adam @ 404

I didn’t think they’d do it, or do it so fast. But UPN50 responded, right away, and with some really condescending things to say. I’m considering sending their response to all their advertisers….

<response>
We have received your email message and thank you for your interest in “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

The number of Detroit Pistons games and Big Ten Basketball games we air are contracted and scheduled before the season starts and we must comply with our contracts. Unfortunately, we can not always pick and choose the games we would like to broadcast and some occasionally fall on Wednesday nights, much as we attempt to schedule around them. But of course, last night’s Pistons’ game was chosen specifically because it was the home opener and we have been carrying the Pistons games for over three decades.

We know it is disappointing when a favorite show does not air in pattern. But we are programming for the Total Audience. And there are many people in our viewing audience who are loyal sports fans. They rely on WKBD’s free, broadcast television sports coverage because not everyone has access to cable stations or wants satellite service.

This week “Star Trek: Enterprise” will air on Saturday, November 1 at 4pm. And again at its regularly scheduled time on Sunday, November 2 at 7pm. It will not be preempted again until November 26. And it is the only UPN program that we air twice a week for our viewers.

Regarding your comment about Fox Sports, we are not sure why you think it would be possible for us to switch any days with them. And we are not sure why you think that the Pistons would rather be on cable television on Wednesday nights, than on free broadcast television. The current Pistons schedule was achieved after many months of negotiations, made more difficult by the fact that Fox Sports is now carrying all of the Detroit Red Wings television games that used to air on WKBD. And a great deal of the Wings games happen to air on Wednesday nights on Fox Sports.

Also we are not sure why you think that our Detroit Pistons viewers, who far out number “Star Trek: Enterprise” viewers, would want more games airing on cable and less games available to them.
</response>
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<dork>
<letter>
Dear UPN50,

I enjoy watching Enterprise. UPN50 is the only channel that I get that shows Enterprise on Wednesday nights at 8 pm. But every year, it gets preempted by Pistons and Red Wings games. For instance, Pistons games look to be preempting pretty much every Enterprise for the rest of this year and more.

My suggestion: Please, switch sports on Wednesday to another day with Fox Sports. I rarely get to watch for Enterprise on Saturday. This is all I want for Christmas. Consider it an early present.

Thanks,
Adam Kramer
</letter>
I say end this rampant denial of our Right To Watch Enterprise! Do the same and give upn50.com a piece of your mind!
</dork>

If you’re a dork and you know me, you probably know that I like SCIFI. In my formative years as a teenybopper it was more apparent, and now that I’m old and brittle, harder to tell.

Imagine my disbelief when I stumbled upon a book website that professed we were pretty much alone in the Universe, currently. FOKE THAT! Rare earth posits that bacteria == common, animal == rare, in relative terms.

I must insist though, it is probably right. But the Universse is a pretty big place, and it’d be silly to think we could predict the physics of the whole thing just cos we think we can observe alot of it.

The best part was the mp3, ala John Lennon, entitled Imagine there’s No Spacemen. Truly dorknical.

2003 has been the year of death. It seemed like everytime I looked at the news or talked to friends another person had died. This was the first year I can remember going to a funeral and being overwhelmed with sadness. I don’t think I can say that it was some getting-older-feeling-mortal effect either. I truly felt a chunk kindof got ripped out of me and I had only known my step mom’s fatherfor about one year.

Now Elliott Smith is dead and I’ve never felt so sad about losing someone I didn’t even know. It’s never been about celebrity status for me, I’ve never found a role model in musicians. But I’ve taken their music. And Smith had an acute sense of the tragic and sad; he had ways of clarifying truth in the stories of his songs that stuck pins through your body. For anyone who has ever sat and mulled over a lost relationship, or a missed chance, Smith was an artist that knew all the right words describe it. He had the ability to make the most mundane things sound like the most beautiful. It wasn’t like he was some sweet folk peddler either, you could still rock out in the mirror with him. At the end of the day, his songs stood on their own.

He reportedly killed himself through a self-inflicted knife wound. And as Krysta said, “How much do you have to hate yourself to do that?” Maybe there wasn’t any hate involved. Maybe he was like any good music artist that has a good sense of the dramatic. But probably not, real life rarely imitates art.

After writing this I feel a bit foolish, like after you wake up after a night of drunken partying and realize what an ass you were the night before. I didn’t know Smith, he could have been an asswipe. But you can’t erase what he did and what he wrote.

The web enabled funniness to distribute itself far and wide. But Siegfried and Roy have completely blown my gourd! Presenting SARMOTI, the S & F approved theme song. Be amazed, and don’t forget, SARMOTI means “yearning” in German.

Sarmoti rocks!

It might be high time that I laid off the acronyms and technospeak. Every techgeek has the problem of recognizing acronyms everywhere in their day to day life. This past weekend I attended a Java conference that was well worth the money I didn’t pay for it (work did). Not only did it get me thinking in alot of new directions, but it tussled my intellectual ass alittle more out of stagnation. More on that later.

But, on the downside, it had the side effect of renewing my ubiquitous problem of taking any nonword I see around town and trying to place it into a techno acronym/abbreviation. The most annoying part is that its simply unneccesary, but you can’t stop it. It feels like terets, a waste of brain “cycles.” AcronymFinder has a mention of one of my favorite abbrevs.
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If it were only so simple. At work about a week ago, I was playing around with the UML diagram features of an undisclosed application and decided to encapsulate my entire life in a use case diagram. I think it covers like 80 to 90 percent of my life activities, and I didn’t take into account extended use cases. oh why me!?

Take a gander at this quicktime movie link below and be amazed at what you hear, or dont hear, or uhh hear.

The McGurk Effect

Talking with your parents doesn’t spur anything, unless you do something massively important following the talk with the parents. And guess what?! I didn’t do anything massively important. That would involve disarming nuclear weapons in North Korea, or the US for that matter. In fact, I only went to the bar after talking to my parents… and guess what! It was completely unrelated to talking with my parents on the phone, this night!
(more…)

I’m feeling very uninteresting currently, so no great posts about life. Hopefully I will go manic in the next day or so and become everyones favorite writer. In the meantime….

I organized a few games of CTF about a month ago. I was thinking of trying to do an urban/downtown game of CTF, so if anyone out there has tips on games like that, let me know. It’s pretty chilly out now, so I’d be wary of people showing up, but let me know if yer interested and in Ann Arbor.

AACTF: http://capture.404.org