Derek’s Blog

Here is a scene from Dr Who in which the Doctor (David Tennant) leaves a recording for Martha with instructions for while he is hiding from the Family in human form. (Did you get all that?)

The fun bit is that only the first 45 seconds is heard during the episode, after which the volume is turned down and we continue to see the Doctor talking without hearing his words. Until now. I like this clip because it’s a fun glimpse into what happens behind the camera.

Not a lot of Twittering this week. With Celia in the Philippines, Carrie in SLC, and all kinds of wackiness at work, I haven’t had time for the important stuff.

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Anyone who pays $30 for a round trip between NYC and Boston can’t have inflated expectations. I know this because I made the trip a dozen times, when just a few years ago it was only $20.

I’m speaking of course of the Fung Wah bus, probably the most dangerous four hours you can spend in a moving vehicle. For that kind of money it goes without saying that my trips had their share of odd smells, strange in-flight entertainment (some of the “nicer” buses had a TV/VCR combo hanging from the celing), and minor mishaps.

One time the bus left a rest stop without a passenger. Someone noticed the empty seat and told the driver to go back — about 20 minutes after we left. Sure enough a very worried woman was waiting in the parking lot. Another time the bus was caught in a severe rain storm, which was problematic because it had no wipers. Fortunately nothing that an unscheduled two-hour stop at a truck stop couldn’t remedy.

Anyway, for all the little Fung Wah adventures I had, thankfully none of my trips ended like this one earlier this week.

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Effective 9/1/2008 Neflix is eliminating profiles so they can “continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers,” where by “all” they mean those not using profiles. Carrie and I started using separate profiles a while ago and it’s been very useful, so this news sucks.

In the space of a week I have lost Google Browser Sync and Netflix profiles. How much more can a person take?

Anyway, here is the official word from Netflix:

Q: What is happening to Profiles?

A: We will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account.

When? Profiles will be eliminated on 9/1/2008.

Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

Do I need to do anything? Consider moving all DVD titles in your Profiles Queues to your main account Queue.

How will this impact my account? On 9/1/2008:

• All DVDs currently at home or in transit will be associated with the main account Queue.

• All Profiles rental history will be added into the main account rental history.

• Your additional Profile Queues will be eliminated. If you would like to keep a copy of each Profile Queue we recommend that you print them out.

• Prior to Profiles going away, we will also email you a copy of your Profile Queues.

• Profiles movie ratings and Profiles Friends connections will no longer be available.

• You will not be able to transfer your Profiles data to a separate new account.

Update: Netflix’s pricing structure is such that two N/2-disc accounts cost the same as one N-disc account. Our account is in Carrie’s name, so this means I’ll have to get my own. It’s still retarded, especially since I “will not be able to transfer [my] Profiles data to a separate new account,” but at least it won’t cost more.

Update 2: I complained to Netflix and apparently I wasn’t alone, because they reversed their decision! Now if only our politicians were this responsive…

You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.

We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.

I like to think that I dislike all operating systems equally, but I have a special hole in my heart for Linux. For this reason I find the Linux Hater’s Blog quite entertaining.

You know, hating on things is like life itself. Sometimes it’s hard to go on, hard to find motivation. Beating a dead horse gets tiring, however much the horse deserves it.

But then occasionally you find something that gives you the strength to labor on. For the lazy, it’s a “tip” on how to use your spare VRAM as swap space. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll leave you with just the intro for some shitnuggets of wisdom on why anyone would want to do this:

Everybody considers today’s graphic cards to be meant only for gamers. After all, why would one need a fast GPU in a server? Today’s graphic cards contain a lot of very fast RAM, typically between 64 and 512 MB. With Linux, it’s possible to use it as swap space, or even as RAM disk!

Oh really? Sweet. Does this mean I can use my four PCIe x16 slots and put in 4 ATI cards with 1GB of VRAM each and get 4G of swap space for like $3000? Oh! Oh! Can I even use OGD1? Because I want the hardware specs for my swap space to be totally open. I think he should have written:

Switched to Linux and realized your fancy pants graphics card is totally shit now? With this trick, you’ll feel better about spending $500 bucks on a video card that’s totally useless because you actually believed someone who told you that you could switch to Linux and use compiz to drag your pidgin windows around in ways that you never imagined.

Long articles like Is Google Making Us Stupid? are getting increasingly hard for me to read, so I think the answer is yes.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The only form of Twitter spam I have encountered so far is the occasional dummy follower. A spammer creates an account, adds one update with a (bad news) link, and follows thousands of strangers hoping they’ll click back to his tweet-link to investigate this mysterious follower. Though said spammer is an asshat, I understand the strategy.

But there is also a more mysterious class of bulk follower: seemingly normal individuals who have active accounts yet choose to follow hundreds, sometimes thousands of strangers — 120,000 in one case. I block these users from following me because they give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. But if they are not spammers, what possible value can there be in following thousands of randoms? Surely the probability of striking gold with this shotgun approach is minuscule.

<Seinfeld>What’s up with those users?</Seinfeld>

In other news, here is this week’s nonesense.

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