i’m still alive. sorta. and this is my attempt at bringing some life into this blog, not that there was much happening here to begin with (thus making it a zombie blog)…

i’ve always wonder what happened to this job with the FDIC i applied for back in Q1 of this year. i was told by friends that i wouldn’t hear back from the powers that be for a long time, but this is ridiculous.

Thank you for applying to Vacancy #2009-SFD-B0188, Information Technology Specialist grade 13 in San Francisco. Because we did not sufficiently define the expertise needed for this position, we are unable to make a selection.

This position will soon be re-announced soon, as vacancy #2009-SFD-B0219 with more precise requirements. Please consider applying for the new announcement.
Thank you for your patience.

HR Person
Human Resources Specialist

while watching game two of the sharks/ducks playoff game, i realized why i am indifferent to professional hockey, basketball, and baseball. it’s not pacing as i previously thought (hockey being the exception). each league has too many games for me to keep track of and in my mind, there’s no great significance for each win or lose. and the longevity of the playsoffs are just as bad as the regular season. hockey and basketball extends the season by playing the best of 7 games. baseball is somewhat better doing a best of 5 games. i find myself not paying attention to the standings until the semi-finals.

sports i enjoy watching because of the fast pacing and significance of each game played:
college basketball
football

sports still up in the air
soccer both us and europe – love watching but i’m not keeping track of the standings

my netflix usage stats according to flixster. i would say that i’m getting my monies worth from the service or maybe i have too much free time.

i’m about to drop to the 1 movie/unlimited streaming plan. there’s enough interesting content available to stream that i don’t need 2 discs at a time considering it’s a two day turn around to mail back a dvd and receive a new one.

You have been a Netflix member since March 2003 and have returned 397 titles to date
You most recently returned a movie on 07/Apr/09 i.e. 2 days ago
You keep titles at home for an average of 13 days
You see 3.8 titles by DVD and 8.0 titles by Instant Watch each month
You’ve indicated that you are on the 2 at-a-time (Unlimited) plan which costs $13.99/month
Your cost/DVD rental is $3.65. Your cost/movie (including Instant Watch) is $1.18
You’re in the 31st percentile. i.e., 31% of FeedFlixers pay less than you per movie

lately my mind has been on twitter. i can’t help it with all the coverage tweeter has seen over the past years. i’ve been skimming a number of analyses on why twitter is popular, relevant, and how they could generate revenue. now i’m wondering if there’s a really good way to measure one’s ranking in the twitterverse.

i did a quick search on twitter rankings and came across the following systems:

twitterholic – there’s not much detail on how rank is determined other than them calculating individual statistics on each twitter user. from the looks of it, ranking is largely determined by the number of followers one has. i rank 265,485th. i have no idea what that means.

twitterrank – they compare themselves to google’s pagerank… part of their calculation takes into consideration the number of replies for a given user. that makes sense… at least to some degree. my twitterrank is 16.15 and i’m approximately in the 36.55 percentile. like twitterholic, i don’t know what that number means. does it take into consideration the total number of replies directed to me? how about the number of replies from different/unique users?

tweeterboard – the site is down but from what i found it measured influence by monitoring conversations. it sounds similar to twitterrank. would have loved to see this in action.

i’m giving up on figuring out one’s twitter ranking. building off of tweeterboard and twitterrank, i am interested in measuring the reach of a tweet. for a given user, what’s the likelihood my tweet will be seen by everyone following me. off the top of my head, some factors that could determine a message’s reach:

1. active audience – are my followers active twitterers? if they haven’t tweeted recently (let’s say 1-2 weeks), chances are they won’t see my message.
2. how many other people are my followers following? these people are the competition. more so if they frequently tweet relegating my tweet off the screen to the “next page”.
3. how frequently do i tweet over the course of a day? an hour? if i’m too chatty, people will start ignoring my tweets. the same goes with carrying too many conversations. i view conversations as a one sided discussion that people will ignore.
4. how many people have retweeted my message in the past week or two? retweeted messages can significantly expand the reach of a message.

am i missing anything? i’ll add to the list as new criteria come to mind.

bit.trip beat grabbed my interest the moment i saw the trailer. it has the qualities of other games that i hold in high regard: super simplistic game play, a retro art style harkening back to the days of the atari 2600, and a bit of quirkiness with the guitar hero like game design. i bought the game from nintendo’s wii store last friday and my expectations for the game were blown away.

the game is a souped up version of pong. you know, that game from the 70s. you move the paddle up and down by holding the wii controller horizontally and rotating it up and down. objects, let’s call them blocks, come flying across the screen and it is your job to send them back (or ‘repel’ as the manual says). if you successfully connect with a block a sound effect is made. when the block leaves the screen another sound effect is made. the series of blocks and sound effects together make a really interesting song that is easy to get into. also, if you hit enough blocks, the sound effects will change from sounding like an atari 2600 to something more modern (yet dated) like a super nintendo or sega genesis. miss enough blocks and the game will revert to sounding like an atari 2600, eventually looking like an atari 2600, and then the game is over.

