Sat, April 28

Fuck Brady Quinn—3:08 PM

Every year, the NFL Draft is more theatrical, every year the wall-to-wall coverage more absurd. And every year I miss Alicia's account of it more and more.

Also: fuck Brady Quinn.

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Thu, April 26

[Automotive Pun Redacted]—8:30 AM

Fox has canceled Drive which is a good thing, because it prevents me from having to decide whether to keep watching it. I felt obliged to give it a try because it's co-created by Tim Minear (Wonderfalls, Firefly) and starred Nathan Fillion (Firefly, general awesomeness). But it wasn't exactly good, it was kind of a ridiculous idea, and nothing much ever happened.

The saddest thing was moving it to its regular time slot on Monday nights. Its two-hour premiere was on a Sunday, which meant I could watch it back-to-back with The Amazing Race, which was pretty fun. Like watching Survivor back-to-back with Lost, or Two-a-Days back-to-back with Friday Night Lights.

5 comments

Wed, April 25

Don Veto

It's easy to call the president "stubborn" when his allies would argue he's merely being "resolute." But there's a difference between "resolute" and "thoroughly unreasonable." (Read more.)

4 comments

Fri, April 20

Synchronicity squeezes my mind grapes—10:39 AM

Last Friday, I enjoyed this article about the little jokes hidden in the backgrounds of 30 Rock:

Mastropierro, who previously worked on the Comedy Central cult hit Strangers With Candy, knows that hardcore fans will pause hi-def DVDs and try to make out every detail in the freeze-frame.

Then, this Tuesday, I was re-reading this for reference (and general laughs):

Schmuck Bait: When the promos for a show tease an outcome which will obviously never happen. Example: "Will Ross leave Rachel forever and move to Paris?" Obviously the actor isn't going to leave the show so it's "schmuck bait".

Then, this Thursday, I saw this, right as Liz Lemon was telling Jack Donaghy, "I should just move to Cleveland!":

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Carl Sagan had a Cosmic Calendar; Universe Man has a watch with a millennium hand and an eon hand—12:02 AM

If the year were only one minute long, April would be around the twentieth second. If the month of April were a minute, 4/19 would come around 36 seconds in. If the week were a minute, Thursday would be 17 seconds before the end of Saturday night.

How do I know all this? The elegantly intriguing Polar Clock – which answers all these questions and very, very few others.

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Wed, April 18

Netflix Links—5:08 PM

Every time a new Netflix DVD arrives in the mail, I enter it into onebee's database. (Most times, I also squeal and do a little dance.) This allows the disc to show up on the About page until after I watch it, when it will move to the Reviews page. As part of this process, I need to track down the IMDb, Metacritic, Amazon, and Netflix links for that movie – a process that's pretty swiftly automated at this point.

Last night, as I was entering Ryan's Daughter (a film I have no recollection of adding to my Queue, by the way – the surprise is part of the fun!), I noticed that Netflix's URL structure has changed.

Previously, the link for a movie's page looked something like this:
http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=554631

Now, they look more like this:
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Gorillas_in_the_Mist/554631

This kind of thing is generally done in an effort to make URLs more "Google-friendly" – presumably because if you see the URL in a page of search results, you have a better idea of what you'll get when you click it. I switched onebee's URLs to a similar scheme during the re-bee for about the same reason.

There are a variety of ways to accomplish this, and in a "legacy" situation like Netflix's, my hunch was that they used re-writing rules to extract just the movie ID (554631) and pass it to the old MovieDisplay page. I.e., the Gorillas_in_the_Mist part is just there for show. Sure enough, I was right. Which is fun, because it means links like this will also work just fine:
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Gorillas_in_the_Diet_Sierra_Mist/554631

So... that's the kind of thing I spend my time thinking about.

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Tue, April 17

Condo Politics—10:14 PM

At some point, I'm sure all of these posts will silently disappear from this site, because of some "dooce"-style behind-the-scenes intrigue. But I'm trying to keep them vague and brief, so hopefully that day won't come for a long time.

Just know that if you ever have the chance to become your condo association board's youngest director by a 30-year margin, you should do it. It is a wild scene, and you will learn things about the way people think that will amaze you. Your concept of "trivial minutiae" will be forever expanded. The decision-making process will reveal new and untold realms of circular logic. Hysteria and panic will coat the walls.

Also, you will close down the library's community room on every occasion. Pack a snack; it may go all night.

All this is to say: I know your teeth are gnashing. You demand meandering, insincere apologies for the lack of Survivor columns; you've learned to expect those apologies in regular increments, and I've been holding back. You deserve your apologies! But you won't get them from me. All I'll say is that yet again Burnett has started packing the jury box before the official merge, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Say the final two comes down to Stacy and Boo. How does Rocky vote? Aside from challenges, he hasn't laid eyes on either person since he helped them build a shelter he also never saw again! How would Lisi choose between Earl and Yau-Man? It's fucking preposterous, I tell you!

Next: I'm getting a waterproof wireless keyboard and monitor installed in my shower. In the last few weeks, I've written half a review of Blades of Glory, a paragraph or two on immigration, a few choice lines on the whole music DRM hoo-ha, and other great bons mots in there, but by the time I'm toweled off afterward, it's all forgotten. So, I'll either need a few thousand dollars worth of customized technology to transport the onebee experience into that fertile, steamy factory of ideas – or I'll just do like the cosmonauts and use a pencil.

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Thu, April 12

Voting with their eyeballs—11:08 AM

From the Guardian (UK)'s story about plans to re-release Tarantino/Rodriguez's double feature Grindhouse as two single releases:

[M]any film-goers have been confused by the movie's structure - mistakenly assuming that there was only one film on offer and leaving the cinema en-masse after the Rodriguez section.

