Let’s return now to our sporadic series celebrating foreign athletes — just the ticket for when technology’s got ya down. So let’s see, we’ve had English football player David Beckham, and French rugby star Frederic Michalak (with skater Josh Wald.) Perhaps it’s time for a Swede?
Sure, Fredrik (“Freddie”) Ljungberg, midfielder for Arsenal, has been the face of CK for awhile now, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still appreciate him.
I hate computers so fucking much at this moment, you have no idea.
I’m trying to get Asterisk working on one of my Debian boxes with a TDM card. It’s a nightmare. A user interface catastrophe to begin with, there’s next to no useful documentation. They require you download the system and drivers as source, with which you need to recompile the kernel. I fucking hate it.
My Fedora box has developed the annoying habit of slicing the screen into offset bands when certain video files (with no discernible commonalities) are loaded. The only recourse is Ctrl+Alt+Bksp to restart X. Would an Nvidia driver update fix it? Perhaps, but Fedora refuses to enter Runlevel 3 without choking, so I can’t run the shell script that installs it. Oh, and the latest package update for BitTorrent (v4.1 trackerless) borked it. I fucking hate it.
Windows is no better. I just tried to install the JRE 1.5_03 edition on my XP Pro desktop. I double-clicked the installer and followed the prompts: no more, no less. Then I get this monstrosity. Visual C++ assertion failures? What the fuck does that mean? Why should I be expected to care? I fucking hate it.
I hate that I’m expected to know this fucking esoteric crap just to get work done. I hate that I have to massage all these different tempermental software applications that are too dumb to do simple things like recognize there’s an existing version installed and just cleanly update it.
I am just so beyond tired of wasting all this precious time in my finite life trying to wrangle some crap that’s not fit for human consumption. In fact, the only thing that is keeping me from throwing the lot out the window is my new Mac mini.
I purchased it the day Tiger was released, and on the first day I shed blood for it. (I had to pry it open with putty knives to upgrade the RAM, cutting myself in the process.) But after a few hours using the Mac, I forgot about my wounds.
One of the things that I love is how easily you can install software. In Linux, it’s a nightmare of different distributions, kernel versions, source and scripts. On Windows, you’re running installers and choosing options and paths.
On my Mac, it looks like this. That’s a disk image. Visit a Website, click a hyperlink, click “Yes”, and you’re presented with a view like that. To install, just drag the icon over to ‘Applications’. That’s it.
Does that action trigger all sorts of actions/scripts/modifications behind the scenes? I have no idea, and I couldn’t fucking care less. It. Just. Works. And right now, that’s precisely what I need.
End rant.
There’s a great little term newspapers use for how they write news stories: it’s called “inverted pyramid style.” Writers start with the most important information and then work their way down, putting the least important bits at the bottom.
One of my J-School teachers said the practice began back when putting a story “on the wire” meant using the telegraph; thus it was important to be sure the main idea was covered even if the transmission was interrupted. (Probably apocryphal, but fun.) Today, of course, the inverted pyramid style is used for copyfit purposes — layout staff know they can lop off the final few sentences without messing with the meaning.
I mention this basic bedrock of journalism because some people seem to have forgotten how it works. Take CNN, which recently ran this story:
Girl buried alive thanks God for rescue
Officer tells of finding 8-year-old under concrete slabsLAKE WORTH, Florida (CNN) — An 8-year-old girl who police say was raped and left for dead in a landfill asked for a pastor “so she could thank God” shortly after her rescue from beneath a pile of stones, her godmother said Monday.
Police said the girl also identified her attacker even before she was removed Sunday from a trash bin at the abandoned South Florida landfill.
“She stated that she wanted a pastor to pray with her so she could thank God for saving her life,” Lisa Taylor, the godmother, told CNN. “She’s 8 years old. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard?”…
So, judging by the headline and the lede, the most important fact about this story is what the girl’s godmother said. Not how she was found, or by whom, which are in ‘graphs 25 and 26. Not who’s been detained for the charge, which is ‘graph 8. Not the words of the police chief, who in the penultimate para calls it “a miracle, [with] some luck and a lot of good police work.”
