Ick.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 31 January 2006 at 11:18 AM

On map sites you can usually get directions for going from point A to point B on criteria like shortest distance or least travel time, but when I give directions to people I don't use either of those criteria. Instead, I usually try to give the simplest directions possible. It's easier for me as I don't have to spend time explaining how to fin my favorite short-cut and it's better for the person I'm directing, since they'll hopefully have less trouble finding their destination. I think it would be cool if map sites could give you directions that involve the fewest turns or use only major roads.

Landmark-based navigation is almost always how you, I, and most other humans give directions and I don't see why we shouldn't expect the same from our automated systems. Since places like google maps can pinpoint all kinds of businesses on their maps, that they should try to tell you what you're going to see at an intersection where you need to turn. Knowing that you should head west on Main Street isn't nearly as useful as telling someone to turn left at the McDonalds onto Main Street.

Finally, if you've ever tried to follow print outs from, say, Yahoo maps at night in area you haven't been to before, you know that reading the directions and driving are (or at least should be) mutually exclusive. That's why we need either simple directions that can be committed to memory or in-car navigation systems. I'm cheap, so I prefer the former. And I think my two suggestions above at least partially address that need. Now someone just needs to implement them.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 29 January 2006 at 8:48 PM

Poker was played tonight, but we had to struggle to get hands played in the the face of a great deal of drunkenness by a few of the players. Lesson learned: when half the people invited over for poker don't play poker, they will serve to distract the poker players and every hand will take at least ten minutes to complete. Also, drunk people are really loud. At least some are. But I knew that already. It's just nice that I don't know too many loud drunks.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 22 January 2006 at 12:27 AM

My hatred for Survivor's Rupert ("America's Favorite Survivor") after reading about his current business endeavors. This probably won't shock most of you -- he was on a reality TV show -- but Rupert's teddy bear persona was fake. He quite literally became violent when people voted to oust him on Survivor. And he often used his work as a "troubled teens mentor" to justify his actions with respect to the other reality show contestants. (I was never entirely sure who should be more insulted when he compared his fellow competitors to the troubled teens. I would certainly never want to be compared unfavorably to a reality show contestant, so I leaned in favor of the troubled teens.) But Rupert seems to have given up on his life of helping others as soon as it became more profitable to help himself -- or so it appears in the article linked above, which makes no reference to his work as a troubled teens mentor. I can't criticize him for that -- I might do the same -- but you can't take a holier-than-thou attitude because of your work with these kids and then abandon them as soon as you're able.

In short, the only thing I want people to know about Rupert is that he had and still has a big ego. He is a reality show failure (he was voted out fairly early on both of his Survivor appearances) who succeeded by projecting an image of himself that doesn't match reality.

Oh, and the the 4 million votes out of the 38 million that weren't cast for Rupert in the "America's Tribal Council" game that ended up winning Rupert $1,000,000? At least two of them were mine.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 January 2006 at 9:24 AM

A dentist running late and a three hour dinner seem to have eaten up all my evening, leaving me very little time for blogging before bed. Especially since I want to get some reading in before bed. I'll give you a full update tomorrow, but for now let me just say that I have three projects and no tasks at work, many projects and no time at home, and I can't wait for the weekend, when I will do nothing.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 19 January 2006 at 10:22 PM

I'm glad Scrubs has finally made it back on TV. I'm not sure why NBS chose to hold it until mid-season, but I've been enjoying the back-to-back new episodes every Tuesday. Another show I'm glad to have back is The Shield. FX's cop drama can sometimes be ridiculously intense, but I think it finally found the right balance between intense violence and character development last season and I couldn't wait for the new season to start.

What else am I watching these days? The Office and My Name is Earl both have their moments and I can't get enough of Project Runway. I'm also eagerly waiting for new episodes of Veronica Mars. (No new episodes in more than a month. What's up with that?) My guilty pleasure these days is The Book of Daniel. I really shouldn't enjoy and TV show that has Jesus in the cast, but I've been roped in by all the wackiness. Finally, I must mention Boston Legal, which is probably the best comedy on TV right now.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 17 January 2006 at 8:34 PM

A slow day. I had a seemingly endless array of meetings to attend at work, which left me with a lot of work to get done in not a lot of time. Needless to say, I still have a lot to do. If I'm lucky I'll catch up tomorrow. I only have one meeting, so that should help. But I have two major projects going on right now and both are demanding more time than I have to give. So I do a little work on one, a little work on the other, and just accept the fact that I'll always be behind on both. Fortunately, I'm intimately familiar with one of them, as it's a repeat of the year-long project that I finished last May. To quote Yogi Berra, its "like deja vu all over again." It's not exactly the best return on investment to have us spend a year designing and testing an architecture that we need to retest less than a year later. Then again, to paraphrase one of co-workers, I don't have an MBA, so what do I know about business? (A: Truthfully, very little.)

