I’m watching The Sum of all Fears. About 9 minutes in we see Jack for the first time as he and a few other analyists are watching video footage of a the Russion President.

One of the characters asks, “Who is that woman with the brown hair standing next to him?”

Answer: Elena Rhyzkov

In the movie Sneakers Dr. Elena Rhyzkov is the woman who is having an affair with the mathematician. I wonder if it’s one of those coincidences or do we have a Sneakers fan. Would you think that Tom Clancey would be?

Okay, I just checked and I’m not the only one who noticed. It’s also mentioned on the Sum of all Fears trivia page.

polyGeek movie trivia

I always enjoy learning more about human behavior. So this presentation by Dan Ariely at TED was very enjoyable.

Spoilers:

What I found the most interesting was the social aspect of cheating. When someone in our group does it and gets away with it we are encouraged to cheat. But when someone we consider to be an outsider cheats we decrease the amount we cheat.

I wonder if there is a way to find out if basketball and football players are less likely to use performance enhancing drugs since so many baseball players have done it and gotten cought.

polyGeek Behavioral science, TED

This was a well edited overview of what looks to have been a very fine presentation at SXSW. Derek Powazek gives his thoughts of what to do, and not to do, when building an interface for a community website where you want to gather intelegent data from a crowd.

polyGeek design, video, wisdom of crowds, youtube

Here’s a great collection of visualiations explaining how the global stock market crashed. Informative from both an economics and design perspective.

polyGeek economy, infographics, visualizations

Great collection of Lego ads. Really hits the mark because I want to go out and buy more bricks right now. I especially like the Esher creations.

polyGeek advertising, Lego

The shape of things to come - shapeless.

I can’t wait to have this thing around my neck and to start programming for it. This will change everything when facial recognition is reliable.

polyGeek technology, TED, User Interaction

defrak
Pronunciation: dē-ˈfrak
Function: verb

To take something that has been frakked up and fix it.
Example: It’s going to take me hours to defrak the code that Joe wrote.

defrakked
Function: adjective

To have fixed something that was previously frakked up.
Example: I defrakked my computer by upgrading Windows Vista with Windows XP.

polyGeek geek terminology, humor

polyGeek Adobe, Twitter

<rant>

I hardly ever use XBox live anymore so it’s just not worth the $50 a year. I logged into the Dashboard and located my XBox Live membership info. I looked all over for the cancel membership button but couldn’t find it. Okay, plan B: just change my billing info so that they can’t bill my credit card. Nope, you can’t do that online. More looking around and I couldn’t find anything about canceling a membership, anywhere.

I got on the computer and went to XBox.com and started looking around. After a bit of searching and many dead ends I finally found a contact number: (800) 4MY-XBOX (800 469-9269). It seems that the only way to cancel a membership is to call them. What does this remind you of? ( AOL anyone? )

Fortunately I get a custormer rep. on the phone pretty quick. He starts asking me info about my account like, “What is your gamerTag?” No problem, I know that: fiveSigmaEvent. Then he asks me what the email address is for my XBox Live account. That, I have no idea. So I have to go upstairs and start up the console, after plugging in the Ethernet cable. I’m not familiar with the new dashboard so it takes a while to locate my email address. I come back downstairs and tell him. Then he needs the final 4 digits on my credit card. That takes a while to find and I get that to him. ( Aside: the credit card that XBox has on file hasn’t been active for well over a year so how did they automatically renew me last year? )

The rep. finally has all the info that he needs to cancel my account and, wait for it, he offers me 500 Microsoft points to keep my membership. Like what in the frak are $500 Microsoft worth? Let me tell you, when I was working there and they came up with the MS points thing we would all roll our eyes. Everyone on the team, and I mean EVERYONE, was against it. But we got trumped by the marketing team.

That brings up another rant topic: the marking department at Microsoft is the biggest joke in the known universe, right? I mean if you met someone who worked for MS Marketing wouldn’t you just have to laugh at them? They get their ass handed to them every time they come out with a new idea. They remind me of the Marketing Department at the Sirius Cybernetics corp:

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, page 50

Which begs the question: why on earth would anyone listen to this bunch of bozos? I generally find people who work for marketing departments to be pretty worthless - the only good marketing people I’ve met are all freelancers. But the MS Marketing team is so bad that if you could build a marketing strategy around doing the opposite of what they suggest you might just have a winner.

In closing: anyone else out there thinking about creating a service/subscription and making people jump through hoops in order to cancel it: if it happens to me you’ll get a negative blog post up the ass!

</rant>

polyGeek rant, Xbox

Jeff Bezos provides two analogies of the Internet with historical technological and societal revolutions: the 1849 gold rush and the spread of electricity. He makes some interesting points and it’s a good watch if you’re even slightly into history.

What he doesn’t talk about is what’s next. He just covers where we are today.

polyGeek Internet stuff, Next.web, technology, TED, video