aubreyturner.org

I made an offer on a house in Keller on Friday afternoon.  On Saturday, the agent called me back to say that the offer had been accepted.  So now we just have to get through all the details after the inspection is done.  Provided that the inspector is available, we should do the inspection this Friday afternoon. 

Unless the inspector finds some major problem, the current plan is to close on the house on September 30th.

I came across an interesting concept via this discussion at Samizdata.net from last week. 

LifeGem is a company that will use a person’s cremated remains (or even those of a pet) to create an artificial diamond.  I’m still not sure what to think about this.  But I’m leaning towards thinking it’s kind of creepy.

Some of the projected blockbusters have tanked at the theaters this summer.  They’re now showing outright commercials before the movies.  And the MPAA is running an “it hurts the common man” series of commercials in theaters that accuses the audience of being thieves (I refuse to give in to their overcharged rhetoric and use the term “piracy” for file sharing; if a Kazaa user starts shooting people and stealing their computers then I might reconsider).  Oh, yeah, and they released some major stinkers this summer (Gigli, anyone?).  So what does the movie industry blame for the poor performance of their movies?  Text messaging.

In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why.

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There’s absolutely nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films – sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching – and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

“In the old days, there used to be a term, ‘buying your gross,’ ” Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. “You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience.”

I swear, these people are living in a dream world (although I find it strange that they’d own up to the fact that they’re trying to buy their way out of the fact that they make crappy movies).

But I think there’s more to it that just text messaging.  A lot of people go to IMDB and rate movies after they’ve seen them.  Quite simply, the movie studios have just discovered that we live in an era of highly distributed real-time communications.  A level of communication that allows the average person to see around and through the corporate hype machine that used to be able to snow them.

Link via Slashdot.

It’s always a little amusing and a little annoying to be accused of “whining” whenever I make a post about privacy rights.  Someone calling themselves “Johanna” (the Yahoo profile identifies this person as male, though) posted a comment to this post I made on June 5th (I really need to start turning off comments on old posts).  I find “her” tone odd and it really makes me wonder if this is some sort of astroturf campaign on the part of Sunglass Hut.  I’m not outright making that accusation, but it does come to mind.  The only way this person could have found that page was to have done a web search for Sunglass Hut, since the page hasn’t been on the front of my site for over two months.  I’m starting to notice a bit of this kind of activity.  People stumble across one of my archived posts and then post a comment several months later.  In at least one other case it appears that there was some corporate interest.  In this case, I have determined that the user came in via AOL (user agent “MSIE 5.5; AOL 8.0; Windows 98” from “cache-rg05.proxy.aol.com”) after doing a Google search for “sunglass hut customer service”.

Anyway, it bugged me a little and I responded a couple of times via email.  I posted those emails to the article as comments.

I’m now down to three candidate houses.  We went back to two of them today, but we weren’t able to get into the third because their child was sick.  We’ll try again later in the week.  After that, I guess it’ll be decision time.

Anyway, between that and the other errands I’ve had to do, I haven’t had much time to write new entries.

During the last election an issue was added to the ballot for the creation of a Denton County Transportation Authority.  At the time, it was sold as simply being the creation of the authority and no new taxes would come from creating it.  I saw this for the bovine output that it was, and voted against it.  But I was in the minority and it passed.  On September 13th there will be another vote to approve a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for a light rail system between Denton and Carrollton.  This will push Denton’s sales tax rate to the state maximum of 8.25 percent.

The people pushing this boondoggle are operating under the delusion that this will somehow reduce traffic on I-35.  Mass transit is simply not an effective option in most parts of Texas.  This area is too geographically dispersed for it to make money.  Further, Texans (and I think most Americans in general) prize the independence that comes from having their own vehicles.  We go where we want when we want, rather than making ourselves subservient to the whims of the train or bus schedules.  I’ve always been wary of mass transit.  There’s a faint reek of socialism around it, which always puts me on guard.

What got me started on this topic is that the signs have started showing up around town trying to exhort people to vote for the tax.  There was also this article in this morning’s Denton Record-Chronicle.

