Angels and Airwaves "I-Empire": Album Review

It's interesting watching a big band break up and seeing the results of the individual member's solo efforts. A lot of bands break up with the stars convinced that when they do a solo album, they'll leave the losers they've been feuding with behind, and that they alone will be revealed as the true greatness behind the band. Often though, they wind up making records that sound like only half, or less than half, of a greater equation. So wrapped up were they in their own talents, they lost sight of what their bandmates' talents brought to their music.

That certainly seemed to be the case for former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge's new band, Angels & Airwaves. Tiring of Blink-182's million selling toilet humor pop-punk formula, he broke off to record his "mature" record We Don't Need To Whisper under the Angels and Airwaves moniker, enthusiastically describing it as the "best music in 20 years".

The hype led up to an inevitable let-down. Blink-182's drummer Travis Barker had played a big role in structuring Blink's songs and keeping them tight and to the point. "Fourth Member" Jerry Finn had helped with the arrangements, and bassist Hoppus had helped with the hooks. Without them, DeLonge's music sounded directionless. There was actually a pretty good album buried in WDNTW, but it was difficult to find. The songs were bloated, over 5 minutes each, with endless build ups and a lack of big, deal-clinching hooks. Never before had a album so long and tedious sounded so unfinished. Some began to speculate that DeLonge's melodies might be best suited for 2 and a half minute sugar-pop punk ditties about breakups, and nothing greater.

It's with some surprise, then, that I can report that Delonge's new Angels and Airwaves record, I-Empire, is great, and arguably DeLonge's best work. He's grown into the mature style power pop that he's been honing since the last self-titled Blink 182 album, and finally fond the sweet spot between pouring his heart out, and delivering the hooks his music needs to stick with an audience.

I read that this album would be "stripped down", and that he would be doing acoustic sets. Actually "I-Empire" is as excessive as ever musically, packed with synthesizers and electronic bells and whistles. In fact, there are several 80s-esque, keyboard assisted pop dirges, and the band it most reminds me of is (+44), his Delonge's former bandmate's new project. It almost sounds like he deliberately did some songs on here in response to theirs, to beat them at their own game. On several ("Sirens" being a good example), he succeeds. Hoppus and Barker have a good sound with (+44), but DeLonge is the better songwriter, and he gets more mileage out of it.

The stripping down appears to be in the song structure. I-Empire delivers punch after punch with every track, and even the longer songs don't overstay their welcome. When I first heard it I listened to the whole thing without skipping through a single track. Even with repeated listening there are few songs I pass on.

Will Angels and Airwaves ever be as big as Blink-182 is? I doubt it. While this album
gets to the point a lot faster than the last one did, the songs still take a while to swell into full form and deliver, and larger audiences might not warm to it. But If you listen to a lot of music and tire of the
same old 3 power chords, you'll appreciate the build-up and craftsmanship.

This is a great album, and DeLonge has finally proven that following his muse and developing this new style was worth the risk. Hats off to him.

Best songs- "Secret Crowds", "Call to Arms", "Sirens"...but really, you can't go wrong with almost any of this.

Nova closes all its schools, files for protection against its creditors

Japan Economy News (check this one out first)

BBC report

Word on facebook-

"so, if ya haven't heard, sahashi has been deposed, nova's stock has been delisted, all branches have been "temporarily" closed (and the keys sent in to head office) and bankruptcy proceedings have started."

Heard that Sahashi, the former prez, was a real nutbar. He would call in all the Japanese staff to Osaka, show up drunk, and rant and scream about how Nova was the #1 company in Japan for like 8 hours, until the wee hours of the morning, and then everyone would have to head back to get back to work the next morning.

Here's a video from Nova correspondent Kayne, who got out in the nick of time. The interviews are in English.

Full-Time University Job

Full time baby! Woooooo!

Just as Nova collapses, It's "99.9% certain" I'll be a lecturer at Kyusan starting April. Just a few formalities to sort through. 4 day workweek, and 5 months vacation a year. I'm thinking I'll get a long-term rent on a good hotel in Thailand and spend my winter/spring breaks from January-March there.

Plus, the word is I'm a lock for a part-time job at another university for my weekday off! Things are coming together nicely all of a sudden.

Apple to allow 3rd party apps for the iPhone...sort of.

The public has demanded it, and Steve Jobs has finally answered. From the apple website-


Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.


