And speaking of Amazon, why is my Gold Box almost entirely kitchenware? It can’t be a random survey of inventory–I know they have more books and music than, say, S’More Makers. They must be pretty desperate to ship that stuff.
Month: October 2003
The funny thing is that The Matrix Reloaded was not called Matrix2, because that would actually make sense–matrix multiplication is a perfectly normal algebraic operation. Yet Alien³ and the Hackers² (and ³!) quasi-soundtracks were exponentially notified, which makes no sense at all!
While I’m grouching, I’m fine with IMDB, but I really need to find a better book / music linkdump than Amazon. I have nothing against them personally, I’d just like having a database that’s less explicitly commercial, and I’d like to avoid contributing to Google’s shopping bias. I tried the Library of Congress, but they’re really useless in terms of context. Anybody else have a better idea?
Oh, and yeah, I own Hackers². I’m weak.
And I’m allowed to post there (shh!)
I thought maybe Sumana had invented the spamblog, but I was wrong.
It’s kind of sad how excited I am that NFD just hit a PageRank of 5. It’s been struggling along at a 4 ever since I got the Googlebar and started obsessing over everybody’s PageRank, because you can see it right there whenever you hit a page. But now I’m at the same rank as Mr. Weing and Mlle. Harihareswara and Msgr. Straub and you know what? At this point probably even my mom is laughing. I’m just gonna stop.
How long do you think until Google gets regulated, seriously? Eight years. I got five on it.
Went out to deliberately bond over Ultimate Frisbee with the Project Improv Apprentices tonight, and after a few practice rounds, ended up on a team of two (there were only five of us there) with the other Old Guy, Greg. I’m twenty-two, Greg is twenty-seven, Nicole and Evan are eighteen, and Richard is nineteen.
And we beat them, ten points to one, despite the fact that they always knew exactly where the frisbee was going. Old Guys ROCK.
Also, as of tonight PIA (which was temporarily, and horribly, called Red Peanut) is officially named Street Legal. This is pretentious, but it’s like choosing a band name: when it fits, pretentiousness is no object.
I’m glad I have a reason to talk about NewsBruiser again, because I’m on the front page! No, actually I want to talk about NewsBruiser because Leonard’s had version 2.0 (“Master Planarian”) out for weeks and I need to install it. Except I don’t want to install it, because a) NewsBruiser installations have traditionally been nightmarish for me (this is due to my hosts and my own incompetence, not NewsBruiser), and b) it has comments. NewsBruiser with comments! It’ll be anarchy!
Sumana and I had a conversation this morning about said comments, and about Leonard’s implementation of Bayesian heuristics in NewsBruiser. We agree that it’s capable of preventing comment spam, but I argued that it can’t entirely prevent tar pit syndrome, because it can’t filter out stupid. Sumana argued that it can. And then we jousted. No, actually we exchanged spam jokes.
(Yes, I know you can just turn off comments, I’m just whining. And yes, I do have a forum and am thus technically already sinking into a tar pit. However, you’ll note that the definition of the tar pit theory clearly states that “as long as no one actually uses the discussion forum, you are safe.” The only people who actually post there came from AZWP anyway, so I’m totally slopy.)
I do need to install 2.0, actually, so I can do trackbacks. I really don’t understand trackbacks, but they sound like they have something to do with RSS feeds or referrer logs, so I must consume them! Speaking of RSS feeds, I’m turning into an RSS evangelist like all the RSS early adopters, and I should be shot. And speaking of referrer logs, Cody Powell responded just as I planned to my goulash bait, and proceeded to write an entry about Cracked vs. MAD, which is a topic I was thinking about just this morning, during my pseudobreakfast. CODY POWELL CAN SEE INTO MY BRAIN.
sudden anxiety
Am I the only person actually still using the phrase “jump the shark?”
I stood in the bathroom and I had to snap my fingers to get the automatic soap dispenser to ejaculate into my hand, and I was thinking about how the other people in the room all paid a thousand dollars to see this show, and I got in for free, and there we all were together, peeing.
I sat in row H of the lower balcony and watched the Gala Premier of The Lion King tour in Louisville, and it was really actually as good as it’s made out to be, even on tour. It’s stylistically and technically excellent, with the kind of transparency of production that I really admire and want to be able to do, someday.
I need to explain now how I got into this black-tie-only red-carpet Kentucky Center 20th Anniversary show, which is that I have Connections. And now I need to explain how I have said Connections, which is that I’ve been rehearsing for a few weeks with the Project Improv apprentices company (my life is filled with improv). I haven’t talked about it in here because I wasn’t really sure how far I wanted to go with it–acting’s not something in which I’m really interested at this point in my life, and I’ve never actually been very good at improv. Yet I keep coming back to rehearsals. I guess I’m kind of in.
The PI troupe proper, by and large, works in the Kentucky Center; their kindness and their comp tickets extend to their adopted apprentices, and so we ended up standing nervously and giggling in the middle of people with free food and champagne. I could have hit the mayor of Louisville (who currently wields considerably more power than, say, our governor) with a rock. I have no reason to hit him with anything, I’m just saying.
It was a good show, anyway, and I got to try out my fancy new black blazer for the first time. I didn’t really want to walk up the red carpet, lined with photographers and drummers and giant puppets, on the way in. But I did on the way out.
I was going to write this into something else, but hell, it’s a vaguely embarrassing anecdote, let’s put it in the blog.
The summer after I graduated high school, my sister declared her intention to move into my slightly larger room while I was gone, in Brazil. I was pretty much hapless in this, since I was going to be moving out soon anyway, and so was made a part of the collective clean-and-pack-both-rooms initiative. There was a lot of stuff, because while I’m mildly materialistic, my sister is a voracious packrat.
While getting down to the bottom of her closet, as Caitlan and Mom temporarily went to get something downstairs, I came upon what appeared to be a Magic Eye puzzle. Magic Eyes are (were) stereograms hidden in computer-generated texture patterns; if you stare at them while unfocusing your eyes just right, a 3-d image pops into view.
This one was a mostly purple square, not part of a puzzle book or anything, just lying around. I didn’t feel like working very much, so I started trying to get the image.
I’m normally very good with Magic Eyes, but this one took forever. I’d think I’d caught something, then lose it, then I’d have to start over with the pull-back-from-your-nose strategy. Finally, I siezed something indistinct–a diagonal bar in the left third of the sheet, and some kind of amorphous shape…
“Brendan? What are you doing?” said Caitlan from the doorway.
“I’m trying to get this Magic Eye to come out,” I replied, a little annoyed. “This one’s really tough.”
She said “Brendan. That’s wrapping paper.“