Looking at and printing pictures, thinking about life, hanging out with folks in Grad, reading The Tipping Point, listening to Rent (that one is Kevin’s fault!).
Author Archives: Danny Silverman
About time Martha wised up – Best thing for her shareholders is to get this contrition stuff over with as quickly as possible. Morals have nothing to do with it.
Fascinating study about subway etiquitte – It’s not so much that people, when asked, will give up their seats, but that the people performing the experiment felt so nauseated breaking the rules of social order.
Pictures
I like having pictures. I like having taken the pictures. I don’t like walking around with a camera taking people’s pictures, because it makes the social situation awkward. When I have my wearable, this will be less of an issue.
I put my photos online, but previously I’ve never really done much with them in the real world. Tonight I went through and printed a bunch of photos of people in my life and stuck them to a wall of my room. What will be interesting is to see the reactions of others who have seen my previous rooms, but more importantly to me is my own reaction. Will I look at the pictures consciously? Will I see one of them from time to time in the corner of my eye and have it trigger a memory? Will they simply fade into the background, like some of my other room decorations?
I actually find it sorta shocking that this is the first time I’ve done this. It’s also the first time I’ve had a printer capable of printing decent (although not great) quality pictures. So really, it was a technology-motivated change more then anything. My new printer made it possible.
Our environment and circumstances really has a lot of subtle effects on us. Because I only take digital photos, the idea of finding some way to get them into the real world never really occured to me back when I would have had to actively seek it out. It is only sheer coincidence that I happened to get a printer that included some free photo paper, tried out said paper, decided I liked printing photos, and started doing it in earnest.
Underwear experts agree, the thong is on the way out – Okay, first, there are underwear experts? Did they get some kind of college degree? And second, eww.
US plans to redirect Iraq reconstruction money to security – A pretty strong statement that reconstruction in Iraq is a failure. Also, with only two weeks left in the fiscal year, the US has spent only 6% of the money allocated for reconstruction. Wowch.
Breast cancer tests flawed, study reports – Except that’s not what the study says at all. It says that none of the four screening methods studied are perfect, but that they all are useful, depending on the circumstance and level of risk. Best, of course, would be a screening method that is minimally invasive/dangerous while being highly accurate, and we don’t have that yet.
“I moved the stars themselves to write her a love note in the sky.” – One of the saddest lines of Futurama, and I’m sure geeks like me can relate. Search for “Leela, about the wedding” and start reading.
Officials deny requiring everyone to spell it “euro” will impinge on Europe’s cultural diversity – The law is unclear on whether the plural is “euro” or “euros.” No, I’m serious.
Academic stuff
At the end of this semester, if all goes well, I will have completed 31.5 courses. Need 32 to go on reduced-credit senior status. Gah. Of course, had all gone well from the beginning, I would have been able to graduate in 3 years, so I guess this is a lesser problem.
With a current GPA of 3.073 on 23 graded Brandeis courses (not counting APs, pass/fail, etc.), if I get A grades in eight more courses, the highest GPA I can get is still a little less then a 3.3. Not sure if there is a big difference at this point between the two numbers.
Keeping a diary may be bad for your health – Not a highly convincing study, but interesting.
Classes in full swing, pretty settled in, finished The Diamond Age, trying to keep up the gym regiment, hanging out with Kevin, among others.
Operation Ignore – Three years after the September 11 attacks, and with a presidential election just a few months away, perhaps we should take a moment to reflect on just how much we knew about what was coming, and how much the Bush administration didn’t do to stop the impending attack.
Rowboat Veterans For Truth – “George Washington would wait to get France’s permission before protecting our people.” We can’t have that.
Farewell, NetFlix
For months, well, years, actually, I’ve thought about cancelling my NetFlix account. I love the idea of the service, but I don’t watch enough DVDs to really justify it. I didn’t want to switch to a lower plan because of all of the limits it imposes. I’ve never felt like I’ve really been getting everything out of the service, but I’ve always continued to pay for it.
Today NetFlix sent me an email saying it was having trouble processing my monthly payment, and it refused to accept my credit card information. Good enough reason for me, just like that my decision was finally made and I called up and cancelled the account. I should have done this months — perhaps years — ago.
They didn’t offer me any deals to try to get me to stay. So let the analysis begin.
I’ve been a NetFlix subscriber for three years and three months. In that time I’ve given NetFlix almost $800 of my money. I’ve rented 83 movies. Wait, really? Ouch, this is going to be painful.
At a cost of $9.64 per movie, I’ve gotten a terrible, terrible deal. Granted, it was self-inflicted. I could have returned my movies faster and rented more. And its different then renting from Blockbuster because I could keep the movie as long as I wanted. But if I look at the movies that I watched on the list, I see that some of them are part of television series, a few of them I never actually ended up watching, and several of them I could have downloaded from the Brandeis network, if I wanted to be less honest.
So I went on Amazon and priced out the cost of purchasing every movie that I watched, with a few exceptions for things that are no longer available and such.
$674.17
Wow.
$674.17. For the price of NetFlix, my DVD collection could be about two or three times larger, and I’d have a few really good movies that I’d certainly watch again, like Annie Hall, State and Main, and The Usual Suspects. And therein lies the dilemna. I clearly did not use NetFlix to its full potential. I clearly lost a lot of money on the deal. But had I been buying the movies outright rather then “renting” them, what is to say I actually would have purchased those titles?
NetFlix is not evil, and it is a good service for many people, the people who watch lots of movies or who share a subscription with friends and family. But it is not a good service for a more casual movie watcher. And it is not a good service for me.
And next time I want to watch a movie on DVD that looks interesting, I’ll probably just buy it. It just makes more sense.
Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ – The original Onion article from January 2001, now annotated with links from present day. Eerie, isn’t it? We knew exactly what we were getting into.
Kevin discusses policy pressures in the Republican Party and Democratic Party.