Steve Jobs talks a great game, but I can't help but be a bit suspicious of his passion for protecting the iphone from viruses. Every internet-connected, open-source piece of hardware on the market is potentially vulnerable to viruses (Including the Mac itself, which has a much larger market share, and you don't hear him talking about problems with viruses on that). So while the effort to keep viruses off the iphone sounds noble, and there's arguably a good case for it, this rationale likely covers a larger agenda.

This strategy jives with the rumor I reported a few weeks ago- Apple has hired key people that worked on T-Mobiles download system. Namely, developers submit 3rd party applications to the company, who inspect them to see if they're something their users might want, check that it doesn't burn up too many of the device's resources, etc, and if it seems good, give the developers he keys to the the device that allow it to be installed. It then becomes available for download from T-Mobile, with that company taking a big chunk of the profits for themselves.

In Apple's case, they would likely sell the officially-approved software downloads via iTunes...and reportedly keep around 2/3 of the profits of those sales for themselves.

So the iPhone may get 3rd party apps, at least for a price. But from the looks of things, the hacker dream of an open source iphone, that anyone can write and install free software for, is still a long way off.

Nova about to go under- a financial analysis

Wondering what's going on with Nova, Japan's biggest conversation school? Foreign teachers didn't get paid this month, and the end seems to be near. If you're interested, here's the best and most comprehensive news article I've read on the subject, providing some good analysis on the business side-

The Japan Times

Pay special attention to quotes from Ken Worsley, a business consultant. He likens Nova's loss of long-term contracts to a bank run. In the past, students paid for 6 months worth of lesson in advance. Now that the government has blocked Nova from doing that, everyone is rushing to get their money back, for fear that there won't be a school to get lessons from next month. And so the money is getting sucked right out of it.

He also says that he sees Nova even trying to continue at this point as simple fear and greed. Not being able to pay the staff (or even rent on their apartment's, even after the employees have paid rent to Nova) is a "huge red flag" that the company is insolvent, and he predicts that the company will go under in November.

At this point, the end is near, and the honorable thing to do would be to close immediately. The only alternative is that they slog on another month or two without being able to pay their employees, basically shafting them for two months of work for free (To add further injury, by keeping up this unpaid charade, the staff even can't apply for unemployment insurance, because their company is technically still in business).

He chalks this strategy up not to the possibility that good news is around the corner, but to the selfish frenzy of people with nothing left to lose. When Nova goes under, the top management will be basically unhireable (think about it...would you hire them after this?) Their only hope is that someone will buy the company out, and they have nothing left to lose but run the company on empty as long as they can. (Besides, who wants to bet that they're still getting paid?)

One more thing- I may have said something along these lines already earlier, but there's a moral to all this. When I heard about all the sneaky stuff Nova did, I used to think glumly, "Well, that what it takes to be number 1". It used to seem like you had a choice in business of being a decent person, or running a tight ship and running a profit. Nova's woes go to show that what goes around comes around.

PS- I just noticed that the very same Ken Worsley I just got through praising has linked to my last post on this on Trans-Pacific radio (small world!) You can hear some interviews with Nova teachers about the current situation there, and find some more links about what's going on.

Alex the intelligent talking Parrot (video)

Alex didn't just blurt catchphrases and sound effects on command...he talked...to you. Watch him in action-





Sadly though, Alex has departed us.

From the report of his death-

It's devastating to lose an individual
you've worked with pretty much every day
for 30 years," Pepperberg told The
Boston Globe. "Someone was working with
him eight to 12 hours every day of his
life."

Well no wonder he died so young. A bird working 12 hour days, with no holidays, to learn to speak a human language intelligently and do math? It probably died of a massive brain hemorrhage.

Giraffe Fight!!

How do two giraffes go at each other? It ain't easy...

Finally tried the iPod Touch

After weeks of shortages, the ipod touch finally reached Fukuoka. The Apple store was so full it looked like they were having a party. It wasn't even like the everyday bustle of shoppers moving around buying stuff; everybody was just sort of standing around in these huge clusters gaping at the merchandise.

The verdict- viewed strictly as an iPod, the touch screen interface is a great and a huge improvement off the older versions. But opening the browser, I was less impressed.

Reading stuff from the states, the main pull for the full scale net browser in the iphone and ipod touch is that it's so much better than the crappy browsers that are currently on cell phones. That might be true of browsers on American cell phones, which all in all are garbage. But compared to what's available in Japan, the browser on the touch is actually something of a step back.

