my breakfast bar anyway. I can’t download songs over-the-air, and there’s no browser and no sign of there ever being a browser. The best trick it’s got is that I can unsubscribe to a podcast over WiFi. But I can’t browse for and subscribe to anything new, so I’m really just depriving myself of content on the go. Hooray.

But all four of these issues with my Zune pale in comparison to the number one reason the Zune is, and forever will be, dead to me.

1. The erasing of my server-stored music

At my house, we keep all our MP3s stored on a Media Center PC, which we mount as a networked drive for adding music to portable devices. So, when I first got my Zune, I ripped three CDs using this laptop, then loaded up the MP3 server and painstakingly picked out some 2,000 songs over about a three-hour period. I didn’t sync again for a couple of months, because, well, I had all the music, video, and photos I needed — and it actually has pretty impressive battery life, so I hadn’t even bothered to plug it in to charge it.

Then, about two weeks ago, I was going on a trip. My Zune’s battery had run out, so I plugged it in to charge it to take on the plane with me. Despite my settings in the Zune software not to sync all my music, video, pictures, and podcasts, the Zune started its sync dance.

When it was complete, it gave me this message:

10 items added
2,372 items removed

WHAT!!!???

Yep. The software, in its auto-sync wisdom, removed every single song from the device that was not stored locally on the computer. There was no prompt, there was no “I can’t find this” warning like the iTunes Library will sometimes offer. It just decided, out of what I assume was some misguided antipiracy effort, to remove any songs that it couldn’t find on my hard drive. What if I were syncing the machine with two different computers with two different music libraries, you ask? Too bad. Zune is in control.

And you know what? I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like sitting on a wiped Zune two hours before I’m supposed to leave from the airport. I don’t like software that ignores what I think is a pretty specific request for manual syncing, and I don’t like device behaviors that assume I am stealing music. What this all boils down to, I’m truly sorry to say, is that I don’t like my Zune. Hello, again, little iPod buddy.

CNET TV gets yet another show this week (you’ll be sick of me soon enough), called Today in Tech History. It’ll be daily, as the name suggests. Check it out, along with our sweet new embeddable CNET TV player!

In case you missed the launch of the last new show, it’s Geek Pop, and we taped our fourth episode today. Sum total of current CNET works now: Buzz Report, Mailbag, Buzz Out Loud podcast, Gadgettes podcast, Geek Pop, and Today in Tech History. No wonder I feel sorta tired … so with that, off to bed. Enjoy! Don’t miss the full-screen button!

It’s not that I disagree that China’s human rights record is abysmal, they should do something to stop the genocide in Darfur, and an independent Tibet would be just super. I just f**king hate protesters. Maybe just San Francisco protests. Protests of the San Francisco variety aren’t protests at all. They’re mobs. You’ll get a couple of true believers, and in the case of the Olympic Torch relay protests, some very nice Tibetan people who really truly have a beef. See, there’s always the orderly majority, but their numbers are on the decline, and it’s the rest of the crowd that ruins it for everyone.

The rest of the crowd is made up of these kids I passed on the way back from the gym just now, who are headed down to the wharf with that unmistakable protester’s gleam. They’re white kids, by and large, not that white kids can’t support a free Tibet, but I know these kids. They’re ungrateful middle-class white kids. They’re Professional Protesters. They’re invariably dressed in dirty black zip-up hoodies and their menfolk can never seem to grow a decent beard. They’re smug, they’re self-righteous, they’re thrilled to death that finally a good issue has come along so that they can stage a decent protest (because, frankly, they’ve gotten kind of sick of the war stuff — that’s so 2004). They’re these people (from the Chronicle):

“At one point, the crowd swarmed an empty tour bus, jumping on top of the vehicle and slapping pro-Tibet stickers on its sides. They retreated when it became clear the bus was empty.”

Yeah. You guys are awesome. They’re also these people:

“… a confrontation between the two sides escalated to a physical violence, when a San Francisco man named Kevin Johnson, 48, walked into a crowd of torch supporters and began yelling, ‘Communists!’”

And:

“… four pro-Tibetan protesters in the area complained that they had been pepper sprayed, although they didn’t know who did it.”

