2008-06-30 21:03 - General
Quite some time ago, I discovered MXC (Most eXtreme Challenge) on Spike. It's a crazy Japanese game show, with silly English commentary dubbed over the audio track. The commentary is sophomoric, and on the border of off-putting, but something about watching those people fall down, trip up, and generally make fools of themselves is quite entertaining. I gobbled it up.
More recently I discovered Ninja Warrior on G4, again a repackaging of a crazy Japanese TV show. It's much of the same, but slightly more serious. The sort of thing where 100 people try, and 90 or so of them fail, usually miserably. Next I found Unbeatable Banzuke again on G4. This was yet more serious, with an even higher failure rate. The competitions are truly random, everything from walking-on-your-hands to unicycles to men pushing women on wheelbarrows.
Long story short: I'm a big fan of crazy Japanese game shows. They generally involve people falling down in an attempt to do something with almost no chance of succeeding. Apparently I'm not alone. Yesterday I found out that ABC is getting in on the act. They've got Wipeout, which I was lucky enough to catch by accident. It's very Americanized, but it's basically the same stuff: a bunch of people competing in nearly impossible competitions, with lots of falling down. Then, during that show I saw a commercial for (also on ABC) I Survived A Japanese Game Show. Even more a mix of the two, this is a real crazy Japanese game show, on air in the US, with American contestants flown out. All I know, yet, is what the commercial said; I haven't seen an episode yet.
One of the saddest things, though, was noticing the extreme difference between the Japanese game shows, and the oh-so-American Wipeout. In the former, the commentator is always talking up the contestant, making a big deal of how well the contestants are doing at such challenging tasks, and always surprised at the failures. On Wipeout, instead, the American commentators are slinging insults right and left, at any flaw they can find. It's not entertaining, it's depressing. More depressing is that they're really just pandering to the market they've got.
2008-06-25 21:37 - General
A series of recent happenings, including the disappearance of the profiles feature has recently prompted me to evaluate my Netflix membership. I've enjoyed their service for quite some time, but it's quite a story.
A few years ago, I was starting a new job. It was a startup, and they didn't have much space yet, just a room at the back of another company's office, which didn't afford much room. It filled up fast and being a programmer, it was easy to let me work from home. (And they didn't have much other option.) This left a lot of time sitting in the same room with my TV. The local video store was Hollywood Video, and they still offer Movie Value Pass. It's very similar to Netflix, but in-store only. Being only a 2-3 block walk away from my old apartment, it was a very convenient service. At that time, it wasn't at all unusual for me to watch three movies over the course of a week, then three on Saturday and Sunday, each. With no waiting for the mail, it was possible, and with an entire video store (except the very newest releases) at my disposal combined with so much at-home time, it was practical.
An entire video store isn't actually all that much, though. The video store doesn't have even a fraction of the recommendation system that Netflix has, nor the selection. I rapidly ran out of movies I knew I wanted, and guessing left me with a whole lot I didn't care to see. (I didn't really watch all those movies, like I hinted to in the last paragraph. Many of them were "just on" as I was doing something else, or stopped only 15-30 minutes in. Returning it and getting another was only a 10 minute walk, so why not?) So if you couldn't guess where this is going: I eventually switched to Netflix. The selection was really the cincher, but the slow cycling of the list was an unexpected side benefit. It took long enough to go from the bottom of a 30+ list to the ones I got, each was usually a surprise.
But, of course, this happened because I have to mail rather than carry each disc just a few blocks. They don't process on Saturday, and the mail doesn't run on Sunday. So it's guaranteed to take 2 days (1 each way) in the mail, and usually at least a day to watch it. It's getting pretty common that it's just 3 I cover over the course of the weekend. To the point where I start to wonder if it's worth the cost; Netflix's selection is starting to dry up too, and I'm watching movies that just don't seem to "do it" anymore.
So how many movies do I watch for my $16.99 (plus tax) per month? I recently discovered FeedFlix, which tells me this, but only from when I started using it on. Because I wanted to make sure my ratings were current, I recently clicked through to see the page that shows me all of my rental activity. After taking both profiles into account, I came up with this:
It bounces up and down quite a bit. The average comes out to 12 per month. That comes out to a pretty good deal still overall, just barely over $1.50 each. I'm pretty confident that's the cheapest that I can (legally) get exactly which movies I choose, to watch at any time that's convenient for me. The question remains then, are there still movies I haven't seen, that are worth seeing?
2008-06-22 18:09 - General
Around a month ago, I started up what has become a new hobby. I had a bag of chocolate chips that had been sitting around for quite some time, so I decided to use them up, by making a batch of cookies. I took them in to work to share, and people seemed to enjoy.
Besides the one weekend that was 95° or more, during which I decided not to go out to get supplies, nor to turn on the oven, I've kept up with it each week. It's a bit fun, and like I said people seem to enjoy it.
Any co-workers who happen to read my blog (there are at least a few) might get some advanced notice that I'm trying something ambitious this week: cheesecake cookies. Really, it's just a bunch of tiny cheesecakes. I'm not as pleased with the result as I have been the last few times, but they're still pretty tasty.
2008-06-18 22:52 - General
Thanks to reddit, I discovered the hundred push ups training program just a few minutes ago. I might be a computer programmer by both hobby and trade, but there is a whiff of machismo floating around somewhere in my nether regions. Little enough that I seriously doubt I'll adopt this regimen, but I did at least have to respond to that obviously-engineered-to-incite "Actually, I'm sure many of you can't even do 10."
