Month: September 2003

Jasper’s Car Wreck

looky

I sent out a notice on the company email last week about the critical blood shortage at Stanford Hospital. I tried to make it not too aggressive:

Public service announcement:

Stanford Blood Bank is desperately low on O-positive and O-negative blood. If you have this blood type, or know someone who does, your community needs you!

Note I am not organising a blood drive- you don’t need to tell me you are going to go give blood! Making an appointment is easy and you can do it on their web site-

http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/

If you don’t know anything about blood, this means if you’re of type O and you’re planning to get in a big car wreck, you’d probably want to do it somewhere besides the peninsula. So this morning I get this email from this guy at the company:

Hi Brian,

I understand you’re enthusiastic about this program, but I still think this is not the appropriate forum
for announcements like this. You might want to try Craig’s list or something like that.

Cheers,
Jasper

What an asshole!

Money in “Alien”

looky

In the Alien series, they talk a lot about “The Company” and its “shares” but they never rely on exposition. Why are shares so important? I have a theory.

“The Company” is the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, an immense corporate conglomerate based on real-life zaibatsu. The Company has an extremely diverse range of products and services, so they handle a lot of shipping, entire colonies on extra-solar planets, and even have their own military fleet. All the characters in the first, second, and fourth movies work for The Company, and the characters in the third movie are prisoners in a penitentary owned by The Company. A large part of Company employee compensation is based on issuance of “shares,” I am assuming shares in the company.

In the Alien setting, the economy of human civilization is dependent on interstellar shipping, but they do not have faster-than-light travel. The crew spends the majority of their multi-year voyages in hibernation pods, a notion popularised in 2001. What this means is the crew of any round-trip voyage is potentially gone for decades at a time and only ages a few months. When the main character “Ripley” (played by Sigourney Weaver) is lost in space in between the first and second movies, she is gone for 80 years and only has aged a few weeks. Upon her return she finds that her daughter has died of old age.

So, imagine you are one of these people on the crew of a freighter, and every time you complete a shipment you are gone for a decade. If you were paid primarily with a standard salary, by the time you get back your savings will be worth nothing, due to basic inflation.

But since a share of stock represents a partial ownership in the company (even a constant percentage of the company), as long as the company exists and grows with the economy, your stake is secure. Since Weyland-Yutani has a monopoly in a number of markets it will be around for a while. And since a share of stock usually has a dividend associated with it, this makes up for your crappy slave-level “normal” freighter crew salary. If the stock splits while you are gone for 20 years, you could be pleasantly suprised when you wake up on Earth.

See, it all makes sense.

In the Alien series, they talk a lot about “The Company” and its “shares” but they never rely on exposition.
Why are shares so important? I have a theory.

That Wacky AntiChrist

looky

How’s this for “Tinfoil-hat”? From an article at Cutting Edge, a web publication which calls itself “Spiritual Insights Into The NEW WORLD ORDER You’ll Find So Startling You’ll Never Look At The News The Same Way Again” (I like to call it “S.I.I.T.N.W.O.Y.F.S.S.Y.N.L.A.T.N.T.S.W.A.” for short):

The following article is part of a series of articles relating to an Illuminati plan to ignite Jupiter as a “sign in the heavens” that will herald the coming of the New Age Christ [Antichrist]. You should read all related articles to get the full picture and understand why we reported it….

Alright that’s enough of that…

The ten-second version: the bad guys are going to light up the gasses of Jupiter like a big beacon to signal the coming of the AntiChrist, which, yes, comes at the End Of The World. You have got to check out that page just for the diagrams alone. Awesome. Sort of evocative of Alex Chiu’s Immortality Device or the TimeCube.

There is something nice about the symmetry of signalling the coming of the AntiChrist with a big new star- just as the Star of Bethlehem signalled the coming of Christ, according to legend. So, style points there.

However this idea does sound suspiciously like Arthur C Clarke’s 2010, in which Jupiter gets turned into a new star by aliens, so I have to deduct some points for plagerism. Maybe someone got stoned while watching TNT and 700 Club at the same time and got mixed up or something.

And, if you want to get even MORE obscure, Arthur C Clarke wrote ANOTHER story called “The Star” in which scientists visit a remote world on which an entire civilization was killed by its star going nova- and they find out that star was the Star of Bethlehem. A theme of the story being, what kind of God kills an entire civilization to signal something? I guess you could relate this to the Quran’s mention of how the djinn were the first race created on earth, and were made out of fire, but yadda yadda.

SHAC: And then?

The ten-second version: the bad guys are going to light up the gasses of Jupiter like a big beacon to signal the coming of the AntiChrist, which, yes, comes at the End Of The World.

Adventures in NetFlix

looky

There is a MT plugin for NetFlix. Actually there are two- one which shows your NetFlix queue (sort of useful, if a little exhibitionistic) and another which shows your reviews of various movies, complete with stars.

So, I checked it out- using Lil’ Dy’s NetFlix account I rated a few movies. NetFlix also has a Recommendations function, which takes your ratings and uses them to recommend other movies you might like. However since I hadn’t rated enough, I had no recommendations. So I rated some more.

And some more.

Now I have something liek 200 reviewed movies- and still no Recommendations. I show this to ShaColby and he showed me what it does- all his recommendations were movies he hated but hadn’t reviewd yet. So, whatever!

Back to the task at hand- installing this NetFlix thingy. A couple of issues:

  • It doesn’t have an image of the movie. Just the title. Okaaaay…. maybe I could write a hybrid NetFlix / Amazon MT tag and call it “Consumer Whore.”

  • Turns out the NetFlix plugin isn’t even consuming a web service- it is actually a hack written by the guy who is one half of SixApart, which actully sucks in the entire NetFlix page using a session ID (a cookie), which in turn is copied from the URL when surfing the site in person. This is not sexy.

Why oh why doesn’t NetFlix have cool web services available for consumption like Amazon does? I need more cool information source crap to automatically hook into my blog!