While it is interesting to watch the trainwreck that is CBS’s _Kid Nation_ keep piling up, all these investigations and lawsuits and various outcries are having the effect of making me *less* interested in the actual show. The more that _Kid Nation_ becomes everyone’s punching bag, the more I remember that this is just another “reality” game show, and I hate “reality” shows.
Monthly Archive for August, 2007
Sun
Aug
26
2007
Improperly prepared blowfish (fugu) can result in an agonizing 20 minute death by paralysis. Make sure your preparer is duly licensed.
Fri
Aug
24
2007
The war as they saw it 0 cmts
Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages.
"The War as We Saw It" by five soldiers in the New York Times
Rainbows End 0 cmts
The full text of Vernor Vinge’s _Rainbows End_, a great novel about a computer-mediated future, is now available for free. The book explores a very near future where pervasive computing has become the norm and all of the things I’ve been dreaming for in wearable computing since at least high school have been attained and have changed the world. So obviously I like this book.
Tue
Aug
21
2007
Long Games and Quick Gains: High School Musical and the Evolution of the Disney Channel 2 cmts
It is difficult to estimate the full impact of _High School Musical_ on the Walt Disney Company, but analysts say that the $4 million television movie produced for the Disney Channel in early 2006 has netted the conglomerate at least $500 million, and as much as $1 billion. It has been shown in over 100 countries, been seen by 170 million people, and has spawned a triple platinum album. There are concerts, a touring stage show, and, coming soon, High School Musical on Ice. There is a HSM parade at Disney California Adventure. Merchandise in every shape and size. And the rights have been licensed to 2,000 schools and local theater groups.
What did this simply plotted, pop song-studded, family-friendly movie get so right? It has been called the Grease for the modern pre-teen generation. And its enormous success caught even Disney by complete surprise, at first. But since HSM’s premiere, shares in the Walt Disney Company have risen by 50%. This week the sequel, _High School Musical 2_ broke records for basic cable with 17.2 million viewers for its first showing. And HSM 3 is already in pre-production, destined to hit the big screen (instead of the small) sometime in 2008 or 2009.
Mon
Aug
20
2007
NetApp, Bacula, NFS 0 cmts
This is a short one. On Friday I wrestled for a while with my new backup solution using Bacula. I’m trying to write the backups to file on a daily basis and then migrate the weeklies to tape. This should make our backups a lot faster and more reliable, with any luck. The file store is Glory, one of our NetApps, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Bacula refused to write files of larger than 2GB in size. This is important I believe (although I’m not yet entirely sure) because in order to migrate the tapes I need the volumes to be of the same size.
Anyway, as one might guess, the problem was with NFS version 2. Standard NFS v2 doesn’t support file sizes > 2GB, but I thought we were running v3 so it took me an exceptionally long time to discover this. Try mounting with -o vers=3 option, and if you get a strange failure, it means your NetApp is not setup to support v3. In FilerView go to NFS configuration and enable v3, but you’ll find the same problem. While the web interface claims the change has been made, in reality NFS is not automatically restarted and needs to be. I wasn’t sure how to do this over the web but SSH to the rescue and a simple nfs off and nfs on saved the day.
Move Over Mickey: A New Franchise at Disney 0 cmts
The success of _High School Musical 2_ is an indication of Disney’s long-term efforts to reposition its cable channel to appeal to the underserved 9-to-14 age group and to rope in youngsters for whom Mickey Mouse seems too babyish. For the time being at least, the movie has made a trio of fictional high school students named Troy, Gabriella and Sharpay as recognizably Disney as that 79-year-old mouse.
"Move Over Mickey: A New Franchise at Disney" by Dave Itzkoff in the New York Times
Sat
Aug
18
2007
Metadata 2 cmts
It is weird that I decided not to buy an album on iTunes because the metadata was inconsistent between songs?
Fri
Aug
17
2007
Radio ramblings 1 cmts
Apparently everyone knows Ryan Seacrest now, thanks to _American Idol_ and other big things, but I still think of him as that DJ on Star back in the 90s. Which I only thought of because I’ve been listening to an old CD, It’s Star Music, with a song I love, “Insensitive” by Jann Arden. I like Star better than KROQ, which apparently employed Jimmy Kimmel for several years in the 90s as a sports guy. I imagine a lot of interesting and well-known personalities got their start in the LA radio scene. Maybe I just don’t know anything about Boston radio, but it doesn’t seem like there is the sort of huge music scene here that there is in LA, its more small venues and fewer big concerts and gatherings. Which seems odd. Or I could be completely out of touch, which is a better possibility. There is good music to be had here, I guess I just don’t see it being advertised. And of course I spend far less time in the car here, and when I am in the car I listen almost exclusively to NPR, and only hear music from my iPod. Which might explain why I don’t have any new music to enjoy. Hmm. Anyone know any good music?
Thu
Aug
16
2007
The Harry Potter Experience 1 cmts
I read (or had read to me, or listened to the tapes of) the first four Harry Potter books, and then I went to college, and that was that. Since then I’ve managed to thoroughly forget most of the important plot details and a lot more from the series.
Much like with cancelled television shows, I found myself with renewed interest in the Potter franchise once the series was “finished.” I picked up an inexpensive paperback box set of the first six books a few months ago and last month finally got down to business. Tonight I finished the second book, and was surprised and amazed at how much I had forgotten, including the major plot twists. Which made it a lot of fun, actually, to experience it all over again.
That someone has decided to pick up Harry Potter doesn’t make for much of a story, but my friends and colleagues with whom I have shared my adventure suggest that my secondary pursuit is a bit more unorthodox and even interesting to the general public. Which strikes me as a little odd, but okay.
The twist is that I’m watching the Harry Potter movies, as well. *Simultaneously*. Well, not exactly, as that would be tough, but for both books one and two I’ve found that by the time I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, I’ve gotten the itch to see how certain things are portrayed on screen. So I’ve watched the movies up until the point when they catch up to where I am in the book, at which point I pause and continue to read. As I expected but which others find amazing, where I stop ends up being almost precisely a quarter of the way through the film.
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