Why Facebook's Stock Is In The Tank

So here I am minding my own Facebook page, and I see that there are some advertising things for me to look at (see right).

Now Hiring.

Now Hiring.

Now Hiring.

Guaranteed Approval for some credit card.

And a PSA for Nurse Practitioner Clinic*.

Anyone who wonders A) how Facebook is going to make any money and B) why their stock is tanking should consider the quality of these advertisements, the frequency with which they will entice click-through yielding value for the advertisers, and the halo effect that these quality advertisements have on other, future advertising that will inevitably follow.

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*== NPCs are a whole other problem.  They are inevitably only going to be only marginally better than Telehealth is, in that NPCs will at least be able to put a band-aid on your minor boo-boo before defaulting to the advice to "go to the emergency room" if there's anything even remotely possibly wrong with you.  How this eases pressure on emergency rooms is beyond me.

Hollywood

So Jenn and I went to see The Dark Knight Rises last night.  The previews show to us were:

• the upcoming Twilight movie (which I didn't understand at all)
• The Bourne Legacy (which I also didn't understand at all)
• Taken 2 (which I only barely understood because I'd seen the first one)
• The Hobbit (complete with singing -- which was cool, but I don't want to watch three hours of it)
• The Campaign (a Will Farrell movie, so no understanding at any level is required)
• Man Of Steel (a Superman reboot?)

Now maybe this is an unfair sample.  I was at a Batman franchise movie, after all.  But by my count, that's five "franchise" movies, and a Will Farrell movie -- and let's face it he keeps making the same movie over and over again so it might as well be a franchise movie.

Wonder why Hollywood is in trouble?  This.  No new ideas are worth anything unless they are presented in a framework that is somehow familiar, that demands credibility based on something that has come before.

Even if that credibility link is weak -- witness "Battleship".  Oh, and Total Recall -- The Total Recallering.  Who the hell thought that was a good idea?  I don't think I have read a single positive review of it.  Anywhere.

Combined with my problems with the feature presentation last night -- the picture was gorgeous, but the sound wavered between incomprehensibly loud, incomprehensibly soft, and just plain incomprehensible (I don't think I understood more than about 30% of what Bain said) -- maybe I'm just too old for the movies now.

I Love Engineering

The MRO team nailed it:

That's MSL "Curiosity" descending to Mars in the parachute phase on Monday morning.

Just think: math made this picture possible.  This is so cool.

(Previously: 1, 2)

Called Shot

The MRO team is going to try to repeat the feat of taking a picture of one space probe from another.

(Previously.)

Does Nobody Think Things Through Anymore?

So this showed up in my email folder yesterday:

That's right: in order to celebrate the American olympic team, Mattel is offering a model of a German remake of a British car -- a model that is manufactured in China or Thailand.

That there's absolutely nothing American about this car has apparently escaped everyone in the decision-making process that led to this model being offered.

Now while there's little that can be done about where the model is made, there have been tons of quality American-designed and built cars rendered as Hot Wheels that would be a more fitting salute to their athletes -- and I say that as someone who has a poor opinion of American-made cars.

Site-specific User Accounts

So in the course of solving the problem that lead to this page's creation, I happened upon the Nagios Exchange site page with the plugin that I ended up using.  The page in question notes that the plugin requires the perl module Array::Compare, but says that it isn't available through the popular yum repositories.

With 15 seconds of Googling, I found it in RPMforge, a factor which simplifies my life immensely.

So.  How best to share this knowlege?  It turns out that I'd have to create a user account on the site just to leave a comment on this page to that effect.  And frankly, that's too much overhead.  Unless I can create an account and log in as a pre-validated user -- something that OpenID permits me to do from my Gmail account -- frankly I'm not going to bother.

It seems insane that in this day and age there are still sites that expect you to create and manage separate digital identities.  I'm not saying make it impossible to have separate digital identities, but for a hit-and-run comment, anything more than about 15 seconds and four clicks is really too much effort and I'm not going to do it.

The StackExchange family of sites know how to do this.  It is easy.

It should be everywhere, at least as an option.

...and yes, I'm well aware that I've just spent far more effort complaining about the problem than I would have had I just created an account and moved on.

Almost Done

This is probably the news that everyone has been waiting for.

After the full-body iodine scan this morning, the doctors decided there were no abnormalities.  There wasn't the predicted all-around study they've done every time before they "just wanted a couple of pictures".  I didn't even get fed through the C/T scanner.  Just 45 minutes on the table under the high-energy plates, and the doctor was happy enough.

This is the perfect result of the test: no abnormalities, no cautionary immediate follow-up imaging.

(And a whopping great bacon cheeseburger for lunch.)

So this means we can start believing that this cancer is really gone.  That this can be the last time the word "cancer" is mentioned with that certain weight that it can carry.

The rest of this is merely book-keeping and accounting.  I'll have to re-do this full-body radioactive iodine scan every three to five years for the rest of my life, just in case the cancer is dormant somewhere, hiding out.  And starting in September there will be a new regular regimen of blood testing to make sure my artificial hormone balance is appropriate with possibly annual visits to this particular doctor.  But in general we can go back to our regular wonderings and complainings about the routine aches and pains that life accumulates.  We don't have cancer still hanging over us.

We'll never get the year and a half of life back that this took.  Hopefully this will just be one story that the kids remember being told rather than experiencing, something to remember to mention to their doctor when they're 30 and doing their own annual physicals.

I'm still not sure what to take away from this as a lesson.  It is true that at times the medical mechanism moved slowly and opaquely.  But I went from being told "let's get an ultrasound of this lump" to "the biopsy returned cancer-like cells" in less than four months, and from there to the surgery in less than six weeks.  So when there's a problem, the system moves quickly.  Keeping everyone informed, well that's not something they do so well.  I guess it shows that in my case the system, generally, worked.

It has been said that life is what happens while you are making other plans.  At times, Jenn and I have wondered if we've been bad-luck magnets between the cancer and the autism and the associated combinations of events those bring.  But with the help of everyone around us we have managed to come through the cancer trial, and right now with both boys' medium-term outlooks looking stable, the autism is probably in the best shape it is going to be.

Thanks to everyone who has walked with us -- and those who continue to walk with us -- through this journey.