I think these people are just weary of Tarantino's "look at me!" antics and they're sparing themselves a wasted 90 minutes. I'm certainly glad to hear that Rodriguez's portion is going first. If curiosity gets the better of me and I decide to go see it, I'll be able to opt out at the midpoint.

4 comments

Tue, April 10

They've redone the Daily Show set again – even worse—12:53 AM

I don't (and won't) use Twitter – wah! blogs are too long! – but I see why it works. Our cool, intellectual side knows this is ridiculous, but emotionally it feels like a lot of overhead to generate an entire post for a nine-word idea. Kudos to Twitter: they've managed to turn that dumb reflex into a meme.

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Thu, April 5

Who's Who—1:32 AM

We still get a lot of comment spam at onebee. On the order of 500 posts a day, roughly. (Fortunately, nearly 100% of these are eradicated before they even get saved in the database.)

I was poking around the comments database today, doing a little "defragging." Before the lastest spam-blocking efforts were enacted, many posts were stored in the database. They were quickly deleted, but they left large gaps in the sequence of comment IDs. We have somewhere around 2,000 comments, but the comment IDs were up in the 11,300 range because of all the big gaps in the counting that were left by deleted spam comments. The only reason to clear out those gaps is that the comment ID field in the database is currently set up to store numbers only 10 digits long or shorter; you don't want to use bigger ID numbers than you have to. Sure, we only have around 2,000 comments today, and it's a long way to 1 billion – but we're in it for the long haul. At the current rate (assuming no increase in comment frequency – which is laughable because in the future we'll have robots to do housework, freeing up valuable time for posting onebee comments), we'll hit our billionth comment by September of the year 1245785. Might as well be ready!

While I was cleaning up, I decided to run some numbers on our current comments and where they come from. Happily, most of them (64.8%) come from members who are logged in. Yay, logins! The other 35.2% come from anonymous posters (though most of these identify themselves by typing in a name, and most of those are people like Holly, Mike, Christi, and – in the early days – Andy; far from "anonymous"). Anyway, here's the breakdown:

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Wed, April 4

Comments are the worst (except this one!)—9:02 PM

Do you detest these "further afield" postings? You do, don't you? It's homework for you: "Look how brilliant my eloquent opinions are – but first do this reading so you know what I'm referring to."

The alternative is for me to compose my own fascinating rant about commercial air travel (again!), which means shaping my ideas with more coherence than I have energy for – or to post my comments on other blogs in a timely manner, so I can rely on those readers to enjoy my brilliance. (Who has time to read blogs that fast? I'm lucky if I get there in under a week.)

Plus, nobody reads the comments on actual blogs. And why should they? You have to traipse through a few dozen losers barking the same opinions back and forth at each other before you unearth anything remotely intriguing. And it's worse on sites where people vote the best comments to the top, because now the mass of people whose opinions you don't respect are pushing their idiot ideas to the forefront! You can't win. That's why I like onebee: enough comments to get a good dialogue going, but not so many that they lose all meaning. (And occasionally they're freaking hilarious!)

Anyhoo – don't read any of the dumb comments on this interesting post about market research, except mine!

What fascinates me (from the "Frontline" clip) is Rapaille's client, talking about his experience with the "code" theory. "I strongly believe in what he is doing. Strongly." Does this guy ever wonder if Rapaille is getting this response by pressing his "reptilian hot buttons" for "market research genius"? Maybe he's discovered that expensive champagne and lots of fancy cars will convince people that whatever he says is gold. As a businessman, he'd be crazy not to make use of that knowledge. No discredit to Rapaille; I'm sure his techniques are valid and they're certainly fascinating. I just wonder, if you're behind closed doors hearing how easy it is to persuade people to pay you for something – do you wonder about the guy you're paying to hear this from? Your intellect tells you he gets great results, but he's telling you your intellect has nothing to do with your purchasing decisions.

On the airline thing, I think the reason the pricing is our main focus is that there's nothing else to focus on. Commercial air travel is a universally miserable experience - across all (domestic) carriers - so every ticket seems too expensive. $65 round trip from NYC to LAX is more than I want to pay. The security hassles, cramped cabins, delays, delays, delays – they should pay us! It's hard to justify spending any money on something that is, at best, a necessary evil. If I were to form a positive brand image for a particular airline (comfort, convenience, efficiency, or just a modicum of customer service), I would probably be willing to pay $20-$40 more for their ticket vs. their competitors'. Or, at least I would coordinate my trips to align with their cheapest fares rather than scouring the web for the cheapest ticket on my travel date. The problem is, no airline is building that brand relationship. They can't afford to, because they're so dismally mismanaged that all their attention must focus on keeping flights in the air and keeping their workers from striking. They're taking schizophrenic, shotgun approaches to branding (cf. Song, an experiment that's already been abandoned in the time since the PBS piece aired). It smacks of desperation, and with good reason: they're desperate.

They should look at those who like to fly. People with private jets. They love it! It's on their schedule; there are no long lines; flights are never canceled. Now obviously Delta can't bring all of these things to commercial air travel, but maybe they should look at where their model diverges and why. For me, it's all about time. "Arrive 2 hours early." "Allow time for security." "Be at the gate when you're called." We have to rush, rush, rush; and if we're late? We're screwed. What happens if they're late? Right: we're screwed. We have to deal with delays and cancellations and missed connections. I'll pay $100 extra for the next airline that offers me a $10 refund for every 10 minutes of delay. And I'll still end up flying for free.

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