My Casio 3G phone renders web pages really well in my vertically long cell phone screen. If need be, you can see pages in "PC mode", in all their oversized glory, though of course the screen isn't big enough to display them all at once. But there's another option that renders the pages in cell phone mode, by squooshing the html so that the text and pictures match the shape of the screen. Its fast and easy to navigate. I can scroll page-by-page by pressing left or right on my control, and line-by-line by pushing up or down. I wouldn't go so far as to say its every bit as good as my PC browser, but its closer than you'd expect. I honestly have no problems with it and use it daily without any frustration.

But in the case of the ipod touch...By refusing to compromise web pages to fit the smaller size and different shape of its screen, the device gives an awkward, if elegantly executed alternative. Since there's no way an uncompromised, full sized web page can fit on the screen, and a smaller version that displays the whole page renders the text so small as to be unreadable, you have to zoom in ultra-close on the text, and then move the page back and forth as you read.

Imagine flattening a newspaper on a table, and shoving your head so close to it that you can only see 3 or 4 words in your field of vision at a time, and then moving your head every time you want to read the next word over. That's kind of what using the browser on the ipod touch is like; as cool as it is to shrink and expand the web page by multi-touch pinching the screen with my index finger and thumb, I'd really rather not have to do it in the first place. Why didn't they compromise by fitting web pages to the screen size and shape, and then let users scroll up and down with their fingers? That would have still been cool, and a whole lot more practical.

So what advantage does a full scale browser have over my current cell phone browser? In theory the difference would be that I can download stuff, see stuff in flash, etc. But the ipod touch doesn't do stuff like flash, and you can't download anything other than stuff apple would like you to buy on itunes.


There are a few nice little toys, such as the youtube widget. The few that are there work so well, you find yourself wishing there were many more of them. But the ipod touch deliberately comes with less widgets than the iphone, and its locked so that it will stay that way. That leads to my original gripe, that it's closed to third party developers. The intentionally stripped-down menu feels barren. So once you get tired of the very few applications on the ipod touch, such as the calculator, you're left feeling that the device just doesn't live up to its full potential. With double the current 16GB memory and for a couple hundred dollars less than the current 50,000 yen asking price, would it be without a doubt the greatest portable mp3/video player
ever? Definitely. With or without the browser and other applications.

But in its current, bare-bones incarnation, is it worth that much money? Nah.

Apple's upcoming PDA- the real reason they don't want the iphone or ipod touch to run 3rd party apps

Been tempted to buy an ipod touch, the new "iphone without a phone", but its not easy to get a hold of one here in Japan. Earlier, Apple promised pre-orders would be shipped by September 28th. That date has come and passed, and they now say that orders will ship in 7-10 business days (now being October 1st). Yodobashi Camera, a big electronics retailer here, used to ask people pre-order them, promising they'd be ready for them somewhere between October 4th and the 16th. But they've since removed the ipod touch from their official inventory on their website, and I've just heard that shoppers in Ginza are being told to wait a month.

As it turns out, the wait might be doing me good though, because Apple's tactics are turning me off. The really exciting thing to me about the ipod touch was that like the iphone, it uses a version of Mac OS, the fullscale operating system for Macs, and as such, is basically a miniature computer capable of running applications. The ipod touch is marketed as an Mp3 player, so the ability to install 3rd party applications has been locked, and Apple intentionally disabled some features available on the iphone . But it was locked on the iphone too, and hackers were able to get into it in quickly. Pretty soon, All kinds of home-made applications were available for the iphone.

It began to look like the iphone and ipod touch would signal the rebirth of the PDA, and take off where the palm pilot failed. With 16GB of flash memory and a revolutionary multi-touch interface that makes using a computer with a small screen bearable, it has the potential to breath new life into the market. The ipod touch is even better still, because it has wi-fi browser and all the core components for only 300-400 dollars. That might seem pricey for an mp3 player with only 8-16 GB of memory...but for a revolutionary PDA? Sign me up.

