Megabucks, what did I ever do to you? Boomtown, indeed…

When I was in college, there was a service called MovieCritic.com or something similar (B: do you remember?) where you could rate movies and it would recommend titles you might also enjoy. Nowadays, this is a fairly common feature, but I remember this site in particular because after I rated some 500 titles, they basically said “We really have no idea what you would like.”

That service came to mind when I tried the new Yahoo! Movie Recommendations service. I rated 260ish movies, and made it clear that I tend to skew towards art house/international.

Y! Movies replied by predicting that, of films currently in theaters, based on my ratings I would likely enjoy:

• Madagascar
• The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants
• Cinderella Man
• Unleashed
• Kingdom of Heaven
• The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
• The Interpreter
• The Longest Yard

There is one movie in that list I would consider seeing. (To be fair, their DVD/Video recommendations were closer to the mark.) Clearly, some refinement of their engine is in order…

Tonight, I called 911.

Just a few hours ago, I was lazily computing away when I heard an overworked engine mixed with the sound of spinning tires and gravel. They’re doing some work on the water mains throughout the neighborhood, so I at first put it down to some kids joyriding, kicking up some of the fresh construction material as they took a corner too fast.

But this was something else entirely. The noise got louder, more insistent. When I heard a loud bang, I sprang to the window. As I looked down from my second floor position, I saw to my shock that a van was driving off my lawn at high speed. In fact, in the intervening seconds, the van had jumped the curb, rocketed through a narrow passage between a hydrant and a telephone pole, then circled through a turn that brought it so close to the house that the van’s left tread disappeared into the garden before scraping against the front step with such force it sheared off a large chunk of concrete. Even after this collision two feet from my front door, the vehicle was moving so fast it left treadmarks on the concrete walkway.

After watching the van bounce back into the street, I paused in surprise. What the hell was that? I thought at first. I rushed around to other windows to see if I could still see the van. Instinctively, I doused the lights as I did so. No sense revealing my position if some maniac ran aground nearby — and perhaps I was imagining it, but didn’t it sounded as though the racing engine was still close?

I couldn’t see anything, so I decided it was time to call the police. I walked downstairs and began to flip through the phone book excitedly. Is this an emergency? What’s the non-emergency number? Is it under ‘Police Department’, ‘City of’, or in that blue government section? I flipped the pages in a hyper fashion. Fuck it, I decided. Time is of the essence.

I dialed 911, and though excited, tried to be brief and professional: someone drove through my lawn, yes, a van, no I’m not sure of the color… I gave my address and the nearest cross streets and listened as the dispatcher put out a call for a “possible 1055,” then told me to call back again immediately if I saw him again.

A few minutes later, as several cruisers converged on the intersection two houses down, I slipped out onto the lawn and surveyed the damage — but was immediately distracted when I noticed that the van itself was just up the road. After peeling out of our lawn, he’d careened off a tree near the corner house, finally slamming so hard into a hydrant that even after slipping a heavy chain around the back axle, a tow truck couldn’t disengage the two. In yet another close have, the van had just missed the newly installed hydrant that crews hooked up last week. Had he stopped three feet to the right, there may have been water works.

I say ‘he’ for convenience, as the driver was missing. As the cruisers zipped around my block, I got the story from the police captain: someone had stolen this van from a house 20 blocks south, and in fact may have stolen another car before that (there were reports of an entirely different van: white, no plates) in another part of town. As barefoot neighbors streamed out of nearby houses, the story spread. Everyone gossiped excitedly about the car thief who was clearly drunk, probably injured, and last seen entering the woods behind my house. Several late arrivals trooped down to get a look at my “stoop.”

Interest soon waned once it became clear the man wouldn’t be found. After the tow truck took a different approach and managed to extricate the van, everyone returned to their beds to sleep.

But I didn’t. I turned on the exterior lights and walked the Wonder Dog around the house, then returned to my desk. And when, a short while ago, I heard the sound of sirens and speeding cruisers once again, my first thought was: I hope they caught that fucker.

I was generating church signs*, if you can believe it, when I clicked my way across to the George Says It site. With all the tools at hand, I just had to give it a go:

Another service from the fine folks who brought you GodHatesShrimp.com (love the banner ad.)

