Toys and Rocks

The day I got my DROID, Paul C and I were talking and he said that comparing it to the iPhone was a stupid marketing tactic. he said it's like comparing a miter saw to a screwdriver. I disagree. Comparing the DROID to the iPhone is like comparing a television to a rock. Television: versatile device that tethers to any other device i want, providing endless usefulness. Rock: good for hitting things and easy to use. the clear choice for those who want a simple device with a few innovative uses, but can only do one thing at a time.

more later. need groceries.

Summer!!

oh my god! Summer Glau is gonna be on Dollhouse! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!

The internet: parting fools from their money since... forever

PaulC and I had a conversation about some shadiness on the part of Zynga, the developer of Farmville. He sent me this article from techcrunch. Read it first or I don't care what you think.

Okay. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, with the exception of the author of this article, who is an asshole. I have personally been fooled into spending money on several of these offers, and I can say with no doubt that every dollar I gave them was because I was stupid, not because I was tricked. Every offer (exactly like those on Farmville) said exactly how much the subscription or service would cost if I didn't cancel it within the trial period.

This guy did no research except to look at the links in the Farmville game client, which link to the actual offers, which ALL state clearly what will happen when you input your credit card information. He's inventing a conspiracy where none exists. If you're stupid enough to give the internet your credit card and/or phone number, you deserve to have your money taken away from you. I am right. I have no sympathy for people who claim to have been "scammed" because they are stupid. That being said, it has happened to me. I paid for a two-month subscription to Blockbuster and a three-month subscription to Stamp.com to get a free iPod. But I didn't get it. Did I cry about it? no. I said "well, that was stupid," and didn't do it again when they offered a free XBox.

This is nothing new. It's probably the oldest "scam" (I put "scam" in "quotes" because a friend of mine in high school actually did get a free xbox. Twice.) on the internet. This isn't going to be the end of the world that this fear-monger is predicting. It's not going to mutate or evolve into... anything. It's making oodles of money for a few people. If they get greedy and try to make more money off it, it won't work anymore. Just like that guy who was skimming a nickel a month from every account at some bank. Then he got greedy and started skimming a dime a month. Then people started asking questions and he got caught.

Again, I'm not saying anybody is doing anything wrong, except the fear-monger who wrote this article. I'm just saying I have no problem with somebody who's smart enough to separate a fool from his money, having been the fool on at least one occasion.

I get that it's "wrong" that Zynga takes money from "shady" advertising firms. But the bottom line is people give out their credit card info and phone numbers when they should know better, and when they are plainly told what will happen. Nobody gets mad at the guy who invented the pet rock. They think he's a genius because he thought of a way to get people to give him money and give them nothing in return.

Anybody reading this have leather seats in their car? How much extra did you pay for them? People don't like car dealers in general, but you don't get mad when you pay extra for leather seats, which do nothing useful and unless you're naked feel the same as cloth seats. If you are naked, they feel great. Until you shift in your seat the slightest bit. Then you get your skin ripped off. While it may be obvious how I feel from the tone of this post, I am not saying anybody (other than the asshole who wrote the above-linked article) is right or wrong. Just stupid. And while I won't say that Zynga is without blame, this article is an obvious and shameless smear attempt, behind which is almost no research and even less relevance.

Whenever I hear somebody complain about someone making money off other people's stupidity, I want to punch them in the boob. There are scams and there are scams. Lying to someone to got their money is a scam. Making the title of your advertisement make people want to give you money is called "marketing." I don't care what the link text was. If you don't read the website before submitting... No. If you click a link on a website and give them your credit card info, you are a retard and you deserve to have your money taken away from you for your own protection.

PS I just noticed that there is a later post explaining that Zynga has "admitted" that one third of their revenue comes from "lead gen and other offers." A third post says they have committed to cleaning up those offers. This is not an admission of guilt. It's a choice by Zynga to avoid a PR disaster. Just wanted to pre-empt that argument.

Security! Hello? Anybody!?

Dollhouse rant. If you don’t watch Dollhouse, gtfo my internets. But more importantly, don’t bother with this post.

Okay. So I just (last night) watched the first two episodes of Dollhouse season current. Still love the show, and I like the direction it’s taking. But one thing that has bothered me from the beginning, and is a continuing trend moving forward, is the dollhouse’s total lack of security. No video cameras, no guards, nothing. At least twice now, Echo has managed to escape. This time, she was completely helpless (had to figure out how a car works) and managed to escape.

