04.30.07
Posted in news, politics, tv at 12:34 am by danvk
I’ve enjoyed the few episodes of the Bill Moyers Journal that I’ve watch so far. There’s:
- Buying the War, a look at press coverage in the runup to the Iraq War. This is pretty terrifying stuff, but what’s most interesting is that there were journalists who uncovered the truth about Iraq and WMD before the war. They were just relegated to the back pages.
- Interview with Jon Stewart, in which they dissect Jon’s recent interview with John McCain. I remember seeing the interview, so it was interesting to hear Jon’s take on it.
- Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo fame. A succinct summary of the U.S. Attorney’s scandal and the role that blogs played in it.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for new episodes in the future. Fortunately, he’s got an RSS feed to make the job easy!
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04.29.07
Posted in wikipedia at 10:40 pm by danvk
Kind of scary, huh? Here it is. I’m afraid #2000 was a bad one. That bracket is definitely upside-down.
Edit #2000 feels a bit cheap, since it was actually made by a bot. On the other hand, I personally scraped the data it’s using, wrote the program to generate the bracket from that data, and wrote the MediaWiki uploader program. Still, with this bot and the Grand Slam Project (I’ll write more on that later), I’m probably going to hit 3,000 all-too-soon.
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04.21.07
Posted in wikipedia at 8:26 pm by danvk
… make you look twice.
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Posted in tennis, tv at 4:39 pm by danvk
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, the world’s #1 and #2 tennis players, are facing off tonight in the finals of the Monte Carlo Masters in Rome. They’ll be on at 5:26 AM Pacific Time, which is OK by me. I’ve woken up at stranger times to watch tennis matches before.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, according to the TV listings, I’d be better off if I lived in Thailand or the Middle East. It’s only being shown live on The Tennis Channel in the US. I thought I got TTC, but it must have been a teaser offer. I get it no more. My only option is to watch it on atpmastersseries.tv.
Their offer must be well thought out, because I’m completely on the fence. I can put up $7.95 and watch the match live in Windows Media Player tomorrow morning, or I can leave it. If the price point were $1 or $2, I’d do this without even thinking. But $8 is a bit steep.
I wish the calculus of live sports were different. I’m sure the ATP Masters Series would do fine if they broadcast all their matches live for free, with advertising. It’s not like you can skip the ads on a live broadcast, and sports programming loses almost all its value once it’s not live. CBS made a bold move to broadcast college basketball free online during March Madness. I wish the ATP Masters Series would do the same, so I wouldn’t have to think about paying my $8…
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04.20.07
Posted in music at 12:06 am by danvk
An awful realization tonight: I live all of five minutes from Palo Alto, work for a software company, and I haven’t listened to Radiohead’s “Palo Alto” since I came to California! Consider that fixed…
I learned one thing from the wiki article I linked to above. “Palo Alto” was originally called “OK Computer”, and was going to be on the album of the same name. The song was cut and renamed, but the original name stayed in their minds for the album. It’s interesting because “OK Computer” is a fine metaphorical title for the album, but a great literal title for the song that became “Palo Alto”.
In a city of the future,
it is difficult to find a space.
I’m too busy to see you,
you’re too busy to wait.
Well I’m ok, how are you?
Thanks for asking
Thanks for asking.
Well I’m ok, how are you?
We hope that you are ok too.
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04.18.07
Posted in personal at 8:42 pm by danvk
After the wallet-losing debacle, I’ve been slowly replacing all my lost cards. Today was a good day. My replacement debit card arrived in the mail this morning. It’s never felt quite so good to pay for gas with a credit card, even at a ludicrous $3.479/gal.
My team at Google had having an off-site involving Go Karts this afternoon, so I took the morning and went to the DMV to replace my license. I’m incredibly impressed with the Santa Clara DMV. Lines move swiftly, and I had my replacement license within an hour. It’s a zero hassle process. Fill out a form, write a check for $21, and you’re good to go.
Driver’s License and debit card are the biggies. All that’s left now are random library cards, and there’s no rush there.
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04.17.07
Posted in programming at 9:06 pm by danvk
Ruby as it ships on Mac OS X is spectacularly broken, especially the irb REPL program. I hate pressing backspace and having “^H” show up, and not having an up arrow makes debugging a statement painful.
If you use Ruby under Mac OS X, you owe it to yourself to follow these instructions to rebuild ruby and irb with readline support. Seriously, I have no idea why I never did this sooner. It’s easy as could be, and now I can press up arrow and backspace in irb.
Update: Also worth checking out: tweaking irb, which explains how to turn on tab-completion and persistent history between sessions. Scariest bit about that page: it ends with “(Hope this post serves your needs Dan.)” Yikes, it sure did!
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04.14.07
Posted in books, music, personal at 12:25 am by danvk
Albums:
- A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory (1991)
- R.E.M., Murmur (1983)
- The Velvet Underground, Loaded (1970)
- Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1962)
Some albums are just inextricably associated with times and places in my life. Loaded wins that award for summer 2006. It’s hard to say how long you have to wait to know, but the early returns have Reasonable Doubt as the sound of starting at Google.
Books:
- Kenneth Browser, The Starship & the Canoe (1978)
- Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1997)
Hopefully I’ll write more about both these books in the next week or so.
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04.13.07
Posted in news, politics at 7:49 pm by danvk
A&L Daily linked to an interesting article in The Boston Globe that attempts to examine the logic behind President Bush’s position on stem cells.
The article makes some good points, most notably that there’s no inherent logical contradiction in the president’s position. This is one of the reasons that stem cell arguments are so maddening. There’s a consistent position to be found on both sides of the issue, it’s just that most people don’t find the President’s side very compelling.
Read the rest of this entry »
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04.12.07
Posted in politics, tv at 11:55 pm by danvk
I watched the Daily Show for the first time in months today. Did it have a noticeable “jumping the shark” moment? It’s not what it used to be. It’s entirely driven by news clips. Play a funny clip, Jon Stewart makes a face and says something sarcastic. Jon laughs at his correspondent being absurd. Jon does an uninteresting interview.
America: The Book was a highlight, but the Crossfire Interview was undoubtedly The Daily Show’s high point. In retrospect, I first remember having my doubts about the Daily Show shortly after the Colbert Report started. I still enjoy Colbert. Somehow their two styles clash in a way that’s very unflattering to Jon. Whatever edge Jon used to have, Stephen’s got it now.
I just watched the Crossfire segment again, and it still brilliant after 18 months. Where’s that Jon Stewart? I wish he’d just talk on his show, instead of falling back on all the news clips and “correspondents”. Maybe then I’d start watching again.
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