Geek On The Mountain

Sci Fi’s Mad Mad House wrapped up last night. This is a reality show that started off with 10 people living in a house with 5 “Alts” (a witch, a voodoo priestess, a modern primitive, a naturist, and a vampire), who were charged with putting the guests through a spiritual awakening as they competed for $100,000.

I have to say that it was definitely entertaining. I have to also say that it didn’t seem genuine to me at all until the last two episodes (or the last one 2 hour episode, as it was aired), which was rather disappointing. It’s not to be entirely unexpected, but I don’t think they really captured what was going on very well. They started off with 10 people who were basically told they could compete for $100,000, but not what they’d be doing. As such, they ended up with a bunch of people who were totally unfit to experience what was going on. There were some obvious people who just weren’t cut out that were tossed right away, but there was one person who suprised me, and that was Lonna. She basically didn’t participate in anything that was going on for the first couple of weeks. She would have surely been cut if there weren’t some others who were even more unfit. Everything seemed to conflict with her religion. She did open up. She changed a lot, although at the end she didn’t participate in a wiccan ritual, which was a showing that she wasn’t really changed. At any rate, she was a genuine suprise, but she was cut.

Going into the last two episodes, I didn’t feel like any of the three people were really much in the way of what they were looking for. The person who actually won, Jamie, didn’t really show much in the way of changing (at least to what I had saw on camera). Another person was an out and out fake who took every chance during “confessionals” to talk about what strategy he was using so he could get the money. It was pretty funny. This guy even had the alts fooled for the most part (particularly the gullible witch). The last person seemed somewhat fake, but she was a strong competitor and hence had done well. We didn’t really know much about what was going on inside of her head (and I don’t think anyone else did either). That all changed. I think in the end we really saw that a change had taken place, particularly in the last two (but perhaps in the third fake person as well) people. I suppose it hit close to home for me in some ways, but I’ll talk more of that at a later date.

It was generally funny watching the alts get duped by the guests. Like I said, the witch was terribly gullible and she has a weird attitude/temper/bitchiness about her, which even extends to annoy the other alts at times. Some of them were also dumb enough to listen to the guests. One guy got eliminated for his “addiction” to cold medicine. It was his own fault really. One of the alts approached him and accused him of this. He said he really didn’t have any addiction, but he played along because it would look good if he were able to overcome this “addiction.” It would show he was changing. It worked out great for him. For all of a week or two. Then another guest told that same alt that he was still using (though he claims he wasn’t). Suddenly he was a liar and he was booted. It was great. Not only did he bring it all upon himself (I love irony), but like I said before, the alt was dumb enough to trust the guests. As if they wouldn’t just make something up to get someone eliminated. Duh.

At any rate, I think it could have been better throughout, but it certainly ended well and it was entertaining throughout. I hope they come back with another one.

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What a wacky day. There was snow on the ground when I got up this morning. Worst yet, it was still there when I was on my way to class at quarter after 9. It was a balmy 32 degrees out. It hit all the way up to 37 when I was on my way to work. What a deal. The best part is that tomorrow it is supposed to be 65…

Class today was at least somewhat fun. That is to say, we were doing instructor evaluations, and I got to nail my one professor (the comments left sum him up very well) that sucks. I usually don’t actually write anything down for the evals, but I really had to here.

I just learned about referrer spam last week. I had been getting referrers that were (basically) porn blogs, and I really couldn’t figure out why exactly, but they were blogs, so I figured they had something someplace on them that showed recently updated blogs or something. Plus, I wasn’t getting huge traffic from them anyways. Then suddenly, in one day, I got 95 “referrals” from some porn search engine. Of course this didn’t make any sense at all, and I started digging around and found out about referral spam. I’m still not entirely clear how it works (that is to say, that day I got 95 referrals, but yet I didn’t see that kind of a jump in actual hits). On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure I really want to know either. I learned some things about mod_rewrite and now our friends are banned. What fun, What fun.

Speaking along the lines of spam, I finally got a comment on an entry last week as well. The URL that was left looked a little too porn like, so I killed it. Comment spam, oh joy. It makes me think about installing MT Blacklist now… but then again I haven’t had another since, so I won’t worry about it too much.

I did something else that was fun the other day as well. I enabled compression via php. This should cut a lot of size off of the main page as it tends to be 30k-40k of html alone. I was seeing it compress down to about 10k the other day. Given, I don’t really notice a big difference, since it takes me about .1 seconds to download the extra 20k, if that long, but for anyone unlucky enough to be stuck using dial up, you might notice a few seconds faster load time.

