Category: Personal

Thanksgiving 2001 – I’m thankful, are you?

So tomorrow we’ll mostly all sit down with friends, or family, or even by ourselves and enjoy a day, maybe two, off from work. Insert cliche here. Blah blah blah, right? But how often do you actually think about how good life is for you, how fortunate you are not to be living in a refugee camp just inside the border of Pakistan with a hellacious winter about to come on? I know I don’t think about this often enough. Okay, I don’t have a job right now. But I do have a warm house, food to eat, a nice car to drive, I just got a Tivo, and especially I have friends with whom to share these good times. I am thankful, I hope you are too. Have fun, enjoy the day, enjoy the football, the food, the company, just remember that if you can read this webpage you have it better than most of the people on this planet.

The Anti-Thesaurus

Nicholas Carroll has published a very useful proposal for a new HTML metadata tag named nonwords. This tag would allow web authors to block a given page from showing up in a search engine result set; Carroll points out that he is “embarrassed by drawing in … searchers, when I have no useful information for them” and the page hits use up his resources needlessly as well as wasting the searchers’ time. I think this proposal is useful, meets good design criteria of being minimal and tightly focused, and ought to be watched to see if any search engines (Google, are you listening?) agree to it. [Wes pointed me here.] A well-educated friend says that the proposal reminds him of “the Zen thing about knowing what something is by knowing what it is not…. or Plato’s shadows.”

Toys for well-to-do suburbanites

Scot Peterson, in EWeek (I still have to remember it’s no longer PCWeek), writes about the problems Microsoft is having demonstrating the value of .Net My Services. You mean, besides the clunky name? Good thing, Peterson says, “even Microsoft President Rick Belluzzo appeared as nauseated as I was.” I suppose the MS marketing crew is trying to preserve the purity of the .Net brand by forcing it to be the first word in any product name but would My .Net Services roll off the tongue a whole lot easier?

Testing new TextRouter version

Version 0.40 has lots of nice improvements, fixes a bunch of usability issues, and adds the ability to drag and drop URLs into the editing window. A few more improvements and fixes and he ought to be able to call it a finished 1.0! Cool.

The crankiest man in America

For the twelfth time since 1977, George Carlin brings his Complaints and Grievances to HBO this week. After a humorous five minutes on 9/11, he blasts just about everyone in America. Guys named Todd (and Kyle), parents who put honor roll bumper stickers on their cars, and guys who fly hot air balloons around the world all qualify to have the sh$t beaten out of them, are missing chromosomes and ought to be thrown out of helicopters. Of course, it’s all funny funny funny! The NRA are dickless lunatics–damn I love him! And don’t miss this wild caricature of the man, it truly captures his wild irascibility.

Great Chefs: Guilty Pleasure

Another great cable show that hypnotizes me with the cool anonymous vioceover is Great Chefs (and its cousin Great Chefs of the World). These shows are very simple, every episode features three chefs, one cooks an appetizer/starter, one an entree, and one a dessert. Discovery Channel (you know, the place where they do it) shows this every weekday afternoon except Fridays when they show the unappealing Epicurious. I watch and just get a chill, you know? Doesn’t matter who cooks or what they cook.

CIA goes military?

I remember reading about the CIA and assorted military or quasi-military events back in the day (LOL, ain’t I hip?) or at least back in the ’50s and ’60s, before they got busted in the wake of Watergate. I don’t ever remember reading, though, that the Company had formed an actual military unit. Now, apparently, that has changed and this unit, the Special Activities Staff, is leading the way in closing in on bin Laden. Not really sure how I feel about the news of this group though. I wonder why the CIA needs this capability, instead of just working with an appropriately trained, staffed, and equipped company from the Marines or the Army.

From the Palm to the Brain

Jeff Hawkins is probably the person most responsible for the success of PDAs today, being the original technical vision behind the Palm Pilot and Handspring. But he’s also had a lifelong interest in the workings of the human mind, stemming from a mid-1980s incident at home. And unlike some very rich people who’ve put money into scientific inquiries of personal interest, Hawkins is actually doing original work himself: he has developed the beginings of a theory suggesting that the brain works by anticipating and completing patterns. Cool stuff, eh?

