This has to be the first time in my life where I wanted to see some advertising staring me in the face but didn’t. I have been watching more late night tv of late. A few nights ago, Stewart had some dude on. The dude sounded smart and was schlepping a book. I go to comedy central’s website to find said book. Unfortunately no love for a “hey you! find this book on amazon!” button. I had to like watch the video for 2 seconds and type the title into papa goog to find it. What a waste of my time. :) But more importantly a possible revenue sharing opportunity lost for ye olde comedy central (even though amazon is shying away from their affiliate program nowadays). Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Oh for the love, what ever happened to:

• late night tv where guests stayed the whole time
• news that covered more than one story per day
• sitcoms with undercurrents of political/societal commentary (can anyone name one that’s not Stewart or Colbert?)

I watched the first and second Transporters either last weekend or the weekend before, and tonight I watched the third installment. Skeptical given its current lackluster rating of 5.9 on IMDb, I was expecting to be let down. But either due to or in spite of lowered expectations, Transporter 3 delivers (hmm, no pun intended).

I think what I like so much about the series is that it doesn’t take itself seriously. I might sound like a broken record on this, but I remain resolute that this is one of the significant indicators of a good movie. As a movie maker, you’re asking everyone to suspend their belief for a while, so I think it’s good when they give a cosmic nod to that fact.

Why is there no componentized, modular, gpl’d crawl/index/search service for home networks that would search your smb, nfs, ftp, upnp, and daap shares, index them, make them searchable, and add value to the results (like cover art, imdb info, etc), and then serve it up for other media renderers? It’d be like the locate cron job, but distributed, and with more value add.

For all you philosophizers out there. Describe truth in the context of history in 30 words or less. How much of what we think is true, really isn’t? Discuss.

Reiter notes that each of the possible causes of the “rapid recrudescence” of mosquito-borne diseases—including population growth, “irrigation and other agricultural activities, ecologic change, movement of people, urbanization, deterioration of public health services, resistance to insecticides and anti-malarial drugs, deterioration of vector control operations, and disruptions from war, civil strife, and natural disasters.”

Hmm, I should have picked a shorter sentence…

“The paucity of information” in the IPCC reports “was hardly surprising: not one of the lead authors had ever written a research paper on the subject!”

We protest, but are rarely quoted, and if so, usually as a codicil to the scary stuff.

Chris Messina wrote a little blerb over at his blog. I read it shortly after he posted it, and thought to myself, “self, I disagree”. So here we go. :)

Vanity urls don’t seem terribly harmful at first glance, but definitely do seem a bit silly. I can understand that having a global namespace like that quickly leads to collisions, so people are forced to constantly modify whichever handle they prefer. I can also not understand certain things about people on the internet (like why they’d clamor over vanity urls and why most people on myspace choose the absolutely worst, ugliest web design principles possible — yet people love them for it).

The omission of a memorable url for my “home” is definitely a good design pattern, as is easily seen over and over by such intelligent people as Papa Goog and Flickr. Having what is basically a permalink, a static url that forever points to a particular document, photo, or whatever, is a good idea, especially when compared to urls (unlike WordPress’s urls that can change, depending on changes I make to the title of the post). This is a no-brainer. Check.

He makes some more decent points up until:

That everyone on Facebook has to use their real name (and Facebook will root out and disable accounts with pseudonyms), there’s a higher degree of accountability because legitimate users are forced to reveal who they are offline. No more “funnybunny345″ or “daveman692″ creeping around and leaving harassing wall posts on your profile; you know exactly who left the comment because their name is attached to their account.

This is where I really start “not buying it”. First and foremost, I don’t think this is a case of correlation equaling causation. Just because names are unobfuscated doesn’t mean that the quality of the comment/content is automatically driven up. I would argue that there are several reasons why the quality is so much better, completely outside of what I call myself. 1) You can’t leave messages on people’s walls you aren’t friends with. You can’t even see most people’s profiles. This is effectively whitelisting, and it works like a charm. If I don’t know you, or I change my mind and don’t like you anymore, I can block you. Everyone who’s ever read youtube, slashdot, or digg comments can relate. Which begs the question, why doesn’t flickr have this sort of watered-down spam problem? 2) Everyone I’m friends with, I actually know (or like 99%) in the real world. The people I’m friends with are people I have at least some interest in having some sort of conversation with (marginal as that conversation may be). That model builds in un-spammy-ness. Which kind of leads me to… 3) Facebook started out in colleges. And while I don’t know the demographics, I’d imagine that the majority remains in that original demographic, if now only a bit older and gradumicated. I think this also builds in high quality content, due to the fact that the majority went to college, and it’s not some 12 year old from New Jersey commenting like an idiot on Youtube.

Anyway, I’ve tried to read his post a couple of times, and maybe I’m missing the point. I agree that narrowing search scope can be useful in certain circumstances. But I still don’t quite grok how showing funnybunny345′s real name in a chat list or in my email or on a blog post or on twitter significantly increases the value of the content or relationship given that either way I know who that person is. Shouldn’t that be a simple feature of the software to allow me to give an alias to or simply rename the contact in my list to something more memorable?

Unless his whole point is that there are so many sites out there and people are forced to keep evolving their handles so much so that you can’t really remember who funnybunny345 is in real life. And that distinction probably does have value. But gmail and facebook are my primary means of communication, and everyone there has a first name, a last name, and maybe a picture, so perhaps I’ve just not hit that wall yet; that use case of not being able to recall who that person is who just commented on my [whatever]…

is feeling much better after getting a much needed ram swap (it was panicing all the time). And I am contemplating whether or not updating the l7 filtering on my firewall is worth the new kernel + wrecking its 163 day uptime.