William Reardon’s Blog

MSN is running a list of the top 10 schools requiring the least study.

Oddly, Northwestern is missing.

Ah, yes, as if not enough people associated my hometown with a prision, it’s apparently the new setting for Fox’s Prision Break. A quote from one of the actors:

I think working in Joliet lends the project a degree of authenticity and integrity that you can’t put a price on. It’s a character itself. I’m not sure I believe in the idea of haunted houses, but if there were ever a place that’s haunted, it would be Joliet.

– “Joliet prison is a ‘Break’-out star”

Man. At least Joliet Jake was cool.

I imagine a fawning aunt or uncle showing pictures and so on of a niece or nephew is up there with watching someone else’s vacation slides, but I simply cannot resist.

Watching my nephew, Quinn, learn to jump is cutest damn thing out there.

It seems Perl doesn’t allow you to create aliases to dynamically variables. Take the following:

{
  my ($foo, $bar);
  *foo = *bar;

  $foo = 10;
  $bar = 20;

  print "foo: $foon";
  print "bar: $barn";
}

What I want is for both $foo & $bar to equal 20, but, if you enable warnings, the warning clearly indicates the aliasing is taking place on global versions of $foo & $bar, not the ones scoped to our block.

Is there someway to do this that I’m missing?

Update: One for the friendly LA Perl Mongers pointed out I had flipped Dynamic & Lexical scoping and pointed me to Lexical::Alias.

I’m a big fan of Public Enemy.

I bought their 3rd album, Fear of a Black Planet literally 4 or 5 times. It seems my older sister didn’t share my love of the PE, so she systematically destroyed the CD each time I purchased it and I systematically re-purchased it. My way of raising my fist to the Man. Kids today with their rippers and all have no idea the oppression their elders had to suffer.

Anyway, somewhere along the way Amazon figured out I like hip-hop and suggested I pre-purchase Power to the People and the Beats: Public Enemy’s Greatest Hits. (God bless their recommendations.) It showed up a few weeks ago & it’s quite good. Granted, I already own their 2nd through 7th albums so I had most of what was on there, but for the most part I would agree with their selections. I wish they would have included “Party for Your Right to Fight” as well as Anthrax’s “Bring the Noise”, but there’s only so much you can fit onto a CD.

If you even remotely like Public Enemy, it’s worth picking up.

Having said that, there’s just one catch, the explicit version isn’t. Some of the swearing is missing. And I don’t mean the swearing that should be missing (e.g., the bleep over “motherfuck him & john wayne” from “Fight the Power”). I’m talking about things like “fuck the forty ounce” from “Give it up.” It’s just not there. I mean come on… “<blank> the forty ounce”? That doesn’t even make sense.

At first I thought I might have purchased a clean version of the CD, but there, on the front jacket, is the explicit lyrics warning. And a song or two latter there’s Flavor Flav’s “kick that shit”… a bit latter, yep, there’s Chuck saying fuck. So what the fuck?

I’m not really sure how to approach this. Should I complain? How would you call up a record label and complain about this? I’m sure they have a department ready to handle complaints about bad language in music, but is that even the same group you talk to about the lack of it? Are they even going to understand my call?

Them: “Sir, you’re telling me you’re not upset that Chuck-D is swearing, but that he isn’t?”
Me: “That’s right.”
Them: “Sir, I’m not sure I can help you. We can’t tell him to swear just for you.”
Me: “No, look, I don’t want him to swear just for me. I want him to swear like he’s supposed to.”
Them: “Sir, I don’t know what kind of fetish you have, but we’re not getting Chuck-D to talk dirty to you. Good day.” *click*
Me: “Fuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkkkkk!”

After that I’d be in the same place now, only they’d think I’m sorta perv. Those fuckers probably sell info on who calls them to mailing lists, and I don’t know what kind of mailing list you’d be on if the they thought I wanted Chuck-D to talk dirty to you on the phone. Actually I think I do, and I’m sure I don’t want to be on that mailing list.

