I’ve never understood much of the logic that goes into the NFL Draft. There are plenty of people making plenty of money whose job it is to formulate these draft plans but some of them just seem bizarre to me. Most curious the search for NFL “potential” instead of actual results.  This is particularly noteworthy in the 1st round of the Draft.

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This past weekend was the NFL Draft, a a relatively boring process in principal that has turned into a two-day media blitz. I TiVo’d the draft thinking I would fly through it and get an overview of how things shook out but ended up watching 3.5 hours of the first round.  It’s amazing how much analysis goes into the nuances of a player (and how oddly wrong some of it is) and the repercussions of a given pick on a certain team.   I tend to think of everything I do and see in the same analytical style and found the draft much more compelling than I thought I would.

Along the same lines, I’m the sort of person that finds reading the game recaps online much more interesting in general than watching the games live.  So Saturday night before bed, I brought up Sports Illustrated and ESPN to read their draft summaries of the first & second rounds.   For two companies that usually take the lead in adopting technology into their coverage, they really need to get rid of one really annoying and out-of-date feature they have on their pages:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”120″ />

For those who aren’t programming nerds like me, that little tag in the head section of an HTML page forces the page to refresh the page every 2 minutes (120 seconds). It’s very difficult to read down through a page when the page refreshes and moves back to the top every X seconds. Both SI and ESPN have this annoyance turned on.

I want my content to be as fresh and updated as possible but that’s why years ago, people started using XMLHttpRequest — it allows you to load the content dynamically without forcing a page refresh. Then, use a little styling and coloring to indicate updated content. Easy enough.

SI, you’re behind the times. You too, ESPN. End Web Developer Rant.

Other than the draft, the big news this weekend is that the USA is about to have an infestation of pigs inhabiting our air ducts.  That’s what people seem to be searching for on Google these days.

Luckily for me, my mother-in-law is a VIP in the hospital world so she let me know that it was actually swine flu I should be freaking out about.

Free weekends seem to be a rarity for Christina and I.  Even when they do occur, something tends to come up or the weekend passes in a blur of wasted time.  This past weekend was one of the elusive free AND excellent weekends.  Christina and/or I got some yard work done, saw a movie, finished setting up my new Drobo, painted the bedroom, went to the park, played 18 holes of golf, ate apple pie, caught up on some television, and had dinner with her family.  Not a bad way to spend the last few days!

Friday night, I went out with some friends to see Monsters vs. Aliens, in 3D.  It had received pretty good reviews and I definitely thought it was a pretty entertaining movie overall.  They took a fun but simply hypothesis: Monsters!  Fighting Aliens!  and turned it into a quick feature film.  Very little time is spent fleshing out the characters or developing the story but… it was an enjoyable, if not the most memorable, couple of hours spent in the theater.  I had heard MvA was the first Dreamworks movie that compared to the Pixar movies and I would tend to agree.  

On the other hand, the sticker shock of the movie ticket was quite memorable.  I’ve read that the movie theater business has been struggling for years even as movie ticket sales have grown to enormous portions.  Despite being a movie aficionado, I very rarely make the journey to the theater.  After paying $14.50 for my movie on Friday night, I don’t seen any reason to increase my theater attendance.  $11/ticket + $3.50 for the 3D “bonus” and you’ve matched the cost of my Netflix subscription per month!  I do like the 3D and IMAX presentations theaters are now offering — a legitimate improvement over my home theater that typically movies do not have — but the cost is a bit much.

Because of those movie prices, there are few movies that are compelling enough that I do with to see them in the theater — and that is only because I would like to see them sooner versus later.  Obviously, Pixar movies are almost universally worth the money for me to go see in the theater.  The occasional Dreamworks movie — Shrek (the original), despite some elitist naysayers, was a great idea and an excellent movie — also tends to make the list.  The fact that these studios are CGI-Animation studios has little influence on my decision but it seems to be a big deal to other people.  I recall sitting in a theater several years ago for a movie and nearly every preview was for an upcoming animated movie, including one of the Pixar movies.  After several of these animated movie previews, a lady in front of me exclaimed “Aren’t there any adult movies coming out?”  For whatever reason, that has always struck me as odd.   I don’t equate cgi/animation with “kids” movies or classify “real” movies as adult movies.  I would consider any Pixar movie to be a genuine contender for Best Picture any year.

From the Halls of Montezuma,
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country’s battles
In the air, on land, and sea;
First to fight for right and freedom
And to keep our honor clean;
We are proud to claim the title
Of United States Marines.