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 16 January 2006 at 9:10 PM

The New York Times Magazine article on hikikomori is really weird. I can't imagine kids shutting themselves into their bedrooms for years and years at a time while their parents continue to live int he same house and support them. The whole concept seems surreal, and if this weren't being published in a major newspaper I think I'd believe that it was all made up.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 15 January 2006 at 5:29 PM

I wrote a post on the 14th, but movable type seems to have lost it. I don't much feel like repeating everything I already wrote, but I visited some Augusta wineries earlier today. They were tasty and I came home with three bottles of wine. That was my day from about 12:30 to about 6:00. Then Jeremy, Ben, and I got some pasta on South Grand. There was quite a wait, but we were lucky enough to find seats at the bar, so it wasn't a problem. After dinner we went out for a bit but now we're back. And that was pretty much my day.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 15 January 2006 at 1:06 AM

I'm intrigued by the new intel-based iMacs and the "2x faster than the last version for the same price claims." But I wonder if I would be better off waiting on that purchase for a bit. I assume that there is some subset of mac software that won't run on these machines yet, and that seems like a good reason to wait. But only if that assumption is accurate. To tell the truth I've been thinking about buying a mac for about two years now, and I suspect I'll still be thinking about it in another year or two. But if you have any opinions on any of this, please let me know.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 13 January 2006 at 6:12 PM

It amazes me that Heidi Klum -- not a native English speaker -- can seemingly get through an entire episode of Project Runway without requiring any voice overs, while native English speakers like Donald Trump and Martha Stewart seemingly can't say anything without needing to dub it in correctly later. To be fair, in the case of Trump and Stewart this might have more to do with Mark Burnett's vision of how the show should go than their respective abilities to speak. Burnett's shows seem rather notorious for their obvious redubbing. And it lessens the show every time he does it. This is supposed to be reality television, but voice overs certainly aren't the reality of what happened. They're a writer's version of what happened, or what should have happened. And the more you make me think about what happens behind the scenes the more I begin to think that the whole damn thing is rigged, beginning to end.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 January 2006 at 8:04 PM

This is the coolest thing I've ever seen on Ask MetaFilter. Make sure you make it through the first dozen comments or so. It's just amazing how the suspicion built up and people started digging up more and more information supporting that original suspicion. Awesome.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 11 January 2006 at 2:39 PM

I was saddened to hear this morning that Jack Snow, the Rams radio color commentator, had died during the night. In his commentary he showed more deference to than the Rams than an impartial observer might like, but I've always been a sucker for the home town spin. I'll miss hearing his voice on the radio next fall.

Prior to Mr. Snow's illness I had never seen a picture of him and knew him only by his voice. As is often the case, he looked nothing like I expected him to look. He looked young and fit; he didn't match the image I had in my mind of a 60-something grandfather. It's amazing how intimate listening to the radio can seem. The voices you hear frequently on the radio become as familiar to you as your friends'. And then you see pictures of these people you know so well and realize you don't know them at all.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 January 2006 at 9:03 AM

I'm intrigued by this new show with that guy from "Ed." You know the one I'm talking about. They guy from "Ed" is record company executive or scout or something in NYC. It's on CBS, it's been well reviewed, and I've enjoyed the promos. But I have this tiny problem with it.

The name of the show sucks. It has such a ridiculous name that I'm not even willing to say it or type it. I cringe when I see it in print. But I'm going to watch it. And you should too. Just don't mention it to me. At least not by name. I'll know what you're talking about if you just call it "that show with the guy from 'Ed.'"

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 9 January 2006 at 7:32 PM

As if there weren't enough reasons to dislike reality TV, now every show on television seems to have learned from their reality brethren that a season can be stretched out with "new" material simply by repackaging the old. Very few dramas on TV these days pass up the opportunity to air a very special episode that consists of poorly strung together scenes from earlier episodes. Perhaps it's the fault of the TiVos. Regular old reruns no longer cut it, so TV execs had to make up something new while keeping expenses in check. They opened their eyes, saw what was happening on shows like "The Apprentice," and never looked back.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 January 2006 at 9:34 PM

I like to listen to audio books when I go on long drives. Music tends to make me sleepy, but talk radio is a decent enough substitute. But I prefer audio books. There's too much work involved in finding a talk radio show that doesn't drive me crazy. But this leaves me with the constant struggle of how to go about picking audio books. Should I get the book-on-tape version of a book I really want to read, the audio version of a book I've already read, or follow some other plan? Audio books don't have great re-reading potential, and if I don't finish a book on my drive I have trouble finding the time to finish it. It's much easier to find the time to read a few pages of a book than it is to listen to a few minutes of an audio book.

So I tend to delve toward what I would normally consider easy reads. Nonfiction like Freakonomics works well because the sections of the book are independent. Childrens books work well too, because of their shorter length.

But the real problem with audio books is their expense. They cost as much or more than hardcover books, but have more limited utility. Audible has a monthly membership program that gives you a couple of books for $20/month, but I don't really go through two audio books a month. It still seems like a better deal than buying a la carte, but I'm not really happy with it. Especially with audible's current redesign in "beta." But I guess I'll stick with it until I find something better.

