I recently stumbled upon a site that uses visual images to test peoples implicit assumptions. Or in the words of the project, “The IAT measures implicit attitudes and beliefs that people are either unwilling or unable to report”.

Check out the site and take one (or more) of the tests.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/

I’ve taken the tests and the results seemed to be accurate although I’m not sure if they actually are. It seemed to me that when answering a multi-category section that was in conflict with my opinions that I could actually feel the mental effort required. If that doesn’t make sense, then take the test!

Categories: Misc
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Future Shop (and Best Buy Canada) started Boxing Day early at 8pm EST on December 24th. http://marketnews.ca/news_detail.asp?nid=2424

It seems that they were totally overwhelmed by the response. The servers were getting hammered resulting in many errors. Service Unavailable was a frequent message along with HTTP Server Too Busy as well as random vbscript errors (a common message was dictContext.Value is null or not an object). I also saw some HTTP 403 errors saying that there was a permission problem running a CGI script. After limping along for a couple of hours where it was almost impossible to pull a page up they tried to free up some processing by turning off some images and turning off the inventory information on the product pages. Also, they put a limit in so that you would be blocked from using the site; a page with no images would appear instead of the page you want with an invitation to browse the flyer with a message they no new users were allowed on the site at the current time (or words to that effect). As of 12:45am the site seems to be functioning much better.

BestBuy.ca was also affected but not to the same extent. I was able to place an order on BestBuy.ca within half and hour whereas futureshop.ca took me almost 3 hours to place an order. I think they share the same infrastructure and code base so I don’t attribute it to any technical differences between the sites. I think it just shows how much more popular Future Shop is than Best Buy (Future Shop also had better deals ).

It will be interesting to see if they do this same promotion this year. Customers may be put off by the technology problems but the real people that I feel sorry for are the technical staff who must have been fighting fires like crazy trying to get (and keep) the site up and running. Not how I would want to spend my Christmas Eve.

I’m surprised that Futureshop/Best Buy haven’t moved to a .NET implementation yet — it’s been at least 4 years of being in the mainstream.

Categories: IT, Tech
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Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have done two amazingly funny videos for Microsoft where he plays his character from the BBC version of “The Office”. These are internal Microsoft training videos about values where he insults virtually everyone. Totally Hilarious!

Part 1: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=9076288729387457440

Part 2: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=959125392868390030

Here is more information on the videos.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2326336,00.html

Categories: Humour, IT, Tech
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I have not posted to this blog for a while — mainly due to a busy work schedule and a bit of sloth. However, I am compelled to post after hearing about the death of Basil Poledouris.

I was shocked and saddened to hear the news this weekend of Basil Poledouris’ passing; I extend my deepest sympathies to his family and friends.

Despite a lack of high profile scores over the last few years Mr. Poledouris’ legacy had long ago been established with a succession of classic scores (Conan The Barbarian, The Hunt For Red October, Robocop, Lonesome Dove to name only a few). I won’t go in to the details of his distuingished career here — those can be found at any number of sites. I rank Basil Poledouris at the top of the crop of film music composers that emerged in the 70’s and found their success in the 80’s. In fact, in my mind he would probably rank as one of the top film music composers of all time. Statistics and ranking can be argued and in the end are probably not all that meaningful. What really matters is the music. And oh what music it is! Poledouris will probably always be remembered for his large, powerful symphonic action music but, to my mind, what really stands out are his melodies. Instantly memorable, they made their way right to the heart. Even in the bombastic fury of Conan The Barbarian two of the standout tracks are the gorgeous love theme and the folksy Theology/Civilization.

Another area where I truly respect Basil Poledouris is in his use of synthesizers. This is perhaps harder to quantify or explain but I really love the seamless way he was able to integrate synthesizers into his scores. Was it groundbreaking? No. He wasn’t the first. I just think that he was really able to use the syntehsizer as a seperate instrument of the orchestra and it usually worked wonderfully. Wind is a specific example that comes to mind where the synthesizers were very prevalent but another (perhaps even better) example is Robocop. In Wind the synths are very up front whereas with Robocop they were more in the background but still meshing with the orchestral fabric of the score.

As an aside, one of the most interesting discussions of film music that I have heard was a talk that Basil Poledouris gave for the SPFM where he discussed at the piano his Emmy award winning score for Lonesome Dove. It was both entertaining and enlightening. Basically, the talk was about 30 minutes of Poledouris going through his score theme by theme explaining his thoughts behind all of the choices in the score: from tempo to instrumentation to thematic structure. That was followed by some Q & A. Overall — a great look at the score and a brief glimpse at the man.

Over the years, I have listened to and loved the music of Basil Poledouris. Even though I will continue to do so it somehow doesn’t feel the same knowing he’s gone. Basil, you will be missed.

Categories: Music
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Recently Dr. Stephen Hawking posted on Yahoo Answers a question: How can the human race survive the next hundred years? Here is my quick answer. Obviously this short answer can’t address all topics and polemics but it’s a start:

To survive we must use the faculty which is the key to the human race — reason. And in turn we must also embrace its corollaries: science and technology. I admit that it does feel like we are in a chaotic time but from a longer term perspective the overall (or average) life of a human is much improved over the last centuries (you, Dr. Hawking are a perfect specific example). I have confidence that if we apply ourselves to our problems that we can arrive at solutions.

Imagine that 80 years ago we didn’t know about penicillin and 65 years ago we didn’t have any commercial penicillin. Infections we don’t think twice about now could have killed you. A bird flu pandemic is obviously on many peoples minds and this would obviously be very bad. Some people might even blame science for these diseases and “superbugs” but the alternative is to just sit back and accept whatever nature happens to throw at us. And history has shown us over and over again nature can be extremely cruel towards life. e.g. Volcanoes, diseases, floods, tsunamis etc. Perhaps some diseases would not exist today without our use of antibiotics but the alternative is literally just to sit back and whither. That is the true path to destruction.

We must to continue to apply our rational thought to our problems if we are to arrive at solutions, survive and even thrive in the next hundred years.