Semper Progressus

NBC didn't decide Chuck's fate (they're sounding more like Fulcrum every day), or at least they didn't announce it, in their up-front presentation today. Based on what I've read, we can expect an official announcement at their "Night of Comedy" on May 19 (a.k.a. "Chucklefront", if you can believe that bit of irony). Variety speculates that they may be waiting to see what other networks do with their lineups, though personally I think they might also be trying to maintain the whole "will they or won't they?" buzz that they've got going. It's free publicity for the show, and I'm sure they recognize that the longer they let this maelstrom swirl, the worse they'll look if they cancel it, so I can only assume they've already decided to renew it. Though even if they didn't, Variety seems to think there's a chance the CW would grab it (it's a WB-produced show).

Maybe now is the time to grab season one on Blu-Ray. If they truly haven't decided yet, I'm sure every little bit helps.

...for the Andy/Dwight duelling Country Road. Aside from the sheer awesomeness of it, it made me finally go look up the anime where I'd first heard that song. Yes, I first heard it in an anime; that's what happens when you're really not a country music guy - you miss out on even decent stuff like John Denver. I decided to look it up after heading upstairs for a shower, leaving my laptop, and my work laptop (working from home today), and my smartphone, and my work iPhone, and my work iPod Touch (maybe later...suffice to say, Xcode is no Visual Studio) in the living room. Fortunately for my laziness, I left my desktop on upstairs where I've been fiddling with GPGPU programming. A little Goolge/Wikipedia tag-team revealed that the little that I did remember ("I think it's that Miyazaki-ish one that's not Miyazaki") was right. Whisper of the Heart. Though I learned (re-learned? I only saw it once, over ten years ago) it was Studio Ghibli, and although Miyazaki didn't direct, he was heavily involved, including writing and producing. The worst part is, I may have that on DVD. I'm too lazy to check right now, though....

Well, I guess that turned into something of a "what's been up with me post". Excellent.

Nice. And honestly, for the most part, those are basically the same thing.

I just have to say to everyone who gave four years of their life to that show: I! TOLD! YOU! SO!

ABC News was covering the whole AIG bonus debacle last night (as, I imagine, was everyone), and afterwards turned to the massive swell of anger surrounding it as the next story. They asked the question of why there's so much anger over this, when there have been worse offenses (numerically worse, anyway, as the AIG bonuses are only 0.1% of what they received from the government).

Is it really not obvious? Concentration of wealth is out of control in America. And while the rich are probably also taking a big hit with the economy in the tank (short-sellers notwithstanding), it's proportionately nothing compared to the family that loses its sole source of income. While things were going well, people accepted the concentration of wealth thanks to the American dream that one day they, too, could be truly obscenely wealthy. But when things go bad and that dream seems hopeless, the unfairness of it really hits them.

Perhaps unfairness is the wrong word. That implies a certain objective morality on the matter which I'm unsure is there. Maybe it is - after all, I'm pretty strongly capitalist, generally speaking, and I find it pretty sick. But whether or not the morality is ambiguous, the facts are not. The last time the distribution of wealth was as lopsided as it is right now was - you guessed it - right before the Great Depression. I suspect that such strong concentration of wealth may be as damaging to a capitalist system as a monopoly is, and for many of the same reasons. And while the main problem with a democratic government is that it does what's popular, not necessarily what's smart, it seems like people are finally realizing the smart thing to do and calling for government to do it.

"Redistribution of wealth" is a major codeword for "communist", but it should be obvious that things like raising tax rates on the wealthy or means-testing social security or even just maintaining closer oversight and stricter regulations on financial markets are not things which will render our society no longer a meritocracy. If anything, it makes it moreso, since under the current system those with wealth and power can and do prevent others from grabbing a piece of that pie, regardless of merit (again, not unlike what a monopoly can do in the business world). This defines a broken system, in need of repair. Not the self-correction of conservatives who believe that free markets are a panacea, but a serious restructuring by an outside agent. Hopefully the new administration will be such an agent. Thinking about it all, I'm at least as interested in how the aftermath of the crisis will play out as I am in the crisis itself - it's going to be real interesting to see how quickly these lessons are forgotten once the economy has been stabilized.

Here's another take on the matter that I stumbled across, with a slightly more colorful tone.

edit: Wow, xkcd really misses the point today...or misses something, anyway...as many forum-posters note. Does he think people are angry because they mistakenly believe AIG gave away almost their entire last stimulus payment as bonuses? That seems to be what he's implying, which I don't believe, nor do I believe these sorts of news graphics are "dishonest" at all. "Without context"? How is it without context? The context is the money AIG came begging for versus the money they're now pissing away. Here's another comparison to counter the one he gives about a million versus a billion (which is even more in-context in regards to AIG): It's like if a friend came begging, pleading you for $1000 to help with their rent and food for the month, and told you if you didn't help they'd be homeless and starving within a week, so you loan them $1000...and they immediately pull out one of those dollars, wipe their ass with it, and throw it in the garbage. Granted, they didn't just do so with the whole grand, but it's still pretty a fucking outrageous thing to do, given the circumstances. Come on, Randall, you're usually more with-it than this....

