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Superbowl Commercials

There weren't many that were any good this year. I'll show you my favorite, below, but I found that a lot of people didn't get the reference. So let's go back to September, 1979, when this famous commercial aired, starting Pittsburgh's Mean Joe Green:

And now that we've set the stage, here's my favorite commercial from this year's Superbowl:

And one more reference to TV gone by:

Should We Call It gnarcissism?

Linux Journal, or, more properly, the janitor at Linux Journal since everyone else is off this week, is running a pole asking if you Google® yourself.

The answer I'd choose isn't there:

No, because there are at least a half-dozen people^* with the same name who are at least as famous as I am, and that doesn't count the 1,300 or so in China.^†

^* Yes, I know, but only for the purpose of this post.^§

^†Working from the old if you're one in a million line.

^§That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Why People Don't Read History

It's just not believable.

Stolen from a comment in Contrary Brin.

I've been on vacation. More actual Linux stuff this weekend, I hope.

How to be a Computer Expert

I really should just bookmark all of xkcd:

Battlestar Galactica: The Summary

After considering the body of work that is the remade Battlestar Galactica, I offer this summary:

Be kind to your sheet-metal friends,
For that toaster is somebody's mother,
We make them do all our hard jobs,
And program them so they can't sob.
Now you may think that they'll kill us all,

WELL THEY WILL!

The Back of the Ticket

From the back of the Washington Nationals Baseball ticket for May 15, 2009. Footnotes added.

By the use of this ticket, the ticket holder agrees that: (a) he or she shall not transmit or aid in transmitting any information about the game or related activities to which it grants admission,^a including, but not limited to,^b any account,^c description, picture,^d video,^e audio,^f reproduction^g or other information concerning the game or related activities^h (the Game Information); (b) the Club issuing the ticket is the exclusive owner of all copyrights and other proprietary rights in the game, related activities,ⁱ and Game Information; and (c) the participating Clubs, Major League Baseball Properties, Inc., Major League Baseball Enterprises, Inc., MLB Advanced Media, L.P. and each of their respective affiliates, licensees and agents shall have the perpetual^j and unrestricted right and license to use his or her name,^k image, likeness^l and/or voice^m in any broadcast, telecast, photograph, video and/or sound recordingⁿ taken in connection with the game for all purposes and in all media^o known and unknown^p throughout the universe.^q Breach of any of the above will automatically terminate this license and may result in further legal action.^r

^aSo if you sneak into the game, you can do any of these things?

^bDon't worry, we'll think of other things later

^cWhich is why I can't actually tell you about the game

^dNo snapping pictures with your cell phone

^eRemember Sonny ripping the film from the camera? Applies here, too.

^fThe cell phone conversation, where you called your wife to tell her the game was going into extra innings? Verboten

^gEven with sock puppets

^hSuch as the young woman bouncing up and down three rows in front of you

ⁱThis includes all bubble gum, sunflower seed shells, and tobacco wads spit out by players during the game

^jOne of the five people you meet in heaven will be an MLB Lawyer. Oh wait, if there's a lawyer there …

^krcjhawk will now forever be associated with the Washington National Baseball Club

^lWell, I don't suppose they'll be using my likeness, but that woman three rows down …

^mI have been told that I have a voice made for blogging.

ⁿWait! We left out Leroy Neiman pantings!!!

^oWhew. For a moment I'd thought we'd left a loophole.

^pJust in case sending pictures via DNA encoding ever becomes popular

^qAt least on Arcturus they don't complain about us calling our championship the World Series

^rA century from now, if we find you put a picture of this game in a scrapbook, we'll exhume your body, drag it to the site of the Spanking-Brand-New Washington Nationals of Boise Park, and cast it out through the front gate. Then we'll sue your heirs.

Just in Case You Are Still Naive Enough to Believe Your Secrets are Safe

Rodriguez, A., On the propensity for unfavorable information to leak even though they tell you that it will absolutely, positively, be destroyed, ESPN (2009).

How to Explain the Metric System to Americans

Because it's time for a change:

xkcd: 5 January 2009

(If part of the chart is hidden, or it's too small to see, click on it to get the full picture.)

Economic Theory

So the House, at least, has agreed with the President to give each and every one of us a big gob of money.

When I heard this, for some reason I was compelled to look up the following (thanks, Google Books) and type it in:

“Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”

Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.

“But we have also,” continued the Management Consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship's peanut.”

Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The Management Consultant waved them down.

“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revaluate the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and ... er, burn down the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances.”

— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the end of the Universe

The Vista Experience

Friend TK sent these along. Blame him, not me:

Vista True Info - For more funny videos, click here

And here's how to install Vista in two minutes or less (I can do this in about 30 seconds):

I'm Going to Bed Now. Really

Motivate Yourself

Augh! I should be in bed, and instead I'm doing this:

Remember those Star Trek Inspirational Posters? Well, I was downloading a few more tonight for use as wallpaper when it hit me, “gee, Dave, there really ought to be some StarGate Inspirational Posters on the web somewhere.” And, of course, there are.

This led me directly to the Motivator: Creator site, which lets you put in your own pictures and sayings. Neat, huh?

So, in honor of last weekend's NCAA Midnight Madness, and in keeping with the theme of this blog, let me get rid of any illusions you may have about the coming season:

From Our Wish-This-Happened-In-Real-Life Department

The way error reporting should be.

The Frakin' Universe Re-explained

Some time ago I did a minor bit of playing around with Flash animations, using the "Export to SWF" option in OpenOffice.org.

It wasn't all that pretty, and you had to repeatedly click on the picture to move from frame to frame.

Then, a few weeks ago, Penguin Pete started a series of Flash tutorials. The first post used the SWFTOOLS package, which looked like it would be fun to play with. So I stripped out all of the frames from my original OpenOffice Impress file, translated them into JPEG, renamed them frame01.jpg, frame02.jpg, frame03.jpg, ..., give the command:

$ jpeg2swf --rate 0.2 frame*.jpg -o cbm2.swf

and produced the following:

(Click here for the animation)

Neat, huh? A few comments:

• swftools isn't available through Ubuntu, so I complied it myself, with the standard options. This was fine, using ./configure with no options, except:
  • The gif2swf program was not compiled, because I didn't have the libgif4 library. libgif4 is available under Ubuntu, but its installation requires a bunch of programs to be removed from the system, including emacs. This makes it toxic, so I'll forget about converting gifs into flash. Fortunately, we have ImageMagick's convert program, and why is anyone using gifs in favor of pngs anyway?
  • When I did “make install” the man pages weren't copied into /usr/local/man/man1. I had to do it by hand.
  • There are some library files which are also compiled, and they aren't installed, either. I don't have any use for them right now, but someday I might, right?
• I'd like to have the titles and pictures fade in. This doesn't seem to be available in swftools, so I'll have to look for another program.
• It would also be neat to have the BSG theme playing in the background, but swftools doesn't seem to import sound files, either. Yet another reason to search more.
• To be true to the original opening, the “many copies” picture should be a montage of Ann Coulter pictures. Anybody got one?
• And the punchline should probably have Obama instead of Teddy.

So consider this the 0.2 version of the animation. More to follow, someday.

My Job Description

People often ask me what I do to make money, as opposed to post this inane stuff.

This pretty much describes it:

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Just a little fun, for a change. This is from the Sex Kills episode in Season Two of House, and is Hugh Laurie at his finest:

• Evil Laugh (ogg format, 35070 bytes)
• Evil Laugh (mp3 format, 29117 bytes) [Currently unavailable due to Awardspace.com restrictions on uploading mp3 files — I'll eventually put it up elsewhere. Email if you really want it in this format.]
• Evil Laugh (wav format, 305964)

Recorded using Audacity 1.2.6, from a video tape of the episode. I had to remember to use gnome-volume-control to unmute the line-in input so that audacity could actually hear the tape. I also had to use Audacity's envelop function to increase the volume.

Photograph from IMDB.

Do People Really Read the Links They Click?

Apparently not ...

Hundreds Click on 'Click Here to Get Infected' Ad

And only 2% of them were non-Windows using geeks wondering what would happen if they pressed the button.

(This would have been a This Week's Sign ..., but that award has been retired until we find something better than O.J.)

Click & Clack in a Pod

Unlike Prairie Home Companion, NPR's Car Talk now makes it easy to download an MP3 version of the latest show: Just go to the Car Talk Podcast page, search for the MP3 button, and download the file.

A nice, simple way to do it, Garrison.

Oh, NPR has a directory of all its podcasts that's worth checking out.

Putting Things in a Whole New Light

The angry words spoken in haste,
Such a waste of two lives,
It's my belief,
Pride is the chief cause and the decline
in the number of husbands and wives.

— Roger Miller, “ Husbands and Wives”

And here's the latest cause of the decline: Compact Fluorescent Bulbs.