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11 November, 2002

Microsoft Cartoons

Microsoft is an easy target for humorists, as demonstrated by this huge collection of Microsoft-related editorial cartoons.

Posted on 11 November, 2002

Converting Photos to HTML

The text-image.com site lets you upload a graphic image, and it converts the image to HTML -- kind of like ascii art.

I created an example that shows the original JPG image, along with the converted HTML, which consists of colored 0 and 1 characters.

 NOTE: This is a fairly large document, ~750K. 

Posted on 11 November, 2002

Movielink vs. divX

SlashDot has a story about a new online movie rental service:

After nearly two years in production, Hollywood-backed Movielink is giving the green light to its online movie rental service. The Web site, a joint project of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros., will debut Monday with a limited selection of first-run and classic films from the five major motion pictures studios, in a test of the technology to select U.S. residents. Though the film studios have licensed content to other video-on-demand sites, it is the first time they've introduced a service of their own. Of course, just like the new music services, this is also only available to US residents.

Something about this seems vaguely familiar. Oh yeah, Circuit City's infamous divX product (Digital Video Express). divX was introduced in 1998, and was an embarrassing failure.

Let's take a look...

No thanks. Visiting the video rental store is not a problem for me. And if I don't feel like leaving the house, cable TV pay-per-view works fine.

Eric Norlin actually took the time to plod through the Terms of Service for Movielink, and had this to say:

...the arrogance of this site is palpable. I'm reading their terms of service. As it turns out, I cannot download a movie to a computer that is not in a "Residence." The following are excluded from the definition of residence: "hotel rooms, motel rooms, hospital patient rooms, restaurants, bars, prisons, barracks, drilling rigs and all other structures, institutions or places of transient or work-related residence as well as places, areas, structures, rooms or offices which are common areas or open to the public or to occupiers of separate Residences or for which an admission fee is charged." My hotel room is open to the public? I mean, okay, yeah, certain ladies have hotel rooms that are open to the public that charge a fee -- but they don't watch movies in there.

By the way, don't confuse the divX service described above with the divX open source codex -- which was named to mock the failure of the divX service.

Posted on 11 November, 2002

Spam Analysis

Like most people, I get a lot of spam email. But, until today, I never knew exactly how much I get. For the past seven days, I saved all of my incoming email (973 message) and did a tally. The result is shown below.

So, 76% of all of my email is unwanted worthless garbage. In term of bandwidth, the spam and virus-carrying messages amounted to 9.7 megabytes, or 83% of all of the incoming email volume. On an annual basis, this unwanted email would fill about 360 floppy discs.

Of the 702 spam messages, 346 of them (49%) were of Asian origin. My original intention was to determine the percentage of spam that was sexual in nature -- but that turned out to be far too much work.

The amount of virus-infected email has significantly decreased lately, and averaged only five per day during the seven-day period. There was a time when I was getting 25-40 per day.

In September, Jupiter research conducted as study about spam:

Since 2001, the average amount of 'spam' received per user has increased from 3.7 to 6.2 e-mails per day.

My spam works out to about 100 per day. If I received only 6.2 spam emails per day, I would triumphantly declare that the spam problem has been eradicated.

Another quote from the Jupiter study:

...consumers will receive unwanted e-mail with increasing frequency in the coming years and that by 2007 the average e-mail consumer will be exposed to more than 3,900 'spam' messages annually.

Well, I guess I'm running way ahead of the trend. At my current rate, I will receive 36,504 spam emails this year. If this trend continues, I will have abandoned the Internet by 2007.

I think I'll repeat this analysis every three months or so, and see if I can detect any trends.

Posted on 11 November, 2002

Cheryl Crow, Cover Girl

My usual Sunday morning ritual is to fetch the newspaper from the driveway, and then separate the wheat from the chaff: The ads go into a big pile, and the actual newspaper content goes into a much smaller pile.

While performing this task, Parade magazine caught my eye -- a beautiful babe (Cheryl Crow) holding an even more beautiful guitar (a red Fender telecaster). I've always thought that Parade's target demographic was the age-75+ crowd, but I guess not. Apart from Marilyn vos Savant's column, this magazine usually offers very little of interest.

At first, I thought the telecaster was a Muddy Waters tribute guitar, like the one I own. But it's not. It appears to be just a well-used American Standard tele.

Posted on 11 November, 2002

Tiny Humanoid?

Hmmm, this is very strange...

On October first of 2002, while vacationing in the Southern Chilean city of Concepcion, a group of family members found what appeared to be a small humanoid creature. The miniscule being measures about 7.2 centimeters long. It has a relatively large head, two arms with long fingers, and two legs.

Posted on 11 November, 2002

Bad Things That Can Happen to You

Currently, there are 1,226 bad things that can happen to you. But who's counting?

Oops... here's one more: Sun's rays to roast Earth as poles flip. I hate when that happens.

Posted on 11 November, 2002

Music Genres

Presented for your convenience.

• JAZZ: Five men on the same stage, all playing different tunes
• BLUES: Played exclusively by people who just woke up.
• WORLD MUSIC: A dozen different types of percussion, all going at once.
• OPERA: People singing when they should be talking.
• RAP: People talking when they should be singing.
• CLASSICAL: Discover the other 45 minutes they left out of the TV commercial
• BIG BAND: 20 men who take turns standing up, plus a drummer.
• HEAVY METAL: Codpieces and chaps
• FOLK: Endless songs about shipwrecks in the 19th century
• LILITH ROCK: I am angry and unhappy and men are around a lot.
• INDUSTRIAL: Chainsaw music played with real chainsaws.
• SHOCK ROCK: Undernourished self-mutilating androginynes with strange urges about their mothers.
• "NEW" FEMALE COUNTRY: Overpaid lap dancers with good PR.
• "NEW" MALE COUNTRY: Overpaid chubby former Schuck's clerks who all buy their shirts at the same place.
• "ALT" COUNTRY: Real country
• BRITISH BLUES: Pasty faced white guys with bad teeth who want to play the blues real bad... and that's how they play it.

Posted on 11 November, 2002