I know other people have already seen this, it's been on the radio a ton I imagine (dunno for sure, last time I listened to "music" radio for any longer than a few minutes was a while ago)... but... Disturbed's cover of "Land of Confusion" is just plain awesome. And the video, done by Todd McFarland of Spawn fame, is even better:
December 2006 Archives
While talking to a friend tonight about the impending Saddam Hussein execution, they pointed out that the other two guys from his trial were also going to be executed. The interesting quote from the conversation was:
Hmm, three people executed - one considered a martyr by some - where have I heard that one before....
So that makes the local judge Pontius Pilate, trying to keep the peace among the natives by executing the guy who's pissing everyone off, all in the name of the big bad power way far away. That would make Bush into Augustus Caesar.
So if that's the case, our local Caesar should probably remember how that story turns out in the end.... Augustus was the last of the "elected" leaders, with the Roman Empire following shortly thereafter.
I was reading a CNN story about a guy who ended up in Montana when he wanted to fly to Australia, and while my initial thought was the "hahahaha!" inner-monologue mocking, I remembered that I damned near booked myself airfare and hotels for Portland, Maine during the week of the O'Reilly Open Source Conference being held in Portland, Oregon. (I'd made the hotel reservations, and noticed when American Airlines, unlike the hotel web site, demanded clarification on my input of "Portland"... the hotel had simply fed me the first Portland hotel it could find, which also happened to be a convention center hotel, etc., etc.)
So instead I'll just say that this serves to underscore the power of a typographical error.
Based on a neat blog post by Tom:
Where I've Lived, as described by Google Maps.
The Trooper as performed by some ten year old kids.
Seriously, someone should sign these kids. The singer's no Dickinson, but... damn.
Zawodny's Law
"Don't Fuck With Simple"- Jeremy Zawodny, (from his blog)
tv.yahoo.com has been one of the few Yahoo services that they had left well-enough alone with. The front page UI had some basic information, a schedule-grid for most of the major-networks for the prime-time period, and was an excellent resource for just going there "quick to see what's on TV tonight."
But, like all things Yahoo that don't completely suck, they're not content if they're not ruining it, so some product designers got their hands on it, and now if you go there, you will get "Yahoo!TV Beta". Unlike with Yahoo!Mail and others, though, there's no way to say "Let me continue to use the non-suck-ass interface as long as possible please."
What are the specific complaints?
- The front-page no longer has a really convenient schedule grid.
It used to have a prime-time schedule grid, in static HTML, that was infinitely useful. Wanted to see what was on for the entire prime-time window on the major networks? You don't even have to sign in, it's just right there -- useful. Now, you get this ... abomination... that only shows you like 90 minutes worth of TV, and instead of prominent placement "above-the-fold" where it's useful, it's buried down on the second page of the site so you have to go looking for it. Very un-useful.
- The Ajax interface to the "regular" listings page is retarded.
Alright, so let's go look at the "big grid", customized to my needs...
This is after I've slid the little pointer-thing to something that "looks close" to what I want. So it'll start at 9:00. However, 8-9pm is in prime-time. Can I slide that bar back just a smidge so it'll show me 8-11pm instead of 9-midnight? Short Answer: Nope. The granularity appears to be that the shortest move to the left that I can achieve will move the bar so that the window shows 6-9pm. In other words, because they want it all to just be nice clean "three hour window segments", they've completely gimped the interface so that it's impossible to see "prime-time". Also, you can't easily even see "what's coming on from now forward?" For example, right now it's 8:10 in the morning. What do I see on the screen?
Yeah, because I care so much about what was on from 6-8 that it I would gladly give up the ability to see what's coming up in order to know what I already missed. And, again, like primetime, if I'd like to see "from 8am-11am", I'm shit outta luck.
Wanna know what's going to be on when you get home at 4:30 this afternoon? Yeah, you're shit outta luck, too. Have fun hopping back and forth left and right in their interface.
Anyone got any suggestions for places a guy can go to answer the simple question "what's on TV tonight?" without having to leap through stupid hoops to get the useful data?
Damion and I took the train down to DC last night (for LISA).
Now, I've owned Battle Royale for months. I've loaned it to people (including Damion). But I've yet to watch it myself. Mostly this stems from 'how' I usually watch movies -- I'm doing something else in parallel, they're on the TV and I look up at them when things seem interesting but I'm listening to the dialogue and keeping pace with the story that way.
Except that Battle Royale is subtitled, which means I really need to be a captive audience watching the screen for two hours.
As I was prepping for the trip, I was ripping a bunch of DVDs to MP4s to store on my hard drive for the trip down. I decided to add Battle Royale to the list. After all, I had a three and a half hour leg from Penn Station to Union Station.
So I start watching this movie, and seriously, it's just as cool as it sounded, and just as interesting as people had told me it would be. And then, at 1:25:52 into the 122-minute movie, it just "ends"... right in the middle of a fairly dramatic scene, too.
Near as I can tell, Handbrake got confused on a layer-change maybe? or I aborted it by accident in the middle of ripping? All I know is that the climactic 37 minutes of the movie are nowhere I can easily get at them!!
I'm half-tempted to ask D to FedEx me down the DVD so I can stop the suffering.
