Prince of Persia on sale

This is pretty crazy. One of my favorite games from last year, the Prince of Persia series reboot, is on sale for just US$16.90, or less than SGD$25, inclusive of free shipping to Singapore and many other countries.
Head over to Play-Asia.com to get your copy sometime in the next few days; the offer ends early next week or when stocks run out.

Affiliate link to product page.(Version sold is NTSC-J, with English and Korean languages)

Comparing ebooks: Classics, Stanza, and Eucalyptus on iPhone

Reading books on little mobile devices has never been very pleasant. I first started reading ebooks ten years ago, on the black and green screen of my PalmPilot. I packed it with Shakespeare to avoid bringing a bag full of books to class. Later in university, I would do the same to get around bringing a suitcase of books back and forth every summer. I used my computer then, and much better looking PDF files.

On every new phone I've bought in the last ten years, I would try and find ways to read books on it, but in that era, it was like hoping your phone could tell you where you were on a map and how to get someplace else. Up until my last Nokia phone, which DID have GPS, the dream of comfortably reading books was still a distant one. Apps were clunky and coded in Java, could only access ugly system fonts, and were no better than opening up a text file in notepad. Proper formatting was secondary to getting words on a screen.

Despite these limitations, I maintained a fondness for the idea of mobile reading and ebooks. Many people I know tell me they can't read off a screen. I think that has less to do with the idea of reading off a screen and more to do with the poor software that's traditionally been available. Microsoft Reader on Windows, which I used to play with, was actually one of the best desktop solutions with its ClearType rendering technology. Of course, telling your mom she should sit in front of a computer to read her bedside novel isn't going to win any converts. Handhelds are the key, but phone software just wasn't up to it.

There are many advantages to reading an ebook on a modern mobile device. For one, you don't need to have adequate ambient lighting. You can pretty much curl up on a couch in the dark. This doesn't apply to e-paper devices like the Amazon Kindles, of course. You can carry hundreds in no more than the volume of a single paperback. If it's a phone that's already in your pocket, you can read in short bursts, anywhere. The main tradeoff used to be that the text would be ugly, which can really make a difference to the whole experience.

Of course, I'm here to tell you that's no longer the case.

The iPhone, with its App Store full of quality 3rd-party software applications, has far more book reading solutions than any other phone had in the past. A company called Mobipocket used to dominate the mobile book reading software space on regular old phones and PDAs; but they were bought by Amazon which has its own Kindle software for iPhones now. One wonders what their plans for Stanza are.

I've tried just about all I could get my hands on. Most of them are not very good. Some stick to the old word processor paradigm and print text downwards on a scrolling page. I don't think that's the way to go. The best ones try to replicate the paper book experience, which is of course, the current best way to read.

-----

Above: Stanza, by Lexcycle (now acquired by Amazon) [lexcycle.com] - Free

Stanza came first, and it was free. I won't go into the details of everything that Stanza does, but it does a lot. You can buy DRM-ed books and you can download public domain books. You can even upload your own PDF files into it. The text rendering though, was a completely DIY affair. It started up with a vanilla black on white scheme, and if you wanted the words bigger/smaller, the line spacing and margins changed, or whatever, you would have to tweak it on your own. It didn't come with presets to approximate professional results. In fact, the earliest versions of Stanza used justified text as a default preset. It looked awful. The latest versions have a feature where you can enable hyphenation, which tells the program it's okay to break some long words up to avoid sentences looking like morse code. What you see above are my own presets, the result of much trial and error.

Above: Classics, by Andrew Kaz & Phill Ryu [classicsapp.com] - $0.99

Classics arrived on the scene a little later with a completely different approach. The selection of books was hardcoded into the app. You couldn't add or take away anything. It was a small library of carefully curated choices, and the fact that each page was professionally typeset to look good was alluded to in marketing materials. Oh, and it had a flashy page turning animation. Subsequent updates to the app added new books, but that hasn't happened in awhile. It debuted at the price of $2.99, which its developers claimed was a special introductory price. I suppose that meant it was especially high for early suckers, because you can get it now for just 99c. The much-lauded professional typesetting was a real disappointment for me. Text was larger than it needed to be, everything was poorly justified (huge rivers), and the text color wasn't quite bold enough. Still, I loved the sound and look of the turning pages. Because every page was pre-rendered and fixed, none of these aspects could be changed by the reader.

