time change

you know what really grinds my gears? yep...
how pointless is it? every f'in year i have to set the clocks forward and then backward. despite creating anxiety amongst my grandparents, disrupting my circadian rhythm, and making me waste 10 minutes of my time setting my clocks it accomplishes one more thing - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. in that sense, the changing of time is a zen-like experience, which i would of appreciated, if i were a f'in zen monk. but i am not. i am a programmer, in bfe cleveland, where it rains, hails, snows, and thunders at the same f'in time, struggling to pay my bills. having to engage in this obsessive-compulsive masochism, is the last thing i need.

IE7 sends cake to the Firefox 2 team

microsoft sent a cake to the mozilla folks. i downloaded IE7 and it looks like they pretty much stole the most important feature (tabbed-browsing) from mozilla firefox. bastards..

even songbirds get the blues...

sometimes..

it's snowing like a mofo in cle

quantitative approach in predicting hits

In the October 16, 2006, Media Issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes about a remarkable new approach to predicting hits in the music and movie businesses (“The Formula,” p. 138). Platinum Blue, a small firm in New York, has devised a computer program to “measure the mathematical relationships among all of a song’s structural components: melody, harmony, beat, tempo . . . and so on.” Gladwell explains, “ On the basis of that analysis, the firm believes it can predict whether a song is likely to become a hit with eighty-per-cent accuracy.” Platinum Blue’s Mike McCready tells Gladwell, “We take a new CD far in advance of its release date. We analyze all twelve tracks. Then we overlay them on top of the already existing hit clusters, and what we can tell a record company is which of those songs conform to the mathematical pattern of past hits.” One of McCready’s notable predictions was Norah Jones’s album “Come Away with Me.” Gladwell explains, “The computer said that nine of the fourteen songs on the album had clear hit potential—which was unheard of. Nobody in his group . . . had even listened to the record before, but . . . it went on to sell twenty million copies and win eight Grammy awards.” Gladwell discusses a similar venture called Epagogix, which employs “a powerful kind of computerized learning system called an artificial neural network” to analyze movie scripts and predict their box-office success-—without reference to the stars, directors, marketing budget or producer. As Gladwell explains, “The way the neural network thinks is not that different from the way a Hollywood executive thinks: if you pitch a movie to a studio, the executive uses an ad-hoc algorithm—perfected through years of trial and error—to put a value on all the components in the story. Neural networks, though, can handle problems that have a great many variables, and they never play favorites—which means (at least in theory) that as long as you can give the neural network the same range of information that a human decision-maker has, it ought to come out ahead.”

youtube or utube : what's in the name?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Utube.com, a Web site owned by a supplier of used tubes and pipes, has been swamped with visitors confusing it with online video service YouTube Inc. and has been barely operational since Google Inc. said on Monday it would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion.

"I'm at a point now, all I want to do is to make the site work," Ralph Girkins, owner of the site belonging to Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., told Reuters on Thursday.

"Today, it's been up the longest it's been up for a week -- an hour and a half," said Ohio-based Girkins.

utube.com is the sixth most popular U.S. manufacturing Web site, ahead of Whirlpool Corp., according to data provided by HitWise.


On Monday, Girkins told Reuters an intermediary who said he was acting on behalf of YouTube had offered $1 million to buy the Internet address, but he turned down the offer and was holding out for $2.5 million to $3 million.

A YouTube spokesman said it had not made an offer and had no plans to do so.

On Thursday, Girkins said he had received about 20 phone calls from people who offered to sell his site for him. He has not been in contact with Google or YouTube, he said.

a communique to the birds

birds: i appreciate your candor. your earnest cries have earned you much appraise. i applaud. birds, allow me to remind you that the summer is ov-er.. go aw-wway.. your chirping is jolly but i've had ennough of it... you are not impressing nobody.. in fact you are only annoying some people who are just trying to (in the words of paul simon) enjoy the sound of silence. now i don't expect you to understand what that means but seriously birds, just fly off to your warmer grounds for once. you can come back next spring but it's time to say 'good bye' don't you think? october.... means anything to you?

they are back..

yes gentle reader of the blog: the devil's children, the birds, are back chirping away. i don't know if this is a function of the weather, it's almost 80 degrees today or whether it's the cold calculus of devil's reason but the birds came back to haunt and terrorize mine ear buds. in a weird twist of logic i welcome them. i sort of missed them, almost. i just hope they are back for a day or two, no more. come cold winter, and shoo these damned entities away to warmer depths of hell..