Movie Quiz

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A movie quiz from Dave Hyatt. I didn’t want to open up his comments to make my stab at the answers, since I’d probably see other people’s answers, so I’m doing it via Trackback. I’ll start with the quiz, and put my answers in the rest of this post. You can use the comments if you want to play along, too!

  1. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
  2. “I came here to do two things: chew some bubble gum and kick some ass. And I’m all outta bubble gum!”
  3. “…also left a man’s decapitated body lying on the floor next to his own severed head. A head, which at this time, has no name.” “I know his name!”
  4. “Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.”
  5. “Anyway, David, when they find out who we are they’ll let us out.” “When they find out who you are they’ll pad the cell.”
  6. “Do you think there really are people who can just go up and say, ‘Hi, babe. Name’s Charles. This is your lucky night’?” “Well, if there are, they’re not English.”
  7. “A hundred million terrorists in the world and I gotta kill one with feet smaller than my sister.”
  8. “The first boy I ever kissed ended up in a coma for three weeks. I can still feel him inside my head. It’s the same with you.”
  9. “Just so we’re clear, you stole a car, shot a bouncer, and had sex with two women?”
  10. “Yeah, man just kinda…you know, you got these claws and you’re staring at these claws and you’re thinking to yourself, and with these claws you’re thinking, ‘How am I supposed to kill this bunny, how am I supposed to kill this bunny?'”

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Apple bloggers?

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There’s been much discussion recently regarding Microsoft bloggers, i.e., people who work at Microsoft and blog. I read a few of them (both because they’re good blogs, and because of the whole “know your enemy” philosophy [grin]).

Got me thinking, though — what about ‘Apple bloggers’? The only one I know of off the top of my head is Dave Hyatt, who works on the rendering engine for Safari. Any others out there I should know about?

Scoblemania

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Yikes. After going through my ‘Technology’ grouping in NetNewsWire, which includes RSS feeds for 34 different weblogs and news sites, every link that I called up as ‘probably worth babbling about’ was from Robert Scoble.

I think I want his job. This has nothing to do with what his job actually is (he works at NEC, but I don’t know anything other than that), it’s just that he’s easily one of the most prolific bloggers I read, to a point that I assume his job must be incredibly low-stress and low-responsibility, since it obviously doesn’t interfere with his blogging time. ;)

Anyway, in no particular order…

  • Erik Barzeski calls Scoble a ‘Microsoft Slut’. Scoble returns the jab. Me, I feel like I’m whoring myself out every time I use a Windows PC instead of my Mac. No real point to any of this, except for the amusement factor.

  • Scoble: “Is there any way to stop Microsoft? I think the answer is getting clear: no.” Kind of a scary statement, but (as befits a ‘MS Slut’ [now there’s a product name we need to see…]) he keeps mentioning all the cool stuff he saw that he can’t talk about, so I suppose it’s a definite possibility. Of course, he also admits that he’s “…too drunk with the Microsoft wine to really be objective,” and he even occasionally says some good things about Apple’s future too, so I’ll cut him a break.

  • Scoble: “It wouldn’t be the first time that Microsoft does something innovative by acquiring another company. Oh, where do you think FrontPage, Hotmail, PowerPoint, Excel, Internet Explorer, DOS, etc came from?” Where’s the innovation in acquiring another company? All of these were innovations before Microsoft got their hands on them — all Microsoft did was recognize a good thing and assimilate it (though I’d personally never put FrontPage in a “good thing” category, there are a depressingly high number of people who use it, so it must be making MS some amount of money, and this is beside-the-point rambling anyway). I’m willing to accept the argument that Microsoft has actually innovated in the past, and may do so again in the future (though I’m hard pressed to come up with any examples), but I don’t think that ‘innovation’ and ‘acquisition’ are compatible.

  • Scoble recommends Watching Microsoft Like A Hawk as a good site for MS info, news, and scuttlebutt. Looks like it is. Unfortunately, I can’t find an RSS feed, so I’ll probably forget to check up on them. Bummer.

  • “Apple has some cool stuff coming this year to be sure — including some desktop machines that are outperforming current Intel stuff.” Damn, but I wish I could see some of the stuff that he’s seen. Now I just have to wait and see if Apple will introduce what he’s hinting at before or (more likely) just after I finally am able to plunk down money on a new machine.

Riot in Anchorage

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[![APD on 6th Ave.]]

[APD on 6th Ave.]: https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/graphics/2003/02/graphics/apdon6thave-thumb.jpg {width=”150″ height=”67″}
Dad pointed out an article in the Anchorage Daily News about a teen dance that “erupted into what officials are calling a riot.”