I alternated between Stanza and Classics for awhile. I changed the settings in Stanza to keep my text left justified until the option to hyphenate appeared. I could never get the page color I wanted. The yellow you see above looks a lot darker on my iPhone's screen, which works well enough.

Above: Eucalyptus, by James Montgomerie [eucalyptusapp.com] - $9.99

Eucalyptus blows them both out of the water, but there's always a catch. It only accesses public domain books on Project Gutenberg, which Stanza can do in addition to opening other files. There are about 20,000+ texts accessible through the PG library.

That's it. That's the only negative apart from the price. I don't consider not having the ability to turn your page color a sickly red and your text color Christmas-green to be a drawback. I love it when somebody who obviously knows his business, a professional of some sort, calibrates something so I don't have to. If you're the type who tries to fix his own air-conditioning or calibrate his own plasma TV, then perhaps you will enjoy whipping Stanza into shape. I didn't.

Even an illiterate can see that Eucalyptus has nailed the look of a book on a small screen. It even has a much better page flipping animation than Classics, and does it in real-time 3D. You can manipulate the softly flowing paper of a page in mid-air the same way you might a real page. You can't do that in Classics. To maintain control over its presentation, Classics seems to store every page as some sort of image file (it's nearly 50MB in size with about 15 books in it). Eucalyptus renders plain text with its own proprietary algorithms to make those beautiful pages on the fly. Because of that, you can change the text size, but not the typeface (it looks like Times to me turns out it's the open-sourced Linux Libertine).

---

I want you to indulge me and do a little experiment. Scroll back up and read the first paragraph, slowly, in each of the screenshots. Then come back here.

~

If you're like me, you would have noticed the big gaps between words in Stanza, and the need for hyphenation, which slowed down your reading/comprehension speed a little. The overall feeling you got after reading it like that was probably something along the lines of "meh". Classics, on the other hand, somehow encourages reading faster, and skimming. I think it's the larger type, which also serves to soften the gaps... but you'll see gaps aplenty on other pages in Classics. The rhythm of the sentence is wrecked. It goes from a slow, three-part opening line that sets the tone for the book to come into something rushed, and not fully digested. When you read it in Eucalyptus, it should be something of a revelation.

---

With regards to Stanza: I don't like having too many choices, because they encourage me to fiddle instead of just read. And if it's not done quite right, like in Classics, I just groan and try to make do. I've read quite a few of the books in Classics. But when ebook reading is done really, really well, like in Eucalyptus, then I can see a bridge clearly stretching from those days spent squinting on a dim, muddy screen in English class, all the way to the present, and it makes me really glad that now other people might finally have reason to get into this.

Advancements in sandwich technology

Science is ready to build a robotic girlfriend. We have the technology.

Believe it or not, the sandwiches from vending machines like this aren't half bad. I found this in the carpark of Mount Elizabeth Hospital tonight. The only other time I've seen a similar machine was in the lobby of Thomson Medical Center. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. It's only attractive in the presence of bad hospital food? But no, not half bad.

Two choices are available, and I'm told these are cycled every few days. The new sandwiches are delivered fresh daily, so with any luck, you'll eat something newer than what's on the shelf of your local 7-Eleven. I had a Sichuan Pepper Chicken Sandwich ($2.80), but the other choice was Chicken & Cheese ($2.30). You can also buy both for $4.50, but I was out of change.

Once ordered, it takes about 90 seconds to toast the sandwich (which stays wrapped in a paper bag), and then you toss it around from hand to hand for a minute. It seems there are only 20 of these machines nationwide, and they are operated by a company called HotBake.

-- Posted from my iPhone with BlogPress

20090426-IMG_0377, originally uploaded by sangsara.

Hopefully this rainy Sunday we're having is a sign that the heatwave is over. 32ºC indoors has not been conducive to anything.

Bintan vacation wrap-up

I haven't been very good about uploading the rest of my holiday photos since the last post, but finally got around to it this afternoon. Here are some of my favorite non-people ones.


(The above panorama was stitched together from about 20 photos; the two edges of the pool you see on the left and right were part of the same straight line. I have no idea what an equivalent wide-angle lens would be.)