Then Apple had to ruin it all. In the past, their stance on 3rd party applications was neutral, neither inviting nor hostile. Their new policy is not only to discourage them, but to wipe them out with firmware updates, and declare the warranties on unlocked products void.
Check out what Jack Schofeld of Gizmodo's iphone looked like before and after the new firmware update; by eliminating all applications from his hacks, it rendered it a greatly inferior product. Don't expect Apple to go any easier on the ipod touch, either. You'd think its lack of a phone and freedom from obligations to AT&T contracts would make it safer, but Apple is sending takedown notices to anyone posting code to unlock the ipod touch. They won't let you get all those features on a low-end, 300 dollar media player, even if its perfectly capable of it.

Here's why- as it turns out, Apple is well aware of the potential of touchscreen technology. News is leaking out about an upcoming apple PDA, basically a fully functioning, touchscreen, flash based computer, which will be similar to the iphone, but 1.5 times larger.

You can bet that this device will allow 3rd party applications, and they'll probably even put out a developers kit for it. But it'll happen on Apple's terms, and at Apple's prices. Much in the same way the ipod touch has had its software crippled so that it lacks features its perfectly capable of an attempt to get you to upgrade to the more expensive iphone, both products are being locked from 3rd part applications in an attempt to make the new PDA, which will take up the high end of the market, a more appealing product.

People are starting to take notice of Apple's increasing arrogance. The company was on the verge of collapse in mid 90's, and for the past ten years Steve Jobs has done everything he can to woo consumers back. But now that they have a killer product again, they're doing everything they can to milk people for it.

This line of thinking is just as short-sighted as Apple's thinking in the 80's, when they lost the platform war to Microsoft. Apple was abusive to 3rd part developers then, too. Like now, all they though about was their bottom line in terms of profits selling expensive hardware. Anyone outside their company trying to cash in on the sales of Apple hardware with their own software was seen as parasitic.

What apple doesn't understand though, is that the widespread acceptance of the touchscreen version of Mac OSX would eventually be much more valuable to them than higher profit margins on upscale PDAs. If developers are allowed to run amuck and create software for the platform, and low-end devices like the iphone and the ipod touch are unlocked so as to give comsumers everything the platform has to offer cheaply, it could consume the PDA market, and eventually become the industry standard for handheld computing.

Apple doesn't have a complete patent on touchscreen technology. Much in the same way microsoft horned in on the mouse/GUI innovations of the mac with windows, rivals are already putting out imitation-iphone touchscreen cells/PDAs of their own (Also see here). They might be lousy compared to the iphone at first...but if they're cheap and open to developers, they'll eventually come to overshadow the closed apple PDA line. And once again, rather than taking over the world, Apple will be left on the sidelines, with the superior, more expensive computer that only a small niche of the market is willing to buy.

UPDATE:

Updates...As I wrote above, the ipod touch will likely stay artificially limited. But I'm now hearing apple will phase in extra apps for the iphone very gradually. First, they'll release a suite of their own making. They'll get first cracks in developing and profiting off extra software for it. That'll happen maybe a year from now.

Then, even further in the future, They might start bringing in third party developers. But only ones that they pick and choose, and to do things they want to see them do. I strongly suspect they'll charge them licensing fees, much in the same way Nintendo does to third party gamers. And even that may not happen for quite a while. Maybe '09, maybe even later.

Now, Apple has genuine has concerns about the stability of the iphone, and don't want it crashing from software the same way so many Nokias do. I appreciate that.

And I'm sure many could point out that Apple is well within their rights to do all these things this way, and even that they have a couple good, noble reasons for doing it. I don't disagree.

But the question for me is this...

Apple lost the desktop OS war, despite being the company that introduced the mouse and GUI to home computers in the first place. Will Apple get payback on a new frontier of OS's, and win the next big OS war? Or, like in the past, will they see their innovations once again cannnibalized by a slew of crummy, cheaper, open-source, open architecture imitators, and once again wind up being a cult-following niche-market with less than 10% market share?

Based on the way they're acting, I'd say there's a good chance the latter will happen. iphone imitations are already on the way, as you can see in the links now at the end of the original post.
Am I saying these phones are better? No. Am I even saying I'd choose either over the iphone myself? It remains to be seen, but likely not. But windows was inferior too, and it still won with ease.

1-2 years is too long to wait for extra iphone software (tight on Apple's licensing leash, to boot). Jobs talks about a goal of 1% market share for cell phones. As big as that sounds, its nothing compared to what the ipod has in its own market, or to what windows has in its. If Jobs wants to see bigger things than 1% market shares, and make apple the major player in this new market, he can't wait til '09 or '10 to put out a developer's kit. He needs to put it out NOW.