Saturday’s event was the annual Fur Ball, a \$10-a-ticket dance for teens age 14 to 19 that’s part of Fur Rendezvous. In all, 1,352 teens got in, according to a ticket count, said Jay Savell, Egan operations manager. The event had a fire marshal-approved capacity of 1,500, he said.

Police said they were told that the dance was oversold. Not so, Savell said.

Some teens with tickets didn’t get in because the center knew it was approaching capacity. By the time Egan staffers finished counting tickets, the dance was shutting down.

Teens waiting outside grew impatient and tried to break the center’s glass windows, police said.

Inside, fights broke out when kids flashed gang signs and showed gang colors, police and teens said. Four or five on-duty police officers, 14 Egan security workers, a dozen other Egan staffers and 10 volunteers from Elmendorf Air Force Base were working security. But police thought the situation was getting out of hand.

Pretty disturbing, but I have to say that after working in teen dance clubs for as long as I did in Anchorage and having watched the shift in attitudes and behavior in the years, I’m not at all surprised that something like this finally happened.

I want to say more, but I’m tired and brain dead at the moment, and can’t coax much more out of me. Bleah. Maybe I’ll revisit this later on.

No jive talkin'

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That was a test, and that was only a test. Hopefully it was at least an amusing test — I was playing with the MovableJive text formatting plugin for MovableType 2.6. I probably won’t use it very often, but it could be fun from time to time.

Unfortunately, at this point, the plugin mangles URL’s (see the comments to the previous post) so I can’t use it to post and link anywhere. With any luck that will be corrected at some later point, though…

Jive talkin'

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This is a test, and this is only a test. Hopefully it will at least be an amusing test — I’m playing with the MovableJive text formatting plugin for MovableType 2.6. I probably won’t use this very often, but it could be fun from time to time. Included filters are Jive, Texas Drawl, Cockney, Swedish Chef, Valley Girl, German Accent, and Hunting Wabbits.

(Via the MT Plugin Directory via Mark Pilgrim)

Seems simple to me

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This is just something that’s been amusing me for a while now, ever since I started working on the Microsoft campus. Here I am, working at the single biggest software company in the world, packed to the brim with some of the brightest people in the tech industry (and no matter what I think of Microsoft’s software or practices, I can’t deny that they’ve got some pretty sharp people working for them) — and yet they need signs posted outlining a four-step process to get a free soda out of the vending machines.

Instructions for free soda

Somehow, this is what I’m reminded of.

Upgrades galore

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Two important (in my world) software upgrades hit the ‘net today: Mac OS X was upgraded to version 10.2.4, and MovableType was upgraded to version 2.6. Both are installed, and both are working like a charm.

This is complete geek-speak, but my favorite change in MT v2.6:

MT::Util::html_text_transform (the default “convert line breaks” code) will no longer add <p> tags around paragraphs that start with certain HTML tags (pre, table, ol, ul, pre, select, form, and blockquote). (Phil Ringnalda)

Since I use <blockquote> a lot when I’m posting links to other sites, this will save me some headaches.

Weather wierdness

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It looks like Dave Winer and John Teggatz have all the cold weather that Dad is complaining he’s missing in Anchorage.

Dad also mentioned a couple articles from the Anchorage Daily News about the warm weather up there.

But it will be a long time before people on both sides of the Alaska Range forget what for many has been the strangest winter in memory — especially over the first part of February, supposedly one of the coldest months of the year.

Days of rain. Massive overflow on rivers. Fairbanks drivers “playing car hockey” on roads glazed with black ice. People taking 10-minute flights to the next village because ground travel was nearly impossible. Potholes sprouting like pussy willows.

Thanks to a persistent southerly flow of air, Fischer said, Fairbanks experienced its warmest average daily mean temperature on record — 13.6 degrees — for the 133 days from Oct. 1 through Feb. 10.

South of the Alaska Range, the wacky winter has forced the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race to change its restart next month from Wasilla to Fairbanks.

“People are really starving for snow right now,” said John Wilbur, chief ranger for the Alaska State Parks Susitna/Denali ranger district. “In the Willow area, there’s no recreation at all.”

Meanwhile, here in Seattle, it’s cloudy and 41. Pretty average for this time of year, from what I understand. Yeah, I think I’ll be sticking around in the Pacific Northwest for a while.

(And on an entirely unrelated note: I really wish that Dave’s RSS feed had individual posts linked to their permalinks. Some link to the permalink on his page, some link to the first external link in the post, and some don’t have any link associated with them at all. It’s a pain in the butt. Just my opinion.)