Couch surfing 2.0

This past weekend saw my girlfriend and I buying a couch for my bedroom – I've wanted a comfortable reading and napping platform in there for ages, but always thought an armchair would be enough – and looking silly in the IKEA parking lot trying to get the flat-packed-for-our-convenience boxes into the back of her car. Assembly only took an hour, and it has to be said that Lady Gaga's album "The Fame" is ideal for such brainless activity, if nothing else. Certainly it can be good for nothing else.

Apart from looking very out of place, this couch (I hereby name it Karl Lagerfeld) has changed the two-point dynamic of my bedroom space. Before, I was either in bed or sitting at the computer. This meant that I'd be online most of the day, either working or wasting time on the internet. Often, there was nothing to separate the two.

But now, a third place for my ass exists, and that has changed everything. No longer confined to this desk, strapped down by continuous IM messages and the climbing number of Unread Items in my feedreader, I'm finding it possible to finally sprawl out and read a good book or watch a DVD. Nobody enjoys a film from a computer chair.

It was all good going already, and then last night I rediscovered Boxee.

An earlier alpha version, tried out during the pre-Karl days, didn't really appeal to me. For those who don't know, Boxee is "media center" software that gives you a big, simplified interface for accessing your media from across the room with a remote control. Very much like Apple's built-in Front Row, or the one that comes with some versions of Windows. So when I was seated right in front of the computer, there was no need for it. From the couch though, it's incredible.

With just the simple old 6-button Apple Remote that comes with almost every Mac, Boxee not only gives me access to locally stored video files (if you rip your own DVDs [or even download films] or TV shows, it downloads cover art and synopses from the internet to accompany them, very slick), it also plays content from providers like Joost and Hulu (US-only), as well as video podcasts like BoingBoing.TV and Rocketboom.

Another alternative is Plex (Mac OSX only), which I'm about to try out today. Both programs sprang from the open-source Xbox Media Center (XBMC) project.

It's got me thinking that one day, I won't even want a traditional desktop in my home. A large, wall-mounted high-definition TV with a wireless keyboard/mouse on the couch can simplify things to just a single location: workspace, reading area, and bed. Kinda like this guy.

Night for Day

There's a thing they do in the movie business (far more in the past, when technical limitations mandated it) where night scenes are shot in daylight through a special filter that darkens the scene. It's called day for night photography; watch any old noir film and you'll see it, the darkness that doesn't look quite right. We roll with such tricks the same way we do hokey CGI effects in modern story-driven films (bonus points if you can name any) – we're willing to suspend our disbelief.

On holiday in Bintan recently, I took a couple of photos like the one above. It was pitch black and near midnight, but setting my camera to keep its shutter open for a full minute, it was possible to gather up all the faint light that normally eludes the human eye, getting a photo that looks very much like day but not quite. The stars are one telltale sign. Who knew that the sun's orange rays continue to creep past the horizon long after we consider night to have fallen?

For working people, one of the joys of being on holiday in the middle of the week is imagining what you'd be doing if you weren't, and knowing that your office and colleagues continue to toil in your absence, maybe even suffering because of it. You know the feeling I mean. When it's Thursday afternoon and you're lying on a beach somewhere, the mind experiences a strange sensation, a pleasurable disorientation, as it tries to reconcile the information it has. You're not in a meeting. You're on a beach. It's Thursday, but not quite.

I used to wonder if it was possible to get that feeling of freedom on demand, as easily as pulling a filter over a lens. Having a tough day at work? Maybe project a few months into the future, where you have a new job or whatever, and confuse yourself into thinking that that world was running in parallel with the present.

Now that I'm not traditionally employed, I find myself having to take the reverse approach on holidays. For my travel companions, the four days burnt brightly with a sharp peak, followed by a treacherous comedown back into working routine. Not having to feel the pinch of expending precious leave days or returning to deal with crises left my experience curve shallower. I didn't dread the end as much, so one might say I enjoyed myself less. The solution was a perverse one. I had to imagine a time when this self-employed life was no longer viable. It's a state that continues to feel temporary, like an illusion made possible by warped optics. Having a job but not quite.

Anyway, I have a nice tan now. Nobody can believe it's me.


-- Posted from my iPhone with BlogPress

Is it the little things that count?

Awhile ago, a friend working overseas who I don't get a chance to meet very often told me that he checks in on this blog every now and then when he wants to know what I'm up to, and usually comes away disappointed. I think he specifically said that he doesn't care about what gadgets I'm after, what I thought about films I've seen, or what I find interesting, etc. Now, this is not the kind of talk many friends get away with, but because I only have to be insulted once every 18 months or so, I let it go.

