Month: April 2006

I just got an email from Play.com telling me that my order for Pearl Jam’s new album (imaginitively titled Pearl Jam) has been posted. This is despite the fact that it’s not supposed to be released until next Tuesday. I beat the system.

Was I the only person to notice this new question on their census form?

It’s time for another Top 5. This time I’m going to indulge my somewhat shameful pro-wrestling fandom and tell you my five favourite wrestling signs, those badly-drawn and badly-spelled cardboard signs that marks and smarts use to dispay their allegiances and, often, their names. I fully expect that this post will be of very niche appeal.

5. "2"

It’s lost all of its humour now due to severe over-use, but this sign was very entertaining the first time I saw it. It’s a succinct commentary on the absurd frequency of "near fall" two-counts. Taking the piss is what wrestling fandom is really about.

4. "Eddie Guerrero Mows My Lawn"

Good old fashioned racism in this one. Latino people mow other people’s lawns apparently. Funny. This sign also spawned the follow-up "I mow Eddie Guerrero’s lawn" sign as he grew in popularity.

3. "Fuck The FCC"

Unlike the previous two signs, this one didn’t lead to a host of copycats. In fact it barely appeared on TV at all. There was much pausing and re-winding involved in finding out what the person in the front row had done to attract the attention of the venue security. It turns out he had held up this sign, and got kicked out of the arena for his troubles. I hope the FCC were watching.

2. "Tazz"

Fans frequently carry signs with their names written on them and a downward-pointing arrow, presumably to help their friends and family spot them in the crowd. A heel at the time, Tazz carried on this tradition while sitting in the crowd behind the announcers’ desk disrupting the show. The only thing better than the fans taking the piss out of the show is the show taking the piss out of the fans.

1. "But He’s From The USA"

How many times did I complain about the irony of geographically-impaired fans chanting "USA" in opposition to Muhammad Hassan, often while he faced non-USian opponents, before one brilliant fan produce this sign? Absolutely brilliant.

The trailers before Ice Age 2 almost had me convinced that animated movies are dying. A group of animals take back the farm. A group of animals take back the woods. A group of animals escape the zoo. A group of animals break into a suburban neighbourhood. Yeesh. I’m glad I’m not a child anymore; the movies were much better when I was younger.

Thankfully the movie itself dispelled my fears by virtue of being abslutely wonderful. I wasn’t a huge fan of the original Ice Age, but The Meltdown is easily and by far better than its predecessor. Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel deserves an Oscar.

Soylent Red was down for some time this afternoon because of a software upgrade on the server. It’s back now. Everyone wins.

As of right now, whenever you post a comment on Soylent Red you will be given the option of getting email notifications about new comments on that post. This is about the minimum that a site can do to try to keep conversations flowing, since most people (quite rightly) will not tend to check back on an old post looking for new comments. There may be bugs, so don’t be afraid to tell me if something doesn’t work right.

Thinking and writing at the same time so I apologise if none of what I write makes any sense…

I’m pondering an alternative way of presenting Web feed subscriptions. Something different to the standard "There are N unread posts from feed foo". Are there any readers out there that will group unread posts based on their topic rather than on their source blog? I’m envisioning something that I can log into and see that "8 of your feeds have new entries talking about Google Calendar" (or whatever the big story of the moment happens to be). It wouldn’t necessarily be the best way to read all of your subscriptions, but it would be useful to get that sort of summary for anything that gets mentioned on more than, say, X% of your subscriptions in a short time. Like a sort of heads up on what’s the big news among all (or most, or many) of your subscriptions that you can instantly see before you start to read through all of the details.

As for the implementation, posts could be grouped if they contain links to the same URL; explicit meta-data tags or categories might be useful (either clustering all posts that share one or more tags or at least using them as a partial heuristic); or the system could use more sophisticated clustering techniques to try to figure out what posts are on the same topic. I think it’s reasonable to assume that a Web-based aggregator would be able to cluster posts very accurately given their access to a huge number of feeds. They could then present to each user just the subset of their results that relate to that user’s own subscriptions. Even for a desktop-based aggregator should have a good accuracy though, given the amount of data to base heuristics on (I mentioned tags and links, and even the plain text should give something useful).

Anyone else think that would be useful? Assuming a decent accuracy in grouping posts, are there any other features that could build on top of it? Finally, has this already been done and am I just making myself look dumb and out of touch by presenting it as new?

My apologies for the paucity of posts in the last week. To make up for it, here’s the week in bullet points:

• Last Wednesday I finally got around to seeing Wrestelmania. Very good overall but I think the two main events let it down a little. It’s good to see Rob Van Dam getting another push. He was the highlight if the ladder match, a fine acheivement given that Shelton Benjamin was in that match too. Everyone else was just filler. The women’s championship match was exceptional, except for the disappointing ending. They’re in the middle of by far the best women’s angle ever in WWE. It’s also one of the best angles overall at the moment. I didn’t like the Triple-H – John Cena match. I always have trouble believing that Triple-H can be beaten, but tapping out to a non-technical wrestler is just going too far. It makes Chris Benoit’s victory at last year’s Wrestlemania much less meaningful. Thankfully it seems like they’re doing a very good job of rescuing Cena’s character now. He’s even on the way to winning me back.

• Jamie finished some college work on Thursday, so I took two days off to celebrate. We spent Thursday and Friday loitering around Dublin like any self-respecting slackers. Why do I keep trying to go to the cinema on Thursdays? There’s never anything on.

• My driving instructor cancelled my lesson on Saturday morning so I went out in Dad’s car instead. This turned out to be a bad idea. The phrase "not firing on all cylinders" is not often used in a literal sense but in this case it could probably be. I stand by my assertion that the car was broken before I drove it anywhere. When you’re relying on the engine to complain at you when you do something wrong it’s not terribly helpful for the engine to spend all of its time complaining anyway.

• I spent Saturday night and the early hours of Sunday playing Gameless, a game which I now realise I still haven’t got around to describing. I guess I was waiting for Jamie to blog about it. I’m not going to try to cram its description into a little bullet point, but I will say that it’s a board game loosely based on 1000 Blank White Cards and it has been endorsed as "better than chess" by a celebrity sportsperson.

• The UCD juggling society AGM was on tuesday. It was basically just a normal session but with more people, free booze (though only in the form of cheap beer, so I didn’t partake in that particular aspect), and games with prizes. It was looking like I was going to come second in every game until someone came up with the bright idea of a club balance race. Every competitor had to balance a club on his face (nose or chin), walk (or run, for the ambitious and the stupid) from the start line to the opposite wall, touch the wall and walk (or run) back to the start. Whenever anyone dropped a club he had to start the whole race again, so essentially it was a matter of being the only person who could finish the course rather than actually having anything to do with speed. I won a set of three hackey-sacks for my efforts. It’s just as well too, because that was the last game. Yeah yeah, I know, it’s not about the winning.

All in the title. You can see the trailer on YouTube. As noted in the comments, the YouTube video has been pulled due to copyright issues. No doubt the trailer will be available elsewhere soon. It’s now available at Apple’s trailers site. Is there still time to campaign to have Conan O’Brien write this movie?

An old friend of mine was fond of saying, "Falling is the best feeling in the world. Landing is the worst." At the time I never interpreted this in anything more than a literal sense. It now occurs to me that if you replace "falling" with "falling for somebody" you get a lot closer to the truth.