Tiny Gods

They just had to push their luck! Right when I was starting to feel like revoking their temporary Hall of Shame membership, Burger King had to go an do this.

Yes, friends, Burger King is now in the cologne business. That on its own isn’t too terrible. It could just be a ridiculous little marketing stunt. Hell, I might have even been tempted to buy a bottle just for the sake of novelty. But they had to take it a step too far with this:

The King's New Clothes

That isn’t an image that I want in my head! It is especially bad considering that they are releasing these ads along side their Whopper Virgin campaign. What does this say to me? It says “The King is going to rape the planet!”

For disturbing advertising, I hereby extend Burger King’s Hall of Shame membership!

I’ve added Google’s Friend Connect to the site (it’s on the sidebar to the right –>). This is just a quick note to say that Yes, you should sign in and add this site. Also, if you’re new to Friend Connect (everyone is) please check your profile and decide if you want your real name and personal info broadcast openly. The defaults are sketchy, so be careful out there if you want to.

This is part one of a two part hall of shame post, the second of which can be found here.  First up is Westinghouse.  Last summer, I purchased a Westinghouse 47″ HDTV.  Last night, I broke it.  I accept full responsibility for breaking my TV, however, the lack of customer service is what gets ol’ W this hall of shame nod. (more…)

This is the second of my two hall of shame posts for the day.  I previously spoke of the poor service I ran into with the manufacturer of my now deceased TV, and the problems didn’t stop there.  This hall of shame nod goes to GE Money Bank, fine purveyors of the “Amazon Store Card”, not to be confused with the Amazon Visa, which is issued by Chase. (more…)

I have gone through several long periods of time without watching TV over the last 10 years. I generally prefer to spend my time with movies and video games. Sometimes I’ll stumble upon or be introduced to a show that I absolutely fall in love with. Such shows turn me into a television viewer again. Then some asshole has to ruin it by deciding that these shows aren’t good shows, and they should be destroyed.

It happened when FOX canned Arrested Development. It happened when HBO canceled Carnivale. It happened when CBS pulled the plug on Jericho. Now ABC is going to kill off Pushing Daisies and I am furious.

Pushing Daisies is among the most unique TV series I’ve ever seen. Absolutely everything about it is excellent. I won’t bother explaining the story or offering up a review since it’s not going to even survive through an entire second season, but it got me in front of my TV. This is a show that was nominated for 11 Emmy Awards this year (it won 3) and has won several other awards during its lifetime. I think that’s pretty impressive for a show that was created during the season of the writers’ strike. It never had a proper chance to attract a large viewer-base early in the game and now, even though it is still receiving much critical acclaim, ABC isn’t going to buy any new episodes because the ratings are too low.

Why do I even bother watching when any show that I really get into is inevitably going to be crushed by bullshit network executives? Now Brian Fuller, the creator of Pushing Daisies, is going back to work on Heroes which is a show that is failing to measure up to the bar it set for itself in the first season. Why does THAT show get to live but MY show had to die? TV is supposed to be the place that I can escape to when the real world is treating me unfairly. Where am I supposed to go now? Huh, ABC? Where am I supposed to go now?!?

At least Flight of the Conchords have a new season starting next month. That will cheer me up. UNTIL HBO CANCELS IT!

Unrelated Note: There is a new poll running in our sidebar. If you ignore the polls or read via RSS, you should get up in here and vote on the fate of the Tiny Godcast!

I love Burger King too much to demand that they become a permanent member of the Tiny Gods Hall of Shame, but they earned themselves a temporary spot yesterday. I will probably revoke their shameful status the next time I eat a Double Whopper and remember that it is the most delicious thing on the planet.

A Burger King was just recently built right down the street from me. It was the only major fast food franchise that wasn’t already within a convenient distance from my apartment. It is now the closest fast food restaurant to me, which is excellent because it also happens to be my favorite.

I was having a relaxing day at home and enjoying the remnants of the weekend with a beer and some Fallout 3. I decided to grab some lunch at BK. Ok, so I was drinking beer before lunch. DON’T JUDGE ME! I got to the drive-thru and prepared to order my standard #2 combo with onion rings and a Coke. I didn’t get to, though.

“Welcome to Burger King. We are temporarily out of burgers, would you like to try some chicken or fish today?”

Of course I didn’t want chicken or fish! I wanted a flame broiled heart attack! I sat there, stunned, for probably a full minute. I said nothing. “Sir?”

