The best commercial from Super Bowl XL had to have been the MasterCard commercial with Macgyver. Why? Because it’s Macgyver. And stuff blew up. Enough said.
Oh yeah, the game was pretty good, too. It didn’t quite live up to its extra-large moniker, but I’ve seen plenty worse.
EDIT: Not Citi, MasterCard. And now you can see it on Google Video.
Yesterday, I was having lunch with a friend of mine, and the subject of my current state of unemployment came up. He then asked whether I had read Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford from this past year. In replying no, he said that he would provide me with a copy, and, sure enough, he did. As he knows, and you, loyal reader, as well, I tend to be somewhat hard on myself. I push, and, inevitably, I sometimes get pushed back. This would be a fairly accurate description of my attempt at business school straight out of Columbia. And now, I push myself to find a new job, to get my foot in the door, to get back up and push again. But, alas, getting the proverbial foot in said door has been a trying task, one more difficult than I suspected. But, I keep looking, submitting the occasional résumé to a potential employer that’s offering a job that I’m qualified for, and typically never hearing a single word from them, ever.
Now, I’m not the biggest fan of Steve Jobs in the world. I think, along with many others, that he’s a bit of an egomaniac. However, he does deserve credit. He founded and currently runs two highly successful companies, Apple and Pixar. (I suppose you could claim he didn’t found Pixar, since he bought Lucasfilm’s computer animation division (if I recall correctly), but that’s just splitting hairs.) Pixar was just purchased by Disney for $7.4 billion, because Pixar has been doing Disney’s business better than Disney in recent years. Now Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder. He’s also brought back Apple from the jaws of marginalization with the iPod and challenged the media conglomerates with his vision of how content should be disseminated. With all that in mind, I was eager to read his speech, to find what nuggets of wisdom lay within.
I just heard on CNBC that the U.S. is beginning negotiations with South Korea to establish a free trade agreement. The Bush Administration, for all the things that they’ve done wrong (and about which I’ve complained fervently) in the past five years, has been doing one thing right — promoting free trade. During Bush’s first term, he was able to get Congress to reinstate presidential trade promotion authority (TPA), which lapsed in 1994 (because the Republican Congress wanted to stick it to Clintion; every president since Gerald Ford was granted TPA by Congress). When Bush came into office, we had free trade agreements with four countries — Canada and Mexico under NAFTA, Israel, and Jordan. Currently, we’re at sixteen. This includes the six CAFTA countries — Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. I’m in favor of free markets and free trade; however, we need to be careful.
So I know I’ve been less than good about getting my new site all cleaned up. Upon thinking about the work I’ve been doing this past week, I realized that I’ve paid no attention to the site, which is fair to neither me nor you. So upon some reflection, I’ve drawn up a little to-do list. I plan on starting on it this weekend and slowly chipping at it until it is no more. So, in descending order of priority…
it’s a…HUH?!
I read an article yesterday that compares Windows XP to the most recent public build of Windows Vista (build 5270). It looks like it will be a pretty good upgrade to XP, though I have no intention on upgrading immediately upon its release (whenever that may be). However, I got quite upset when I saw a screenshot of IE7. I don’t know the IE team has been doing to the backend of the browser, but the UI they’ve put together is horrific. It doesn’t make any sense! There is no rhyme or reason to it.
It appears that the recent Netflix settlement might not be so quickly approved. The proposed class-action settlement, which is supposed to be approved on the 18th, allows current customers to receive one month upgraded service free. So if you currently subscribe to the standard 3-DVD-at-a-time program, you would be bumped to the 4-at-a-time program if you opt in. Those who were customers prior to 15 January 2005 would get a free month of service. The problem is that if you must explicitly downgrade/cancel your service, otherwise you will be automatically billed for the higher/new service after the month is over. Well, somewhat surprisingly, the FTC has filed a brief in the case.
After considering the comments from my last post, I now have Live+Press installed on my site. Now every post I scribe will automatically cross-post to my LJ (i.e. this one). So there shouldn’t be any problems keeping up with my blog via LJ. However, I’m not going to be coughing up money to LJ still for a paid account. So the premium LJ URL will be defunct at the beginning of February, but the standard one will work as normal.
Also, when I get enough time, there will be additional content on my site. I still need to finish off the styling of all the automatically-generated blog pages as well. So expect to see some additional interesting stuff here once I have the time to add it.
So the holiday season is almost over, but by no means winding down, and there have been some interesting goings-on as of late. First off, I already had my first maintanence request in my apartment when Sharon, in an attempt to make the leaky faucet stop leaking, pushed the cold water handle too hard, causing it to leak more…with scolding hot water. I must say that I was not impressed with their promptness, since they weren’t prompt in the slightest. Had I an incident serious enough that flooding started to occur, there would have been a major problem very quickly. But it has been fixed, so my bathroom sink is usable once again.
I have to go out today and face the throngs of people doing last minute holiday shopping since I have some of that to do myself. If I’m arrested on murder and/or assault charges today, you’ll know why.
I’m back on the job hunt, now that I’ve pretty much have my apartment taken care of except for some books, wine, and a couple of evil closet boxes that I refuse to open until I visit Ikea first. But just because I don’t have a job, doesn’t mean I haven’t been coding. If you use Firefox, give it a try. If you don’t use Firefox, I would suggest you download and try it. You’ll like it…
Well, most of my stuff got moved in to the new apartment on the 2nd. Since then, it’s been a battle not only against unpacking everything, but also against everything else I have to do. I picked a bad week to unpack my things. Monday, which was supposed to be productive, turned out to be a bust when I locked my keys in my car in the only way possible (by leaving them in the trunk and closing it when the rest of the car was locked). Tuesday through Thursday I was pretty busy but got some stuff done in the evenings. Friday was the first entire day I spent unpacking and today I spent about half of it unpacking, setting up my computers (finally; that should tell you how little time I was able to spend here if my computers didn’t get set up for a week!), and such. Hopefully, I’ll be predominately finished around Tuesday.
Initial reactions: Everything is going to fit, pretty much. Adelphia cable TV sucks (but I knew that already). Cable internet is far superior to DSL (whether Adelphia cable internet is better will be based on number of outages I fall victim to). The people who installed my home theater setup at the old house did a lazy job of it and cut wires they had no business cutting. Being able to access the backs of my computers easily is a joy. Vonage == cheap + good - 911.
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