Posts from — January 2008

For those of you missing The Daily Show, you may enjoy some podcasts from John Oliver (perhaps my favorite current correspondent). He and Andy Zaltzman have 10 episodes, about 30 mins each, of really funny news-related comedy at The Bugle: Audio Newspaper for a Visual World. Some of the topics are British, but most of it is quite accessible to Americans.

I’m hoping to see John Oliver later this month when he comes to SF.

A hilarious short list: 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. That site has some great stuff, including Personals from Nonpersons (my favorite is “Toyota Prius seeks irritating pseudoenvironmentalist for smug attitude and poorly informed dinner-party rant on Middle Eastern oil politics.”)

I wrote up some personal goals for the next few months, in several different areas, analogous to the goals that I set at work. These cover what I want to do in terms of fitness, socializing, music, correspondence, and reading. These are all quantifiable, ongoing goals, such as “bike to work 4 times per week on average”, so I’m using Joe’s Goals, a free, simple goal tracking app, to keep track of this. I’ve been using it for a day, and it seems pretty good so far… recommended if you’re doing something similar.

The New Yorker has a brief video segment about the use of torture in the TV show 24. Normally, I’d say that it’s just TV and there’s no need to worry about it, but I’ve heard the term “Jack Bauer interrogation” used too many times by people trying to sell torture in serious forums. It’s worth watching (unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to embed it).

In the video they mentioned that torture used to be what the bad guys did.. I hadn’t really thought about that before. While I can think of films in which protagonists used torture, I can’t think of any movie or show that uses it so regularly and positively.