I had to make a decision. The #8 looked like it was chicken, so I asked for that. “I’m sorry, sir, that sandwich is grilled. We can’t grill it right now.”

I felt my face crinkling up in a look of bewilderment that the kid at the window must have seen, because he immediately said, “I’m really sorry. Is there something else that I can get you?”

I had seen the commercials where Burger King tells people that they no longer serve the Whopper. Shit like that makes people upset. I never thought it would happen to me. I was being let down by The King, and I wasn’t even on TV. This was real. I looked sadly at the speaker and said, “Never mind. I guess I won’t get anything.”

I was trapped in the line with cars on both sides, so I had to wait for the line. Before I pulled away from the speaker, though, the kid came back and said that they would grill up my chicken sandwich for me. I smiled and thanked him, I paid for my food, I took it home and sat back down in my gaming chair. I was pleased that they had at least helped me out that little bit. Then I opened the bag.

The fries were stale. So so stale. I have worked in fast food before. I know what it looks like when you refry old fries. Also, they had dropped the fries into the bag upside-down, so they were just all over the fucking place. Thanks, Burger King. Jerks.

I tried to contact Friskies today because they don’t carry a bacon wet food for cats.  9Lives has a Liver & Bacon Dinner that my cat quite likes.  How can you have the option to sell bacon to people and utterly refuse to do so?  The mind boggles.

Anyway, I tried to submit feedback this is what I see:

We are currently updating this site.
Please return later today to enjoy the improvements.

Wow, that was lame.  And after all that “work”!  Name, number, email, address - Friskies needs to know. Really, they can’t listen to my cat food feedback without knowing where I live and how to reach me 24/7.   

So I decided to write this post and I needed the exact error message (authenticity!) so I resubmitted the form.  I put in crap data and it went through fine.  OK, I think, I can submit my comment now.  Not so fast, my naïve self!  The website breaks again when I submit real data.  Fake data works like a charm.

Friskies is a Purina brand, so you can blame the parent company for the website problems, but the Friskies execs need to get on the bacon train.  Here are my original comments, which Purina refuses to accept:

Why don’t you have cat food (canned) with bacon in it?  My cat’s love the 9Lives “Liver & Bacon” and I love feeding it to them because I also love bacon.  Friskies has no bacon food that I can find, and I feel this is a mistake.  I prefer 9Lives to Friskies because of the selection.  And btw, the Indoor Selects line makes my cat throw up.

Update:

I replaced the ampersand above with “and” and substituted K for C in select(ion) and the submission was a success:

Thank you for contacting Nestlé Purina PetCare Company.  Your email has been received by our Consumer Affairs Department.  One of our team members will respond to your email as soon as possible.

This does not make me especially happy, because they have proved their previously theoretical incompetence.  Their SQL injection scrubbers are overzealous to the point of brutal retardation.  And here’s some more bad news, Friskies: I’ve gotten another cat, so now you’re losing DOUBLE the profits.

I have got nothing original to say, I just noticed a couple different articles in the last few days that provide some interesting new ways to get a lot of processing done fast.  Specifically, the keyword “Mathematica” caught my eye in both articles.  I used mathematica in college some, but not nearly as much as I could have - I really should have used it to implement the neural networks in that CIS class instead of Perl.  

The long and short of it is that Wolfram Research has been making an insanely useful tool for a long time and now anybody with a PC can start using it to do processing previously limited to supercomputers.  Well, the processing power is still confined to supercomputers, but now they are supercomputers you can own, or at least borrow.

Option One: Own A Personal Supercomputer

There’s no video out and it basically just provides local utility processing power when you want it.  It reminds me of One Crazy Summer, when Bobcat and Cusack stick the Corvette into their sailboat and win the race.  Maybe it’s nothing like that, but remember when Bobcat was in that Godzilla constume?  Awesome.

Powerful engines in crappy packages still go zooooooom!

Option Two: Rent Supercomputer Time On The Cloud

This idea presents you with two options inside the application: run locally, or send the data to be processed on The Cloud and return the results to your terminal.  It’s the computer equivalent of saying “Here, you do it!” and dumping your work on someone else - which is precisely why I like it.  It’s no different from the RenderFarm concept or the Microsoft Team Server code compilation idea, but this will scale up towards infinity, which is a nice place to scale to.

This past week, Microsoft released the “New XBox Experience“, which provided a wide range of enhancements to the system.  One of these was streaming video via Netflix for XBox Live ‘Gold’ subscribers with an unlimited Netflix subscription.  I’ve been a Netflix subscriber off and on for a few years now, and already had the Gold subscription to XBL, so I gave it a shot.  The results were so-so.