To CNN, all of this pales in comparison to the adorable factor, with the little girl asking for a pastor. Now that’s a sweet image, definitely. But it ain’t journalism.
For bonus points: try to find the paragraph where they say the girl thanked the rescuers.
I don’t check the stats very often, because they’re not too interesting (and I have to wade through the 2,000 people a day who do image searches for this Beckham picture) but every once in awhile I have some odd reason to check the JSP.o records.
Yesterday, I did just that, and saw that a few people (two of whom I knew — hello Cath and Joel!) had used the search box to leave me a message. Then of course there were those who were using it to, you know, search, and one of those was someone looking for “iPose”.
If you saw my “April Tool” post, you know that the iPose was a fundraising effort, and I called out a guy for having a damp spot on his shorts. Well, here’s where the small world part gets going. See, my visitor came from a Google search for “ipose Nate”, so he was looking for references to that guy in particular*. So big deal, right? Well, the other piece of the puzzle is that this visitor was using the computer at 128.196.166.(xx), AKA (xx).alpha-epsilon-pi.arizona.edu.
So, short story long, within 5 days of my posting about the project, someone from inside that very frat, and probably the model himself, was reading it.
Oh Google, how I love you and yet fear you so…
* Sharp-eyed readers will note the word ‘Nate’ doesn’t appear in the body of the post. Google was actually scanning an alternate description I put in for users with visual impairments and/or limited browsers.
For all the boredom and isolation that living in a small town entails, there are also benefits. Today’s paper carried the “County’s Most Wanted,” with 12 people under active arrest warrants still at large. These n’er-do-wells have allegedly committed the following crimes:
That’s right, we have a couple of genuine thugs, plus a forger, some false reporters, petty thieves, and my favorite, 28yo Jana M. Pringle, who’s wanted for “criminal mischief”. They only have photos for half of this list, and though Jana was spared the indignity of a skeezy likeness, she still probably wishes they proofed it a little longer.
That is, unless she does weigh 1,505 lbs.
This week, Kuwait’s parliament voted 35-23 to allow women to vote (though with some strings attached.) About time, you might say, and it certainly is. But before we excoriate the all-male parliament for taking so damn long (however much they deserve it), perhaps it would behoove us to take a look at how well the good ol’ U.S. of A. has done with its head start.
Meet Mrs. Rebecca Latimer Felton, the woman who got us rolling. I put her picture here because you probably haven’t heard of her. Though she was the first woman to occupy a seat in the United States Senate, she also holds the record for the shortest term (24 hours: 21-22 Nov 1922.) As it happens, she also holds the title of oldest Senator at the time of first swearing-in (age eighty-seven, and when you’re born in 1835 I think just that is an achievement.)
Following Felton’s appointment, there was a bit of a lull. The 24 hours of excitement was enough to tide the electorate over for nearly a decade, until Hattie Wyatt Caraway won a seat in 1932. Hattie (love the name) had actually first occupied the seat in 1931, when she was appointed to replace her fellow excellently-named husband, Thaddeus Horatius Caraway. (Replacing husbands was something of a trend, as to this day nearly half of all female Senators have served less than a full term, most just a year.)
Fast forward to today. In a time when the population of the nation at large is 51% female, the Senate is 86% male. In the 83 years since Mrs. Felton, there have been 33 women who’ve held Senatorial office.
That number seems low to me, and I’m not the only one:
Based on percentage of women in the upper and lower house, [t]he Inter-Parliamentary Union ranked the United States 59th out of 121 countries in the world for representation of women. Countries ahead of the United States include Rwanda, Cuba, South Africa, Vietnam, Pakistan, China and Bosnia. (Center for Voting and Democracy)
I don’t have some magic number or quota in mind, but I do think that it’s not too much to ask that a representative democracy vaguely reflect its public (and don’t get me started on the millionaires in Congress…) Or, put another way: when it comes to women in politics, Kuwait took a long-overdue first step. I just wish we could say we’re a lot further down the road.
