A little while back I had a fun idea: I bet I could use twitter to collect and store little, ad-hoc data statements; with a simple parser, those statements could be used to make data. A little ad-hoc database right inside twitter! I even got myself a domain name where I could tinker with it.
Well, mycrocosm beat me to it. It’s cool. It makes graphs. Rad. Exhibit A, on my time spent engaged with the Olympics:
Also. Tinkering with mycrocosm, I found Google Charts. Holy smokes!
Update
And today I see daytum, another service of the same sort. It’s invitation-only, dammit. But it looks cool.
This is a really pretty fascinating story: How do all those champion shirts and hats get to the winning Super Bowl team so quickly? And what happens to the pre-manufactured gear prepared for the team that loses?
Distribution is a science. Twelve employees from Reebok and the N.F.L. huddle midway through the fourth quarter and handicap the game. If the score is lopsided, they stalk the sideline of the winning team, keeping the boxes out of sight.
But if the game is close, half the group goes to one side and half goes to the other. Each employee is assigned a star player to outfit. If the Colts win, for instance, someone immediately has to get a shirt and cap to quarterback Peyton Manning. If the Bears win, someone has to find linebacker Brian Urlacher.
The other team’s gear is hustled behind locked doors, to be given to a relief organization that sends them overseas, usually to Africa.
It’s been a quiet couple of weeks here at SHQ. I’ve been catching up on things that might have been neglected for a while earlier in the month, such as shaving and reading for fun. So here are a few reviews of holiday pastimes.
- 13-hour drives to see family for Christmas: Mixed. That’s a long time to spend in the car, especially on the way home when that unsettling noise from the engine keeps getting louder.
- Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman: Favorable. The audiobook version of this, which until a day or so ago was entirely free at iTMS, carried me through a good 6-hour chunk of drive time. It’s read by Hodgman, and is lots of fun, even though it tends to get a little overly cute now and then. It’s sufficiently nerdy for anyone likely to be reading this review, containing both extended histories of the Hobo Wars as well as a section on Noteworthy Rivalries in Dungeons and Dragons.
- Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe: Mixed. I’ve read somewhere, perhaps on the back of the book, that this was one of the best fantasy novels Of Our Time. The story strikes me as pretty interesting, and Wolfe has invented a fairly fully-realized world, but every one in a while I find myself rolling my eyes at the language (“He sighed, the kind of wheezing a leather pillow sometimes makes when one sits on it.” Or, “She picked up a leek, and then as if she did not know what else to do with it she dropped it down her throat like a mountebank swallowing a viper.”); I’m also not at all sure that I buy the motivation of the boy-torturer’s imminent treachery (again, it’s on the back cover, and the set-up is made in the first ten pages of the book).
- Spritz cookies: Favorable. Mmm, cookies.
- Those damnable meringue cookies: Unfavorable. Who likes these terrible things?
- Snow: Favorable. Except when it forces me to drive unexpectedly for 13 hours.
- Deadwood, season 2: Favorable. Good stuff. Season 2 really takes off.
- Blood Diamond: Favorable. I have a hard time taking Leonardo DiCaprio seriously, but this is a pretty well-made fim, though one that is occasionally needlessly preachy.
- Jennifer Connelly in Blood Diamond: Favorable, even though the movie doesn’t give her a whole lot to do. If you like John Hodgman’s reference to Noteworthy Rivalries in Dungeons and Dragons, you’ve probably had a crush on her ever since Labyrinth.
- $50 auto parts machined into $800 auto parts: Unfavorable. Damn you, Subaru.
- Kale: Favorable. Adds flavor and texture to any winter-time soup.
What to make of this halloween costume?
- Mild to unspeakably bad taste
- Breaching experiment/taboo breaking
- Something the kid will not remember happily
- You’re doing what?!
- Lighten up, you PC liberal mama’s boy, if Charlie Chaplin and Cartman can dress up as Hitler then my boy can dress up as a suicide bomber
- Other ______________________
The new Bravia ad is stunning. One part of my brain kept thinking “no, that’s just got to be fake.” The rest of my brain told my face to smile stupidly and just watch it over and over.