At the same time, if any of you I know could do me a favor and date Flavor Flav to ask him what’s up, I’d appreciate it.

Erika, Diana, Liza… I’m looking at you.

The Freakonomics guys have a couple of interesting posts relating to “peak oil” over on their blog:

• “Peak Oil:” Welcome to the media’s new version of shark attacks
  http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/08/peak-oil-welcome-to-medias-new-version.html

• Betting on Peak Oil
  http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/08/betting-on-peak-oil.html
  

They pull apart a poorly reasoned article form Sunday’s New York Times magazine on the topic, explaining how people tend to not understand the theory of supply & demand, and we needn’t panic over the thought of the cost of oil suddenly jumping to $200.

Kinda makes we wanna go out & buy a hummer.

Bravo, HBO.

I don’t know if Six Feet Under will replace Sopranos as my favorite TV show of all time, but it’s certainly a worthy challenger.

It was sad watching Nate die a few episodes back, but, in the end, it was a terrific concept on the part of the writers. First, it gave one final storm for us to see the family through — a logical breakpoint as the rest of the family members began their lives anew. Second, he wasn’t totally gone — much like how when we lose someone, their impression on our life is still there, answering our wandering mind’s questions about what they would say or do if they had still been around.

Hats off to the writers & producers. No episode stands out as cookie-cutter formulaic. I almost shit myself the episode where David was kidnapped. And David & Keith somehow became my favorite TV couple along the way.

If Rome is this good, I tell you, I want to have HBO’s babies.

We’re looking for a few ass-kickers to join my team in Yahoo’s Content Match, specifically focusing on things RSS. The job description hasn’t hit careers.yahoo.com just yet, but here it is in the meantime:

---

Take RSS to the next level. Enhance the Publisher experience. Develop, experiment & learn how to monetize XML syndication.

Bring your drive, passion, creativity, experience, curiosity, and sense of adventure to one of the most competitive teams at Yahoo! Brainstorm creative new cost effective platforms to meet ridiculous capacity, performance, business optimization, relevance and scalability goals.

Apply your knowledge to broad architectural and business goals, create those architectures and those goals, drive the business. Know how to cross pollinate ideas to change the landscape. Make intractable problems tractable. Make those you work with more effective.

If you’re excited by insane scaling latency capacity requirements and can think up solutions to complex problems with low milliseconds time constraints whilst serving a billion searches a day you’re close. If you’re Bayesian statistics savvy and are intrigued and challenged by the hidden meanings in the web then you should talk to us. If this makes you nervous don’t waste our time.

Responsibilities:

Deliver functional high capability systems that meet architectural, performance and design goals. Drive test driven development lifecycles that provides zero defect, perfect quality, high performance systems to production.

Be prepared to do what it takes to win.

Skills/Qualifications:

Required:

• Mature team player able to absorb divergent, possibly conflicting ideas and find the optimal solution
  
• Creative flexible curious thinker with broad experience from which to draw novel solutions and new solution patterns
  
• Understanding of XML Syndication (RSS, Atom) and the blogsphere Experience with advanced development process methodologies
  
• Experience with large scale system design that are optimal for large scale operations, systems scaling and capacity
  
• Capable of complex system dependency analysis and decoupling
  
• Ability to analyze system and business processes for capability extraction and abstraction
  
• Ability to abstract core capabilities to reusable components
  
• Ability to communicate designs both written and verbal
  
• Ability to analyze business needs and distill to technical solutions
  
• Insane attention to detail
  
• Detailed system performance analysis capabilities
  
• C++/C low level server precision coding
  

Desired:

• Broad experience with multiple technologies
  
• Highly scalable distributed system experience
  
• Kernel level coding expertise
  
• DB design expertise
  
• Semantic content analysis expertise
  
• Experience in IR
  
• Bayesian statistical probability models
  

---

If you’re interested, drop me a line.

Holy crap! My Calvin & Hobbes RSS feed has over 100 subscribers on Bloglines alone!

Now if only This American Life would release their content in mp3, we could create a podcast & I’d be in RSS nirvana.