July, 21, 2005 archives

from an article in the washington post: “federal regulators accused seven companies wednesday of hiring others to send illegal e-mails with pornographic messages to tempt consumers to visit adult Internet sites. ”

“tempt consumers to visit adult internet sites”? i wonder why they avoided all forms of the word advertise. i guess they needed to sex up the language a bit to make it seem seamier.

i eagerly await the announcement that the ftc has cracked down on the mortgage spammers. i wonder if they will be accused of tempting consumers to visit online mortgage sites.

yesterday i watched the day after, the 1983 television movie about a nuclear exchange with the soviet union and its aftermath. it is showing its age, and its a little amazing to think how plausible that scenario seemed in the early 1980s. there was one little throwaway comment that seemed particularly funny given subsequent events — the conflict between the soviet union and the united states is triggered when west germany is cut off (again), and as a group of students are gathered around a radio listening to updates about what is happening, one of the students says they aren’t worried about the conflict escalating because it is just germany — but she’d be worried if it were in the middle east.

i think the thing that is most amazing to me about the film is that just barely twenty years later, i’m working side-by-side (virtually) with a number of amazing developers in and from the former soviet union.

the day before yesterday, i watched the day after tomorrow. there was a lot of hand-wringing about the politics of the movie when it came out, but at its core it is just an old-fashioned disaster flick. it’s not a terrible film, but it certainly doesn’t rise very far from its genre. and it’s hard to take bubble boy in an even slightly serious role.

i saw charlie and the chocolate factory, and i quite enjoyed it. there are some ways it falls short of willy wonka & the chocolate factory, but it definitely exceeds it in the quality of the special effects. i particularly thought the ending of the willy wonka version was more satisfying. and seeing the other children again near the end was very much a case of one too many special effects.

the gimmick of using one actor for the oompa loompas worked well, but i found it nearly impossible to make out some of the lyrics of the songs, which were amazing aside from that.

i think the heat is melting my brain. i’ve been in a pretty foul mood all week. my apartment has these heater/cooler unit things, but i generally avoid using them because they don’t really have a thermostat. what i sometimes do is crank the one near my bed up for a while to cool things down before i go to sleep. besides apparently causing a foul mood, the heat doesn’t bother me all that much except when i’m trying to go to sleep.

i have a feeling i’ll have more use for them next week when they’re going to be washing the windows in my building during the day and i have to keep my windows closed. no breeze for me.

but it looks like it will be cooler next week, if the dashboard weather widget is to be believed.

wired reviews hooking up, and the biggest complaint is that for a show about online dating, it really doesn’t have much to say about the online part of that. i agree that the timescale of things is terribly unclear. from the show, you get the impression that some of these women are going on dates every night, seriously considering guys as “maybe the one” after two or three dates/days, and then breaking up the next day. (then again, maybe they are. what do i know?)

yahoo has extended the blo.gs stream interface so consumers can add filters. cool!

this will be good for cutting the bandwidth in the whole feedmesh process — a consumer could just tell blo.gs not to pass it entries for which it was the source. it’s not everything needed for duplicate suppression, but it is a good way to cut out big chunks of them.