Be sure to check out the behind the scenes video.
From behind the coffee bar: “Boulder’s cool. It’s like a ritzier Flagstaff.” While Boulder is indeed a fine city, I assert that a good chunk of whatever ritzy quality it possesses is outweighed by its disproportionately-high trustafari population.
I see from this week’s Weekly that Tucson has a new Irish Pub coming, right down the street from campus. If the construction photos are any indication, the place has its requisite fifteen pieces of flare and then some. The interior was apparently build in Ireland, then shipped to Tucson (as was Kieran. Maybe he can weigh in). Olde-world authenticity aside, I’m not sure the owners know exactly what they mean when they write that the friendly atmosphere inside will “echo the pathos of rural Ireland to a tee.” Is pathos really a selling point? (The site is flash-full and not linkable; from here click on “about” for the pathos-ridden spiel.)
Also from the Weekly comes news that Tucson’s Krispy Kreeme locations have closed. I can’t count the number of times I bought various swamp cooler parts and then swung through the Krispy Kreeme for some extra sugar. The donuts weren’t ever particularly good, but they were sweet, and I loved to watch them plod along on the conveyor.
A few short letters I thought of writing during and after my trip to Montreal for ASAs:
Dear Fortunate Timing: Thanks for taking me to Montreal on Wednesday, instead of Thursday.
Dear Canada: Your twenty dollar bill is lovely.
Dear Montreal: I really like your city but I think you ought to work on the whole running-red-lights-at-high-speed issue. Admittedly, it was impressive to see that Porsche rocket down the hill, but the narrow margin between it and my knees still makes me a little queasy.
Dear Air Canada: My overall experience with you was quite nice. Forgetting to transfer my baggage to terminal 2 in Toronto so that I could clear customs in time to catch my flight to Phoenix, however, was a pretty big oops. Thanks for holding the plane a little longer.
Dear Customs/Immigration Guy: I was sweating because I had been running. Didn’t mean to freak you out or anything. Still, you could have been a little nicer when it took me a second to get my brain in gear and tell you what I’ve been doing in Canada. For a few seconds, “Waiting with low blood sugar for my bag” was all I could think of.
Dear Apple: I had earlier believed that I had escaped the sudden and random shutdowns I hear tell of on the MacBook. Turns out, not so much. It’s hard to write and give a presentation on a computer that doesn’t turn on. It’s like the prettiest, most expensive lucite paperweight I’ve ever seen, currently. *
Dear ASA: Again with the cross-country trip? 2007 is New York. Maybe 2008 could be in Miami, or Boston, or Chicago—yeah, we haven’t all gone there for at least a couple of years. How about some attention to the West? Seriously, Salt Lake City hosted the olympics; I think it could handle us, but you’d all have to get over the High Culture bias first. I can tell you where to go for a beer, if you want. Denver, Seattle, San Diego, and Portland are also just fine.
Dear ASA: If you’re going to have conference hotels, how about having the conference, you know, at the hotels? The palais was a pretty neat building, but if the meetings aren’t even going to involve the hotels in the slightest, maybe we could promote any of the multiple very nice, much cheaper, free-breakfast-including spots instead? Again, you’d have to get over the High Culture bias first.
Dear cabbie: You say you’ve been driving that elderly couple, the one I shared a ride back to the airport at 5am with, all week? Do they know how much you’ve been ripping them off? The hotel-airport fare isn’t normally $50, dude.
Dear Portugese restaraunt on Crescent: You’re kidding, right? The only thing Portugese about our meal was … well, I don’t know anything about Portugese food, but I’m pretty sure you don’t either.
Dear French-Canadian TV: Wow, we can’t show anything like that on broadcast television in the States. How very European. Also, I caught a little bit of Star Trek 2 dubbed into French late one night. Know what’s the same in any language? “KAAAAAHHHNNN!”
