Haibane.info

Month: October 2009

  • Windows 7 Guy

    Does Microsoft really want Peter to be the face of Windows 7?

    Microsoft and FOX One have announced a marketing collaboration that will see Windows 7 in a new special with the working title “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show” airing Sunday, November 8, at 8:30pm EST and PST. It will star Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show as well as his Family Guy co-star Alex Borstein (voice of the series’ Lois character).

    Well, Stewie is probably more appealing (and remains the only reason I ever watch the show. There, I said it. I watch the show. Want to make something of it? Because I’m not ashamed. I’m not. Maybe you watch it and you’re ashamed. Maybe you’re projecting your shame on me. How do you like that? Turnaround is fair play, right? Doesn’t feel so good, does it? Are you feeling a little embarrassed right now? A little red in the face? Tight in the knickers? How do you like them apples? Are you sick of this paragraph yet? Isn’t this exactly how the monologues on Family Guy go? On and on forever? With no end? Long past the point where the joke was even remotely funny? Firmly into tedious territory? Now that I’ve made my point, don’t you wish I would drop it? I mean, is it really necessary to keep flogging this? Oh wait, you get it, that’s exactly the point, right? By making my point, about how unfunny Family Guy’s taking-the-joke-too-far shtick is, and then continuing to make the point after I’ve already explained once what I’m doing, is really making the point, right? Isn’t that clever? You don’t think so? Could that be because you’re a nekulturny philistine oaf? I mean, isn’t that more likely than The Family Guy not being the most hilarious show on television ever? Did you like how I dolloped in some Russian in there? Do I have the patience or the willpower to comtinue this interminable exercize? No.)

    AT ANY RATE – Family Guy is one of those shows that has it’s flaws, to say the least. Stewie and Brian, when they are together, are the only thing watchable about it. I find the reaction by some that this amounts to “selling out” by McFarlane to be hilarious – as if the show had any artistic integrity to preserve. It’s a blunt instrument (and for those who failed to understand this, McFarlane created American Dad to really hammer the point home. Apparently even this was too subtle for some people, so he followed up with Cleveland.

  • what if we were lied to? a sci-fi bleg

    I am racking my brain and memory to no avail – I need to recall the autor and name of the short story set in an alternate history where the Nazis win World War II. The Germans roll over Europe, conquer Britain, win in Russia. The Japanese expand into China and Asia, and the two axis powers swallow the entire globe. Then they turn on each other, and fight World War III, and the Nazis are ultimately (barely) victorious. At this point the Nazis break out the old Holocaust Instruction Manual and turn the resources of the planet towards genetic purification and the glory of the Aryan race. And they succeed. And centuries after World War II, the true Third Reich becomes a pure race indeed on white-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired people. As the centuries pass, the Reich liberalizes, moderates, and eventually becomes a Republic. True learning and democracy again flourish as the homogeneity of the Aryan race – now the entirety of the human race – ensures peace and prosperity and minimal conflict. The horror of the past centuries is increasingly edited out and ultimately forgotten entirely, lost in myth. A new history emerges, one scrubbed clean of any messy reference to wars or races, and after a few generations this new narrative has become set in the collectve stone of human memory.

    And one day, a full millenium after the dark prehistory that gave rise to what has now become a human utopia, two students at the University of Tokyo, Hans and Franz (names may be different from my recollection) are eating lunch. Hans turns to Franz and asks him., “do you ever get the feeling we were lied to?”

    if you thought that was a cool summary, the original was 10^6 times better. Help me figure out who wrote it! I think I might have read it on one of these, but I’m not sure.

  • Kindle gets cheaper, again

    Good grief, Amazon just dropped the price of the Kindle 2.0 by another 40 bucks! New price: $259. And they are introducing a GSM-enabled version for only $20 more so you can download books worldwide, not just in the US. This is unbelievably aggressive, and probably partly motivated by Sony’s recent refresh of its own ebook line.

    I still think that the Kindle DX is the one I want, though – the better PDF support is critical for me. But with the price drop on the mainstream Kindle, I am even less likely to buy a DX now; the price on the DX has to come down sooner or later. The only reason I need PDF support is because I will use the Kindle heavily for my academic journal reading; if not for that I’d probably have bought the Kindle the last time it dropped in price.. and be cursing about it now.

