As you probably know, the character “Creed” in the American version of The Office is played by a man named Creed Bratton. Bratton was a member of the 60s group The Grass Roots. He plays an exaggerated parody of himself on the show. Just for kicks, here’s a YouTube video of Creed and the rest of The Grass Roots from an appearance on The Jimmy Durante Show. Creed is on the left, in the back and white striped sweater. Check out his solo!
Mmmmm.. Tortilla Chips!
Wikipedia sez:
The tortilla chip was invented by Rebecca Webb Carranza as a way to make use of misshapen tortillas rejected from the automated tortilla manufacturing machine that she and her husband used at their Mexican delicatessen and tortilla factory in southwest Los Angeles. Carranza found that the discarded tortillas, cut into triangles and fried, were a popular snack, and she sold them for a dime a bag at the El Zarape Tortilla Factory. In 1994 Carranza received the Golden Tortilla award for her contribution to the Mexican food industry. She died in Phoenix, Arizona, on January 19, 2006, at the age of 98.
The inspiration behind this post was an entry at Last Night’s Garbage, a website that posts pictures of the garbage piled up on the streets of New York City. It find sound lame, but the site is really interesting. Check it out!
Are you “Damaged” yet?
The FX original series Damages is kind of like Lost, only it takes place in law offices instead of a tropical island.
The basics of the show are thus: billionaire Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson) has been cleared by the Feds in the “Enron-style” meltdown of his company. A prominent New York attorney (Patty Hewes, played by Glenn Close) is leading a civil case against Frobisher on behalf of his former employees. We enter the show as a young, “just out of law school” attorney (Ellen Parsons, played by Rose Byrne) is entertaining offers from Hewes and Ellis Nye, another New York attorney. Ellen takes the job with Hewes… and her life is changed forever.
This might sound fairly straightforward so far… but soon lies are told, conspiracies are hatched, and no one is as good or honest as they seem. Double-crosses pile up and turn in to triple-crosses and quadruple-crosses. People you think are the good guys turn out to be bad. And the people you initially want to hate turn out to be kind of nice. Like Lost, the show poses questions, and then answers them the next week… only to ask 50 more questions in return. And you have to pay attention when you watch this show: questions may be answered in subtle ways, such as seemly innocent phone calls, peices of paper left here or there… or a single drop of blood.
The show is nearing the end of season 1, but you can still catch up if you’d like. FX is running a 12-hour marathon on October 20th beginning at 8PM. So fire up the DVR and catch one of the best new shows on TV!
Do you know this idiot?
Pictured below is a man that published pictures on the Internet of himself sexually abusing children. This idiot used a “swirl”-type feature to obscure his face in the photographs… only he was too stupid to know that investigators could simply load the picture into Photoshop and reverse the effect… thus his picture here:
This guy is apparently German. The photos, “involving 12 different young boys” are believed to have been taken in Vietnam and Cambodia in 2002 or 2003. Germany’s federal police force, the Bundeskriminalamt, undid the photoshopping to reveal the man’s face to the world. I don’t suspect I’ll see the guy around Belmont, NC, but if any jimcofer.com readers are in Euroland… keep your eyes peeled for this moron.
Read the official Interpol notice here.
The Funniest Commercial Ever…
Hey, at least Jack In The Box knows who their customers are:
First Radiohead, then NIN…
If you haven’t been keeping up with this news lately, maybe you should. First Radiohead announced that they’d be ditching their record label and publishing their new album online. Then Trent Reznor announced that Nine Inch Nails will do the same. That’s worrying to the music industry, but not that bad. Radiohead is a great band, but they’ve never been a big seller, especially here in the U.S., and NIN only has about a dozen fans left, so the labels probably don’t give a damn where they end up.
But then Madonna went and dropped a bombshell today. She’s leaving Warner Brothers – the label she’s been on for most of her 25 year career – and signing a deal with Live Nation, the concert promotion people. Although Warner will still have the rights to her next studio album and another “greatest hits” album (as well as her entire back catalogue), Live Nation will distribute three new studio albums, have exclusive rights to promote upcoming concert tours, and exclusive marketing rights to Madonna’s name. The 10 year deal is worth $120 million for Madonna in cash and stock.
This is interesting news, not only because it’s the first time a truly huge superstar has left the traditional music industry behind, but it also reflects where the money is for the artists. Madonna’s last four albums have sold 10.4 million copies in the US. Even if Madge was getting $2 per CD sold (a completely outrageous amount, even for her), that’s “only” $20 million. In reality, she’s probably getting $1 or 75¢ per disc, so cut the $20 million number in half. On the other hand, her last three tours have netted $385 million in ticket sales, to say nothing of merchandise sales. We can assume that Live Nation will be getting a cut of Madonna’s ticket revenue under this deal, but how much is unknown at this time. What we do know is that this deal is so big that it’s driving down Warner’s stock price: Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor was the #1 selling album in the US in 2005, and without Madonna as a “marquee brand” on Warner’s roster, the label looks like a poorer investment. As of this writing, their stock is down 30¢.
Read all about Madonna’s new deal here. Oh, and Oasis and Jamerquai might be next…
Use a blocklist!
