This Blog Is Dead
I have finally given up on this blog. R.I.P.
In its place I would like to introduce my new site, citrusboy.tumblr.com. I have been publishing for the past month “in beta,” and now it’s time to take off the wraps. It’s my very own tumblelog! Hooray!
What is a tumblelog, you ask? In essence, it is a blog without the hassle. It means posts that are shorter, but more frequent; mixed media rather than plain text; hyperlinks instead of personal rants. In other words, more fun for me as a publisher and you as a reader.
To learn more about the tumblelog concept, check out this outstanding introduction and tutorial over at Lifehacker.com. To set up your own, head to tumblr.net and choose a URL and a password. You’ll have a tumblelog up and running in about 10 seconds!
It’s so easy and addictive. In fact, Lilacmoon and George have frequently-updated tumblelogs as well. Add us all to your RSS reader, and enjoy!
Tab-completion in Mac open/save dialogs
Here is a nifty keyboard shortcut for my Mac readers (wait, that’s all my readers… all 2 of them).
via Lifehacker
San Francisco municipal WiFi
I think most people would agree that the San Francisco WiFi project is more of a publicity stunt than anything practical. But after reading the latest list of pros and cons, I’m starting to wonder: is entering a 17 year contract to provide spotty 300 kbps coverage really a smart PR move for our city? It certainly doesn’t scream “high-tech technology hub of the West Coast.”
Movies you’ll love (probably not)
If there’s one thing that bothers me about Netflix, it would be its decidedly mediocre recommendation engine. You would think that with millions of customers submitting millions of reviews and star ratings, somewhere in all that data would be the answer to the question, “what movies will Matt like?”
So far Netflix is doing a pretty poor job. Or rather, it is doing a good job at making very bad generalizations. I’ve rated a few anime highly, like Millennium Actress and Castle in the Sky; I also like a lot of the Pixar movies. Netflix interprets this as, “Matt will like anything animated.” Likewise my recent 4-star rating for Twilight Samurai seems to have convinced Netflix that I will love all samurai movies. Right now its list of “movies you’ll love” consists of mostly cartoons, cheesy anime, 50’s samurai flicks and a few Bollywood movies (huh?).
An informal survey of friends using Netflix revealed similarly frustrating experiences. So I was very surprised to read an update in the New York Times (sorry, subscription only) about the $1,000,000 contest to improve Netflix’s recommendation engine. The article reports that Netflix has one of the best systems on the market. Even more surprisingly, the brightest minds working to claim the million dollar prize have so far only managed a 6% improvement over the existing recommendation engine.
That is depressing. Surely there must be a better recommendation system out there. So I did a Google search, and I found MovieLens.
MovieLens is a free service that turns out to be a research project at the University of Minnesota. I decided to give it a shot and the results have been promising. The recommendations it has produced for me are pretty spot-on in terms of the genres I like, and I am actually interested in seeing most of movies it listed. If you are having problems with Netflix it may be worth checking out. Here are some of the finer points:
- You’ll have to reenter all your ratings into MovieLens (this took me about an hour for 264 movies)
- MovieLens lets you assign half-stars (Netflix does not)
- You can filter recommendations by genre and decade (I limited my search to movies released in the 1990’s and 2000’s)
- MovieLens can produce recommendations for a group of people: invite “buddies” onto the service and it will choose movies it thinks you will all enjoy (I haven’t tried this yet)
I am going to move some of the MovieLens recommendations to the top of my Netflix queue and see what happens. Here are my next six rentals:
- The Beat That My Heart Skipped
- In the Name of the Father
- Dear Frankie
- Little Dieter Needs to Fly
- The Return
- The Road Home
Wish me luck!
No DRM, please
Steve Jobs has some thoughts on music.
What American accent do you have?
My result:
You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
Well played, internets. Well played.
Live action Katamari Damacy
It was only a matter of time: with the help of computer graphics, someone has recreated a Katamari Damacy “roll up” using live actors. It’s a bit disturbing.
Tokyo subway advertising
PingMag this week has a great article, Top 10 ad-tricks in Tokyo’s train stations. My favorite has to be the giant tea bottles.
via Stylegala
MUNI goes from bad to worse
San Francisco has two* major public transportation systems: BART and MUNI.
BART is a commuter train that shuttles passengers along elevated tracks and through subway tunnels to and from the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, and several other cities east of San Francisco across the Bay Bridge), the San Francisco financial district, and the two major airports. It is remarkably on-time, fast, and–if your destination is downtown San Francisco–very convenient. These benefits come at a high price, though: some trips are over $7, and most trips across the Bay Bridge (the bulk of the commute) are over $3 each way.
MUNI is an all-pupose fleet of buses and streetcars that provides transit throughout San Francisco itself. A subway runs through the downtown stations; as trains exit the subway they become streetcars bound for various residential neighborhoods. Gas and electric buses run along a grid of routes that covers everything else. The fare is a flat $1.50 to go anywhere on any combination of routes, good for about 2 hours.
I’m generally happy with BART, but I tend to avoid MUNI at all costs. Its buses and trains are crowded and slow, and breakdowns and congestion in the subway cause huge delays. During one of my recent commutes, it was often faster to walk 2 miles home along a major street than to wait for a bus during rush hour.
MUNI apparently never recovered after the ridership decline that accompanied the dotcom crash in 2001. The frequency of buses and trains has been cut; fares have been increased twice in the last five years: first from $1 to $1.25, and then to $1.50. You’d think that after these drastic changes, and with a rebounding economy that the situation would be improving. But as the Chronicle reports today:
San Francisco Municipal Railway officials revealed Tuesday that service continues to slip and that the agency faces a $40 million-plus deficit next year… A year-end service report shows a troubling trend in which buses and streetcars missed their scheduled arrival times more frequently and were more crowded, forcing drivers to pass people up.
If you live in San Francisco you experience these problems with MUNI all the time, but it is sad to read that things are getting measurably worse. For a typical MUNI horror story, check out this Municide rant.
* Two useful transit systems, that is. I didn’t include CalTrain.
