I love this trailer

via youtube.com This trailer works almost better than the movie does. Actually, I think the 2nd half of the movie is great. But this trailer is great the whole way through. Makes me want to pull out the soundtrack again.

The NCAA, Film Festivals, and Economics

Imagine that you could run a business that relied on volunteer labor, was so popular it was worth many millions of dollars, and was largely tax free. Sounds illegal, but it's not. It's an accurate description of college football and college basketball programs. I have a bit of a hard time with the NCAA rules, and today's sanctions against USC are a good  enough reason as any to post on this topic. With colleges serving as the de-facto farm teams for pro-basketball and pro-football, anyone who wants to play in the pros pretty much has to go through them to make Read more…

Some quick thoughts on AT&T’s new data plan

As I posted earlier, I think the new capped plans will generally save Mary and I money. We each use well less than 2 gigs of data a month (Mary’s even lower than that, at less than the 250 mb. But really, it sounds like a good deal now … it won’t sound like such a good deal in a month. The reason: multitasking. Starting in just a few weeks, the iPhone will be able to support multitasking. What does that mean? It means that I could leave my Skype app open and running, able to receive Skype calls anytime Read more…

Pippi Longstocking

After learning that Steig Larsson's character Lisabeth Salander (from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) was inspired by Pippi Longstocking, I was interested in seeing the similarities. Mary and I both read Pippi Longstocking recently, which was a nice children's story. Pippi's similarity to Lisabeth is more in the reaction from other characters than from any character similarity. They both have their own way of doing things, and a tendency to drive adults crazy who don't know how to deal with them. Pippi's superstrong: she can lift a horse or show up the strongman at the circus. And Lisabeth knows Read more…