At lunch I discussed Hawkins’ idea with a friend. We digressed a little bit but he brought up an interesting point. Evolution seems to have attempted an optimization in the nature of our brains, trading off the ability to learn from the environment (external stimulus) against speed of response. Accordingly during the first dozen years of life, when human children are most likely to have parental support and protection, brains are very malleable and open to learning; consider, for example, how much quicker children learn a new language than do adults. After that age, humans (until the Industrial Revolution came along) are more or less able to handle themselves and the brain becomes hardwired (my friend used the analogy of an EEPROM burning in a PROM around that age). Interestingly, most cultures’ coming of age ceremonies such as Jewish bar mitzvah and Christian confirmation take place at age 12 or 13.

Some people are sick in the head, some just foolish

“Times are tough, man, just getting tougher–cover me!” Those words from Springsteen sure apply to us today, between the terrorism, the economy, and sick people sending real and fake anthrax though the mail. The people I really resent, though, are the ones trying to take advantage of people’s fear to make a quick buck. Fortunately, the government can sometimes help with this, and in fact, the FTC is doing just that, as Reuters reports in U.S. Warns 40 Web Sites on Bogus Bioterror Products. The people running these companies are sick in the head, I think. But okay people, scared or not, oregano oil and zinc mineral water will not prevent or cure anthrax!

While the operators of the websites discussed here have clearly passed the line into unlawful actions, I am also getting more than a little fed up by companies that are adding patriotic graphics and words to their advertising. What bin Laden and Al Queda did was bad enough but please, let’s not use it to make a few bucks, okay? Keep America rolling, says one of the big car companies, but what they’re truly doing by offering zero percent financing, according to analysts, is pulling in future sales and settting themselves up for weaker spring and summer sales. One market researcher suggested that as many as 400,000 sales were being pulled into October and November from the first half of 2002; the car companies like the incentives so much, though, that they’ve extended them into January. These executives are just foolish.

Today’s movie: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Of course, there was no waiting a week or two to see this one. Warner Brothers has The Official Harry Potter Website, with online games and such, and IMDB (which is part of Amazon.com, actually) has the more informative site. Good movie, lots of great effects, and the three kids who star as Harry, Ron, and Hermoine do a super job carrying this film. Certainly worth seeing and you can see the trailer online if you want.

Director Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone, Bicentennial Man) and screenwriter Steve Kloves (Wonder Boys, The Fabulous Baker Boys–how did he get this assignment?) put a solid story up on the screen, you can see where the $125 million was gloriously spent. They had a tough time choosing which 20% of the novel to include in the movie and did a mostly good job–although novelist J.K. Rowling was noted as having substantial input– but I think we needed more on the Harry/Draco Malfoy animosity and the same on Professor Snape (Alan Rickman does a smart job in the role). Along with Rickman, Columbus will be providing significant numbers of older English actors with employment as this and the other six Potter movies are made, including John Cleese, John Hurt, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, and Richard Bremmer.

Steven throws down the gauntlet!

Steven DenBeste, a self-styled “a demented starship captain who sometimes dreams that he lives in San Diego,” has written some of the best commentary I’ve seen on the war against terrorism. He and I are very much in agreement on a key point, that neither of us have seen “a single convincing argument against this war, because they all had the same fundamental flaw: none of them would work in the real world. None of them would actually solve the problem we face.” Now he has challenged three weblogging anti-war writers to a debate:

Resolved: The United States is correct to be fighting this war and should not stop doing so.

Rebecca Blood was given the original challenge but she has declined; I am waiting to see which others will debate Steven via weblog, each posting arguments and counterarguments to their own sites. Anyone can drop out at any point and the judgement of winner and loser is up to us, the reading public. I am sure this will be a very interesting series to follow.

One of the South’s most divine foods

Nakada, who is probably a little too fond of these delights for his own good, points us to the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts appreciation page. I didn’t think it was possible but Taquitos Senior Editor Stewart Deck has compiled too much information on this simple snack food vendor. But looking through the site I realized that there are more people with too much time to spend on snack foods. I mean, a recipe for Keith’s peanut butter and Cocoa Puffs sandwich on toast? Oh god!