1. Netflix disc - Role Models
Finally, a movie about boobs and LARPing!! And it's really funny. Highly recommended.

2. theater - Watchmen (any spoilers behind cuts)
I realize it's based on a GN, which we've bought but haven't read yet, and it wants to be true to the source material, but damn that plot wandered all over the place! I didn't even know what was going on half the time, in spite of how ridiculously heavy-handed the director was with his themes (not to mention the music that everyone has complained about. Great soundtrack, poorly utilized.) The plot is also kind of dated, somehow. I don't think cold war/nuclear threat is automatically dated (Thirteen Days is very suspenseful, even though you know how it turns out, and I still love WarGames), but something about the way it treated it made it obvious that it was written before the last couple of decades happened. ( minor spoilers ) I dunno, I guess it all rung kind of hollow. It was kind of an assault on the senses with little point. I imagine 300 was the same, and perhaps Sin City as well (this certainly hasn't made me any more interested in seeing them, so I may never do so). Is it possible this director is to graphic novels what Uwe Boll is to video games? Maybe it's a little early to go that far.... Anyway, I still look forward to reading the GN, to see how it worked in its original form.

3. Netflix instant - Dirty Dancing
Watch some old Knight Rider, then watch this. I swear Patrick Swayze looks just like David Hasselhoff.

Verizon finally released Windows Mobile 6.1 for my phone a little while back, and they bundled a few other updates with it, including EVDO rev A support for higher speed. Higher speed indeed! I finally got around to re-hacking it for free tethering and pulled up speedtest.net: 1174kbps downstream! Over a megabit on a cellular connection? Yes, please! 343kbps upstream isn't too shabby, either.

I strongly encourage all my highly mobile friends - especially those always questing for free hotspots (ecmyers!) - to Google how to hack your phone for free tethering and start really getting your money's worth. You don't even need a smartphone/Blackberry; I was doing the same thing with my old LG Chocolate and Verizon's $5/month wireless web service.

1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit "random" or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on "explore the last seven days" or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

There's been a lot of yelling around here, most of it over silliness, so I'm making the following peace offering to trinityvixen:



I wouldn't want to go down Lincoln-style tomorrow (assassinated at the theater, I mean - it's not a "hoo boy, Mary Todd Lincoln was homely!" reference).

Perhaps what's most bizarre is that this was done by the same guy who did that awesomely disturbing (and disturbingly awesome?) Lazytown/Lil Jon mashup that viridian posted a while back...(which is back online, as they've successfully appealed the takedown request).

Wow, apparently today is the 200th birthday of both Abraham Lincoln AND Charles Darwin.

They should totally hang out....

We all know that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", but it occurred to me this morning just how important intent can be to the moral learned from parables. Take "the boy who cried wolf" for example.

Kid is assigned to watch some sheep, gets bored (and/or is an attention whore) and shouts that there's a wolf when there is none. Villagers come, kid weakly asserts, "Uh...it left or something," villagers leave. Repeat a few times until they get sick of him, wolf actually shows, kid yells, villagers ignore, wolf eats kid (and sheep, to get the moral through in case you, ah, prefer sheep, if you know what I mean).

Ostensibly, the moral is that if you lie (and get caught, as Garak pointed out when Bashir told him the parable in an episode of Deep Space 9) people won't believe you. Or, more succintly, don't lie.

Setting aside for the moment that the villagers should've taken him off the shepherding job as soon as their disbelief in his cries rendered him ineffectual at performing the task, what struck me was how a change in intent, or in circumstances beyond control, could've led to exactly the same beliefs and actions from the villagers, the same outcome, but with a wildly different moral.

For example, if the kid actually believes he sees a wolf in the brush and calls out, but it turns out there is none, the exact same sequence of events will follow, but the moral can't be one about lying. It sort of seems it'd be a communist-dictatorship-style "lesson" about the importance of doing your assigned job well...because otherwise the sheep die, depriving the people of a vital source of food and clothing material (oh, and you die, too).
If there was actually a wolf, and it fled before the villagers got there, the moral could be that wolves, as pack animals, understand human social structure, and can use it to manipulate us, much to our peril. We'd be learning the moral as villagers, not as the shepherd, presumably, to be extra-vigilant about those wily wolves.

I'm sure there are other possibilities, and probably for other parables as well. I guess these subtleties are why the audience for these moral lessons is usually restricted to children, who don't have the attention span to think too deeply on the subject matter. Because they just don't hold up to scrutiny when you do analyze them.

Me to other driver: "Good job, ass-grape."
Michelle: "What's a grape?"
...pause...
Me: "Ummmmm.... It's a small fruit usually sold in bunches?"
Michelle: "Oh my god, that was such a non-sequitur I honestly didn't know what a grape was!"