Former Corinth Mayor Shirley Spellerberg said there’s a long list of reasons she can’t support the authority or an increase in sales taxes for any resident in the county.

“It’s not going to reduce congestion and pollution on the highways because of low ridership,” she said.

“People don’t use the HOV lanes that are there now,” she said. “If people were concerned about congestion, they’d be carpooling in the HOV lanes to get where they want to go. That’s not the way it works in Texas.”

She almost gets there, but she’s still somewhat under the influence of the “cars are evil” Kool-Aid.  If we really wanted to do something about congestion, we’d widen I-35 and get rid of that stupid HOV lane.  But she ultimately comes back around to a couple of salient points.

Opponents also said mass transit really only works in high-density metropolitan areas with centralized business districts.

“I wish they’d listen to the experts on how this hasn’t done what it was supposed to do in other areas,” Ms. Spellerberg said. “Surely someone has enough common sense to say that you don’t pour all the money down a rat hole.”

I’m hoping to be out of Denton soon, but I will be around long enough to vote against this boondoggle before I leave.  But I’m not holding out hope that it’ll be defeated.

One of my pet peeves when I was in school was the amount of money spent on college athletic programs.  I was always of the opinion that colleges were supposed to be about academic pursuits (imagine that!).  But whenever I would bring this up I was told to shut up because the athletic programs were bringing money into schools.  Having better things to do with my time than argue with football players, I never bothered to pursue the matter.  However, it was never far from my mind during the times I lived in the dorms, since it was hard to miss a bunch of drunk, loud, obnoxious, and destructive idiots in the lounge or running rampant in the halls.  Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Now comes evidence that I may have been correct.  The NCAA has released a study on the effects of funding on athletic programs.

Spending more money on college sports does not lead to more victories or alumni donations, according to a study released Thursday by the NCAA.

The two-year project, billed as the most thorough of its kind, also said that out of 117 schools in Division I-A, only seven make money.

That’s considerably lower than previously believed. The new NCAA study did not take into account state and public subsidies.

“It is myth breaking,” NCAA president Myles Brand said of the study, initiated before he took office in January.

(emphasis mine)

I don’t have a philosophical objection to college athletics, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking it makes money (at least for anyone besides the “student athletes”).

More links:
   NCAA press release
   Full report (PDF file)

If you could choose one supernatural power for yourself, what would it be?  Invisibility?  ESP?  Telekenesis?  Teleportation?  Something else?

I’ve often thought that the ability to teleport myself or objects would be pretty handy (imagine the savings on transportation ).  At the same time I wonder about the drawbacks or limits of such powers.  Invisibility could be a liability because you could get hit by someone who doesn’t know you’re there (I recall this specific situation from an episode of the X-Files ).  With ESP, would you really want to know what everyone was thinking of you?  What about the ethical implications?  What if you accidentally teleport yourself into a dangerous place (the middle of a firing range, a nuclear reactor, etc)? 

I know, this is weird, but every now and then these things just pop into my head.

Eagles soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.
   —Elf Sternberg

How hostile are you?

Here are my results:

Cynicism Score: 10

• If your score is 0 to 3, your Cynicism level is very low.
• If your score is 4 to 6, your Cynicism level is probably high enough to be of some concern.
• If your score is 7 or more, your Cynicism level is very high.

Anger Score: 10

• If your score is 0 to 3, your Anger level is very low.
• If your score is 4 to 6, your Anger level is probably high enough to deserve your attention.
• If your score is 7 or higher, your Anger level is very high.

Aggression Score: 8

• If your score is 0 to 3, your Aggression level is very low.
• If your score is 4 to 6, your Aggression level is borderline, and you may want to consider ways to reduce it.
• If your score is 7 or more, you probably need to take serious steps to reduce your Aggression level.

Total Hostility Score: 28
If your Total Hostility score is 10 or less, some research suggests that your hostility level is below the range where it is likely to place you at risk of developing health problems. Any score higher than 10 may place you in the group whose hostility level is high enough to increase your risk of health problems.

Of course the test itself suffered from an annoying lack of options (i.e. each item only had two options, and the lack of viable choices ticked me off).

Link via Jay Solo.