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I just can’t help it. I just watched the Simpsons and I saw something interesting and I just had to check it out.

In the episode, which is basically just Homer and Marge trying to get some time away from the kids so they can have sex, there is extensive amounts of traveling being done. It is revealed to us that they are using a Viza credit card. Most notably, the card is issued to Ned Flanders and is numbered 8525 4941 2525 4158. Bart and Lisa happen to have a card issued to Rod Flanders (not bad for a 10 (ish) year old), numbered 8525 4941 2525 4158, the same as the other. I thought I could at least use this as an excuse to look up the credit card format and see what it all means. I came across a rather extensive article (which is typical for that site I might add) that covers all kinds of stuff about credit cards, including the number format. What I find is that any actual Visa card (although this is a Viza) would have a number starting with 4. In fact, none of the major cards will start with an 8, so the number pretty much means nothing. Not a big surprise. I should also add, that as of this writing, google turns up nothing but lists of numbers for the CC# with spaces, and returns no hits at all if you remove the spaces or add terms like “simpsons” or “flanders.” Once again, no big surprise, but it shows that there isn’t an immediately obvious pattern when taken as a whole. I can’t help but think that they have some sort of pattern. It just feels that way. It is sufficient for 8 ASCII chars in hex, but the numbers are in the wrong range to be actual letters. On the other hand, speculation like that is largely pointless. I’m no cryptographer, so I would hardly know where to start trying to figure out how text would be encoded into that. Furthermore, it seems most likely that the numbers were just taken completely at random (or at least from sufficiently obscure sources to make it be more or less that way).

I must also confess to having an ulterior motive for writing about this. Don’t get me wrong, this is the kind of thing I would just waste my time on anyways, but I had a thought. You could call it a test really I suppose. The thing is, I have received more searches for people looking for information on lisathemovie.com than anything else. It makes perfect sense to me too. It’s just other people, not unlike me, who wonder what basis in reality that might have so they go poking around the internet looking. The difference in that case is of course that it is a website, so people naturally go online to look for it period. I’m not sure if I’ll get anything of the same response from credit card 8525494125254158, but it seems worth a shot. Not that I’m trying to draw in all kinds of useless traffic about some pointless topic, but more so in that I am curious as to how much people (like me) actually search around for this crap

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When we got home from the zoo and such the other day, I watched We Were Soldiers. I had TiVoed it because I could basically. I never particularly wanted to see it, but I was browsing through movies and saw it, and I generally like Mel Gibson, so I figured I’d give it a go.

I have to say that it was really good. If I’m understanding it correctly, it is an account of the first major battle fought by the US in Vietnam. It’s mostly really just one giant bloodbath when you get right down to it. That’s not really what the movie is about (though it kind of is), but that is what fills most of the time. Normally I’d call that entertaining. Even here I still will. But it’s more realistic and engaging then what you’d see in most movies. This makes it all rather disturbing.

The interesting thing is that even though it is a movie that is more less completely a war and fighting, I would really call it an anti-war movie. It’s kind of saying here’s how war is (not that I can even begin to presume to make the comparison to real life based on my person experience). Have a look. See how stupid it is? That’s what it says to me. In the end, we basically have both sides portrayed as being human, and both commanders (those on the field anyways) walking away feeling like they lost the battle, and both realizing that it won’t get any better and that in the end, nothing will be accomplished except a bunch of people will wind up dead. That’s the moral of the story if you will. I agree completely. My thoughts exactly. To sum it up, war is dumb.

I don’t know how accurately it portrays the actual Vietnam war. I don’t think it really has anything to do with Vietnam though. It could be set in any war in any time period and still mean the same thing. The movie isn’t about any particular war. It is about war in general.

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Last week I happened across the Hollywood Stock Exchange. I thought it was rather interesting. It basically is a stock market for movies. The simple gist of it is that you can buy stock in upcoming movies, actors, and directors. They adjust the prices based on how movies are doing and it looks like the movies themselves cash out 4 weeks after being released. They give you $2 million to start investing with and there are stats listings to see how you’re doing. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic idea. I haven’t done a whole lot so far, but I think it’s at least an interesting idea.
It would be really cool if it was expanded to cover TV and perhaps even music as well.

On another note, I have heard (rumors….who knows if it’s true or not) that movie execs will actually look at the numbers here. The idea being it’s kind of like a feedback mechanism. If lots of people have bought stock in an upcoming movie, they know that there is a lot of interest out there for instance.

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