I'm not having a lot of tech luck lately. As if the low-tech meltdown of both cars and the furnace on Thanksgiving (now 2/3 fixed, and the other car should be back soon) wasn't enough, I'm now having a high-tech meltdown: my RAID-5 array with absolutely everything on it collapsed last weekend, and just this evening my Xbox 360 RROD'd. (I guess the rumors about NXE taxing the consoles is true, since mine's been running for two years without a snag.) I almost think I should be afraid, rather than excited, for work giving me a new computer, and letting me build it, too.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/12/01/funny-pictures-oldest-ever-lolcat-found/

That is seriously awesome. In a really weird sort of way.

I know everyone's all into talking about last night's debate right now, but I thought people might want to be made aware of this. I know it passed under my radar last month, but I plan to check it out before going on vacation.

Couric: So, what newspapers and magazines do you regularly read to stay informed and to understand the world?
Georg: I'VE READ MOST OF THEM!! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Again with GREAT APPRECIATION for your AMER'CAN PRESS, KATIE! HAHAHAHAHA!
Couric: Ok, right...Yortuk?
Yortuk: How about ALL OF THEM?!! HAHAHAHAHA! You know, any of them that have been in front of me all these years in Amer'ca.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Yortuk: We do not have such a vast variety of news sources in Chekoslovakia. It is a foreign country where news is tightly controlled by Communist party.
Georg: Believe me, Chekoslovakia is a microcosm compared to America!
Both: HAHAHAHAHA! That's why we are...TWO WILD AND CRAZY GUYS!!!
Couric: *facepalm*

My earlier post about there being no good software out there for mobile devices turned out to have been ill-informed. I'm just behind the times on these things, as it's not an area of tech that usually piques my interest...until now, since I have one. Handango seems to have descended in the last four years (when I got my PalmOS-based Garmin GPS/PDA) from the be-all end-all of mobile app stores to the dumping ground for any random guy who threw an app together in five minutes and thinks he can sell it. Real developers are selling their own apps direct.

But enough about stores - let's look for free software! I've already downloaded both Google Maps Mobile and Windows Live Search. It's interesting to compare the two - not surprisingly, Google Maps is really fast but lighter on features, while Live Search sort of chugs along but is laden with bells and whistles. The thing is, most of them are USEFUL bells and whistles, like nearby movie listings and low gas prices and traffic info on more roads. I've also read that if you're using them for GPS navigation, Live updates your position quicker and provides a better interface (Google's makes you manually step through the turns, for example, which is not great for driving). Still, I'll try them both for that myself....

No, my phone doesn't actually have GPS built-in, but my old Garmin hasn't really ever been the same since it got dropped in a toilet a few months ago, so I've been considering a replacement. Turns out GPS technology has made ridiculous advances in the last four years, as well. Most of the dash-mount nav systems in the stores look exactly the same, but I was also curious about getting a Bluetooth GPS receiver and using it with software on the phone, so I started nosing around for those. Imagine my surprise when I discovered this sick little bastard! It can continue to track GPS satellites while in your pocket?? Its battery lasts 9 hours?? I'm glad that, based on the two dozen or so glowing reviews of it I've read, I'm not the only one surprised by its abilities (yes, their claims are accurate) or I'd feel like I've been living under a rock.

So, at about a third the price of even a basic dash-mount GPS nav system, and with at least as many features when paired with FREE software on the phone, I'll probably be trying to get THAT a payday or two hence.

None of this means I'm giving up on writing my own apps for the phone, mind you. I've tried both the freeware "Yacht Game SP" and EA's official "Yahtzee Deluxe" and both have crappy UIs, so I might write my own Yahtzee game for it. Or something.

Now if only I could get Verizon to pay 90% of the cost of a new computer or home theater system, I'd be set!

This article is for kent_allard_jr, and anyone else who's petrified by the current economic turmoil. Yeah, things are tough, and they'll remain tough for a while, but it's not going to be disastrous. So let's all knock off the sky-is-falling talk and get back to what's really important right now: Is the new Knight Rider series going to improve or what? Personally I feel like the second half of the pilot episode was already better than the first half, so hopefully that trend will continue...

Man...remember Deke?

Deke.

Oh, come on.

What, you need a reminder, or something? I'm talkin' 'bout Deke!

I really don't know where my brain keeps all this shit, or why it unearths it at random times.

ETA: I hope someone else remembers this. If not, it'll be worse than the Korgano reference I made a week or two ago. Right? Korgano? Anyone? Bueller? (Oh, sure, everyone gets "Bueller"...I haven't even seen it.)

I got a new phone this week. (Same number.) It's Verizon's SMT5800 "smartphone". It runs Windows Mobile 6 (I've had the opportunity to play with Blackberries at my office and don't like them), and I've already configured it with my email accounts and stuff. (I'm hoping that the 10MB/month plan from Verizon will be enough for how I use it so I needn't pay even more for the unlimited plan...I dunno, though.)

The really excellent bit is that I'll be able to write my own applications for it very easily, using the same development tools I'm already familiar with for writing Windows applications. This is "really excellent" because the vast majority of mobile software out there (regardless of platform) is utter shit. The wife and some coworkers all think I should work on something saleable. My tendency is to just write stuff completely customized to me instead, although if this guy's "applications" are any indication, it'd be a pretty low bar anyway.