But the thought that someone might be more interested in reading narratives on the minutiae of everyday lives – months after the fact! – rather than the critical choices that express our personalities, continues to strike me as strange even now, several weeks on, in the middle of the night.

There's always Twitter and Facebook if one wants status updates, but that can't be what he meant. Who would want to trawl through half a year's worth of anyone's Twitter stream? Microblogging, like the worst supermarket sandwiches, is generally worthless and meant for immediate consumption. Unless you're a fake celebrity account with carefully crafted witticisms (see @CWalken), chances are your lifestream's value as entertainment is virtually null after 48 hours.

Before I started thinking about this, my view was that Twitter presents microscopic detail from which a more complete picture of a life can be fabricated. In this story, blog posts are overviews; providing structure. Also, keep in mind that the two accounts of time spent (the descriptive report and the vocalized introspection) will coincide at some point. For example, if you hear a lot about my activities, you'd be able to discern a pattern that indicated my tastes. Conversely, if I told you how I felt about theatre, you would know not to look for me in a Sunday matinee.

I wonder if the opposite is true. Twitter and status updates are not detail, they're noisy overviews. The most coherent image one can put together will still be a best guess estimate. Real detail resides in thought and writing. The way most of us use Twitter, with truncated phrases and inhibited rhythms, it's no substitute for going without a word limit. In much of today's communications, you can't be sure whether it's the voice or the format you're hearing. It's the reason why I can skim a friend's blog posts from years ago and remember how they used to be. It's also the reason I keep my own.

After having tried to keep my different interests in separate blogs, and failed, it's come back to this. I'm grateful now for having one single place that periodically captures the things I'd like a future version of myself to know I once considered important, and for friends to know today, however unappreciative they might be.

Comments on HDR Camera vs iFlashReady [iPhoneography]

I just posted a comment on another site that ended up being too long, so I thought I'd reprint it here for my own records.

Last week, Glyn Evans from iPhoneography.com put up a review of HDR Camera [iTunes link], a US$1.99 iPhone app that promised to magically turn single-exposure photos from a crappy 2-megapixel camera into HDR masterpieces. For that review, Glyn used one of his usual sample photos (a close-up of a bolt on a wooden gate) to demonstrate the app's effects, but being the smartass that I am, I wrote in to essential say that I thought it wasn't suited for the purpose at hand (scenes with potential for HDR photography are usually marked by a wide variance between their light and dark areas [hence the name, High Dynamic Range], such as landscape shots with lots of sky. Properly done, HDR photos show the world in ways that our eyes cannot perceive, with everything evenly lit despite an overpowering light source).

I recommended looking at another application that I use regularly, iFlashReady [iTunes link], which gives fantastic HDR-like results. Glyn agreed with my points, and took down his review for some rewriting. It's just gone up again today, and his conclusion is still that HDR Camera is a waste of money.

My comment starts below. The remarks directed at another commenter, TrevorML, are in response to his question about the suitability of other general image editing apps on the iPhone to this sort of processing.

---

Hi Glyn,

Since our correspondence, I've had the misfortune of being tempted to try HDR Camera out for myself, and have arrived at the same conclusions as you. It largely produces unpleasant results I would be ashamed to show anyone on my iPhone or Flickr account. Other apps like iFlashReady and PhotoFX are far more capable of taking a badly exposed photo (a fault of the iPhone's limited camera software) and giving it some points of interest.

TrevorML: I'm glad you asked that question. Naturally it's impossible for any iPhone app today to produce true HDR images, as those require a series of bracketed images as you have noted. The iPhone camera API does not allow apps or users to manually adjust the auto-exposure values, or any other values for that matter. The best we can have for the moment (perhaps iPhone OS 3.0 will hand over more control to apps) is apps that simulate the effect by recovering lost/hidden photographic data.

I initially thought that iFlashReady worked by simply boosting the brightness of photos, which is how we might normally approach the problem in Photoshop/Aperture/Lightroom, etc. but it's actually more advanced. Looking at the developer's website, I discovered that they produce a professional application, Essential HDR (www.imagingluminary.com), for Windows PCs. It seems that they've taken some of their technologies and applied it to iFlashReady, and probably decided that marketing it as a brightening app would be more commercially successful than proclaiming its HDR features. Rightly so, I think, as few mainstream iPhone users know or give a crap about HDR.