the first time you play the game, it feels like there’s nothing complex about the game. this is pong we’re talking about, right? wrong. the game quickly becomes increasingly difficult. you start moving the paddle up and down the screen at a frantic pace not really knowing what to expect. after going through the cycle of losing, restarting, losing, and restarting once more, the game starts to become more familiar. you’re not reacting to what appears on the screen anymore. you know what is about to appear and how the song is supposed to go. the gameplay suddenly turns into a song and dance between you and the blocks as you glide the paddle to the proper place.

bit.trip beat has that addictive quality where you can’t help but say to yourself, “one more time” each time you lose. the game is available to download through nintendo’s wii store under the wiiware category and is an exceptional bargain for $6.

sony disappointed gamers everywhere by not dropping the price of the playstation 3. i’m confused as to what sony is trying to accomplish with the playstation 3.

sony is constantly touting they have a 10 year plan for the system (much like how the cylons had a plan) along the same lines as the original playstation and playstation2. the difference here is that the original playstation and playstation2 were hot sellers since their release dates. not everyone is wanting a playstation 3 this time around.

the playstation 3 has an identity crisis. is it a game machine or is it a movie machine? thanks to the high development costs of games, there aren’t that many unique must have games on the playstation3. on the movie side, i don’t believe the market for blu-ray movies is that terribly large (i should look up the numbers on it). there’s not much incentive to purchase a blu-ray movie player as dvd quality movies seem to be fine for most everyone.

besides adjusting price, there’s not much sony can do to change the market perception of the playstation 3. one thing that comes to mind is sony needs better marketing or something more slick, even if it’s on the verge of being a lie. playstation 2’s emotion engine promised to bring real life experiences (or was it movie like experiences) to video games. that’s a concept everyone could grasp no matter how far fetched the idea was. with the playstation 3, sony was marketing the cell processor and blu-ray. those things are too tangible and not many people understood/understand why these technologies are better than the playstation 2 or xbox 360 other than being bigger and faster.

i’d love to see sony adjust their plan for the playstation 3. heck, i’d love to purchase a playstation 3 myself.

as earlier reported by various tech news sites, microsoft’s encarta is going the way of the dodo bird. wikipedia might have played a role in encarta’s demise as suggested by others but wikipedia’s popularity is given too much credit. wikipedia didn’t play a significant role in shutting down encarta; broadband killed encarta.

encarta was brought to market in the early/mid 90s just as cd drives were becoming affordable. anyone remember the MPC (multimedia pc) consortium? back then, mass information about everything had to be stored on cd as dial up access was the predominant way to access the internet (in extreme limited fashion), the web was still a toy, and not everyone was online yet. people bought the yearly updates for the encyclopedia on a disc (encarta, grolier, and some other one i forget) because it was relatively cheap and it was an extremely efficient and easy way to have the latest information at your finger tips.

in the late 90s and early 2000s broadband (and by extension the web) was gaining acceptance in american households. with the wealth of information online, who needed to buy the early update of the encyclopedia on disc? instead of having one authoritative source for everything, there are millions of authoritative sources, each with their own area of expertise!

other factors leading to the decline of encarta:

there isn’t anything funny about natasha richardson’s death but i could help but giggle at this sentence in the nytime’s follow up article.

The description of Ms. Richardson’s behavior after she fell fits with the initially subtle symptoms of the condition, said a brain surgeon not involved in her care, Dr. David J. Langer, the director of cerebrovascular neurosurgery at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, Beth Israel Medical Center and Long Island College Hospital, and an assistant professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University.

more than half of the sentence is used make dr. david j. langer sound like a very credible source on the issue. i’m sure he is but still…

three minor things i don’t like about facebook’s like feature.

1. the name like. yes, it’s natural to say aloud but there will be a point where people starting using it as a noun or verb (take your pick) and cause some confusion about the context of what’s being said.

2. unless i missed it or it’s hidden somewhere, there’s no way for me to see everything i liked (see #1).

3. this is really picky, but shouldn’t there be a dislike button? the only time i could really see this come into play is when people post items related to politics or religion.

update: Make that 4 things…

4. You can like your own postings. Shouldn’t it be assumed that one’s own postings are considered ‘quality’ submissions by the poster?

i finally saw ladies in lavender late last night. i say ‘finally’ not because it’s a movie that i’ve been wanting to see for the longest time nor was it my (more high brow) friends bugging me to see it but because the disc has been sitting around for nearly a month from netflix. it’s not a highly interesting movie that i would recommend to anyone unless they’re a fan of british accents or watching the golden girls. about three quarters the way through the movie, i couldn’t help but notice a strong resemblance between the plot of the movie and an article published in the washington post about barely anyone recognizing great talent playing music on the streets, more specifically the world’s best violinist playing on the streets of DC during morning rush hour. go ahead and read the article, it’s pretty fascinating. at the end of the movie, one of the first credits was “Performance by Joshua Bell”.