Today I’m unveiling a tiny new feature that I hope will be the harbinger of good things. It’s my “Recently Watched” movies sidebar, and it shows the 10 movies I’ve seen most recently.
In order to get this simple tool to work, I had to do two things: one, convert my previous (static) list to a database, and two, create some dead-simple way for me to update it. I did both, and now it’s possible for me to add films to my complete list (which are automatically pushed to the sidebar) with a single click.
As I made that possible, I laid the groundwork for some new features. (At the moment, you can sort by decade, but that’s just the beginning.)
Of course, one thing this snazzy new tech won’t do is explain how I choose which films to watch. Even I don’t think I could explain that…
I have had just about enough of this piling-on “Newsweek” for their story which reported that interrogators may have flushed a Koran. This lunacy has really gotten out of hand:
Afghanistan’s government said Tuesday that Newsweek should be held responsible for damages caused by deadly anti-American demonstrations after the magazine alleged U.S. desecration of the Quran, and it suggested that foreign forces may have helped turn protests violent. (– Pakistan: Newsweek retraction “not enough”)
Newsweek should be held responsible? I really hate to trot out the word “surreal”, but… So Newsweek ran with a story that contained allegations which had been published previously. For the sake of argument, let’s say they were true. So? At what point do we make the leap that rioting mobs are a valid response to getting a book wet?
Ahh, Google Maps. So large. So pretty. So…confusing. Or at least that’s the impression you get from this Yahoo! News story (the title’s too cute by half), in which a search for “brothels” in three ZIP Codes turned up “the University of Oregon’s history department in Eugene, Ore.; the Happy Ending bar in Manhattan; and the Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, S.D.”
Sound odd? If you know anything about the tech, it’s not too much of a surprise. See, where competitor Yahoo! (and others) has localized services built mainly from licensed yellow pages data, Google is trying to discern information directly from Web pages. You can see the difference when you do a search on Yahoo! Local for “pizza 60605“: the first 10 are obviously pizza joints. Do the same search on Google Local (which also powers Google Maps) and the #5 result is “Barry Personnel Resources Inc.” Why them? It’s not clear. (Google’s references don’t even contain the word “pizza.”)
But let’s get back to sex. See, the best part of the article was the reaction from one Leslee Unruh, abstinence maven:
Leslee Unruh, the president of Abstinence Clearinghouse, an organization that connects advocates of abstinence before marriage, was more than taken aback by the labeling of her office as a bawdyhouse. [jsp: a what?]
“This isn’t accidental,” she claimed. “I think this is deliberate. Abstinence is under fire, we’re under siege. Our opponents are trying to discredit the largest organization in the world that networks abstinence educators.”
Yes, the sex-crazed Googlites have targeted thriving Sioux Falls, S.D., for a takedown in their quest to get everyone laid — before marriage, natch. And worse, their campaign is getting noticed:
Unruh also said that while the “brothel” label was news to her, it explained some odd behavior she and others in her office have seen.
“We’ve been seeing some strange men stopping by the office,” she said. “They’re clearly looking for something. If they’re traveling and using Google, maybe they think we’re.” she said, but didn’t finish. “We’re right off the Interstate.”
Are all the best brothels off exit ramps? News to me. But I still think Leslee is being overly suspicious. After all, maybe these men “clearly looking for something” are just trying to score tickets for the Purity Ball!
I just finished watching the season finale of “Veronica Mars” — no mean feat considering we don’t get UPN (and it actually aired yesterday.) I was able to bypass what would once have been, ahh, show-stopping obstacles thanks to your and my favorite communication network, the Internet.
In fact thanks to the Internet (and season boxed sets), I’ve probably watched more TV this season than any other — yet only a tiny fraction of that was on the tube.
