Since he brought it up, I thought I’d give my own reaction to the endings of some of the anime series I’ve been watching. For obvious reasons, one should BEWARE OF MILD SPOILERS below.

[update: cleaned up the formatting and added a review of Please! Teacher]

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Dear child,

You’re not clever, you’re not funny, you’re certainly not my friend, and you have nothing interesting to say. Stop spamming my comments.

And, by the way, it took me about five seconds to wipe out your latest “contributions”, so you’re not even a real annoyance, just a bug on the windshield.

Oh, and if anyone else reading this wants a good laugh, it took this wannabe-troll three hours to come up with 18 lame comments. All wiped out with one line of SQL code and a quick rebuild.

(oops, miscounted the first time; I counted all the POST events, forgetting the mandatory preview I turned on a while back. I had to go by the logs, since I’d already nuked the actual comments. :-))

(which, by the way, is done with: delete from mt_comment where comment_ip = “nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn” and now() - comment_created_on < 1;)

(oh, and for more amusement, I’ve added each of his IP addresses to my badlife PF blacklist, so he can’t even see the site until he reconnects and gets another one. If he keeps it up, I’ll just block the entire subnet for a while; it’s not like I have so many readers that I actually care about the loss of a few random Class C networks for a few days.)

(and if he ever did rise to the level of an actual annoyance, my badlife system can trivially be extended to automatically add his IP addresses to the blacklist without human intervention; I did most of the work a long time ago to deal with mass downloads of my picture site…)

Could someone please explain to me how the film shown in this trailer could possibly deserve the title I, Robot? Or even how they managed to pull this story out of Asimov’s legacy? “Sci-fi action thriller suggested by the classic short story collection”, my ass!

Adding insult to injury, the official movie site is a steaming pile of Flash.

Now this is an example of good citizenship. Not only did this guy spot a suspected killer in a bar, but when the FBI didn’t take him seriously, he went back to the bar, gathered physical evidence, and then drove around the area until he found the guy’s car at a motel. Thank you, Conrad Malsom.

The idea is sound: identify music by acoustic fingerprints instead of relying on the clumsy CD-hashing approach used by CDDB, which not only produces a lot of collisions, but relies on the presence of the CD in a compatible drive. The poor quality of the CDDB database is a separate issue, one that MusicBrainz doesn’t obviously solve.

iEatBrainz is a beta Mac client for the MusicBrainz database, and if the results it produces are representative of the fingerprinting technology and current database, it’s not worth my time right now.

For a simple test, I fed it a 97-song playlist out of my iTunes library, consisting of tracks ripped to MP3 and AAC from my CD collection over the past few years.

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Yes, yes, Kinsey is a villain composed of equal parts pure evil and arrogant condescension. We get it already, okay? Could you please drop the Snidely Whiplash act and get on with the story now? Yeesh.

David Was takes GB out for a spin. Being NPR, the commentary also comes with a different sort of spin, but what can you do?

Latest fallout, emphasis added:

The Social Security Administration has said it would not accept any marriage licenses from San Francisco as proof of marriage until the legal dispute was resolved.

So now straight couples in San Francisco can’t really get married, either, and any who did so recently are in “gay-wedding limbo”. Somehow I don’t think that will increase their support for gay rights.