Dear sociology bloggers: Sorry I couldn’t stay. See you next year.
* I was going to do the joke where I write, “My computer has been shutting itself down unexpect NO CARRIER”, but Drek beat me to it. Damn you and your compatible sense of humor, Drek.
Update 8/26/2006: Because I know folks are on the edge of their seats, I returned the MacBook for repair, received it three days later, and it has performed great ever since. Fingers crossed that Apple has zeroed in on the shutdowns problem and I’ll have smooth computing from here on out.
I made it to Montréal last night; it turned out to have been a comparatively fortunate day to be traveling. Today was full of some really interesting conversations at the CITASA mini-conference.
At the risk of becoming a The Show repeater tower, I have to say that, on the subject of terrorism, Ze is good today.
I’m on the way to Montreal, a day earlier than many of my sociologist colleagues; I’m going to try out a couple of pre-conference events this year. Having elected to drive on down to Phoenix the night before, rather than get up at 2am for a two-hour drive, I’m camped out at a hotel for the night. (Note to self: Make some friends in Phoenix.)
A few notes from the road:
- The Sleep Number Bed. Believe the hype.
- Hotels are my opportunity to catch up on my cable TV. The National Geographic Channel has an amazing documentary called “In the Womb.” It’s just like watching “The Miracle of Life” in 6th grade, but without the awkward giggling and with absolutely stunning photography.
- I now recall why it’s so great to live outside of the desert. It’s ridiculously hot here, even though it’s not nearly as hot as it was a couple of weeks ago. My desert defenses have been weakened by Flagstaff’s high-altitude cool.
- I got caught on on post-primary coverage after the drive down from the mountains. Joe Lieberman is a jerk of almost mythic proportions.
Ever since coming back from Colorado, I’ve had a terrible cold, making me feel rather checked out. The couple of big deadlines in my immediate future loom both blurry and imposing, but the energy to tackle the work for them just isn’t there.
Nor is the energy for blogging, but I can still make lists of things I would have blogged in the past week.
- I’ll concede that it must be hard to make a dramatic story about a guy who is essentially invincible. That said, Superman Returns really blows.
- My student insurance is pretty much worthless while I’m living away from campus. Thanks, Arizona Board of Regents.
- I heard today that 7% of people don’t metabolize codeine. Perhaps this is why my cough syrup has no effect whatsoever.
- Students used to have this debate pretty frequently in my classes, and now an interesting study from Brookings finds that the working poor pay more than others for the same goods and services.
- Disk Inventory X lets you navigate a treemap of your Mac hard drive. With the treemap, I quickly found a 1.5 gigabyte jpeg that iPhoto had created through some kind of crazy bug.
Here’s a screenshot:
- One more thing. Been reading Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between (NYT review).
And that’s all I’ve got for now.
At the funeral of Ken Lay:
“Ken Lay was neither black nor poor as James Byrd was,” Lawson said. “But I’m angry because he was the victim of a lynching.” Lawson, who also spoke at Lay’s Colorado memorial service, likened the businessman to President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus — all of whom, the minister said, were wrongly victimized.
Blink. For real? I mean, there’s hyperbole, and then there’s likening Ken Lay to a man who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck. Ditto for shamelessly confusing “prosecuted” for “persecuted” in the comparison to Jesus Christ. Wow.
A few observations from a weekend trip to Colorado:
- Wifi in the Phoenix airport has improved dramatically from when I tried it last time. This time around, I could reach all my regular ports: secure SMTP, ssh, the works.
- What kind of person goes to a blog, finds the email feedback form, and anonymously sends a message filled with the same repeated (and adamantly-stated, if the number of exclamation points are any indication) profanity?
- The best breakfast burrito in Fort Collins is at Mugs on College Ave. Seriously, this sucker is tasty.
- When chosing a restaraunt for a semi-formal celebration, it is not necessarily a sign of impending doom that the joint is around the corner from the Hunt Club. But it’s not encouraging, either.
