Happy New Year

I am quite glad to see the end of 2007. It was a horrible year for many of my friends, though it did have a couple of good moments.

2008 has a lot to answer for in regards to its older brother. At the very least I expect an end to my current project at work, an end to the war, an end to the writer's strike, and a return to normalcy.

Just as soon as we figure out what normal is.

Even Stephvens

It was my birthday recently, and Comedy Central gave me a present: almost every single segment on the Daily Show, going back ten years.

So here is one of my favorite segments, which is more than six years ago now. Damn.

Fascinating

I saw this on the Group News Blog the other day and it's hypnotic.

The Blogger Play site is a live feed of every image that's uploaded to Blogger. A never-ending glimpse of vacation photos, pet pictures, food, and general life events.

There's a voyeuristic quality to it, but it's also a little like speed-reading every blog as it's posted, particularly if you enable the information overlay--you get a profile of the author and the entry.

So far this morning I've seen travel pictures of Finland, some network diagrams, a bunny investigating a vacuum cleaner, stir fry, vacation photos, and somebody's 3D artwork. I'm curious to see if the types of images change as different parts of the world wake up and go to sleep. Though Australian and Polish vacation pictures are pretty interesting.

A small but significant portion of these appear to be linkfarm blogs, judging from the product names and the like that keep showing up. Blogging is the new spamming but the old phishing, I guess.

My work is kinda boring

Because at no point have I done anything as cool as what's illustrated in this news story.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, is a key step in the creation of ultra-powerful lasers known as gamma-ray annihilation lasers.

Think about that. Gamma-ray annihilation lasers. The name just rolls off the tongue. I fully expect that to be a new weapon in Supreme Commander or EVE Online.

Yeah, I'm still playing that damn internet space game. A friend of mine asked me the other day what my character is like and I was confused. You never really see people in the game, just spaceships. Sometimes a floating corpse in space (fun fact: everybody in the future weighs like 240 pounds and is six and a half feet tall, you can tell by the stats when you pick one up) but that is about it.

There are rumors that a version in the future will have walking through space stations, but I really don't see the appeal. It would be like a grimy Second Life or something.

I don't want to tell you how to do your job

But could you make the logo bigger?

You may have seen this before, but recent work events have caused me to look it up again.

Make the logo big—two minutes and 36 seconds of rocking out design.

Other songs I would like to see:

• IE 6 Is Screwing Me Over Again
• Hey Guess What? It's Rounded Corners Time
• I Wanted This More Vibrant (Primary Colors)
• All Of This Should Be Bold
• Leverage Our Synergy

Ack, time to go find a way to trick IE6 into recognizing a max-width limit AND not fuck up on floats. I think this is probably a lost cause.

No wonder I am getting a headache.

Gort, please stop this crazy thing

I think it's pretty much a given that Hollywood is out of ideas.

Not only are they making an CGI Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, now there is this... this... thing:

Twentieth Century Fox has set Keanu Reeves to star in "The Day the Earth Stood Still," its re-imagining of the 1951 Robert Wise-directed sci-fi classic.

There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to start. This film doesn't need or cry out for a remake. It certainly doesn't need CGI effects and there is no way that Keanu can approach how good Michael Rennie was in that role.

Does anyone else find this disturbing?

Item the first:
Robert Murdoch is going to buy the company that publishes the Wall Street Journal. Now granted, the opinion section of that paper has always been batshit insane, but now the rest of it is going to match.

Item the second:
The FTC has decided to abandon Net Neutrality. Now granted, there may still be time to save the Internet as we know it, but it's not looking as good as I thought it might.

So the future looks like it's going to look more and more like Fox News. (Though if you blank out the logos in the bottom I usually cannot tell the difference between Fox and CNN right now.)

These two events are bad enough, but combining them in one day seems like a horrible idea. Not that has ever stopped anything from happening before.