Trivial Matters

Sunday I joined Facebook. Between the new job on campus and the fact that everyone else I seem to run into is on there, I figured it was time to give in.

And I must admit, this is *way* better than MySpace (not that I’m a social network aficionado by any means). The interface is cleaner, better organized, and has much more information avaialble at any given moment.

It isn’t perfect, however. I still find myself stumbling around for a few things, even after three days. The search feature could use some improvement in narrowing down my results, and a quick tutorial wouldn’t have hurt either.

But the crowning achievement has got to be the applications. I’ve heard about people being bombarded with application invites from their friends, but I’ve yet to experience that. So, for me, the application feature is just fine. I started playing Mafia Wars yesterday, and (as some could see from my status messages) I’ve had to pry myself away from it to do homework, sleep, and everything else in life.

Even as I write this, my character, Louie the Cyclops, is rebuilding his energy levels so that I can finish a few more jobs and get to level 8. I like the fact that the money rolls in regardless of whether I’m there or not, but it’d be nice to build energy and stamina just as quickly.

I’d also like to see the fights explained a bit more, especially the Hitlist jobs. I took on several with no idea about what the guy was packing, and lost them all. That being said, for a free game that I can play when I run out of Conceptis puzzles (which is happening faster and faster each week), Mafia Wars is the bomb.

Capice?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a trilogy consisting of five books and a short story. It was written by the late Douglas Adams, and is one of my favorite books of all time.

I didn’t discover the books until I was into my late teens. A guy I worked for started quoting it and when I looked puzzled, he exclaimed that he couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it yet. So I picked up a copy and literally absorbed the entire work in about two days. I’ve tried to make it a habit to re-read it every year, but both of my copies have been in storage for 2008.

I was reminded of it today when we were asked to write down our favorite book in my first class. I wrote it down, not knowing that the professor would pick the same book. Now I’m determined to either buy a third copy to read again, or make it a priority once I get my stuff out of storage. We’ll see how the rest of my classes go and how much reading there is for next week.

Once I’ve gone over it again, I’ll post a more complete review. So much of the plots are jumbled up in my head (especially after watching the movie, which combined the first three books… and not very well either).

Finally, I got to see this movie. I had to drive clear across town (in the snow as it turned out) to find a theater playing it. One would think that for all of the press it has been getting, and all of the talent involved (Ron Howard, Frank Langella, Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell, and Oliver Platt to name a few) that it would be getting many more screens in Portland.

But anyway…

The film opens with actual news footage about Watergate, leading into the resignation speech (I kinda hoped for a cameo by Ben Stein). The first half of the movie is the setup for the interviews. Frost is presented as a playboy push-over who was going to softball Nixon, all the while trying to sell it as the most important interview of all time.

I was a bit dissapointed that there was not much exposition on the Watergate scandal beyond what most people know. I was born during the Reagan administration, and only know what happened from history books. And you could tell from the movie that there was a popular hatred of Nixon, but it is never justified or explained fully.

Knowing that this was based on a play, I tried to picture each scene as if it were being on a stage. The only parts that were lost on me were the “interviews” with Frost’s research team and Nixon’s Chief of Staff that were scattered throughout the movie. (I thought of the show Life in that they are the same style of post-event interviews.) At first it seemed like they were interviewing the actual persons being portrayed, which I think would have been a better move, but I quickly recognized the actors.

As far as the acting goes, Rockwell was over-used and Platt was under-used. Langella and Michael Sheen both give great performances, but never at the same time. In fact, the whole movie was jumpy in the sense that only one actor at a time was able to shine. Perhaps it was intentional, but the idea of an “ensamble” cast doesn’t work if they can’t act together.

Also, too much focus was on Frost’s girlfriend. At times, I expected her to be a spy for Nixon or something, but in the end she was just someone in the background who got way too much screen time. (Maybe if they had said the two got married or something in the “afterward” text before the credits, their relationship might have actually meant something, but I guess she was a fictional creation of sorts.)

Altogether, it is a decent movie. I’ll have to see if I can find the original interviews to watch and compare. I didn’t know that Diane Sawyer was working for Nixon at the time, which was an interesting twist that they didn’t play up at all (at least I found it interesting). I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tries to do something similar with Dubya in the next few years.

There were actually two benefits that came out of my music drive going to sh*t.

The first was finally weeding out some old duplicate tracks that I had been carrying around. Back in 2002, when I was deployed, I copied about 5 CDs of MP3s off of a shared music server on base. Most of the tracks had poor tags (missing track names, album names, etc.) and over the years, I acquired many of the tracks through legitimate means. The record companies can rest assured that my music collection has quite a few less pirated tracks.

The second benefit was being able to redo my main playlist. I like to use the party shuffle feature when I’m working (like now) and I use a playlist to narrow down the library to just the tracks I want to hear. Right now, the playlist of 1671 tracks out of 5792 total. But I’m wondering if there is a way to optimize this further.

I use a “top 50″ playlist on my running iPod, and I want to try and keep it as accurate as possible. The problem is that I still have duplicate tracks in my library. Some are songs that are on more than one album, but most are live tracks that I also have a studio version of. I’m wondering if there is a way to program iTunes to combine the play counts of all of the related tracks and put the most played of the duplicates into my Top 50.

For example, I have three copies of Everlong by the Foo Fighters. Two are studio tracks (from the original The Colour And The Shape and the re-released extended 10th anniversary edition) and one is a live version off of Skin and Bones. If I play all three on a regular basis, say Sudio Version 1 - 10 times, Studio Version 2 - 12 times, and Live Version - 8 times, how can I get just Studio Version 2 in my Top 50 with a total play count of 20?

I’m sure I can find a way to exclude duplicates from the Top 50, but that would not help if track 50 was played 15 times. Then all three versions of Everlong would be excluded for bieing under 15 plays individually.

I’ll do some searching tomorrow and see what I can find. If anyone has some ideas, post them below.

Part of my job with the Army involves analyzing messages, but not the coded kind that most people think of. No, I get to look at marketing messages (for lack of a better term), usually sent by the enemy, and figure out what makes them work; what makes them effective.

That skill, it seems, has spilled over into my TV watching. I cannot watch a commercial these days without trying to dissect every little bit, from the actors used to how the words used are arranged.

I find this ironic because, as a kid, I avoided any sense of commercialism. I never had to have the Air Jordans or whatever else was popular back then. I work plain clothes without labels or markings. But it wasn’t because I knew about target audiences or anything like that, I just never had the desire to “fit in” that way. As I grew older, some of the idealism went away and I find myself sporting symbols like the Nike Swoosh over other brands, or even the plain (and cheaper) versions.

So even though I much better at reading through the marketing BS, I’m apparently more susceptible to it. I’m not sure what that says about me, but it can’t be good.

I might turn this into a regular thing here, where I take apart a popular commercial. Or not. I can’t give away all of my secrets on here, can I?