Sunday, August 17, 2008

Digital Embarassment

You know what's frustrating? Computers. Especially when you mess up something on a computer, because it might very well be public and digital, easy to preserve. Especially when you're someone who is supposed to be good with computers.

Take Facebook, for example. Facebook has a feature wherein you can give them access to your e-mail account, and they'll look up people that have exchanged e-mail with you and see if they have a Facebook account and allow you to add them as friends. Handy, right?

Well, suppose you are subscribed to a mailing list (for example, the Python programming list). There are hundreds (thousands?) of people e-mailing each other on this list. You probably aren't friends with all of them. But there they are.

By this point, you can probably see where this story is going, so I needn't continue. In my defense, I haven't slept in like two days, and the cancel/continue buttons are like right next to each other.

Hopefully most of the people will realize that I'm just some random guy, and not someone they know (although, I do have that very common name..). Of course, they might be like me, and just accept every friend request they get, because what if it IS someone they know but they just don't recognize the name?

We'll see.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Stay Of Execution


The start date for the Large Hadron Collider is now September 10th. Plenty of time to live it up in the meantime! ^_^

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

1 Day Left

Again, just over a day until the LHC gets turned on and the world possibly comes to an end. ^_^

At least I won't have to pay off these credit card bills...

Dr. Horrible captions

I don't know if you've watched Dr. Horrible with the captions on yet, but they're hilariously inaccurate. Here are some examples (captions first, actual spoken words second):
Act I:
A heinous crime, a show of course
A heinous crime, a show of force

I don't know.
It's not a no.

Act III:
I hate the homeless.
This problem that plagues our city.
I hate the homeless
-ness problem that plagues our city.

Everyone can blaze a hero's drill.
Everyone can blaze a hero's trail.
(A hero's WHAT?)

Hammer me nail.
Hammer, meet nail.
(I suspect the captioner is not a native English speaker)

Why?
Way!
(Hammer finishes the lyric after he comes out of being frozen. How is this not obvious?)

Captain Hammer would say that.
Captain Hammer will save us.
(Capstone line of the series, ruined in the caption)
So, I e-mailed Hulu and asked them wtf and where'd they get the captions from? Their response was:
I'm not certain what our source is -- I believe that we had found some open-content subtitles and performed some verification that they were correct before putting them up. I've watched the first few minutes of Dr. Horrible with the subtitles after we had put them up, and remember seeing that they were ever so slightly off in terms of timing, perhaps about a half a second too early, but I hadn't noticed anything actually being seriously inaccurate. If there's an obvious error somewhere please let me know and I'll send that information to our quality control folks.
So, mystery solved. They took someone else's captions, and didn't bother to check them. Because that would take effort.

Lazy, lazy.

Best Commercial (NSFW?)

Updated:
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(If you want something done right...)

Dark Knight

So, I watched the new Batman movie, and enjoyed it. I would have left out the Harvey Dent plotline, as it was fairly unnecessary, but overall it was good. Except that Bat-voice just didn't work for me. Here is a clip that gives you an idea of what I'm talking about:
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