Until recently, I think most people in the U.S. assumed piracy died in the Age of Sail, years before the U.S. even existed as an independent nation, but piracy has existed to varying degrees even to modern times.  The Straights of Malacca near Singapore have long been a haven for piracy but the dramatic rise of piracy off the Horn of Africa has been shocking.   As bad as our economy seems to be, it’s disturbing to think of how far a society can fall when the only way to sustain a living is to resort to piracy.  It’s hard to dissuade the lifestyle when the Somalian pirates who succeed can live like kings and are considered celebrities in their hometowns. (more…)

Marriage is a hot topic.  Gay marriage, marriage rights, “what happens in the bedroom… “, etc, etc.   These all pop up in the news regularly.  Should ____ be allowed?  What about ____ ?   Maybe I’m missing something but I’m curious why marriage is a legal institution at all?

I’m living the hypocrisy so I can appreciate the tax benefits from being married… but I don’t understand why I deserve those tax benefits.  Regardless, not only taxes but health care, visitation, power of attorney, inheritance, citizenship… all of these are heavily influenced by your marital status.  The religious folks out there believe marriage is sacred… but it seems  but in the past month, I’ve had two friends reveal their marriage plans.  Neither was due to any dying desire to rush into marriage — it was simply for the health care.  A business transaction, nothing more.

It seems to me that if marriage is a sacred institution, which it should be, it should be removed from government supervision.  I’m not the only one who seems to think this way.  Replace it with a legally binding agreement unrelated to the religious ceremony known as marriage.  Marriage can then remain a bond between a husband and wife and the government can legislate w/o getting bogged down in the religious ramifications of laws.

Recently, Facebook altered everyone’s home page to provide a more real-time, “life streaming” type of view of your friends.   The changes are a direct adoption of the Twitter phenomenon, a company Facebook tried but failed to acquire earlier this year.

While the Facebook community revolted, as they do each time Facebook changes, I think the whole idea of “life streaming” is fascinating. I learn a lot more about my friends by observing their behavior and activity online than I do from “Likes”, “Dislikes”, “Relationship Status”, etc (the typical stuff found on a social network).

Even better than viewing miscellaneous status updates from my friends are viewing the items they find interesting.  I use Google Reader to aggregate news and it has a built-in method for quickly sharing articles from the web.  That is automatically displayed to all my friends and vice-versa when they find interesting articles.  I use Reader more than even Search or Maps.   The feed of items along the right pane or via the “My Life In Links” tab above is an RSS feed of my Google Reader Shared Items.

The consistent problem with life streaming is that activity on one online site doesn’t show up on my activity at another site.  There are any number of approaches to resolve this including propagation websites like Ping.fm, aggregators such as FriendFeed, multiple site-posting functions in applications, and any number of others.  They all have varying degrees of usefulness but all seem to be lacking in some way.

In the meantime, I’ve been testing various items.

• Google Reader RSS/Atom Feed or click the “My Life In Links” above.
  
• FriendFeed or click the “FriendFeed” tab above.

Hollywood and DC have always had a curious relationship, typically involving actors or directors spouting unsolicited opinions about the current state of affairs.  On occasion however, some thespians take the next step and actively get involved in the political process.  Hollywood is typically considered left-leaning but surprisingly, the arguably most famous and successful of these actor-turned-politicians are two conservatives, Reagan and Schwarzenegger.

Christina added “House” to our regular rotation of shows awhile back.  It’s pretty entertaining even though it tends to have the same general storyline every episode.   The show from this week was a bit different and seems to have been developed “on-the-fly”.   Kal Penn, aka Kumar, aka Taj, played Dr. Kutner in House up until this week when he unceremoniously shot himself.  No rhyme or reason as far as the plot of House goes but apparently the star of stoner movies has decided to take his talents elsewhere.   More specifically, to his new job as Associate Director in the Office of Public Liaison for the Obama administration.  I suppose it’s no weirder a job transition than Schwarzenegger’s path from body-builder to action star to Gubernator but it’s definitely odd.

In my opinion, House has struggled a bit recently.  The suicide episode from this week was almost completely devoid of any humor (fittingly, perhaps) but I don’t watch House for the drama; I watch it to catch House’s latest one-liners.  These have been few and far between recently and the removal of Kutner from House is not going to help.  Kutner was probably the most entertaining character other than House himself.

I actually thought quite awhile about what to title this entry.  It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written anything and I didn’t want to burst back on the scene with a potty-mouth.  I get mocked for it (especially from the “I shame sailors” girl I married) but in general, I try to avoid “irrational exuberance”.  However, the last day or so has tried my patience and settling for “Curiosity killed the computer” instead of more colorful metaphors is a triumph.  

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