DC Metro “Flipbook” Ads

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WMATA recently installed flipbook-style advertising — a series of stills in slitted lightboxes which produce a motion effect due to your own persistence of vision as the train speeds by. The ads are installed in tunnels between Metro Center, Gallery Place/Chinatown, and Judiciary Square on the Red Line to Glenmont. (More on that from WaPo, NBC4, and DCist.) Here’s my very messy and compression-artifact-laden attempt to catch the ads with my mobile phone’s video recorder:

Update: Much better video of the ads from Life Outtacontext, who likens the tunnel flipbook format to a “21st Century Zoetrope.”

Downgrading my DSL

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Remember the time I got DSL a year ago? I got it at Verizon’s promo rate of $29/month for the first year, with the first month free. It sounded pretty good at the time — until their $14.95/month promo rate was introduced a month later, at which point I was locked into the prior deal for a year. I know it’s been a year because I got two renewal notices last week, one by mail, urging me to renew at the continued promo rate of $29/month; and another one by email, urging me to do the same for $14.95/month. Both were quite insistent that I do so before the regular rate of $37/month kicked in on the May deadline date.

I called Verizon and, after a surprisingly short wait on hold, asked the sales rep which rate I should be getting. It turns out that the $29 plan is for a 3.0 Mbps download speed, while the $14.95 plan is for 768 kbps. I really don’t need 3.0 Mbps of throughput, so I asked to be downgraded to the cheaper deal on renewal. They complied quickly and without any fuss. So, here I am, paying half of what I’ve been paying for DSL, at a speed of less than 1/4 what I used to be at, and I feel no discernible difference, as I rarely engage in high-bandwidth activities like BitTorrent and viewing of excessively long movies.

(The extra $15 per month I now have from the downgrade will go into my “Get the Star Trek Original Series DVD Set” piggy bank — which, I now admit, actually serves to offset the cost, as I just won a secondhand ST:TOS DVD set on an impulse eBay auction.)

On the “Gospel of Judas”

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Update: Also see my Gospel of Judas roundup.

Gnostic Gospel of Judas, they say! Hot on the heels of Christ On Ice and the, er, “newly discovered” Gospel fragment, the news outlets are currently drooling all over National Geographic’s recent conclusive dating and translation of surviving fragments of the Apocryphal Gospel of Judas, now dated to about 300 CE. The text is classically Gnostic, emphasizing a duality splitting Christ’s “spiritual” and “fleshly” natures, as opposed to Christian orthodoxy’s belief in the Incarnation.

Looking beyond the wide-eyed “OMG THIS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE CHRISTIANITY AS WE KNOW IT” sensationalism, Internet Monk asks if a 300 year-old apocryphal biography of George Washington would be regarded as authentic were it discovered in 1970. James F. Robinson, an expert on ancient Egyptian texts, regards the Judas Gospel as mostly a dud, produced by Cainite Gnostics who took it upon themselves to “rehabilitate” villians of Bible mythos. Even if you don’t believe in the account of Judas, there’s no denying his contributions to the Christian narrative. Truly a historical icon.*

[crossposted to Metafilter]

“V For Vendetta” Alphabet Review Roundup

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I actually haven’t seen the movie yet, nor have I read the graphic novel, but the chance to see if there was a movie review for every letter of the alphabet was too good to pass up. I stumbled over K, X, Z, and V (heh) and had to resort to Livejournal and MSN Spaces a few times, but there we have it, 26 “V For Vendetta” movie reviews along the same theme: some verbose, some versed, some vacuous, some vindictive:

Outage

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Sorry about the overnight outage. The site was hit by a “XANAX” comment spam attack, prompting a well-justified overnight lockdown from Site5. The spams came in at a rate of about 2-5 comments per second, from a botnet — a network of infected PCs — with machines mostly in the 212.138.64 range. This meant multiple IPs from various locations were simultaneously hammering mt-comments.cgi, and since I use static files, each comment meant a db entry and a static file rebuild. Doing this hundreds of times per minute meant intense load on the machine, so that the comment spam flood effectively operated like a DDOS attack, slowing down all the sites on the server.

