Friday I was working on projects, as well as a lot of planning stuff. It was a long day, especially since I worked on some stuff rather late. Hopefully that'll be done soon though and people will like it. Raadt made a cool theme for IncidentBase too - you'll have to ask about it sometime.

Saturday was a relaxing day. I slept in until sometime in the afternoon, and then did some cleaning up. I made a couple dongles to go from S-Video and dual RCA to STP RJ-45s. Basically to run video and audio over STP CAT5 to upstairs. Much easier than running a bunch of coax and audio patches up. After that was set I watched a couple movies. First was Napoleon Dynamite, which I thought was pretty boring. The soundtrack had some interesting parts, but it's not something I'd go out and buy. The movie itself was boring, with a lot of dumb humor. I guess to each their own, as some people seem to think it's the best movie ever. Second movie was I, Robot. That movie also got split reviews, but I liked it a lot. I liked a lot of the ideas that Asimov brought up, but never really got into his writing style. Something about how they were written just never hooked me in. This movie seems to have done a good job of adapting many of his ideas into a single coherent story. It sorta has a traditional sentient robot plot line, but that hasn't really been done well with any modern movie. For some reason the good stories just seem to be books. Maybe this movie explains why, given there are 3 rendering companies, 2 pre-vis companies, 1 motion capture studio, and 3x the number of stunt people as actors. That can't be cheap, and robots don't exactly draw a mainstream audience (although the two main characters may have helped the draw on this one). Good mix of just good action and a strong plot, and they didn't go and throw in an unnecessary love story. I'd recommend this one. I also find the shape of the USR building in the movie rather funny. Think cable modem...

Sunday was getting up earlier than normal for church. After that was off to the parents' place for lunch, as my dad's birthday was last week. Their Mac Mini arrived as well, so I went with my sister to pick out a keyboard and mouse she'd like (my dad was supposed to order them online 2 weeks ago, but never did so we ended up spending way too much at Best Buy). Plugged it in and it was good to go. Those things are tiny. Seriously, the box my Axim came in was bigger than the one it came in. After that was home to clean up a bit and get ready for people coming over. Last year people showed up at 1, this year it was more like 5:20, although I'm not gonna complain. It was a decent crowd, and I think everyone had fun. Lots of junk food, and Nick showed up but disappointed everyone by not bringing the promised chili. There were two people doing homework, and 4 people on laptops during the thing. Surprisingly schdav left his at home, which is pretty rare for events at my house. :) The funniest part was the Lincoln Fry auction, which sat at a high number (I think it was $99 trillion) after a quick rise. Basically once it passed $1 mil it started getting out of hand. I have the numbers, maybe I should graph it. It was interesting to see companies using the bidder list/high bid name to advertise. Yea, mostly the type you'd expect to see getting links on web sites in that way... There was one very funny one with the picture of the combined Janet Jackson and Paul McCartney... The Internet is a great thing. Everything I looked for online I was able to grab quickly, including videos from the pregame stuff. I'm not sure that the TV people would be that happy about it, but if they don't release it, what do they really expect? The big exception being laughing at godaddy for their site dying for a couple minutes after their commercial. Everyone else I looked into seemed to be using stuff like akadns and akamai, and even yahoo auctions was having noticable performance problems. It's cool that they got it back up quickly though, and seemed to keep it in house at least somewhat. The longer version of their commercial (shot down by Fox) is a lot better than the one that ended up getting aired. It better conveys the message which was basically some of the crazy inconsistencies about what's getting aired and what isn't lately. Also the company CEO has a blog on which he has some interesting arguments and reasoning. Halftime was good, even though we had to educate some people who had never heard of Hey Jude (and shortly after when some commercial had a U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday which they couldn't identify either). There is that whole thing about him being the clean guy after last year and noticing the selection of people on stage. Austin had a great comment on that, and while I don't remember his exact wording some other people expressed the same ideas pretty much perfectly. It is something to think about. As Dave said, he's an old man now so it's OK. Menards takes the cake for the cheapest looking, least interesting, and most annoying commercial. Yea, it's just like their other ones, except it played during the superbowl. It looks like some guy with a camcorder made it.

I stumbled on this interesting article. The PDF is linked, but the text is more readable on their page. I especially like point #3. The part about "what constitutes spam is in the eye of the beholder" is very true, and I hear about it weekly and sometimes daily. It's amazing how many people fail to realize that and just make people want to completely ignore everything from them. Gone are the days where you can hit people with commercials that the vast majority of people see - the whole system is moving towards targeted and "grassroots" or "community-driven" (yea, I know, lack of better terms) marketing. Those who get people pissed at them early on will have an interesting time in the future. The other points in the article are definitely valid as well. A good summary could be to let the consumer make an intelligent choice rather than try to force feed them stuff. A good product or service will sell itself. Consumers are becoming more intelligent and picky, especially with the availability of information on the Internet. The days of being able to sell crap with marketing spin are going away.