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Friday, May 03, 2002
Something you might not have known. During the Gulf War, every Patriot missile intercept failed. There is no evidence that any Scud missile was ever brought down by a Patriot missile.
Oof. An NY Times article about the cleanup in lower Manhattan... "Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Gov. George E. Pataki explained that efforts to identify remains will continue at the medical examiner's office and at the Fresh Kills Landfill." Man. That's a poor choice of name.
Thursday, May 09, 2002
If you've seen the movie, you may be interested in mistakes from Spider-Man. Personally, I wasn't impressed. It felt rushed. And the climax wasn't very climactic. Oh well.
Monday, May 13, 2002
The World Rock Paper Scissors Society. Be sure to read their exclusive coverage of 2002: Year of the Rock.
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
Eminem disses Moby on new single. I saw Moby on "The Daily Show" last night. He's a quiet but interesting interview. He seemed to think it was funny that Eminem named him.
Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Song of the day: Single Gun Theory - "I've Been Dying". Hey, we're going to have a Mac client soon. The other night I remembered an article I had read about a man trying to understand women. After all his thinking, all he could come up with was "Soft. Smell nice." So I did a search on that. Then I got this nice ad in reponse to my query:
Another thing about Single Gun Theory from their News page. In response to the question "Are all your CD's still available?", the answer: Yes! Nettwerk has recently re-pressed all our stuff. It wasn't available for a while there, and we were just about to put our entire collection onto Napster / Gnutella / etc. when suddenly...there it was again. You can now order our CDs (even "Flow..." and "Like Stars") from Nettwerk's web site. If you can't spare the cash to buy our stuff, don't worry - I often put our entire collection onto the Gnutella file-sharing network, so do a search on us occasionally and you should be able to find our stuff there.[emphasis mine] Holy Jeebus, they're enlightened! Makes me want to buy them even if their other songs suck.
Thursday, May 16, 2002
You know how you notice some small thing that you've never noticed before, and then you wonder how you could have missed it all that time? For me it just came while reading "A Heart-breaking Work of Staggering Genius." There was a part in the story where a long conversation is taking place. Dave Eggers doesn't bother with the "he said, she said" and instead simply states the dialogue. It always annoyed me when writers did that because it made it difficult to know who was saying what. Only just now did it occur to me that it was probably intentional. Weird. Minor. Of almost no insight. Obvious, almost. And yet I've gone 24 years without knowing that. Well, at this point, I guess that it was probably one of the few remaining things I didn't know. Figures it was so small, otherwise I would have learned it by now.
Microsoft might be doing something tricky. Or I could be paranoid. It's been the policy of free webmail providers to add a tag line at the end of all outgoing emails. This one came to me via a Hotmail email: "Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com." Pretty benign, no? Well, the email was actually sent as HTML. The URL in the text of the message wasn't actually the same as the URL specified in the HREF attribute of the anchor tag. That URL was: http://g.msn.com/1HM105401/44. Now, that looks like a rather randomly generated path on the end of that. Pardon me while I go all "UN Black helicopter" conspiracy crazy on you, but that would be the way I'd do it if I wanted to know which emails resulted in clicks to MSN. Just generate a random string for every outgoing email, save it as well as pertinent information about the email (recipient, sender, maybe more), and keep track of who comes to those links. Why they'd want to do that is beyond me, but I can't think of a legitimate reason for it. No legitimate reason for disguising the URL either.
Saturday, May 18, 2002
From PIRG, an alliance of state Public Interest Research Groups: information on credit reporting bureaus. Most importantly, the phone number 1-888-5-OPTOUT (1-888-567-8688), which allows you to opt out of marketing offers based on information in the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and Trans Union). Give this number to everyone you know; these people are not your friends.
A somewhat unconventional but funny review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Heh. Turdonia.
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
I find it ironic that ABC showed "Enemy of the State" in the current political climate. Something that heightens the paranoia of ordinary Americans about privacy and spying issues is probably a good thing, though. Two things: Jon Voight's character's birthday was September 11, 1940. And there was the worst example of an overdub that I have ever heard in my life, including imported Hong Kong movies. The finale of The X-Files sucked. Really really sucked. The writing was even worse than Chris Carter's norm, Kim Manners indulged in stupid camera work, and the plot was completely pointless. There was no real explanation of what Mulder was doing all this time, nor was his Earth-shattering secret anything close to that. In the one episode where the complete truth was promised, the characters once again did the normal X-Files thing where they avoided telling anyone about anything for no good reason at all. That whole "I can't tell you because...." and then you find that both the knowledge and the purpose of keeping it secret were completely insignificant. All in all, it was a complete waste of time. Speaking of complete wastes of time, one thing that was not was About A Boy, which we saw this weekend. I think it goes down as my favorite movie of the year thus far. They did an excellent job of walking the balance between earnest and acid. It was really clever and funny too, but not in the David Mamet "look how clever I am" sort of way. The movie was pretty faithful to the original book, to a greater degree than High Fidelity was. I liked Hugh Grant's performance as well. Chances are, men and women will perceive his character completely differently. Men: "I want to be like him." Women: "What a jerk." Regardless, he didn't stammer once in the whole film. No cutesy charm. None of those "quirks" that made him increasingly annoying in most of his films that came Stateside. And the haircut is a definite improvement. I don't understand why all the reviewers were glowing about the score by Badly Drawn Boy. It was there. It didn't really do much for me either way. Given the quality of the rest of the film, it didn't need to. If you go see it (which you should instead of, say, Star Wars Episode 2 or Spider-man), be aware that Ibiza is an island off the Mediterranean coast of Spain where many Europeans go for vacation. In some ways, in terms of hedonistic pursuits, it is apparently the Las Vegas of Europe.
Limited Time Offer: The Best Excuse Ever.
¶ 360 Posted at 11.56 AM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | politics ) Saturday, May 25, 2002
The Secret Diaries of the Fellowship.In other news, we're getting sued. And I'll leave it at that. No good can come of saying more, and quite possibly some bad.
¶ 361 Posted at 03.00 AM ⇒ No Comments ( (un)employment | linkage )
In applying for (yet another) job, I got the sudden urge to add at the end of the cover letter:
PS - I'm really smart.I mean, that's basically what I'm trying to say in the whole cover letter, only more obliquely. I wonder how effective that tactic would be...
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
Who's dumb enough to get fooled by an email like this:
Klez.E is the most common world-wide spreading worm.It's very dangerous by corrupting your files. Because of its very smart stealth and anti-anti-virus technic,most common AV software can't detect or clean it. We developed this free immunity tool to defeat the malicious virus. You only need to run this tool once,and then Klez will never come into your PC. NOTE: Because this tool acts as a fake Klez to fool the real worm,some AV monitor maybe cry when you run it. If so,Ignore the warning,and select 'continue'. If you have any question,please mail to me.I guess I shouldn't ask.
They claim that they speak English too. In fact, they claim they invented it. Even so, sometimes you need help understanding them. Dictionary of English slang and colloquialisms of the UK.
The Apocalypse is surely on its way. The next reality tv show? E! brings us The Anna Nicole Smith Show. Sounds bad, doesn't it? It gets worse. Part of the show will be her hunt for a sperm donor. Apparently she's already reproduced once; she has a 16-year old son.
¶ 368 Posted at 03.54 PM ⇒ No Comments ( stupid people | whoa ) |
