Justified has some Splainin to Do
Based on a string of good-to-great reviews and some recommendations from friends, I picked up Justified. So far, I’ve seen the pilot. Pilots are often poor indicators of how well a show will turn out, and I hope that’s the case here, because based on what I saw, this show is massively overrated. The plot is something like this. Raylan Givens is a badass US Marshal in Miami who guns down a suspect old west style just to prove what a badass he is, so they transfer him to exactly the part of eastern Kentucky he grew up in. One
Star Trek Fans Can’t Tell you why they Like It
Matthew Yglesias has an article about Star Trek which is triggering all of my normal rants. Really, it’s fascinating stuff. One day in the distant future when the dust has settled and alien anthropoligsts are digging through the ruins of AMERICA, they’re going to be utterly baffled by Star Trek fandom. So what did I learn from Yglesias take on the same tired material that I didn’t already know? That self-delusion is a big part of the Star Trek fan’s relationship to Star Trek, that’s what. It’s something I’ve always known but never really noticed, actually. I used to be
Alex Hannaford is a Slippery Eel
Alex Hannaford is a slippery eel. The evidence: this column that he wrote about gun culture in the United States (Hannaford is a Brit – a writer for the Guardian). The first misleading thing about the column is the title: “What I Discovered when I Got a Gun.” Hannaford did, in fact, buy a gun, complete with concealed-carry permit, but he doesn’t seem to have learned anything from the experience that he didn’t already know, nor does he provide any account of how the experience changed him. What he does instead is try to pass this off as research, but
The Spanish Prisoner is not a Movie
The Spanish Prisoner is one of those movies that I’m not allowed to review, because if I say what I really think about it, then I’m a heel, and I don’t understand how talented a God Among Men like David Mamet is. But I’m going to do it anyway, because movies like this piss me off a little bit. Movies like what? Movies that are nothing but a plot. Movies where the characters are neither people nor archetypes, but rather MacGuffins who set up Twists. And you know what’s worse than movies that are nothing but a plot? Movies that
Why He Doesn’t Get a Pass
Incredibly, some people I know who read the internet every day and even like the Bieb seem to have missed the story of how he went to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam and demonstrated in spectacular fashion what a total douche he is. If you’re one of them, he wrote this in the guestbook: Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber. Because that’s the effect the Anne Frank Museum is gunning for: forget the Nazis, would she have liked me? What’s incredible to me is that
PySide Up and Running in OS X Lion
At the moment, I store all my passwords in text files which I manage with Vim. This is, of course, a horrible idea. It’s true that I name the files cryptically, so anyone who stole my laptop would probably take a long time figuring out what they were, but there’s still really no excuse. It’s better than using a pet’s name for everything, mind you – my passwords are all suitably secure – but still. Now, I’m well aware that there are tons of password manager apps out there, but this is the sort of thing that I would really
Using Eclim with the Samsung Smart TV SDK
I’m about ready to port the existing Samsung Smart TV app that I’ve developed for our distinguished partner to our own use. One problem: the Samsung Smart TV SDK has advanced by leaps and bounds in the meantime. For example, you can’t use the Samsung Smart TV IDE with SDK version 4.1 – you must use Eclipse instead. In theory, I shouldn’t really care, since I developed the old one by sniffing out where the source files were and editing them with Vim, the way any self-respecting hacker would. Why bother yourself with corporate bloatwear when the World’s Best Editor
Margaret Thatcher didn’t Sleep, What’s Your Excuse?
The BBC has an article about my favorite Margaret Thatcher legend: that she never slept. I first came across this from the horse’s mouth. I read The Downing Street Years – the first volume of her memoirs – as soon as it showed up at my university library, and she mentions her four-hour sleep schedule fairly early on. But, unlike the suggestion in the BBC article that she’s one of the 1% (snicker) who naturally only need 4 hours, she claims that it was something she deliberately trained herself to do while Leader of the Opposition in the late 70s.
Is Bitcoin a Bubble?
Is Bitcoin a bubble? That seems to be the fashionable thing to say about it right now. I disagree, though. Let’s start with terminology confusion. Justin Fox does a pretty good job in his HBR article Building a Better Bitcoin of explaining why you have to be careful with your terms here. Classically, a speculative bubble is a situation where the price of a particular asset is much higher than its fundamentals/intrinsic value will justify. So, we would speak about a bubble for a stock if it’s trading at a higher value than can conceivably be recouped from the earnings
Is Bitcoin Dangerous?
There are plenty of nonsensical arguments against Bitcoin on the web. This morning, I was fortunate enough to come across an essay that collects most of the intelligent ones. Let’s go through them and see how they stack up. (1) Bitcoin is not really stateless because it leaves a permanent transactions record. The concern here is that since cryptocurrencies can’t be self-validating (there is nothing inherent in a string of bits that tells me that it is a legitimate example of a Bitcoin – to verify this I have to query the web to make sure that a sufficient number