Today’s movie: The One

Considering how anxious I was to see it, I’m as surprised as anyone that it took me two weeks to get to it. But Jet and his buddies at the Multi-Verse Authorities were worth the wait, this flick is far superior to the last two movies I saw. Others (friends, critics) weren’t too impressed but I sure was. Li plays the hero and the villain this time out and he really creates two separate, very different characters–this is the first I’ve ever seen him play a baddie and he’s a nasty boy! Writing/producing/directing team James Wong and Glen Morgan found a way to take cool concept right out of today’s physics journals (the multiverse) and make a tense action movie out of it. Okay, they went a little too far with the central conceit that drives the bad Li but you have to give them a little slack. This is 90 minutes that keeps moving and moving until a titanic confrontation and a conclusion that leaves both Li’s happy, sort of.

Wong and Morgan came together as a team writing for the X-Files in its early years, went out on their own with the underrated and sorely missed Space: Above and Beyond, worked again with X-Files creator Chris Carter on the darkly serious TV series Millenium, made their feature film debut with last year’s Final Destination.

Carla Guigino plays her character in two of the universes, also as different as the two versions of Li, with few pitfalls. Delroy Lindo shows up here with hair! Morgan and Wong bring some of their regulars in here to good effect, especially James Morrison and Tucker Smallwood who played starring roles on Space: A&B.

Zaphod: the anti-Dave

Dave Winer is an interesting guy with a weblog who is also Chairman and CEO of Userland Software, Inc. As with many people who write things worth reading, though, sometimes he crosses a line that pisses people off. As Dave has been writing for years he has pissed certain people off, or at least amused them no end, so that some of them are now documenting Dave’s follies (the folks behind WinerLog, led by the mysterious Zaphod, choose to remain anonymous for some reason). Even some big industry names have had it up to here with him. I have to admit, I admire Dave most of the time but he can piss me off as well; one telling point about Dave’s attitude towards this topic is that even though he proclaims openness as majorly important, he shut down the discussion group associated with his weblog a long time ago. OTOH, WinerLog is hosted on EditThisPage.com, which is owned and operated by Userland Software, Inc.

Update: The swell folks at WinerLog give BillSaysThis a little love, thanks guys. Only a few hours since their link to this article went live and a dozen hits already!

Advertising (by me) for the laughs

A new trend in web advertising, after so many other forms–banners, popups, pounders–have clearly failed, is being called micro advertising. Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger (the service that I use to publish this weblog), today debuted the Pyrads service and I figured for $10 for 3,333 views I’d try it out; I expect I was one of the first since I have RAD Order ID #104 (whoohoo!). You can see the results in this screen capture. Yes, I had to use up one of the views to get the shot but since the ads rotate, it was the only way I could see it myself. In the first few hours (no more than four, since that’s how long ago I bought the add), I had 11 hits (out of 276 impressions delivered) from it, so that’s cool. If you’re reading this page after clicking through on the ad, please drop me an email and let me know what you think.

About the ad itself. The title is limited to 20 characters and the text to 50, so I wrote: title – BillSaysThis is fun! and text – Wandering comments on the real and online worlds

Okay, not going to overthrow Madison Ave. anytime soon, still a cheap thrill.

Update: In response to an email from Alex Rose (thanks!), I checked the referrer logs to see that after about 23 hours Blogger/Pyrad delivered 992 impressions of my ad and 29 people clicked through to see this site. Three percent may not sound like much but it’s much higher than the average banner ad gets. And I still get over 2300 more impressions delivered!

Pompeii: New erotic murals

Reuters is reporting on a set of recently unearthed erotic murals at the ancient Roman playground of Pompeii. The 16 works were found in a unisex public bath nicknamed the Pleasure Spa. I bet they were having some pleasure, judging from the murals. Pompeii, which was huge, much larger than I expected, is the city buried in lava when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD but incredibly well-preserved and the subject of ongoing archeological efforts. Oh well, Dad and I got there a little too soon. Is another trip called for?