    Of course, I’ve also been doing some actual reading of late, and am now a few hundred pages into Quicksilver. I can easily see how owning a Kindle would accelerate this habit. I am genuinely conflicted at night between WoW and these analog pursuits!

  • forecasting the winter in wisconsin

    This was the first week in Wisconsin where the temperature was actually cold – mid 50s earlier, and now around low 60s. Fall is pretty much here, which is my favorite season but still attunes me towards dreadful anticipation of the winter ahead. The last two years – coinciding with our move to Wisconsin from Texas – have been unusually cold and heavy snowfall, so we really got pummeled. I actually broke down and got a snowblower near the tail end of last year’s winter, and ended up using it only twice (after a whole winter of backbreaking manual shoveling, including a minor bout injury). So I am prepared, but anxious to see what lies ahead.

    According to the weather forecasters, there’s a resurgent El Nino in the pacific which is going to mean bitter cold and heavy snow for the east coast. But my concern of course is the upper midwest, and this year it actcually looks like there’s general agreement that while it will still be cold, there won’t be as much snow this year for us as there was the past couple:

    The Midwest and central Plains, which have been hit hard the past two winters, may end up with a lack of snowfall this year. Places like Chicago, Omaha, Minneapolis and Kansas City may have below-normal snowfall and could even average a bit milder than past years.

    A warm and somewhat dry weather pattern is expected from the Pacific Northwest into the northern Plains.

    The Farmer’s Almanac is in agreement, calling the winter season for the midwest “bitterly cold and dry”:

    According to the 2010 Farmers’ Almanac, this winter will see more days of shivery conditions: a winter during which temperatures will average below normal for about three-quarters of the nation.

    A large area of numbingly cold temperatures will predominate from roughly east of the Continental Divide to west of the Appalachians (see map). The coldest temperatures will be over the northern Great Lakes and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

    (…) Near-normal amounts of precipitation are expected over the eastern third of the country, as well as over the Pacific Northwest and Northern Plains, while drier-than-normal conditions are forecast to occur over the Southwest and the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes.

    2010_us_wintermap.jpg

    But how well do my recollections of the past two years being crazy cold and insanely snowed compare with the reality? Since Wisconsin’s climate data is available online, it’s easy to see just how normal or not the recent years were. We moved to Wisconsin (specifically, Marshfield) in July 2007. The closest major city is Wausau for which the data is available. Since we were coming from the Houston area, to us it felt like the whole of the 2007-2008 winter season was bitterly cold and snowy. In retrospect, the daily temperatures for late 2007 were well-bounded by the 30yr averages, except for a colder spell in late Nov – early Dec. As the winter continued past the new year into early 2008, there were wild temperaure swings (e.g. +45 to -20 F in two days) from January to mid-February, and then it was consistently and significantly colder. On the whole, then, it was indeed a colder-than average winter, though even average in Wausau is still bitterly cold for a Texan transplant. As far as snowfall for that winter goes, we had a crazy big snowstorm on Dec 1st (which I got caught in – long story) and then kept on getting big snowstorms almost every two weeks until mid-January, after which we started getting more regular but smaller snows. But by the end of that season we had exceeded the average snowfall by 20 inches. Keep in mind that even the average was almost five feet of snow! Even an average year would have been tough for an ex-Texan, but that year was just crazy.

    We moved to Madison in summer of 2008, so I turn my attention to the Madison-area data instead of Wausau for that season. The early winter, in late 2008, was colder than average, though we had a warm spike in late December thru the new year. Early 2009 was actually average until mid-Jan, at which point it got really cold again. Temps were again wildly variable until mid-March. As far as snowfall that season goes, though, it was a nightmare. December 2008 was the snowiest December on record, and we just kept on getting hit. We kept getting hit with medium to large-size snowfalls all the way into early April! The scary thing is that it was even worse in Madison the prior year (while we were in Marshfield).

    The bottom line: it was indeed exceptionally colder, and snowier, these past two years. But they really were outliers; look at the 2006 season in Madison and you see the snowfall was much more reasonable, and was even abnormally warm. While a warm, dry winter would be heaven, I’m willing to suffer the cold if it means less snow. I hope these forecasts are accurate; I’ll be revisiting this topic in April to see how they fared 🙂