WTF? What kind of circus are they running? How is it conceivable that an active can escape from the dollhouse? Why does the chair not have restraints on it? Okay that may be going a bit too far. Why is there not a second chair with restraints on it? Do they not even lock the doors? How can someone take the elevator up to the ground floor without knowing the password AND scanning their thumb? How does an organization so clandestine not take even the most basic security precautions? How is there one square inch of the dollhouse that is not under constant video surveillance? Money is no object for these people. How can this not be the most secure location in LA? Even after Alpha escaped and killed just about everyone in the Dollhouse, there is zero security in the place. Inconceivable.

The thing that really pisses me off is that this comes not from J. Michael Straczynski, not from Ron Moore or David Eick. This comes from Joss Wedon, of Firefly fame, who’s commentary on Serenity states that he cut from the film a scene or two that made the bad guys appear foolish. Seeing the cut scenes, they did make individuals appear gullible, but they didn’t make the evil organization with more money than brains seem foolish.

This ridiculous “plot device” of the dollhouse having no security does exactly that. This is a clandestine organization that traffics human beings. They make more money in one engagement than Bill Gates makes in a week. It is inconceivable that such an organization, while being so successful, is simultaneously so stupid. Completely inconceivable. Totally destroys every shred of the show’s (otherwise reasonable) believability.

I’m still enjoying the show, and I’m still going to watch it, but if this malarkey continues, I’ll be blogging about it a lot.

My God. It’s full of stars.

I found this insanely entertaining. You will most likely find it silly, disturbing and/or thoroughly uninteresting. Also I’m testing some new blog features and I had this post laying around.

Here is a WMA. Don’t play it before you turn your speakers down. Don’t play it at work. Don’t play it in the library. You have been warned. I made this file with nothing more than a cheap microphone, the speakers (which are on either side of my monitor, about twenty inches each from the microphone) on my computer, and my mouth. When I say my mouth, I don’t mean my voice. There is no voice anywhere in this recording. I also tried really hard not to breath on or into the mic.

I was playing with the settings in Steam, when I noticed that it has its own voice chat module. So I clicked “test microphone” and spoke into the mic. I heard it come through the speakers twice because there is about a half-second delay built-in. Then I tried to make a sound so loud, yet also so short, that I could make it echo a second or a third time. While I was able to achieve multiple echoes, it wasn’t with a loud sound, but rather with almost no initial sound at all.

I put my mouth right up to the mic, opened wide, as if to shout, and before I actually shouted, heard a noise start to build up in my speakers.

Basically what happened is my mouth acted like an echo chamber, creating feedback between the mic and my speakers. Mostly a lot of screeching and wind-like sounds, but I found it intriguing that all of these various sounds came from zero dollars worth of equipment. So I loaded up Sound Recorder and clicked record. Then I played around for a few minutes. Like I said: interesting to me, probably less-than note-worthy to all of you.

PS Why is receive not spelled like achieve? It must be a holiday.

teampaulc mailing list

just testing to see if this gets posted to the teampaulc mailing list.

We're cookin' with Hydrogen now, baby.

This is a rant about this week's episode of Stargate Universe. This is a five minute conversation with a three second “I f*#@ing called it.” You probably don't care, but on the off-chance that somebody else watches SGU and also caught this (or didn't), here's my rant.

If you saw Stargate Universe this week, read on. If not, spoilers ahead.

Glad you decided to stick around. So, last week on SGU, Destiny fell out of hyperspace, presumably for a good reason. The initial assumption was that the ship was completely out of power and that the engines simply quit. At this point, I thought “well just open up the solar panels and recharge the batteries. This is an ancient ship. They surely had solar powered spaceships.” But I digress.

Luckily, the remaining shuttle still had power. So they determined that there were three planets orbiting the nearby star that might be habitable. The ship, it seems, dropped out of hyperspace where it did to give those aboard the best shot of survival. It appears that the ship is on a course that will slingshot it around one of the system's gas giants as a breaking maneuver. The crew guesstimates that the maneuver will put them on course to intercept the orbits of the three possibly-habitable planets. But no. Turns out, the ship comes out of the slingshot heading directly for the star. Bad for the people onboard.

Long story short, the shields were still up, but nothing else had power (including internal sensors), so they assumed the shields were down. Everything turns out okay, but there is some suspicion that Dr. Rush knew that the ship dropped out of FTL and shut down so that it could fly into the star, open its solar cells and recharge the batteries. To which I immediately said: “No shit, McFly.” I knew that and I don't have a degree in astrophysics, anthropology, or ancient spaceships.