But iFlashReady does work as an HDR app in practice, and like I was saying, it goes beyond simple brightening. What seems to be happening is a localized contrast balancing that increases brightness in dark areas without touching already well-exposed spots. A dark object can be directly beside a bright one, and the effect does not bleed over. I think it's probably more than just tweaking shadows and highlights too (as can be done in PhotoFX; I've tried and the results are not comparable), as it seems to have many subtle steps and a gentle tonal curve. The result looks surprisingly natural, and you can see that above. The ones from HDR Camera certainly do not.

Another thing that impressed me greatly was that the makers of iFlashReady seemed to have tuned their results with the iPhone's camera in mind. Noise is effectively suppressed, or simply not exaggerated by their processing. HDR Camera's "Night Mode" produces horrendous blotches of color noise across the entire photo. A few other apps I've seen also seem to just port their image effects over from the desktop side of things with no regard for imaging characteristics of the iPhone's camera.

If I sound like I'm plugging the app because I know the guys who made it, well I don't. I just use it nearly every other day and enjoy it a great deal. But since I'm recommending, another app I use often and find sadly underpublicized is the superb "ColorTaste with TOY LENS" [iTunes link] by Tandem Systems (who is really a rather friendly Japanese developer), which costs US$1.99. In my opinion, this app handily beats others like ToyCamera [iTunes] and Camerabag [iTunes] because of one feature: lens distortion modelling. It doesn't just alter colors and add a vignette (although it can do those too), its Toy Lens mode subtly distorts and blurs photos to look like they came from a tiny plastic lens, like what you'd find on a Diana (120 film) or Vistaquest VQ1005 (keychain digital) camera.

Again, to tie it back to the earlier part of this comment, this sort of initiative in iPhone app development impresses me greatly. Rather than just doing a me-too image processor, these two companies have opened up new avenues of iPhone photography.

Karaoke midget*

Karaoke midget*, originally uploaded by sangsara.

I was having lunch at a hawker centre and heard some (pretty awful, I'm sorry to say) Chinese singing, but couldn't figure out where it was coming from. A little while later, this guy comes from around the corner pushing a karaoke machine on a trolley and singing into a microphone. The fact that he was a midget just made the whole thing more surreal.

He was also rocking a single rolled-up pant leg, which disappointed me greatly because real gangstas don't sing Chinese love songs.

*I don't know if midget is an acceptable word, although it's the one I was brought up with. Someone suggested dwarf, which to me sounds even more derogatory.

Mad about our English

Sign in photo reads: This Way to "Bus Stop"

Sorry I didn't get a photo of the bus stop in question, but it was a really awesome "massage parlor".

~

In the 2008 Singapore-produced documentary, Mad About English, well-meaning residents of Beijing are shown preparing for the arrival of Olympic Games tourists by learning English phrases, often unsuccessfully, which is where most of the somewhat mean-spirited comedy comes from. Seen uncynically, the film has its merits, but it is hard to shake the idea that its producers believed the earnest efforts of the Chinese would ever amount to more than very awkward (mis)communication. I could be wrong, basing this on a single viewing, but the repeated images of fervency followed by failure, as well as the film's title itself, sets off some alarms. The film features no voice-over narration, which is a problem in two possible ways.

By explicitly saying nothing (with words) in a documentary format, a director invokes the powerful semiotics of neutrality; it's a dumbshow of backing off with upheld hands and sealed lips. But, of course, film is not a medium that depends on words for meaning, although we are conditioned by the bulk of documentary features to think that because narration is either truthful or biased, a filmmaker/agenda is powerless without it. Sometimes, the absence of narration can be a red herring. Defenses down, some viewers will inevitably take selective and non-linear editing at face value.

What does that leave those listening to Mad About English with? English mangled by foreign accents, accompanied without exception by subtitles. The screening I attended was regretfully punctuated by enthusiastic laughter whenever someone pronounced badly. You'd never see that kind of behavior outside a language classroom, but in a theatre, oh why not? They didn't need to pay a man with a gravelly voice to ridicule the Chinese students, because you'd notice that, of course. They let them do it to themselves, is the next point.