So how many? If you read the title of this post, you know. Twenty six. To be honest, the last two or three really took all I had and I could easily be one off in either direction, counting in my head became surprisingly difficult. And I'm typing this with arms that are yelling at me. But according to the initial test at least I'm in rank 3 (of 7, higher is better). Not a total couch potato slob. And I did real push-ups. Held my entire body straight (no lifting from the knees or bending at the waist to cheat), and I went from elbows-locked to nose-almost-touching-the-floor. Should I be thumping my chest now, too?
2008-06-18 21:15 - General
So I just got an email from Netflix, a service I truly enjoy. As long as I can remember, they've supported multiple profiles on an account. I've used this extensively to control what I get and when I get it. For a long time, I had a "tv show" profile, getting 1 DVD at a time, of the 3 that my account lets me. This kept me from being overwhelmed with an entire season of a show sitting at home at once, and no motivation to watch it all in a row. Now they say that they're "... eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account."
That sucks. The "why" seems like a total cop-out. So tell me, Netflix, how is removing this useful feature going to "improve the Netflix website for all our customers"? How is it going to do so for the customers who specifically found this to be a useful feature?
This comes only a week or two after I noticed the monthly charge coming from Netflix seemed to be more than I remembered. So, how much does Blockbuster's DVD-by-mail service cost again? ......
2008-06-16 17:41 - General
I got new glasses this morning. I've needed them for a while. I got my previous pair in February of last year, and at the time, the optometrist didn't even give me the prescription I really needed, it was such a change from my previous lenses. So, I knew that I needed new glasses even when I got those, and I waited for the 12 month minimum period imposed by my insurance.
Today I left home early to swing by the store and pick them up. As expected, I can see much more clearly. But also as expected, the new higher index of the lenses hurts my eyes. I know it will go away, but right now it really stinks. And nobody's said a word about the new frames, neither.
2008-06-07 15:34 - Tech
I'm confident I've heard of it before. Rather long ago, in fact. But I've just finally started using it in the past few weeks. Launchy is a sort of GUI command line, as much as an oxymoron that might sound like.
In short, Launchy will make a quick index of all of your start menu (and anything else you configure it to index). At a keystroke, it's all available for launching directly. It only takes a few keystrokes to narrow down to exactly what you're looking for. And, in my experience, it learns well. If I type only "ed", which it initially completes wrongly, and manually choose EditPlus, it remembers that. Next time I type just "ed", it brings up what I'm looking for.
One drawback is the default shortcut. It's Alt-Space, a keystroke that already does something in Windows. I'm pretty sure that's the reason I blew it off when I first heard about it. All it takes though is a quick reconfiguration (I chose Win-Space, a minor change) and that only drawback is eliminated.
The putty-launchy-plugin also brings all my remote servers directly to hand, with the same typically few keystrokes. Truly useful.
2008-05-23 17:52 - Tech
For a while now, the AMO site has tracked popularity not only by downloads, but by "update ping" frequency. They've made the data available in an attractive interface, for example here's the statistics for Tiny Menu, my most popular extension. At the time of writing, it shows 270k downloads and 53k active daily users. That seems like a lot, which makes me somewhat proud. But is it a lot?
Over two hundred extensions make their statistics visible to the public, as I do for all of mine. So, I can answer that question rather well. I downloaded the statistics for all the public extensions, and started some figuring. For the most recent day available, I had 244 different data points available. Sorting them by frequency, I saw the standard long tail distribution. There's a single extension with just one daily user, and this number grows slowly. There are 144 (59%) under 10,000, and 224 (92%) under 100,000. Then there's the outliers. The top three are 552k, 1.2m and 4.0m live users. So I divided them up into exponentially sized bins to build a histogram. Grouped together that way, the data becomes:
| Bin Max | Frequency |
|---|
| 10 | 5 |
| 13 | 1 |
| 17 | 2 |
| 24 | 3 |
| 33 | 6 |
| 49 | 5 |
| 76 | 3 |
| 123 | 4 |
| 210 | 9 |
| 379 | 12 |
| 733 | 14 |
| 1,525 | 20 |
| 3,439 | 20 |
| 8,492 | 22 |
| 23,181 | 40 |
| 70,738 | 34 |
| 244,325 | 19 |
| 968,348 | 6 |
| 4,471,786 | 1 |
Which produces this histogram:
So it turns out that Tiny Menu is actually in the most common category, by that grouping. It's not all that many users. Overall, it comes in at 203 of 243, which is certainly up there, but there are of course much more popular extensions out there.
2008-05-18 15:48 - General
Things have been quiet here recently. I mentioned that I recently purchased SICP, and I've read it all by now. It was interesting, but hard to apply in any meaningful way. Lisp doesn't really solve the problems I'm generally faced with. Or at least, I don't understand how to make it do so.
Well, now, I've just discovered the Google Treasure Hunt 2008. I've never heard of one in a prior year, but based on the first question (the only I've seen so far), it's the fun sort of puzzle I might really enjoy. To paraphrase, there's a robot on a board of a particular size. It can only move down or right. How many distinct paths can it take to get from one corner to the other?
Upon seeing this question, I immediately recognized a pattern similar to that of the Eight Queens puzzle, which I just saw as an exercise in the SICP book. So, I'm setting out now to attempt to apply some of my scheme skills. I wonder how much of it really sunk in ...