(* My sign actually has nothing to do with my kind of pink. It’s actually a reference to the recent pregnancy of my friend Georgie, who had pink hair the first time I met her.)

Single blond enjoys costume jewelry, airbrushing, and rubbing her face with huge burgers.

Paris Hilton. Under normal circumstances, she falls in the category of “things that I know exist, but will pretend otherwise.” Sort of like Southern Baptists. Or Olestra.

Yet somehow, the recent coverage of the underchested heiress’ new burger ad pierced my protective shell, and I found myself curious enough to visit the site and watch the commercial.

Curious, you understand, not just because of what the overwrought Parents’ Television Council calls its “raunchy, sexually graphic” content, but because of the incongruous nature of the elements: waif-thin honorary anoxeric pitches burger with 72g of fat. It would be like making Bush the dean of Oxford: comedy gold!

Surely they were making it to play up this contrast? Sadly, no: the commercial disappoints. Except for the great bit when she randomly interrupts her washing to take a tiny simulated bite from the monster burger, it’s like every cheesy Ferrari/model poster you’ve ever seen (except Paris manages to look less sultry.)

All is not lost, however, for those with a sense of humor — check out the supporting materials. There’s the “corporate commentary”, which is unintentionally hilarious. Watch as the company marketing director, who’s billed as a “mastermind” by the link, says they picked Paris because her “signature line is ‘that’s hot,’” and the burger is, too! Snicker as the pointy-haired director calls Paris perhaps “the biggest blond female celebrity” and bills the 2 seconds of burger time as a chance “to see who’s hotter, the burger or Paris.”

Then there’s the best bit: downloadable backgrounds. Here’s an excerpt:

Is that not the least hot thing you’ve ever seen? Oh my do I laugh every time I see it. Can’t you just picture some marketing exec saying “where’s the burger? We have to see the burger!” Yet they want the holy “buzz” of Paris. So they make this bizarre burger/bitch/Bentley combo.

Wouldn’t you just love to meet the person who would actually want that as a computer background?

Hmm. On second thought, perhaps not.

Let’s return now to our sporadic series celebrating foreign athletes — just the ticket for when technology’s got ya down. So let’s see, we’ve had English football player David Beckham, and French rugby star Frederic Michalak (with skater Josh Wald.) Perhaps it’s time for a Swede?

Sure, Fredrik (”Freddie”) Ljungberg, midfielder for Arsenal, has been the face of CK for awhile now, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still appreciate him.

I hate computers so fucking much at this moment, you have no idea.

I’m trying to get Asterisk working on one of my Debian boxes with a TDM card. It’s a nightmare. A user interface catastrophe to begin with, there’s next to no useful documentation. They require you download the system and drivers as source, with which you need to recompile the kernel. I fucking hate it.

My Fedora box has developed the annoying habit of slicing the screen into offset bands when certain video files (with no discernible commonalities) are loaded. The only recourse is Ctrl+Alt+Bksp to restart X. Would an Nvidia driver update fix it? Perhaps, but Fedora refuses to enter Runlevel 3 without choking, so I can’t run the shell script that installs it. Oh, and the latest package update for BitTorrent (v4.1 trackerless) borked it. I fucking hate it.

Windows is no better. I just tried to install the JRE 1.5_03 edition on my XP Pro desktop. I double-clicked the installer and followed the prompts: no more, no less. Then I get this monstrosity. Visual C++ assertion failures? What the fuck does that mean? Why should I be expected to care? I fucking hate it.

I hate that I’m expected to know this fucking esoteric crap just to get work done. I hate that I have to massage all these different tempermental software applications that are too dumb to do simple things like recognize there’s an existing version installed and just cleanly update it.

I am just so beyond tired of wasting all this precious time in my finite life trying to wrangle some crap that’s not fit for human consumption. In fact, the only thing that is keeping me from throwing the lot out the window is my new Mac mini.

I purchased it the day Tiger was released, and on the first day I shed blood for it. (I had to pry it open with putty knives to upgrade the RAM, cutting myself in the process.) But after a few hours using the Mac, I forgot about my wounds.

One of the things that I love is how easily you can install software. In Linux, it’s a nightmare of different distributions, kernel versions, source and scripts. On Windows, you’re running installers and choosing options and paths.