The second implication of a film like this having no commentary, where commentary is especially needed to contextualize and humanize the trials of a culture struggling under the burdens of learning a foreign language, as a matter of upholding national pride, is that it does not speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. One shouldn't expect common people to eloquently hold forth on the significance of several million people simultaneously taking an interest in English. Or to effectively defend their efforts and point out how they may yet make a difference to visitors' experiences or perceptions of China, however small.

The movie suffers for this, mostly depending on one character near the end (Li Yang aka Crazy English Teacher) to provide analysis. Policies of non-interference are all well and good when a lion kills a zebra on camera, but expecting cab drivers to acquit themselves with grace after a few weak lessons is kinda cruel, and a little too American Idol: Auditions for my tastes. Instead of reading this choice as the filmmakers not having anything to say, it can be argued that they're choosing to stay silent – an important distinction.

I've just read that the film was marketed as a "docu-comedy". I guess that's that.

But every time I walk down Orchard Road and see a badly written sign or advertisement, I think the joke's on us now. There are just too many examples of English gone wrong in Singapore, and I face them with a combination of anger and embarrassment. No longer apathy. It shouldn't be tolerated, and maybe something can be done about it. There's a gwailoh (foreigner) character in the aforementioned docu-comedy who walks around Beijing in a black trenchcoat, correcting instances of bad English wherever he finds them, talking to store owners and giving them advice. A grammar nazi turned vigilante.

I had an idea that we could use something like that here, maybe in the form of a non-profit organization that offers proofing services to anyone producing something for public display, from simple signage to one-sheet flyers. I'm talking about making it easy for anyone to get quick, professional advice (as easy as sending an email?) on whether or not the copy they're about to print is ready for public display.

Considering that we've got Integrated Resorts, the F1 night race franchise, and other tourism-heavy initiatives in the pipeline, the net effect of having "clean streets" can be huge for Singapore. Likewise, you can't expect the standard of English use amongst children to improve when they're surrounded by poor examples. These services would have to free, of course, so we're talking either volunteer work, sponsorship, or government funding.

This is something I'm going to think about more over the next few weeks and maybe do some plausibility research on. If you think it's a good idea, I'd appreciate you letting me know. Thanks.

Mosaic music festival 2009

The Esplanade's annual music festival is back again, and although I've never been the sort to go down every day of the week that it's on, we somehow ended up there two nights in a row over the past weekend. In keeping with my tradition of only seeing one paid act each year (Maceo Parker and Rachael Yamagata were the last two), we attended George Duke's concert* on Friday, but sadly did not hear "I Love You More", the song with the intro everybody knows from Daft Punk's "Digital Love". It's a very strange song, with that funky electro opening riff tacked onto a bland early-80s sort of ballad.

The free performances are what I enjoy most, as they have the atmosphere of a real music festival, with people milling about and wandering from one performance to the next. On the first night, I managed to get some Qik video of a Taiwanese hip-hop collaboration between one MC Hot Dog and 3P. And then a couple more of a Malaysian group called Funk Mob, and Mike Stern & The Yellowjackets on Saturday. I also had my Panasonic LX3 handy for some HD video of the latter, and an "all-star jam" that followed their performance.

Videos embedded below (may not show in RSS):

HD videos on Flickr –

--------

Qik videos from iPhone –

Watching Leo

I meant to be in bed by three tonight, but got caught up watching Leo Laporte do his weekly The Tech Guy radio show. For those who don't know, Leo is an ex-TV presenter and old radio hand who dispenses IT advice and covers trends and news in a very accessible way. I'm personally enamored of his easygoing presentation style and vocal impersonations, tuning in to his This Week In Tech podcast almost as much to hear his voice as for the content.

The most interesting thing he does now is broadcast live video during the taping of all his podcasts and radio shows (in a new studio he built from scratch near his home in California), so fans can watch the process. It comes up to be about 30 hours on camera each week, and that chatroom has something like 3 to 5 thousand participants per show. I love having it on in my screen while I read or do other things, just a pity about the time difference. If you're up past midnight, check the link below to see if he's on.

Twit Live

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

My attractive industrial design

At the 3rd-party Apple store this afternoon, my girlfriend pointed out this iPod speaker dock, saying it was rather good looking. I was horrified, and then found it really funny. I suppose her bad taste explains why we've been together so long.

-- Posted from my iPhone