Sean Reiser

Very rarely do I say this but I've found a film you must see, Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth. I came across the film innocently enough, it was being discussed with William Katt on the Slice of Sci Fi so I acquired myself a copy and sat down this evening to watch it. I was surprised by what I found ... simply the best hour and a half of sci-fi I've seen put to film.

I've been playing with the Artisteer for Macintosh beta and thought I'd write up my thoughts. If you're curious about my thoughts about the windows version please look here. To be fair as with any piece of software that is in beta, anything I discuss may change wildly before the final release.

Since the Windows version was written in something .NET based the folks over at Artisteer decided to use mono to port the package over to mac. One of the side effects of this is that it retains the Windows look and feel, as you can see in the image below. To a Macintosh purist having a ribbon interface would probably feel uncomfortable and overwelming. At the very least it feels out of place. They say they are looking into giving the program a more windows look and feel.

While I'm looking for work I've been playing with the new version friendfeed API and built a module to track mentions of an individual node. If you look at block at the bottom of this post you can see what I'm trying to do. I've managed to recapture some comments about one of my blog posts that I didn't know happened and see some other activity around my posts such as who's bookmarked it, who's shared it on google reader, etc.

As I've been engaged in a job hunt I've been dealing more and more with applying for jobs online and I've begun to notice a disturbing trend. A number of sites from reputable firms have been asking for the last 4 digits of my SSN as well as my birthday. Now that these firms also require you to have an account on their site to apply for a job, they ask you to answer "personal questions" so they can reset your password, commonly your place is birth is used.

Last night, or rather early this morning, at around 3AM, I received a Facebook IM from a former coworker (let's call him "Frank") telling me he was in London, "got mugged and robbed at gun point" and needed my help. He went on to tell me that he was beaten and bruised. Where he said he needed cash, my primary concern was for his health. I figured he needed someone to get him to a place where he could get medical care, to a police station, or the US Consulate so I began reaching out via social networking to my contacts in London.

As we've all been enjoying the high of the Apollo 11 anniversary, I've gotten to thinking about where the space program is today and were it is going.

My parents were born in a world in a world where man hadn't walked on the moon and had often commented how they wouldn't thought they've seen it in their lifetimes. As they took me, at the age of 1 month and placed me in front of a TV to watch the lunar landing, little could they imagine that 40 years later, I would have no memories of man leaving the orbit of Earth.

OK, before I actually get to the post, a little housekeeping. Where I received a few positive comments from yesterday's post, If You're Not Sleeping With Someone, Why Do You Care Who They Sleep With?, I've gotten some rather negative, vulgar and abusive email, which I won't post here. I do have one request though, I have the courage to post my thoughts here, online, where people can see them, please feel free to use the comment box below to voice your disapproval.

OK, I suspect this may cause some problems for me in the future, but I really don't care, I've been carrying this post inside of me for a while and I'm going to let it out. Through a series of retweets I would up staring at the twitter feed of someone who seems to be homophobic and angry. I engaged him earlier today with the following tweet:

I know I'm going to kick myself later for asking this. @REDACTED if a person isn't sleeping with you, why do you care who they sleep with?