Anyone Know the Rules?

Another Million-Dollar Idea Too Late

2012-11-04T09:43:00.001-08:00

How many times have you been half asleep and come up with what you're sure is a million-dollar idea? Happens to me all the time. And usually I awake only to realize the idea is crap.

But not this morning.

My sleep-induced idea this time? A website that would track the success/failure of those who make predictions. This could include political commentators, sports analysts, global warming "experts" - you name it.

So, I get up bright and early and begin searching the web to see if anything like this already exists and, sure enough, find the recently launched PunditTracker.com.

Crap balls for me, but great news for everyone else because I might never have actually gotten around to building the site. PunditTracker has a really interesting scoring system (fwiw, my idea for a site name was ScoreSight, a play on foresight - I think I like their name better) and I think has some real potential to bring "accountability to the prediction industry."

Roseanne Barr for President. Really.

2012-10-04T04:53:00.000-07:00

I might be the last to know on this one, but I only recently learned that Roseanne Barr - yes, that Roseanne Barr - is an official and legitimate candidate for President of the United States of America.

By "official and legitimate" I mean she has actually been nominated by a party (The Peace and Freedom Party - I hadn't heard of it before either) and will appear on the ballot in some, if not all, of the states.

Her platform, if you can call it that, is pretty much a joke. Not a "ha ha, this is funny" joke, more like a "was she high when she wrote this?" joke. Still, she claims she's serious.

So here's the thing, I kinda like Roseanne. I think she's relatively smart, sometimes very funny, and crazier than a box of donut holes. I loved her recent reality series, "Roseanne's Nuts". I don't really want her to be our next president, but I do think I might vote for her.

Why would I vote for someone I don't want to win?

I know my vote doesn't really count for anything. I don't see a vote for Roseanne as a throwaway vote, because no matter who I vote for it's a throwaway.
I want to be able to honestly tell people when they ask who I voted for (and they will) that my choice was Roseanne Barr.
I want to be able to wear proudly "Roseanne Barr 2012" clothing.
Mainly though, I want "Roseanne's Nuts" to get picked up for at least one more season and I figure the more votes she gets, the better the chances.

In fact, I'm not sure I can think of a better reason to vote for a candidate than to influence my television viewing choices. I mean, that's why people voted for Huckabee and the McCain/Palin ticket isn't it?

A Little Less Stupid About Drupal RSS

2012-02-27T19:38:00.005-08:00

Sit down, because this might come as a shock.

Sometimes I can be an idiot.

Most recently I felt like an idiot when setting up drupal to serve as a blog. More specifically, I wanted to setup an RSS feed to which readers could easily subscribe. A brief search on drupal.org led me to the realization that drupal has rss built in - it's at [domain]/rss.xml.

"Great!" I thought, and so I went to my [domain]/rss.xml and found there staring at me, nay mocking me, a bunch of xml markup code.

That wouldn't do at all. Where was the pretty, shiny subscription page asking me which reader I wanted to use?

Idiot.

If, like me, you are also an idiot and have run smack dab into this very same problem, allow me to de-idiotize you (might be a word - I don't know, I'm an idiot).

What you need to do is create a free Feedburner account. Once created, you will burn a feed - and the feed you will burn is your http://[domain]/rss.xml feed. Upon burning this feed, Feedburner will give you a nice new feed url with a 'feeds.feedburner.com' domain.

Now you're probably going to need to open up your page.tpl.php file in your themes directory, find the line of code where your RSS feed icon is displayed, and add an <a href...> pointing to this feedburner feed link. That's what I had to do, but your theme may be different and, again, I'm an idiot so I don't completely vouch for this step.

Once I did all of that, I clicked on my RSS icon and sure enough, there was the pretty, shiny subscription page. It was so enticing I tried to lick the monitor and taste its goodness.

Did I mention I'm an idiot?

What a Strange Format Talk Radio

2012-02-16T07:32:00.000-08:00

My wife and I recently purchased a new car, which came with a 3-month subscription to Sirius XM radio. Frankly, since the advent of the iPad I rarely listen to the radio, but I thought I'd give it a try and see what's happening on the airwaves these days.

Music stations are pretty standard - like I remember them. I enjoy hearing some new music and older songs I'd forgotten about. What really strikes me as odd though are the talk radio stations.

As best as I can tell, this is the format for all of them:

30 second lead-in to the show, replete with a musical score, sound bites and a tag line for the show, which is usually screamed.

2-5 minutes of "witty" banter between the show's host and the producer (read: sidekick).

2-5 minutes of teasing dialogue about the "really good stuff" that the host is going to talk about later in the show.

5-10 minutes on the current topic, which consists of the host outlining the issue in an exceptionally loaded manner, then stating and re-stating his/her opinion on the issue. Something along the lines of:

"Get a load of this. Obama, or maybe we should call him 'no mama', put out a release today saying he's going to murder innocent babies while they're still defenseless in their mother's womb. What do you think about that? Did I hear that right? I mean, he's actually saying he hates infant life. Wow, just wow. This guy isn't just destroying our country, he's destroying our children and families..."

... and on and on it goes.

I'm admittedly relatively new to this whole talk radio thing, but can someone tell me if this is what it's been reduced to generally? Maybe I'm just listening to the wrong shows.

And just one more general point, unrelated to the idiocy I've been hearing; Why the long lead-ins to each show? Wouldn't it make more sense to jump right in, rather than give me, the listener, a reason to switch channels because the lead-in is so ridiculously long?

I think I know the answer to that one though - based on what I've heard to date, they have nothing intelligent to actually talk about on talk radio so they need all the filler they can get.

Sick, Lies and Office Space

2012-02-14T20:03:00.000-08:00

In many ways, the movie "Office Space" nailed the inanity and utter ridiculousness of much that goes on in the daily corporate environment. But I've always thought there was one particularly silly office game we all play that was missing from the story:

The Contagion.

The contagion - one person in the office gets sick and several others catch the illness and miss a day or two as a result.

But they don't catch it actually. They're fine and everyone knows it, but no one will ever step up and call it out. Why? Because if they do they remove this tool from their own belt for future use.

So we all express our sympathies to those who "fall ill". We ask them if they're feeling better and listen with intently feigned interest while they describe the symptoms they aren't suffering from. Actually, the interest isn't feigned - we need to know those symptoms in case we too would like to enjoy a day off.

It's accepted office practice. It's a permissible, perhaps even a condoned bald-faced lie. When you're faking the illness, and reporting on its effects to your office workers when you do finally return, you almost feel good. It's like you're helping them out, spreading the contagion, allowing them an opportunity to enjoy a break from the daily grind.

Your co-workers fake sympathy for your fake illness. Their insincere words are really a coded "thank you" for presenting them with this gift (though they'll still consider you moronic for trying to pull one over on them and the rest of the office).

The only time the contagion feels even a little wrong is when you are patient zero and you faked the initial illness only because you couldn't stomach the thought of work that day. The entire outbreak is based on a lie - your lie.

It's a conflicting place to be. On the one hand, you're pleased to be able to offer this gift to the same co-workers you faked an illness to avoid. On the other hand, it's difficult to sit idly by and watch each of them, one by one, garner sympathy for what you know without a doubt to be a lie.

In the end, it's a small price to pay for playing the game of contagion.