Looking back on my experience, I’ve spotted a few trends:
Add to that one more: I really don’t care about networks. Do these shows come from ABC, BBC, NBC, UPN? Like I care. The sooner the production companies sell direct, the better. I won’t miss the local affiliates, either. I never watch local “news”, and if I miss out on my local car dealers’ great incentive programs, I’ll find a way to soldier on. After all, I’ll have a bunch of TV to catch up on…
Self, remember:
We used to have one of these back in the day:
That’s a Compaq “portable”, though we, along with everybody else, called it a “luggable”. (Yes, you can move it; there was a handle on the top. Also check that link to find out about the historical importance of the model.)
The beast was the size of a piece of luggage — note the full-size keyboard — and weighed around 30 lbs. [13.6 kg.] The processor was just 5MHz, the screen was green and black, and there were no wacky frills like a battery, either.
So I gotta say, as much as technology sucks right now, we’ve come a long way, baby.
I can’t tell you how long I’ve been buying stuff online (in what we’ll soon see is an ironic twist, Amazon’s order history page isn’t working right now) but it’s been many, many years. I’ve watched as online retailers who get it, like Amazon, have innovated, making the shopping experience smooth and worry-free.
Sadly, too few sellers “get it.” Just within the last week, I’ve been required to jump through unnecessary hoops to give companies my money. Moments ago, for example, I did what I should have done ages ago and bought a UPS so I could keep the bajillions of Firefox tabs I always tend to lose when the power flickers (as it’s done twice this weekend.)
The vendor asked for my credit card number with “no dashes or spaces.” Let me tell you a little something: it takes one line of code to strip out non-numeric characters from a sequence, and it’s something sellers should be doing anyway for security purposes. So why make it more difficult for me to ensure I’ve entered the right characters?
This site also had another of my pet peeves: the foreboding “click only once” or you might get charged twice message (in red, no less.) Again, it’s trivial to do a quick duplicate check. After all, when does anyone ever intentionally make a duplicate order in the space of a few seconds? Bingo: never. (Amazon goes one step further: they’ll even warn you if an item you’re buying appears anywhere in your purchase history, so you don’t inadvertently buy the same CD twice.)
To add insult to injury, the order confirmation e-mail from this site includes this:
Please remember that the advertised price does not constitute an offer to sell. The order confirmation does not signify our acceptance of your order, nor does it constitute confirmation of our offer to sell.
That’s right, the order confirmation is not a confirmation of my order. Super!
Slightly less annoying is the “cram the e-mail with junk” approach, which another (major) vendor took last weekend. In a message sent from ‘USPREPAID‘, I was told that “If you have already paid for your purchase, please retain [the e-mail]…” but “[i]f you need to send payment…” be sure to reference the invoice number. Is it too much to ask that a system smart enough to send me a message from the pre-paid confirmation system doesn’t waste my time with details about where to send a check?
All this sort of thing reminds me of the fuel pump I used the other day. I rolled up, got out, and saw the pump had a massive sticker: PRE-PAY ONLY. So I removed my card and scanned the menu, which offered two buttons: pre-pay… or pay inside.
We’ve got ISBNs and ISSNs, I think it’s time to devise a system for tracking movies.
I’d like to see an ISMN for a number of reasons, chief among them that it would allow me to track movies I want to see far more easily. As it is, I have a collection of random text files, a category in Gjots, a few entered in IMDb’s “My Movies”, and of course the various scraps of paper.
Step 1 would be to consolidate those, of course, but step 2 would be to start providing tools that would keep track of the ISMNs, and then be on the lookout. Knowing that I was interested in seeing a film, my computer (or mobile phone, or whatever) could scan movie listings, Amazon/Netflix availability, and television schedules, returning relevant information as it comes in.
A unique serial number would prevent annoying glitches such as the one I spotted on Y! Movies the other day, in which they claimed my local theater was showing the 1995 release entitled Man of the House starring Chevy Chase, when in fact it was the unrelated 2005 film with Tommy Lee Jones. Harmless, perhaps, as there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d see either picture, but still an avoidable error.
