Thoughts after the passing of Andreas Katsulas

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:00:12 -0600

First of all, an apology for the long drought here. I shan't bother making excuses. I'm just going to start writing stuff again and hopefully do it more often :-)

Now, on with the show.

As many of you already know, Andreas Katsulas, who is best known for his role as Ambassador G'Kar on the science fiction series Babylon 5, passed away on 13 February 2006 from lung cancer.

To a fanboy like me, this is a fairly significant loss. I'm both blunt enough and honest enough to admit that it isn't so much Mr Katsulas' loss that I'm speaking of, but that of G'Kar.

Is G'Kar just a fictional character? Yes, he is. But there's really no question of anyone else ever portraying that fictional character now that Mr Katsulas is gone. Completely aside from JMS's pronouncement, it simply wouldn't make sense. No one else would have the right cadences, the right facial expressions, needed to bring the character alive in the same way.

Voice, actually, is what most comes to mind when I think of Mr Katsulas. With his face largely hidden within the prosthetic makeup that transformed him from a human being into a Narn, his incredibly expressive voice was a large part of what brought the character to life. Deep, sonorous, capable of an incredible range of emotional expression, Mr Katsulas' voice enabled JMS to make all the many transformations of G'Kar's personality -- from freedom fighter (in his backstory) to dissolute and corrupt politician, back to freedom fighter and from there to mystic and statesman -- and keep it credible.

Fans of classic Star Trek could always hope, as late as 1999 when De Kelley died, for more productions involving the classic cast. Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation and B5's contemporary Star Trek: Deep Space Nine can still hope for more, some day, as all their principal cast members are still alive.

But Babylon 5 fans must now come to terms with the fact that there will never be any more Babylon 5. Between the death of Richard Biggs (Dr. Stephen Franklin) last year, and Andreas Katsulas this year, there really wouldn't be much point. You could postulate stories that included others in the B5 cast but not them...but you'd always know they were missing, and somehow, a lot of the fun would be missing with them.

This might be just as well. Most of JMS's attempts to extend the B5 universe past the original series really haven't fared so well. But still, the part of me that's still a fanboy, despite my efforts to grow up, is saddened to realise there will probably never even be an attempt, now.

A Space Phone Odyssey: Prelude

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 15:35:50 -0600

For the three or four readers out there who don't already know this particular prejudice of mine, I prefer not to carry a separate PDA and mobile phone. I find the functionality of the two devices to be sufficiently complementary that there's no really good reason not to have them married in a single device. I need the functionality of both devices to survive my busy and geeky lifestyle, because my memory is crap, and my handwriting is crap, and I'm hardly ever home.

A little less than a year ago, I found my old portable brain, a Kyocera 7135, was becoming inadequate for my needs. The biggest issue initially was not the feature-set of the K7135, but the instability of the hardware. Three successive handsets each failed me in various ways that pointed to hardware, rather than software flakiness. Eventually that, combined with a jones for a particular feature, sent me looking elsewhere.

It was kinda sad, too, because K7135 was a Trek Geek's dream. It looked similar to a 1967-era Star Trek communicator, although the top half of the clamshell was actually functional, containing the earpiece and display screen, rather than just a protective cover. In the hand, it felt not unlike I imagined a Trek communicator would feel. It had an interesting feature whereby one could have it play sounds when you flipped it open, and one of those sounds, called 'Dolphin' by Kyocera, sounded suspiciously like a Trek communicator's chirp; and since it could play converted MP3s as ringers, one could also make it sound the Trek-style bosun's whistle when it rang.

Software-wise, the older Palm platform that was running on the thing was actually pretty good. It worked well as an actual CDMA mobile telephone, both held up to the ear and via a headset. It had rudimentary voice dialing. It was based on the PalmPilot, so it included an address book and calendar functionality I was used to (having had a separate PalmPilot for quite a while). Text messaging was fairly easy to do. There was a simple but functional web browser that worked over Verizon's now-aging 1xRTT data network at about 14.4Kibps. The built-in mail program was a bit lame, but Eudora for Palm ran on it as well, enabling me to get basic access to mailboxes if I needed it. It had only a numeric keypad rather than a keyboard, but until about a year ago, I didn't really care.

Two things started me looking for a new spacephone (correctly pronounced 'spaaaaaaaaaaaaace phoooooooooone' unless you're in a hurry or the joke's wearing thin in coversation). The first was the aforementioned instability. It was ridiculous, in my opinion, that having paid a not insignificant sum for the thing, each successive incarnation would flake out on me after only a few months. Verizon were very good about replacement, but that didn't change the annoyance of having the thing flip out and forget everything it was supposed to know about my life.

