Wazzup?

Remember this?
Show/Hide


Looks like they got the band back together, and made one of the best ads ever. ^_^
Show/Hide

Full Moon

October 14th, 2008. The anniversary of my (and siblings) birth, and a full moon. Glorious. ^_^

Happy 238^th Corben.

Ass Repair Tool

lol

Keepon

It's really quite hypnotic...
Show/Hide


It's actually a research project by Marek P. Michalowski, a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, and Hideki Kozima, a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan.

I wants one.

Duck Tales Inflation Lesson

An episode of Duck Tales dealing with the negative consequences of inflation.
Show/Hide

Comment from Digg:

It seems insane that even a kids show shows what will happen if we keep the current system of money we have and yet the people in charge seem to not be able to grasp such a simple concept.

Qwerty is designed to slow you down

...is a myth.

I picked up this correction from the Dvorak Zine when it was featured on Slashdot a few years ago. It stuck with me because I had, like one of the zine researchers, believed it to be true. It seemed to be logical, yes? Science knows, the qwerty layout itself isn't logical.

But it's a complete fabrication. QWERTY, as a layout, was created BEFORE there were typists, during the design process for the first typewriters. There WAS NOBODY TO SLOW DOWN.

But a lot of people don't know this, and so the old myth persists.

This came up recently in a course I'm taking on the human-computer user interface. I mentioned that I thought the keyboard/mouse combo was a great interface (it is), which brought up qwerty, which someone mentioned was designed to slow you down, which I corrected,

and was then corrected by the instructor. YES, he said, it WAS designed to slow down typing. Not only that, but the most commonly used keys were placed in positions harder to hit (weaker fingers, the bottom row, etc), and common sequences (like the word-ending 'ion') were broken up so you couldn't hit them all together...

All of which is completely wrong.

The 13 most commonly used letters in English are, in order, ETAONRISHDLUC (this changes over time, and I haven't checked in a few years; you might be more familiar with the previous ETAOIN SHRDLU).

Five (ASHDL) are on the home row, easiest to hit. Six (ETORIU) are on the top row, 2nd easiest to hit. Only two (NC) are on the bottom row.

Four (TRHU) are struck by the index fingers alone (I also hit C this way, because I learned WRONG), the strongest fingers.

'ION' uses three adjacent fingers on one hand. It's not strictly right-to-left, but you very much can hit them all together.

Anyway. I tried to put down a common myth and was "corrected" by the teacher. You'd think this wouldn't bother me anymore. The me-being-correct-but-not-believed thing, I mean. I do seem to have a very Cassandra-esque curse in this regard.

Confusing Map

(Click for larger)

This is the map for my office.

Where is room 312B. Are you sure?
How about room 312D?
Room 312E?
Room 307H?

One of those 307H rooms is actually 307G. The 307G on the map is in reality 307J.

So, yeah. Lots of mistakes here.

I only found this today (after being here for a year) because a lot of students were coming in looking for 307G. How could they be confused, there's a map? Ah.

Break's Over

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 20, 2008

Now that he’s finally fired up on the soup-line economy, Barack Obama knows he can’t fade out again. He was eager to talk privately to a Democratic ex-president who could offer more fatherly wisdom — not to mention a surreptitious smoke — and less fraternal rivalry. I called the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (yes, truly) to get a read-out of the meeting. This is what he wrote:

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

BARTLET leads OBAMA into his study.

BARTLET That was a hell of a convention.

OBAMA Thank you, I was proud of it.

BARTLET I meant the Republicans. The Us versus Them-a-thon. As a Democrat I was surprised to learn that I don’t like small towns, God, people with jobs or America. I’ve been a little out of touch but is there a mandate that the vice president be skilled at field dressing a moose —

OBAMA Look —

BARTLET — and selling Air Force Two on eBay?

OBAMA Joke all you want, Mr. President, but it worked.

BARTLET Imagine my surprise. What can I do for you, kid?

OBAMA I’m interested in your advice.

BARTLET I can’t give it to you.

OBAMA Why not?

BARTLET I’m supporting McCain.

OBAMA Why?

BARTLET He’s promised to eradicate evil and that was always on my “to do” list.

