Day: February 7, 2005

Dear everybody who loved Sideways so much

Didn’t you guys see it the first time? When it was called Swingers?

I liked the movie okay, and of course the cast members–especially Thomas Haden Church–did their jobs with pinhead spot-on laser accuracy. But to what purpose? How many books and movies are there in which a pessimistic, divorced English teacher writes a book that’s too long so he goes out with his immature, more handsome friend and ends up finding some kind of unresolved redemption with a woman who blah blah blah. I saw Wonder Boys too. I guess this one had wine in it, which is great, if you like wine.

Speaking of Leonard, you do remember Dog Bites Dog, right? I’ve been putting off subscribing to its RSS feed because man, that’s a lot of volume, but then I remember to check it again and get gems like these:

A while back, I thought about starting a weblog just to post funny Dog Bites Dog headlines, but you can already subscribe to DBD yourself, and I don’t trust that my funny-filter is any better than yours.

Little epiphany

It occurs to me that I finally have a use for that old iMac on which I installed Yellow Dog Linux over a year ago: the Ultra Gleeper.

Also, check out this hilarious graph from Leonard’s official Gleeper paper, on methods of obtaining new links to recommend:

Method Link quality Limitations
Stumbling upon incoming links while following outgoing

links

Pretty good Depends on serendipity
Google Web API (link: queries) Not good: ordered by

PageRank instead of recentness

1000 queries/user/day
Technorati web API (Cosmos query) Excellent 500 queries/user/day, frequently down
del.icio.us screen scraping Excellent I tried this and Joshua Schachter got mad at me