Katie Über Alles

Today's Annoyance

People who do not offer full feed RSS feeds for their blogs.

If you have a blog and only offer a one-sentence snippet (or worse yet, nothing at all) through RSS, I will stop reading your blog.  I just don't have time to sift through all the blogs I read using anything other than google reader.  I'm not going to click through.

So, if you have a blog and you care about people reading it...you might want to change your settings.

Shout out to Truckin'

Long ago, I used to be a prolific short story writer.  I even won an award or two for some of my stories.  It's something I would like to get back into, but between school, and catching my breath from school, I don't have the time.  I do really look forward to each installment of Truckin, though.  I found Pauly through his poker writing, but reading these short stories are worth your while too, and largely devoid of poker content for those who have no idea what I'm talking about when I write things like: "Playing TPOC like it's the nuts is not +EV."

Feedburner = the awesome

I've had google analytics enabled on my blog for quite some time.  A little over a year ago, google bought out feedburner and then made many of their services free.  So, I've been sprucing up the old blog and set up a feedburner account...and I can't rave about it enough.  If you have a blog and you are interested in more than just posting your latest diatribes, you might want to check it out.

Grandpa table flop?

Been playing around with some tracking stuff on my blog.  I know I've been getting a lot of traffic from some random places and I wanted to get a better handle on where it was coming from. 

Although I have had the equivalent of a blog on my website since before anyone knew what a blog was (seriously, I had a journal back on my website in the Spring of 1997), I wasn't really tuned into the blogosphere until one of my projects at work between 2004-2005 was to be the primary contributor to a blog about re-entry to society from prison for one of our clients.  Yes, I used to get paid to blog.  Rock.

Ever since then I have hearted typepad, but due in part to the fact that it lets you specialize so much it can be confusing.  Anyways, I just figured out how to get Google and typepad to talk to each other in a way that enables me to track a lot more than using just typepad alone.  One of the things I can now see a hell of a lot more clearly is searches that brought people to my site.  And the most common search bringing people to my blog right now is:

"Grandpa table flop"

What the heck?

What the....?

In the category of "is this really news?", look at what I saw on Wired Science today....

Firefox Logo Spied In Deep Space

By Charlie Sorrel April 11, 2008 | 6:43:02 AMCategories: Elsewhere in the Tubes   

One of these is a photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope on December 17, 2002, featuring the variable star V838 Monocerotis. The other is the same photograph overlaid with a familiar logo. Can you tell which is which?

Below is another photo of the same star, from the Wikipedia entry on V838 Monocerotis. If the above photo has been photoshopped to look more like the Firefox logo, the editing seems minimal: it's been rotated relative to the photo below, and some of the gas cloud may have been edited out around the "tail" of the fox.

If you've got a link to the original Hubble photo used above, let us know in the comments so we can compare. UPDATE: An eagle-eyed commenter, Wevah, spotted the original version of the Firefox-like nova photo on Wikipedia. It looks like the only modification was to rotate the image. It must be a sign from the stars!

Stuff XXX People Like

And no, I don't mean stuff porn stars and strippers like, though that would be a good one too.

Stuff White People Like has really taken off.  I've been forwarded posts by several people I know and it's even been a topic of conversation in the GVPT grad lab (though what hasn't been, really?). 

Well, one of my friends just sent me the link to another blog: Stuff Hill People Like...  and he questioned how long they would have their jobs.  Firing aside, it is pretty hilarious.  Check it out.

I am tempted to start one for grad students.  Two things that can't be on that list: sleep and money.

One of the best blog posts I've read in awhile

Read this! (from Overcoming Bias)

I'm tagging this with a poker tag because eventhough it's not explicitly about poker, it is about decision theory which is always applicable to poker.  Political science tag because decision theory is also blatantly related to polisci (especially in the rational choice literature...regardless of your opinion of RCT, in polisci we are concerned with understanding and predicting how people behave politically speaking, so obviously decision theory is relevant).  Religion tag because I love his characterization of his path to atheism.  It mimics my own (side bar: Maybe people interested in promoting religion should stop giving such vapid answers to children who obviously are deep thinkers and in asking "why" want a real answer, not one that betrays a lack of understanding of the topic at hand). 

King Tut and my birthday

Just passing through Philly on the train on my way home from Thanksgiving in Connecticut.  One of the best things about taking the train is that I can get some work done.  I just finished up my state and local notes for the week and decided to take a break before jumping back into more work.

One of the many blogs I have in my google feed reader is the Wired Science blog.  They have a post today about how November 26th was the day in 1922 that King Tut's tomb was discovered...pretty cool.

Also, I don't know how many people I went to college with read this blog, but I just found out from Christian Berle that Kevin Burkett died on Thursday.  RIP, friend.  :(

Supreme Court Weakens Campaign Finance Laws

The Supreme Court struck down part of McCain-Feingold today.  SCOTUS blog has a few insightful analyses (as always...for those interested in such things, I recommend subscribing to this blog with your feed reader).  At first blush, I am not sure how I feel about this ruling, but then again, I have always had mixed feelings on campaign finance regulation.  The libertarian side of me says regulation is inherently bad, but the practical side of me sees the utility of it.  Thoughts from the peanut gallery are encouraged...  If nothing else, this probably means that we will be deluged with swiftboat-esque ads in 2008...especially if you live in a battleground state.

This also reminds me of why political science is so exciting to research...things are constantly changing which means we will never run out of interesting research topics.  Of course, we also have the problem of measurement more than a lot of other social sciences.  How do you measure power exactly?  You could make a career out of that topic and never come up with a good answer.

The Grand

I love Cinematical.  Mainly because I can find out about movies I never would have heard of otherwise.  There haven't been too many poker movies out in the past few years, especially considering the "poker boom" (which is now pretty much on a downswing, but I digress...).  I've been looking forward to Lucky You which is *finally* releasing this upcoming weekend against Spiderman 3 (it was supposed to be released in the Fall of 2006 and then again about a month ago...I was beginning to think it was never coming out), and I just read on Cinematical about another movie I'm going to have to try to hunt down: The Grand. 

Written by Zak Penn (of X-Men and PCU, and, if you are a complete and total film geek, Incident at Loch Ness fame), this movie looks like it could have real potential.  First of all, it's a mockumentary, a la This is Spinal Tap.  Who doesn't love a good mockumentary?  Second of all, it has a lot of poker pros as well as some fabulous actors in it.  Third, a lot of the film is improv.  Fourth, Woody Harrelson is in it playing a character called "One Eyed Jack."  Cinematical's review is promising.   What is there not to love?

The Grand premiered this weekend at Tribeca.  Hopefully it will be hitting the Silver or some other local theatre soon.