Probably the cops, though. I mean, let’s be realistic. It’s always the cops. These idiots would never get so disorganized that they’d pepper-spray each other. Christ.

And later today, this angry mob will make its way back through downtown San Francisco, and they’ll be all fired up from getting in fights and being pepper-sprayed and hopefully being dragged away on camera by S.W.A.T. team drones, slavering like a rabid dog as they oh-so-eruditely get their points across. And they’ll knock over newspaper stands and they’ll litter the streets with pamphlets and they’ll high-five each other and scream obscenities and/or dogmatic truisms at passersby. I just can’t wait for the evening commute.

And here’s the thing. They’ll convert absolutely no one, they’ll earn the respect of no one, they’ll impress or otherwise convince no one, and they’ll have just about as much impact as eight solid years of repeating protests have had on George W. Bush’s Iraq war policy, which is to say zero, because there was a time and place for “protests” to do their thing and be effective and that time has passed as “protesters” have morphed from conscientious objecters leading unprecedented protest movements that grew to encompass people from all over America and into a perceived Gathering Ground For WhackJobs who will, in fact, protest anything. Ugh. Shut UP, protesters.

I taped an interview with NBC 11 sometime last week, talking about the digital TV switchover. I will say NBC 11 picked some goofy sound-bites to use, but that’s me, a DTV jokester! Here’s the clip, which aired last night.

Apparently, clips from me, Brian Tong and Tom Merritt may eventually be turned into a 30-minute PSA that NBC will run in future months, so watch for that as well!

I don’t know who started this use of “really” as a sort of sarcastic, biting, questioning sort of way to suggest that the recipient of the “really” is a complete and utter moron. It’s used to hilarious effect by Seth Myers and Amy Poehler in their “Really, with Seth and Amy” segment And it’s … for lack of a better description … becoming one of those phrases that white people like. Catch it at the end of this Daily Show clip for example (and heaven preserve me from even visiting Berkeley, to which I live all too near, but that’s another post).

But today, I was at the Oakland Zoo, and I realized that not only has “really” permeated the consciousness of almost everyone around me, it’s apparently also become a parenting technique. For example, a woman pushing a baby in a MacLaren stroller offered this exasperated shout to her daughter, maybe four or five, who was taking off in the other direction: “Really, Zoe? You’re just going to run away. Really.” Then, not 10 minutes later, yet another mother hollered to her child, this time a girl of more like 3, “You’re REALLY going to run right through that mud?”

Now. See. I know the use of “really” as a cutting, world-weary expression of sangfroid makes you a super-cool grownup. I’m with you, dude, you’re totally the type who’s faux-amazed that another human being could possibly be so utterly, uselessly, shamelessly unintelligent, and your faux-amazement is its own form of intellectual genius. Seriously. You’re like the star of your own Heathers movie. But here’s the thing. Child-rearing is not like Dissing Your Dog. They don’t actually get your hipster sense of disdain. When you ask them if they’re really going to run away from you instead of saying put, or they’re really going to tromp right through that mud in their toddler Uggs, they’ve really only got one response for you. It goes a little something like this: “Yep!”

I know the title would seem to suggest a post of epic proportions, but I’m trying to get out the door and go to the grocery store after spending a full hour upgrading WordPress (damn you, server-side file permissions) and installing this beautiful new theme (damn you, built-in Windows Vista .zip extractor). So, here goes. Here’s a YouTube video of me on the Today Show last Sunday:

Here’s the latest Buzz Report (”Hookers and tech, together at last”):

And click here to watch the latest Mailbag, which cracked me up, at least.

On that note, I’m off to Whole Foods, where I fully intend to be both annoyed and amused by my bougie hippies, as always.

This week’s Buzz Report is a doozy, mostly thanks to Tom Merritt’s amazing 1940s broadcaster voice, producer Sarah Harbin’s mad editing skillz, and Khoa Nguyen’s animation. Wow, this show needs credits!

Why is this not a bigger story? Banks are freezing the home equity lines of credit they extended to their customers. I’ve seen reports that Countrywide has frozen over 122,000 lines of credit; IndyMac just, for the second time in just over a month, froze mine–citing an “adverse change” in our credit and financial situation since the line of credit was issued. In both cases, the “adverse change” seems to have been a drop in credit scores of around eight points. Eight points. In neither case did the scores drop out of the “good” credit score band, in case you’re wondering.

