Previously On…
I've noticed recently that a lot more TV shows than usual are doing story arcs instead of being composed mostly of standalone episodes. Which I like, because I enjoy the idea of an ongoing story that can't be wrapped up neatly in 43 (or 22) minutes.
However, it seems that the writers (or producers, or whomever) seem to think that every episode in a story arc needs an extensive 2-4 minute "previously" segment where they recap what's happened in the story thus far. Is it really necessary? It's annoying, and wastes precious time that could be used for actual story development. Take a hypothetical half-hour show, which really has 22 minutes of actual airtime. If they spend 2 minutes at the beginning doing previouslies, that's 9% of the show they've wasted. Lame.
And are people really that stupid and forgetful that they can't remember what just occurred last week? I can understand a short "previously on" segment if the show has been on hiatus for a month, but week-by-week?
I suppose there's the issue of people who missed last week's episode, but really, why waste time catering to those people? There are plenty of ways to catch up on missed episodes (legal and technically-illegal), and most popular series have their episodes re-aired later in the week.
Then again, I do like that more series are doing the extended story arc thing, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.
My Friends Are Awesome
On startup companies:
alexmek: did he tell you about the 'make your own porn' idea? [...] SebMon: I'm trying to scheme a way with Brian to get your 'company' funded! alexmek: dude. we don't even really need funding. we just need people who know prostitutes. and a camera. and we can start out using brian's apt. or mine. [...] alexmek: does your friend's dad know prostitutes?
What’s Real?
It doesn't happen often, but sometimes there's a truly insightful comment in a Slashdot post:
Honestly, I think virtual worlds will set us free and give us the strongest dose of reality check we've ever experienced. After a while you notice that you are valuing utterly imaginary things above actual real things and then you start thinking, "Well, Jesus. What is the value of real things? Maybe the 'real' things in my life aren't even real. Maybe the real things I bought are just as hollow as so many bits on the ether. Maybe that's a problem that I should address."
Or maybe it won't turn out that way for most. My perspective: there's as much virtual crap at the local shopping mall as there is in the Flavor of the Year online game. It's all the same hat.
Cool, I have mod points today.
Run
I've been doing some random reading, and came upon this dude's personal development site. Now, I usually don't put too much stock in things like that. Everyone's different, I tell myself; you can't motivate everyone using the same strategy. Feel-good reading material isn't actually going to make a difference in my life.
And maybe it won't.
But why not try?
One of the articles is about the tool of the 30-day trial. The idea stems from the shareware software industry: usually you get the software as a free download, and you have 30 days to try it out before you have to buy it, with no obligation to buy. (Some applications would have a timebomb that caused them to stop working after 30 days; others would rely on the honor system to hope you'd pay.)
Anyway, the idea is: you pick a well-defined task, possibly a goal for something you think you might like to make permanent, and say you're going to do it for 30 days. After the 30 days are up, you reevaluate, and see if you want to continue. If you genuinely don't want to continue, you stop. If you really do want to continue, or if you're on the fence, inertia will help keep you going, as 30 days is enough to be habit-forming.
So, here it is: for the next 30 days, I will run 3 miles every other day. If I'm feeling up to it, I might push it to 3.5 or 4. Ideally, I'll run in the gym at my apartment, but if necessary (there's only one treadmill), I'll run up the street and back. It's 1.6 miles up to Sunnyvale-Saratoga along El Camino, so there and back will give me my 3 miles.
Now, we'll see if I actually do it...
Ads
So I finally caved in and added Google Adsense ads to my website. They're pretty non-obtrusive, and can be themed to more or less blend in with the rest of my site, so I don't mind them all that much, especially since I can place them more or less wherever I want.
There's one annoyance that I want to mention, though. If you're serving pages as application/xhtml+xml to conformant browsers, Adsense won't work in the form Google gives it to you, since XHTML-conformant renderers do not allow the Javascript document.write() method to be used on "real" XHTML documents, not to mention that the HTML iframe element used by Adsense doesn't exist in XHTML. Fortunately, there's a clever workaround, which is apparently approved by Google (or so I've read elsewhere).
Otherwise, the process was pretty painless. I don't get all that many site visitors (and probably most people who read my blog do so via the RSS feed, which doesn't get ads), but hopefully this will help in some small way to defray my hosting costs.
I'll give it a couple months as a trial, and if it doesn't seem like it's worth it, I'll take it down.
WordPress update
I just updated wordpress on this blog to 2.0.1 (2.0.2 was giving me problems). I also approved a bunch of comments that seemed to be genuine. There were over 200 comments in the moderation queue, so if I deleted your comment as spam, I’m sorry, but I really didn’t feel like spending more than a few minutes on it.
I also installed Spam Karma 2 to help with the spam problem, so the comment moderation queue shouldn’t need to be checked, and comments that are good should appear immediately.
Post authors: if you don’t like the WYSIWYG post editor, disable it on your profile page.
Ecological Footprint Revisited
Just an update from my post yesterday: Since I have many non-US readers, I'll point out that the site claims that the average "ecological footprint" for people living in the US is 25. So I'm at least below average for where I live, though we have a pretty high footprint in general.
Really, I kinda think this site is mostly a silly scare tactic to get people thinking about how much they consume and impact the environment. Which is a good thing, of course, but their methods leave a bit to be desired.
According to my score (the lower of the two), if everyone lived like me, we would need 3.9 planets. Jasper lives in The Netherlands, and while their average much lower than in the US, he even overshoots it by quite a bit.
They claim that the actual per-person resource availability (on a global scale) is 1.8. That means in order to have a stable ecology, the actual worldwide average needs to be 1.8. I'll admit that I'm not as eco-friendly as I could be, but I'm by no means a huge offender (by local standards, anyway). That means there are plenty of people "worse" than I am. If that's truly the case, shouldn't the planet be an uninhabitable wasteland by now?
There's a pretty in-depth FAQ list about the footprint quiz. They seem pretty serious about pushing its accuracy, and actually claim that they're being conservative. Since I really don't have the time or inclination to research this properly, I can only take it with a grain of salt. If anyone is interested enough to look into it and comment here as to what all of this means and how these numbers are calculated (and why we aren't all dead yet), I'd be curious to hear it.
Footprint
No, not the memory footprint of Xfce. My ecological footprint according to this site.
CATEGORY / GLOBAL HECTARES
FOOD / 1.5
MOBILITY / 1.7
SHELTER / 1.7
GOODS/SERVICES / 2.7
TOTAL FOOTPRINT / 7.6
Not too bad, you would say, considering Brian got 24, but…
IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 4.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
I don’t know where they got this figure, but I have a very hard time believing that. I have a small car, a small house, produce little waste and usually don’t fly. That should be below average, except maybe for the 130km a day I have to drive, so let’s say average, not 1.5 times higer.
WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.2 PLANETS.
Oops ;-)
Getting up on time
Brian, I thought the way to make sure you get up when the alarm goes of is to put the alarm clock somewhere you can’t reach from your bed ;-)