ISMNs would also enable another dream of mine: differentiating versions. Almost two years ago, I suggested creating a list of DVD differences. My ISMN idea is a superset of that proposal, identifying both the film itself (with a major number) and the release version (minor.)
So say we have a code like 52.2001.1920.2.1 or even MX-2001-1920-ES-UR1. The first group could identify country of origin (Mexico), the second, year of release (2001), the third the serial, the fourth the spoken language (Espanol), and the final could differentiate between theatrical, pan and scan, unrated, airplane edition, edited for length for TV, and whatever else.
I could create my movie list and instruct my electronic agent to keep on the lookout for the films I wanted to see, and set certain parameters I would be willing to accept (say, has to have English subtitles, but can be rated or unrated.) Also, it would be a great way to share reviews with friends and even shopping sites. Why slave over Amazon reviews when you could write up a post on your own site, tag it with the ISMN, and then let Google or Amazon pick it up in a scan?
While we’re on the subject, it would also greatly simplify finding the official movie sites for films. (Why do we not have a .film domain extension? I’m so tired of BlahBlahMovie.com or WankSpanktheFilm.net.) Pop the ISMN into Google, you could get the official page for that film, or the nearest thing to it, working from most to least specific.
I recognize this is horribly esoteric, but I hope the studios similarly recognize that the more ways they provide to keep track of their releases, the better the chance they’re going to get watched.
Update [Sat 03:09]: If I didn’t care if the number itself had meaning (and I don’t; ISBNs don’t) I suppose I could follow IMDb‘s numbering. A couple of years ago they went from links like http://www.imdb.com/Title?Se7en+(1995) to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114369, where the prefix ‘tt’ denotes a film (a person is ‘nm’). Other sites, such as Rotten Tomatoes, accept this numbering standard as well: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/alias?type=imdbid&s=0114369 works, for example.
Now if only somebody would break up the different versions by content, language, and country…
I admit it, I watch “The Apprentice.” (In fact, I also watch the UK version.) It’s not something I’m proud of, and often the show sure doesn’t make it easy. Take tonight’s episode, when Des Moines resident Tana made it to the final two.
Now, I don’t particularly mind Tana, though I think she didn’t do herself any favors when in one breath she implied that fate is controlling the situation, and in the next she’s thanking G-d for getting her this far. But whatever.
My beef is that following a battery of interviews, one of the CEOs reporting to The Donald had to trot out an old chestnut, saying that he didn’t think as a girl “from Iowa,” Tana would be able to cut it in a big city like “New York or Chicago.” I’m suprised he even recognized Chi-town, located as it is smack in the middle of the flyover states. (Perhaps he was aware it’s also home to the world’s busiest airport and the world’s tastiest pizza.)
It all reminds me of a similar incident back in 2001. It was March 25, and B and I were watching “Politically Incorrect”. If I recall correctly, the show was a special, live post-Oscars edition. The guests: Aisha Tyler, now sometimes CSI cast member, and several others who I don’t recall. The topic: the decline of movies.
Ms. Tyler lets fly with an observation that she didn’t think people in Iowa read the reviews. Then she said something very similar to: “I think they look in the paper and say, ‘Hey, Dude, Where’s My Car? I like dudes. I like cars. Let’s see that.'”
Needless to say, I was similarly unimpressed by Ms. Tyler’s lack of insight on this point. And I shared that with her, in an e-mail with the subject I'd rather be Middle American than you. (What can I say, I was a drama queen back in the day.)
To her credit, Aisha actually replied 12 hours later. She gave me a sort of half apology, saying compelling TV was about dramatic opinions. (I kept both e-mails, which is why my dates are so precise.)
Aisha would have been better served to engage on facts, and not stereotypes, but at least she clarified. I don’t expect to get even that much from the guy on tonight’s show. But I’m going to poke around for his e-mail address anyway…