The second was a week spent at a conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. As advanced a city as SF is, you would think a convention center like the Moscone—which harbours many a geek convention—would have WiFi permeating the place, but in fact, there were only two rather weak hot-spots set up by the Embedded Systems Conference people, themselves, and they didn't reach into the classrooms. Yes, I'm that much of an addict—I wanted at least minimal connectivity to peeps and my stuff while I was absorbing nifty new knowledge, and the only way I could get it at all was by using the rarely used Internet features of my portable brain.

Shortly after this trip, the second instance of the K7135 I'd owned started to go wonky. I let Verizon send me a replacement again, but I'd also determined it was time to move on. I started looking at the state of the art, and was really sort of disappointed.

The only Palm-based entries were the Treo600 and 650. The 600 was reputedly pretty solid, but actually lacked certain features I'd liked about the 7135. The main advantage was the full keyboard. The Treo650, at the time, updated the feature set fairly significantly, including Bluetooth support for wireless headsets and support for Verizon's new, faster data system, 1xEVDO, but was reported to be dreadfully unreliable. I'm told that many of its problems have been fixed by now, but at the time, it was really quite horrid.

I looked at the Blackberry offerings at the time. Blackberries are reputedly very stable (their primary audience is business, and it shows). It looked like Research In Motion (RIM) were groping toward something really well-rounded, but their devices were still heavily geared toward the messaging side, with somewhat lackluster performance as actual telephones. Bluetooth was only starting to appear on some models (and not yet on the full-keyboard models), and other features I like—admittedly chrome, like MP3 or WAV ringers that could be customised— were absent. There was also some question as to whether RIM was going to survive a nasty little patent fight they were (and still are) embroiled in with patent shark NTP, Inc.

That left me with Windows Mobile, and a decision I've come to regret. The device that had the feature set I was looking for in the end was variously known as the XV6600 on Verizon, the PC6600 on Sprint, and the Siemens 66 on Cingular. They were all the same device, made by a mysterious Chinese entity known as HTC. Decent but not fantastic performance as a phone, a slide-away keyboard, a nice screen, good handwriting recognition (even with my lousy handwriting), a half-decent browser and mail capabilities, Bluetooth, including the ability to synchronise data over Bluetooth. It looked kinda cool, as well, although like nearly all similar entrants in the field, it felt a bit clunky in the hand. But Bluetooth means never having to actually put a phone next to your ear, anyway.

Initially, I really kind-of liked it, despite its Windows provenance. I had occasion to use the wireless data features almost immediately, and found them useful, if not always pretty. Through Verizon's Wireless Sync, I was able to back things up over the air, and even enable a kind of push-email not unlike the feature that makes Blackberry so hot. The keyboard, tho' small and membrane-like, was surprisingly easy to use reliably.

But after a couple of months—sadly, after the return period was over—I realised I'd made a bit of a blunder, when the device, as all Windows-based devices will eventually do, crashed and reset itself. Only when a Windows Mobile 2003 phone crashes and resets itself, it forgets everything it ever knew and has to start over from scratch, one of the exact kinds of instability that had driven me nuts on the K7135.

I really, really should have trusted my instincts with this one. I dislike Microsoft as a corporation, and dislike Windows in all its many incarnations because the software engineers who write it seem to have absolutely no interest in prioritising writing robust code. I don't even have the excuse of not having read up on the device. I did read up on it, and I concluded that any negative vibes I was getting were a combination of user stupidity on the part of various people complaining, and my own stubborn anti-Windows prejudices, and since prejudice is bad, something to be gotten over.

Like I said, I should have trusted my instincts. The XV6600 didn't have to suck, and it didn't entirely suck, but it turned out to suck enough to make me embarrassed for having spent good money on it and unwilling to consider reselling it on eBay because I can't imagine foisting it off on anyone else.

(The third incarnation of the K7135, by contrast, I wound up giving to a friend, and as far as I know, she's still using it in good health).

I should have waited until the market produced something more robust, knowing that eventually, someone would. But I was impaitent for the geeky wireless networking features, and allowed my desire for shiny new toys to overcome my good sense.

Well, now it's not quite a year later, and the market has indeed produced the phone I really wanted a year ago. The Blackberry 8700c. My first impressions of that new toy will follow in the next installment.

What Happens When I Press This Button? - Deep Geekery

Thoughts after the passing of Andreas Katsulas

A Space Phone Odyssey: Prelude