On my Mac, it looks like this. That’s a disk image. Visit a Website, click a hyperlink, click “Yes”, and you’re presented with a view like that. To install, just drag the icon over to ‘Applications’. That’s it.

Does that action trigger all sorts of actions/scripts/modifications behind the scenes? I have no idea, and I couldn’t fucking care less. It. Just. Works. And right now, that’s precisely what I need.

End rant.

There’s a great little term newspapers use for how they write news stories: it’s called “inverted pyramid style.” Writers start with the most important information and then work their way down, putting the least important bits at the bottom.

One of my J-School teachers said the practice began back when putting a story “on the wire” meant using the telegraph; thus it was important to be sure the main idea was covered even if the transmission was interrupted. (Probably apocryphal, but fun.) Today, of course, the inverted pyramid style is used for copyfit purposes — layout staff know they can lop off the final few sentences without messing with the meaning.

I mention this basic bedrock of journalism because some people seem to have forgotten how it works. Take CNN, which recently ran this story:

Girl buried alive thanks God for rescue
Officer tells of finding 8-year-old under concrete slabs

LAKE WORTH, Florida (CNN) — An 8-year-old girl who police say was raped and left for dead in a landfill asked for a pastor “so she could thank God” shortly after her rescue from beneath a pile of stones, her godmother said Monday.

Police said the girl also identified her attacker even before she was removed Sunday from a trash bin at the abandoned South Florida landfill.

“She stated that she wanted a pastor to pray with her so she could thank God for saving her life,” Lisa Taylor, the godmother, told CNN. “She’s 8 years old. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard?”…

So, judging by the headline and the lede, the most important fact about this story is what the girl’s godmother said. Not how she was found, or by whom, which are in ‘graphs 25 and 26. Not who’s been detained for the charge, which is ‘graph 8. Not the words of the police chief, who in the penultimate para calls it “a miracle, [with] some luck and a lot of good police work.”

To CNN, all of this pales in comparison to the adorable factor, with the little girl asking for a pastor. Now that’s a sweet image, definitely. But it ain’t journalism.

For bonus points: try to find the paragraph where they say the girl thanked the rescuers.

I don’t check the stats very often, because they’re not too interesting (and I have to wade through the 2,000 people a day who do image searches for this Beckham picture) but every once in awhile I have some odd reason to check the JSP.o records.

Yesterday, I did just that, and saw that a few people (two of whom I knew — hello Cath and Joel!) had used the search box to leave me a message. Then of course there were those who were using it to, you know, search, and one of those was someone looking for “iPose”.

If you saw my “April Tool” post, you know that the iPose was a fundraising effort, and I called out a guy for having a damp spot on his shorts. Well, here’s where the small world part gets going. See, my visitor came from a Google search for “ipose Nate”, so he was looking for references to that guy in particular*. So big deal, right? Well, the other piece of the puzzle is that this visitor was using the computer at 128.196.166.(xx), AKA (xx).alpha-epsilon-pi.arizona.edu.

So, short story long, within 5 days of my posting about the project, someone from inside that very frat, and probably the model himself, was reading it.

Oh Google, how I love you and yet fear you so…

* Sharp-eyed readers will note the word ‘Nate’ doesn’t appear in the body of the post. Google was actually scanning an alternate description I put in for users with visual impairments and/or limited browsers.

For all the boredom and isolation that living in a small town entails, there are also benefits. Today’s paper carried the “County’s Most Wanted,” with 12 people under active arrest warrants still at large. These n’er-do-wells have allegedly committed the following crimes:

• Sexual Abuse (3rd)/Indecent exposure
• Violation of probation/Abuse (3rd)
• Violation of pre-trial release
• Violation of probation/Burglary/Theft
• Forgery (3 counts)/Theft (4th)
• Driving without a license/proof of insurance
• Assault/Theft (5th)
• Criminal mischief (4th)
• Filing a false report
• Possession of drug paraphenelia
• Theft (5th) (2 counts)
• Filing a false report

That’s right, we have a couple of genuine thugs, plus a forger, some false reporters, petty thieves, and my favorite, 28yo Jana M. Pringle, who’s wanted for “criminal mischief”. They only have photos for half of this list, and though Jana was spared the indignity of a skeezy likeness, she still probably wishes they proofed it a little longer.

That is, unless she does weigh 1,505 lbs.