A Couple Things

I found a couple sites today that I thought were interesting. The first is a couple 20-somethings having a little fun at the expense of the UFO true believers. I was surprised at how quickly everyone dismissed the cop's initial report that with binoculars, he could see that they were flares hanging from helium weather balloons (which is exactly what they were). And it's nice to know that the History Channel has run out of history and now features a weekly UFO show. Another reason to not spend the money on cable TV.

The second site requires a bit of explanation. Jenny McCarthy has become the front-man (front-woman? front-person?) for the anti-vaccination movement. Way back when, there was some concern over tenuous links between the preservative thimerosal, used in childhood immunization shots, and autism. That link was later proven false, but no matter; the manufacturers had mostly stopped using the preservative in 1999 (also note that the primary target of the anti-vax crowd is the MMR vaccine, which has never had thimerosal). Problem solved, right? Get real; this is America, where problems can never be solved because too many people make a living bitching about the problems. Se we now have a permanent anti-vax movement running around making provably false assertions. But as we learned from Goebbels, if you keep repeating a lie, it will become a fact in the minds of the general public. So the movement grows, gains momentum and believers, and eventually starts to have results. Probably not the ones envisioned by the anti-vaxers, but results none the less. Hence, the Jenny McCarthy Body Count; a web site that is updated weekly from CDC records and reflects the number of preventable deaths and illnesses caused by not vaccinating children. Actions have consequences, sometimes horrifying ones.

OK; I'm gonig to rant a little, so you may want to plug your ears.

We don't have cable, but we watch a few shows on Hulu. Until their latest "upgrades," Hulu was pretty basic: a list of TV shows you can watch on your computer, with a few options that made it easy to watch specific shows that we like to watch without having to sort through a bunch of other crap we could care less about. As you have probably already guessed, the upgrade changed all that. Like everything else in the world, Hulu now has social networking features where you can "friend" people and see what shows they watch or are subscribed to and visa versa, or get recommendations on shows you might like, blah, blah, blah. First, at 44 years old, I find I just don't care. I don't care what books you read. I don't care what TV shows you watch. I don't care what restaurants you eat at. I. Just. Don't. Care. Nothing personal, but at this point, our tastes are pretty well fixed and are not likely to change. No problem; Hulu spent a bunch of time and money that could have gone towards adding actual content to the site, but it's their business to screw up any way they like. I'll just ignore the other crap the same way I ignore MySpace and Facebook and Twitter and Redit and Digg and and and. Except in the process of adding all the crap, the features I did use have either disappeared completely or are broken. Nice. One example. We used to occasionally browse through all the TV series on Hulu. They had an alphabetical listing that linked to a page that listed what episodes were available in the correct order. Simple, right? It's gone. Now really, how hard was it to have that page?

While I'm ranting, when I find the four-eyed moron that decided that 6-point gray text on a white background is good graphics design, I'm going to beat him in the head until his brains fall out. Are web-based companies now hiring the mentally handicapped? I'm seeing this all over the place.

Enough ranting for one post. Other than it looks like I finished this post up just in time for Cable One to take a dump. It's been running like someone pour glue into everything for the last few days. Maybe this means something is getting fixed. OK, looks like it is working at the moment so lets see if this works....

Nope. Must have missed my chance.

Ha! Success.