The last time we appealed the IndyMac freeze, we pointed out that despite the shockingly precipitous eight-point drop, our credit scores remained excellent and our overall household salary had actually increased 25 percent since we bought our house in April 2006. When we got our latest letter, about a week ago, we called customer service who told us, first, that we’d have to re-file our “dispute” the same way we had before–via fax; and second, that they had, on that day, mailed out 10,000 letters exactly like the ones we got.

This is, in a word, unacceptable. In my case, it’s ludicrous: we significantly overpay our line of credit bill, because we want to get rid of it. We’re hardly “high-risk” customers. And now we’re being punished for that diligence: we overpay on this high-interest debt instead of saving that money in a low-interest account. Why? Because the line of credit is just that–a line of credit that we can turn to in an emergency. Now, because a bunch of banks got themselves into trouble by convincing people that they could afford a lot more house than they bought, they’ve activated what I can only assume is a dumb algorithm that auto-cancels the lines of credit that they were, just a year or so ago, handing out to people like lollipops. And it’s really dumb if it’s canceling accounts based on credit scores that go from “really good” to “pretty good.”

If Countrywide is freezing more than a hundred thousand lines of credit and IndyMac is freezing 10,000 on any given day, and other lenders are following suit, it’s a more than safe bet that a lot of those people with frozen credit lines are perfectly good customers, like my husband and I, who are in no way default or foreclosure risks. Did I get a nontraditional variable-interest jumbo loan that used a credit line to supplement my cash down-payment instead of a nice, easy, 30-year fixed mortgage? Yes. Why? Because I wanted to buy a house in Oakland. It was silly, I know. To want to settle in the town where my husband grew up, raise a family near his old stomping grounds, maybe send them to the same schools–build some kind of family history in what, I think, is a pretty nice city. One that just happens to be almost entirely unaffordable.

Don’t even get me started on the way that Proposition 13 and out-of-control lenders combined to create a perfect storm of astronomically increasing housing prices in an utterly artificial market that makes California the least friendly environment to young families or, god forbid, the less-than-upper-middle-class that I have ever seen. Don’t even ask me what my property taxes are! And the way the financial structures aligned themselves to make the impossible seem possible? To support and justify and enable housing prices’ race to the moon? It’s unthinkable. When we walked into our mortgage brokers’ office to talk about buying our house, she calculated what we could afford each month using our gross income. She claimed we could “afford” a house with a monthly payment that was more than we took home after taxes. But what if we hadn’t done our own math? What if we didn’t know how? What if we trusted the advice of a respected, non-sleazy professional who wouldn’t dream of trying to drive a bus right over the top of us? A lot of people got themselves into a lot of trouble because they walked into the offices of mortgage brokers who looked at them like fat rabbits just ready for the spit, and a lot more people are finding themselves in trouble as those banks and brokers now get a tummyache from all that fat rabbit they ate. And it’s a bunch of crap.

Here’s the worst part. The more stories we read about the “subprime mortgage crunch,” the more the tone of the reporting starts to point the finger at the people who took out the loans in the first place. The people with “bad credit,” or the “irresponsible homeowners” whose “eyes were bigger than their stomachs.” I am telling you, reporters, you need to knock that tone off right now.

These lenders were consumed by the white-hot greed of a thousand suns, it was their playing field, their rules, and homeowners got taken for the ride of their lives. Now, those lives are being ruined, and while you can argue that the lenders are suffering because they’re losing money or being acquired or going out of business, it’s not enough. They’re headed for big, fat falling-interest-rate bailouts. Most of them will be acquired or bounce right back stronger than ever. No, it is not enough. They should be investigated, punished, reformed, hell, even shut down. And they won’t be. And this is what I liked about John Edwards–at least he talked about the possibility that this kind of “business” shouldn’t keep happening in America. Because you know what? Like the lenders, I am going to be just fine. I am lucky as hell–I have a great job, a stable family, a good salary, and good credit. I’m one of the lucky ones. But if I feel like the deck is stacked against me? I can’t even imagine what it would be like if it really and truly were.