Comments: 6 Posted by david on 7 January 2006 at 12:20 PM

They installed new copy machines at work and now everyone I see with printouts has them stapled in the wrong corner. This is, I'm guessing, a by-product of the new copiers' non-graphical interface. Previously, you would select a little icon indicating which corner you wanted to have the staples in. Now, you have to select one of the following four options: left forward, left rear, right forward, right rear. The left and right part is easy enough to figure out, but correlating forward and rear to the bottom and top of the pages (or is it the top and bottom?) doesn't make a lot of sense. A lot of my colleagues have decided to pass on the automatic copying because of this confusion. And perhaps that's what the Xerox people wanted, since each copier came with a manual stapler Velcroed to each machine's work surface.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 January 2006 at 11:17 AM

STLtoday updated it's look today by "chang[ing] the color scheme of the site, dropping the blue and orange" and replacing it with in-your-face red, white, and grey. STLtoday has never been the best looking site around, but this is awful.

On the bright side they "anticipate a broader, more extensive redesign in the springtime." Hopefully, things will be slightly more subtle when they do a full redesign.

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 5 January 2006 at 8:48 AM

During challenges in football games, why do the tv people always gives us split screens of the opposing coaches? What do the coaches have to do with the challenges, especially booth reviews, aside from their basic association with the whole game?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 January 2006 at 11:28 PM

I tells you a lot about me that when I admit that I got upset when I read the phrase "this is the queue, in no particular order." I'm sure I'm in the minority on this, but that statement is totally contradictory, and it bothers me. I mean, if you're calling your list a queue, you are being rather specific about the order of the elements. Queues are first in, first out. If that isn't what you want, call the damn thing a list.

Of course, the above rant is one yet another example of why I don't get many dates.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 January 2006 at 7:45 PM

I read P.D. James's The Lighthouse over the weekend. Overall, it was an enjoyable page-turner in the style of James's other Adam Dalgliesh mysteries, but I feel the James may be past her prime at this point. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the main characters in the book is a novelist who is reported to also be on the downward slope of his career. Another character is an independent octogenarian, much like James herself. She seems to have taken the mantra "write what you know" to heart with this book.

The book stumbles a bit out of the gate with a rather plodding beginning in which the reader is given some background on the murder at the heart of the story and some of the characters that we'll meet later. The three person investigative team is also given some back story at this point, but to no real purpose. If you make it through all of this, congratulations. The book gets considerably better after this point.

We are next transported to Combe island, a fictional island off the coast of Cornwall. Combe is a private retreat for powerful people to visit and recharge their batteries. A lot is made of the fact that the isolation and solitude of the island will help prepare these powerful figures (PMs, captains of industry, etc.) to be more productive when they return "to the real world." Combe proves to be an inter sting if not entirely believable invention and the island's isolation sets up a mystery in the style of Agatha Christie. The limited number of suspects and the all-knowing detective fit perfectly in her style, and the choice of an isolated island as the scene of the crime hearkens back to Christie's And Then There Were None.

In a slight breaking with traditional fiction, our transportation to Combe also takes us back in time a few days. So we first will read about the events that lead up to a murder, then read all the characters' interpretation of these events when interviewed by Commander Dalgliesh and his team. I wasn't entirely happy with the time shift, mostly because I thought we needed to be a bit more explicit about things like that. I was expecting the location change, and found myself reading for a number of pages before it became clear that we were also going back to a few days prior to the previous section of the novel. However, this is a minor quibble as the characters introduced in this section are extremely engaging and I found myself eager to read more about them. Finally, the murder occurs and we switch back to Dalgliesh.

From this point forward, the novel proceeds in a regular fashion. Dalgliesh interviews the suspects and in the process collects all the clues needed to solve the crime. Some other things occur and then Dalgliesh has a revelation and figures everything out. The murderer is apprehended and we have some falling action involving more back story on the investigative team. All things considered, perhaps not the best mystery out there, but definitely worth a read.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 January 2006 at 10:48 AM

I find that the Lord of the Rings movies are considerably improved if I hit chapter skip every time Frodo, Sam, or Gollum appear on the screen. It also conveniently cuts out about 30% of the movie, which improves the movies a great deal just from a time perspective. But really, I just don't like Frodo.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 January 2006 at 11:08 PM

Ten seems like an arbitrary number, but I guess I'll keep with tradition and offer you my ten best movies of 2005. This list comes with the caveat that I currently have about ten additional, well-reviewed movies on my "to see" list that I just haven't gotten around to viewing yet. So this list is not intended to be definitive, just a representation of what I saw and liked last year.

1. The Squid and the Whale
   
2. Sin City
   
3. Syriana
   
4. Broken Flowers
   
5. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
   
6. Munich
   
7. Batman Begins
   
8. Good Night, and Good Luck
   
9. Howl's Moving Castle
   
10. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    

Honorable mention also goes to Jarhead, Lords of Dogtown, Serenity, Star Wars - Episode III, Pride & Prejudice, and Red Eye.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 January 2006 at 2:30 AM