OBAMA O.K. —

BARTLET And he’s surrounded himself, I think, with the best possible team to get us out of an economic crisis. Why, Sarah Palin just said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” Can you spot the error in that statement?

OBAMA Yes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t funded by taxpayers.

BARTLET Well, at least they are now. Kind of reminds you of the time Bush said that Social Security wasn’t a government program. He was only off by a little — Social Security is the largest government program.

OBAMA I appreciate your sense of humor, sir, but I really could use your advice.

BARTLET Well, it seems to me your problem is a lot like the problem I had twice.

OBAMA Which was?

BARTLET A huge number of Americans thought I thought I was superior to them.

OBAMA And?

BARTLET I was.

OBAMA I mean, how did you overcome that?

BARTLET I won’t lie to you, being fictional was a big advantage.

OBAMA What do you mean?

BARTLET I’m a fictional president. You’re dreaming right now, Senator.

OBAMA I’m asleep?

BARTLET Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET I mean tons.

OBAMA I understand.

BARTLET I didn’t even think there were that many white women.

OBAMA I see the numbers, sir. What do they want from me?

BARTLET I’ve been married to a white woman for 40 years and I still don’t know what she wants from me.

OBAMA How did you do it?

BARTLET Well, I say I’m sorry a lot.

OBAMA I don’t mean your marriage, sir. I mean how did you get America on your side?

BARTLET There again, I didn’t have to be president of America, I just had to be president of the people who watched “The West Wing.”

OBAMA That would make it easier.

BARTLET You’d do very well on NBC. Thursday nights in the old “ER” time slot with “30 Rock” as your lead-in, you’d get seven, seven-five in the demo with a 20, 22 share — you’d be selling $450,000 minutes.

OBAMA What the hell does that mean?

BARTLET TV talk. I thought you’d be interested.

OBAMA I’m not. They pivoted off the argument that I was inexperienced to the criticism that I’m — wait for it — the Messiah, who, by the way, was a community organizer. When I speak I try to lead with inspiration and aptitude. How is that a liability?

BARTLET Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

OBAMA You’re saying race doesn’t have anything to do with it?

BARTLET I wouldn’t go that far. Brains made me look arrogant but they make you look uppity. Plus, if you had a black daughter —

OBAMA I have two.

BARTLET — who was 17 and pregnant and unmarried and the father was a teenager hoping to launch a rap career with “Thug Life” inked across his chest, you’d come in fifth behind Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and a ficus.

OBAMA You’re not cheering me up.

BARTLET Is that what you came here for?

OBAMA No, but it wouldn’t kill you.

BARTLET Have you tried doing a two-hour special or a really good Christmas show?

OBAMA Sir —

BARTLET Hang on. Home run. Right here. Is there any chance you could get Michelle pregnant before the fall sweeps?

OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?

BARTLET Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

OBAMA Good to get that off your chest?

BARTLET Am I keeping you from something?

OBAMA Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know all of that and it took you like 20 minutes to say.

BARTLET I know, I have a problem, but admitting it is the first step.

OBAMA What’s the second step?

BARTLET I don’t care.

OBAMA So what about hope? Chuck it for outrage and put-downs?

BARTLET No. You’re elite, you can do both. Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.

OBAMA Wait, what is it you always used to say? When you hit a bump on the show and your people were down and frustrated? You’d give them a pep talk and then you’d always end it with something. What was it ...?

BARTLET “Break’s over.”

Best Cat Video

I was without Internet for a few days, so I missed the premier of the current BEST Cat Video:
Show/Hide


Here it is with Twilight Zone music.

Here it is with Jaws music.

Here is a slightly faster version.

Test Your Color IQ

It's simple, really. Drag the blocks of color around until you have a continuous spectrum from left to right. Right?

I scored 129. Lower is better, 0 is perfect.

Craziest

Interesting Scrabble-themed video. (flash-video) (flash)

Life is a Game
 of Patterns and Chance
And Those who Play Well
 will Win.
  — Liz Dubelman

Scroogled

Two things.

First, Google has their own browser now. It looks potentially sweet. You can find out more about the designs behind it here, in a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud. (Also check out the Slashdot article)

Lots of cool new features in Chrome. Faster Javascript VM, more security, less memory usage (in the long run), tabs-as-processes (one crashed tab isn't going to take down your entire browser). Seriously, go read the comic book, there's lots of stuff there.