Since old open comments are usually the target of these attacks, I’ve reinstalled MTCloseComments to block off entries older than a month, and scoured my access logs for all the IPs in the botnet to add to my blacklist — a mostly imperfect solution, but returning 403’s to spam bots should be enough of a stopgap for now, I guess. Pity; I was hoping I’d be able to keep older comments open for more discussion, but the spam is just too much trouble. Hence the spam aspect of the tragedy of the commons — spammers, in their overpowering thirst for inbound links, will drown out conversation and disrupt the flow of communication for the chance that 0.1% of their victims are gullible enough to buy cheap fake drugs or click links on their ugly, keyword-littered websites.

What I’m wondering is, if a weblog spammer’s aim is to boost a site’s search engine rank with multiple links to the site from multiple pages, what use is it if his rampant posting of those links just brings down the target site, making it impossible for search engines to crawl, defeating the purpose of the spam anyway — even without considering that I’m already using nofollow in all comment and trackback links? It just goes to show, as I’ve said before, weblog spam might make a lot of money for the spammers and botnet operators, but money can’t buy them brains.

Pickles and Pandora

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IMG_6062.JPG IMG_6065.JPG

Separate photos, since I didn’t want to try and get the cat and the parakeet together for a group shot. I can assure you, however, that Pandora does not care a single whit that there is a squawking parakeet in the room, as you can see from her nonchalant drowsiness.

LOST 2.17: Rock Out With Your Locke Out

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Blast Door Map Screenshot[Note: Spoilers follow.]

Wasn’t that such an awesome episode? Blast doors! Balloon! Parachute food! Ow, my legs!

Locked Down Locke

Locke is big on the concept of the Island being an agent of Fate, and twice now, something big has happened which coincided with him losing the use of his legs: the death of Boone — which he once referred to as a sacrifice that the Island desired — and now the Hatch lockdown. It could be said that Fate operated to trap Locke just where he could see the Blast Door Map when the black lights came on. It could also be said that Fate made him a moody, gullible, codependency addict with father issues. That scene at the airport motel was a clear trinity of Locke Disasters, past, present, and future: his grifter “father,” the passing Oceanic planes foreshadowing the coming crash, and one of TV History’s Most Pathetic Wedding Proposals.

Oh, and in case you missed it, the lady whose home Locke was inspecting? It was Nadia, Sayid’s childhood friend who escaped from Iraq.

Henry Gale

Now, all this time I figured that Fake Henry Gale (FHG) was clearly lying, simply because his name was taken from The Wizard of Oz, and I was waiting for someone in the show to point that out. But no, there actually was a Real Henry Gale (RHG), as his driver’s license showed. What I’m wondering now is, if FHG knew that Sayid and Co. would find the balloon based on his map, and would find RHG’s body, why didn’t he bolt when he had a chance, and why was he so earnest in asking Sayid if they had found his balloon? It’s unlikely that he would think Sayid wouldn’t dig up the grave site. No, I think LOST still plans to leave the Other-ness of Fake Henry Gale in question, and it’ll be interesting to see what explanation he gives for his lies in the next episode. Maybe he’s defecting.

Update: After seeing 2.18, it looks like he’s an Other. Okay.

Skinner Box

After seeing the food drop, Amy joked that the whole island scenario is just a gigantic Skinner Box, especially given that the Orientation film mentions B.F. Skinner. It’s actually a plausible theory; one story about the Skinner Box was that in a cage where food was delivered consistently with every press of a switch, the rat would eventually learn to trigger the switch only when it was hungry, but in a cage where delivery of food would only occur on random presses, the rat would begin to push the switch repeatedly, even when not hungry — like a gambler playing at slots. Note that this episode featured a poker game between Jack and Sawyer, gambling with food.

More stuff from HoWeCogitate, Beanblog, Mostly Muppet, LOST Fan Blog, and LOST and Gone Forever.