Hugs for a Cure

Okay, so I'm zipping through the last 60 pages of the Fellowship of the Ring so I'll finish it before seeing the movie. I know it's playing in a few theaters at midnight tonight but I don't know if I'll actually see it. Aside from tickets being difficult to come by, it's over 3 hours long (including previews) and I have to work in the morning. Bah.

So 90% of the reviews out so far have been raving about how great it is, particularly in how closely it follows the novel. But I don't get it.

The last commercial I saw talked about 'epic love' and, reading the book, unless they're talking about the love Sam has for his 'master' Frodo, I don't have any idea what they're talking about. Love is not any part of this story. In fact, the story is all about the company of men, and not in that kind of way either.

To put it another way: Hobbits have a way of making Arthur Dent seem randy.

So are the ads just being deceptive? Are reviews being written by journalists who couldn't make it past the first admittedly slow 40 pages, and don't want to admit it? Or do the last 60 pages consist largely of orgiastic revelry to counter the previous 400 pages of not?

Time will tell (and, I suppose, sex will sell).

AdCritic is no more. That's sad. What's nice is the spirit with which they exited. Unlike some sites that just pull the plug when they go under, or worse yet, continue to accept orders after going bankrupt, the folks at AdCritic have a good nature about it. They make a site explaining what happened, and they drop the curtain and show that they're real people with spirit who tried to make a nice thing but had bad timing (to which they say "We'll work on that.")

Though it got really slow in the end, the idea was sound, and the traffic was high. All in all AdCritic was a good go.

Thanks guys.

I feel so obligated to post something on Monday mornings, especially if I've been quiet most of the weekend.

Well bah! I've got to shower and catch my train!

Busy this morning, but I'll post some stuff up this afternoon when things ease off a bit.

'Till then, any comments on the amazon banner up top? Love it? Hate it? Lifting it? Ditching Fury over it? :-)

Ho-Ho-Ho!

PS: Props to Ernie who got selected for the 'The Weakest Link' contestant pool for the second time in a row yesterday! He bitches about how they only do celebrity shows now, but I don't think he's realized that with his rising weblogging-star, he might be one of those celebrities. Mmm... A-lister The Weakest Link... "(insert witty blog-referencing Anne remark here)"

Hey look, I did write a post. Cool, except now I'll probably miss my train...

Tom Green filed a Superior Court divorce petition Monday morning, citing "irreconcilable differences" with his spouse, Drew Barrymore.

Now I don't think the movie was that bad, but even so, you probably should have watched it before you married her, Tom.

Well they did it again. Something happened to Dreamhost's file system that made it revert to a previous day's backup. the comments people made have been lost for one day, and who knows what else.

I still have the comments archived in email, so I'll probably recreate them, but it's still annoying. What with email, sql and now even web files going down, being deleted, or otherwise blocked or bouncing, there isn't a part of my Dreamhost service that hasn't keeled over at some point in the last month.

A great user interface will only go so far when the tradeoff is a site that's not accessible or reliable.

Oh, on an ironic note, I had the stomach flu yesterday, fever, chills, all kinds of stay home and hallucinate in bed, and my computer arrived. At work. Ah well. I'm feeling mostly better now, though weak. Since I wasn't going to let myself set up my computer 'till I had my office clean anyhow, maybe that's the next thing I should tackle.

Sorry for the downers this week. Actually, a lot of things are looking up. Expect much more joy (and less misguided fury) in the new year. Thing are good. To quote the Tick: Life am good.

Australian magazine The Age tackles this question, summarizing a year-long study where several volunteers shaved their bellies in the name of science, to test the 'hair conveyor-belt theory.'

More incredible to me than the study itself, (which is insanely great research in the name of abstract knowledge) is the quote:

"Most people have belly-button lint and they want to know why it collects in the navel, what it is composed of and why it is almost always blue,"
-Dr Kruszelnicki

Wow. And I thought the blue-lint thing was just me. I've actually talked to friends about this. Nice to see I'm not alone!

Behold the power of Powerpoint as a tool for presenting bad customer service. Of course, while the story deserves spreading, it's the novelty of powerpoint that keeps this meme alive.

Complaint slips should really have a space on them for UML flow diagrams, so the customer can pinpoint exactly where the system broke down.

God it never ends... The Amazon Package in the Void, the missing $0.25 cents, and now my new computer in limbo.

There's a long story behind this, but the short version is that FedEx thinks someone's here between 5pm and 8pm or 7am-8am to receive packages, like they can't figure out Yahoo is a business.

They promise it'll be here today before 5. They've got 92 minutes.

A pair of tidbits: First is the first electronic bulletin board created in the '70s in (of all places) Leopold's Records in Berkeley (later bought by the Wherehouse, and even later closed and replaced by the neighboring Tower Records).

Next is Google's expansion of their Usenet search to posts from over 20 years ago. At over 700 million messages, it's the most comprehensive usenet library ever compiled.

Some notable posts in the new library are the first known use and explanation of emoticons (1982) (raise your hand in pride shame if you remember using 'J/K' to let people know you were 'just kidding' before the emoticon was invented), the first post to alt.religion.kibology (1991), the first thread about AIDS (1982), and a bunch of other pieces of collective net history that I'm so glad were saved after all.

My librarian/teacher friends (of which I recently realized are a staggering percentage) would be (are?) so proud.