To get it setup, you need to download a small update for the XBox, and then type the code it gives you into a form on the Netflix webpage.  This was a painless process, the update was only a few MB to download, and the account linking went off without a hitch.  After that, any movies in your ‘Instant Queue’ will show up within the Netflix player on the console, with a UI similiar to the ‘Cover View‘ of iTunes.

After you choose an item to watch, the player attempts to determine your connection speed, buffers for about 15 seconds, and your video starts playing.  You’ve got basic controls during playback - pause, fast forward, rewind, skip back/ahead.  All in all, it is a very simple, painless process.

At first, things seemed to be great.  I queued up one of their HD movie selections, and it played through fine.  After the initial success, I queued up a handful of movies and TV shows.  The selection was fairly limited in my opinion - of the 30 or so movies in my regular queue, only 5 of them were available for instant streaming.  Of those five, two were not able to be streamed to the XBox because of licensing issues with Columbia Tristar, a studio owned by Sony.

My ultimate test of the service came over the weekend, with a marathon of the short lived TV series “Jericho“.  I ran into pretty much the same issue as earlier in the week - watching episodes early in the day was fairly painless, but as day turned into night, my connection suffered and soon I was watching episodes barely above YouTube quality.

Now, this isn’t really the fault of Netflix - it is a problem with the internet connection from the cable company, that they don’t have the infrastructure to support the connection they sell you when the entire neighborhood gets online at night.  The problem with this is that they don’t seem to be that great at figuring out your connection speed from the start.

Early in the evening, each episode would start out at 4 bars (out of 4), and about a minute or two in, the video would freeze, and the Netflix screen would popup saying that the connection speed had changed, it would redo its speed test, then buffer a lower quality video.  As the hours got later this would sometimes happen again partway through an episode, and the quality was downgraded to the YouTube quality version. Eventually it got to the point where it was starting at 3 bars, and partway through would drop down.

The 4 bar quality is pretty good, and the 3 bar quality is acceptable.  Any lower than that and it’s not worth it in my opinion.  I only hung in there because I was already pretty far into the series and wanted to see how things ended, but if I were watching a movie, I would have just cancelled it and waited for the actual DVD to come.

Another HUGE drawback is that there is no way to browse the Netflix library on the XBox - you can only watch the titles that you have already added to your instant queue via your PC.  This isn’t a huge deal if you have a computer close by, but it does add another layer to the service that just seems unecessary.

All in all, if you are already an XBL Gold and Netflix subscriber, this costs you nothing extra and is a nice bonus.  If not then, I don’t feel it is really worth it, given the current title selection, potential bandwidth issues, and the inability to browse titles on the console.  Overall, I think Netflix is a good deal, but if you are really only interested in the streaming video, its probably not worth the $8.99 a month for the cheapest plan that offers unlimited streaming.

Two unrelated and virtually unlinkable stories about female astronauts have been linked, virtually, by yours truly.  Together, they form a grim view of the future.

First there was the diaper astronaut lady.  We don’t need to talk about her, because there’s nothing left to be said.

But now, oh boy, now we’ve got an active duty female astronaut making headlines with her extra-terrestrial faux-pas. 

The conclusion I have come to is that, I’m sorry to say, 2001: A Space Oddysey will not become a reality any time soon.  Sure, it’s already 7-going-on-8 years overdue, but I’m starting to worry that we’ll never see it come to fruition.  You see, you just can’t have floating space monoliths without incredibly creepy space babies.  

It’s a PB&J situation.  Basically a peas-and-carrots arrangement.  

If our Earth Women don’t start playing their A-game in orbit there will be serious consequences.  Such as no space babies, no space colonization, and no interstellar colony ship runs that turn over 3 or 40 generations en route.  

I don’t mean to sound like a chauvinist, but our Space Men can handle their tools, so maybe they should be having our Space Babies.  So, thanks for the effort, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, but next time maybe you should tether your space tools to your space belt and spend a little less time applying your space makeup in the space rear view mirror, am I right fellas?

Ladies, you’ve got a collective reputation to create, and then protect.  If you drop your tools the next little astro-gal is gonna have to pick up twice as many moon rocks to get some “space cred”.  Cosmochicks are hawt, so let’s avoid a space-based analog to the old shipping superstitions.

If the salty ol’ space swabs ban women from our shuttles then we’ll never be able to sustain an interstellar war across the width and breath of a hundred galaxies!

But maybe there’s hope after all.