Do you use P2P applications? If you do, do you use some form of blocklist protection? If not, you might wanna check out this article from Ars Technica, which summarizes a study conducted by three researchers at the University of California, Riverside.
In a nutshell, the researchers discovered that NOT using a blocklist while using P2P apps leads to a 100% chance of connecting with a rogue computer – one run by Big Media (or, more likely, one of the third-parties hired by Big Media) for the purposes of tracking the trade in illegal files. Let me repeat – if you don’t use a blocklist, your chances of connecting to an illicit tracker or peer are 100%. Simply connecting to a rogue computer doesn’t mean that there will be an lawsuit against you in the near future, but it’s not good. It’s a list of “who’s being naughty” that most of us do not want to be on.
The good news is that using blocklists is pretty easy. If you’re running Windows 2000 or XP, Linux or OS X (but not Windows Vista), head on over to Phoenix Labs and download the latest version of PeerGuardian, a simple to use “P2P firewall” for Windows. Just install it, tell setup what you want to block (P2P, spyware adware) and you’re in the blocklist business. Although PeerGuardian isn’t a magic bullet, it is amazingly effective. As the blocklist study noted, “avoiding just the top 5 blocklisted IPs reduces the chance of being tracked to about 1 percent”.
There are other blocklist managers out there. BlockList Manager from B.I.S.S. is one. The popular Bittorrent program Azureus has one built-in. Whatever app you want to use, make sure that you start using one today. After all, although these blocklists might not be perfect, they’re far, far better than nothing at all. And the study (linked in the Ars article) proves it!
Random Movie Trivia
– In the film Die Hard: With a Vengeance, a madman has placed a bomb at an elementary school and threatens to detonate it if Bruce Willis refuses to travel to Harlem and wear a sign he had hidden there. In the “theatrical version” of the film, the sign Bruce is forced to wear says “I hate niggers”; in the “broadcast version”, the sign says “I hate everybody”. Because that part of the film was shot on location in Harlem, the producers feared a riot would break out if Bruce wore the “theatrical version” of the sign… so he wore the “broadcast version”. So the TV version of the film has been left unedited, while the version shown in theatres was edited. As you know, it’s usually the other way around.
– Pride of the Yankees is a 1942 film starring Gary Cooper as New York Yankee legend Lou Gehrig. One problem with casting Cooper was immediately obvious: Cooper was right-handed, while Gehrig was left-handed. Since the film was released only a year after Gehrig’s death, the producers were certain that the moviegoing public would notice the inconsistency. To solve the problem, everything in the game scenes – all of the uniform numbers and logos, the billboards and scoreboard – were printed in reverse, and when Cooper hit the ball, he’d run to third base, not first. The producers then simply flipped the film over, and Cooper now appeared to be left-handed, and all of the text on the uniforms, billboards, etc. appeared to be correct.
How to buy a digital camera
The holiday season is almost upon us, and one question I’m asked again and again is “what kind of digital camera should I get for my sister\mother\father\grandmother\father-in-law???”
The truth is, there is no “correct” answer. Everyone has different needs and different budgets, so I honestly don’t know which digital camera is best for you… or your mom or dad or sister or mistress. And, to be honest, although I have a reputation as being a “gadgethead”, I really don’t keep up with the digital camera market that much. I have a nice Canon S400 that I’ll use until it either breaks forever, gets stolen, or is laughably out of date.
Having said all that, I have put together a quick guide that’ll help just about anyone buy a decent digital camera at whatever price point they choose. Keep in mind, though, that the following guide is for people just wanting a decent “point-and-shoot” camera, something for taking snapshots of vacations and birthday parties. If the person you’re buying the camera for is a serious photography enthusiast or professional photographer… stop reading this guide immediately and seek the help of a professional camera salesperson.
1) Buy a camera from a company that’s always made cameras. Following this single step will help you bypass 90% of the issues that come with buying digital cameras. Companies like Canon, Pentax and Nikon have made cameras for decades and know what they’re doing. Digital cameras sold by companies like Dell and HP might be good. Or they might not. They might have been designed by highly-qualified engineers at HP. Or the company might just rebrand cameras made by Korean or Chinese companies. You’re just more likely to get a lemon from one of these guys than from a traditional camera maker. The sole exception to this rule is Kodak. I’ve never read a good review of a Kodak digital camera, so I’d advise you to stay away from them… unless you want “easy to use”, which Kodak cameras usually get good marks for.
A Neat RDP Trick
I don’t know how often this trick will come in handy for you system administrator types, but I “invented” it today whilst troubleshooting a problem for a client.
As you probably know, Remote Desktop lets you share your local printers with the remote computer that you’re connecting to. But did you know that you can share that printer on the remote computer, too? And if you share that printer any client on the destination network can print to your desktop printer?
I didn’t know it at the time. As I was troubleshooting something, it became obvious that I needed to try and print a document as part of the troubleshooting process. But I was at home and the user was in Charlotte. So I logged in to the company’s SBS server, shared my home printer off the server, then added that printer as a local printer on the user’s PC. I clicked File > Print and chose my home printer… and the document printed on my home printer!
This might be one of those “Well DUH! Didn’t you know that?” tips, but I thought it might come in handy!