It's way beta, there are no plugins yet, you can't really customize it all that much, etc. Definitely not ready for everyday browsing. But that's not why I'm not going to use it yet. Which brings us to...

The other thing.

Another "feature" that Chrome has is that it changes your iGoogle ui to the new experimental ui.

Permanently.

Even if you use your old browser, it's still the new interface. And the new interface is crap.

They've taken the tabs from the top and turned them into a left-side navbar.

Old style:


New style:


The new style takes up WAY more space than the old style. We've gone from one thin line of text to basically another column. I don't want four columns, I want three. I have my settings set for three. Can I have three? No, because I can't turn off the new experimental beta ui.

Also, the new ui is buggy as hell. Lots of things break (even GMail). And you can't do things you used to be able to do (drag items to different tabs).

So, I wa all set to quit iGoogle and move to Netvibes, which is like the old iGoogle interface. RIGHT before I started customizing my Netvibes page (I was going to do so just as soon as I'd finished reading the complaints in the Google groups about the new ui), I saw a post that said there was a javascript command you can put in your location bar to revert to the old ui.

javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');

Write that down. If you use iGoogle, and Google switches you to the new ui (which they are doing to random people for testing purposes), this is how you opt-out.

At least, for now. Until Google sees this and disables it or something. Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"? When Google pulls stunts like this... I'm done defending them.

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.

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! ^_^

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:
Show/Hide

(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:
Show/Hide

Kinetic Typography

SURELY, I am the last person to discovery the kinetic typography videos on YouTube, yes? So, there's really no reason to blog about it.

But here are some of my favorites:

Pulp Fiction

Who's on first? (A classic bit; I also enjoy its many variations)

Peter Griffin dislikes "The Godfather" (Probably my favorite of the bunch right here ^_^)

(There are a lot more good ones out there)

I don't know what took me so long to finally see these. I guess they're just not the type of thing I normally watch. ;-)

PAX update

The $5 off ($45 total) preregistration price expires soon. The exhibit hall (PDF) looks much bigger than I remember from last year. Oh look, Brawndo is going to be there!

Also, they've announced the Keynote speaker: "screenwriter and developer Ken Levine"

What what? Ken Levine, (sort-of) famous writer (e.g. Frasier, Cheers, Wings) who has a sweet blog I sometimes read? I didn't know he was working as a game developer.

That's because he totally isn't. They meant Ken Levine, who worked on BioShock (among others). [Unrelated sidenote: BioShock was only $15 on Steam this past weekend. Crazy! That's how I found out about the Penny Arcade game, and now we're going in circles...]

Also also, MC Chris dropped out as a musical act, but Jonathan Coulton will be there! So will MC Frontalot, The OneUps, The MiniBosses, and some people I've never heard of (Anamanaguchi, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, Freezepop).

What brought about all this seemingly-random update nonsense? Because the "Describe PAX in Seven Words" contest winners are posted.

• Saw you across the room. Horde, right? (Victoria Worthington)
• Lights sway: A Sea of DS’ glow. (Lisa Johnson)
• Where gamers go to be as One. (Scott Platkus)
• I *STILL* haven’t finished all this ramen. (Phoenix Gabriel, that's me!)
• I fell and accidentally flashed Wil Wheaton (Kate Newman)
• I stand in awe. Finally, I’m home. (Wade Larson)
• I’m only anonymous in my basement? Sh*tc*ck! (Matt Thrailkill)
• And the best of the haiku entries: The Omegathon | Twenty Omeganauts Try | One Victorious (Sean Martin)

Now, of course, I've already been notified, right? Well, here's the thing about me: I've got such fringe luck (in both directions) that I've come to expect the unexpected. Like the time I won a free copy of a soon-to-be-released game (unexpected) only to have the game company fold before its release (unexpected). So I was fully prepared for this to be a trick by some prankster (I know how easy it is to spoof e-mail, since I am a total computer nerd). But there it is, my name, on the official PAX site. That makes it real. ^_^

Of course, now the horrible thought is that they think I'm the guy that won the "Win your weight in ramen" contest (same booth from which I got my case of ramen). I'm totally not. They're going to find out, and they're going to kick me out of PAX.