How Many Videos Have I Watched on Youtube?

This is just a fun question that you used to be able to easily answer on youtube. But it seems some time in Nov 09 it was removed. but while it seems to be gone there still seems to be a way to access the number for the time being.

  1. go here: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME?v=2 and replace USERNAME with your username
  2. Search for videoWatchCount

kind of a pain but hopefully that data will stay in the feed. We know google is tracking us all very closely. we might as well have access to that data.

“Couples Retreat” Poster In UK

One of the things that really gets me about racism is when people complain about the the stuff that doesn’t matter. Here’s two version of a poster for “Couples Retreat”. Your supposed to supposed to be offended by the UK version that has edited out the black couple.

Guess what? If you want to be angry at racism then you should be pissed at the US poster as well as the whole movie. I agree with the movie Studio. They edited out the more minor characters and put the more famous people up front. I’m supposed to feel better about the US poster with the tiny black couple in the background? I’m supposed to feel better about a movie industry that does not give leading roles to blacks unless it’s a film for blacks?

This is just an instance where people see their own biases and become uncomfortable. I’m not singling this movie out. I’ve not seen it and I hear it’s fairly good. But in an industry where blacks are marginalized don’t get pissed if the poster reflects that reality. Instead of adding more black people to posters why not just go see more movies with black people?

Windows 7: First Glance

Vista was a pain. When I got my new computer with it I had trouble getting the network card to work. Also an attempt to install it on a family member’s “vista ready” totally borked their system and I was up till 4am trying to restore xp. They never upgraded to vista.

But so far Windows 7 is coming up roses. The $50 upgrade I got was a pretty sweat deal and the upgrade was easy. Granted vista and 7 are similar enough that there are no huge architecture changes but the upgrade was super smooth. It asked all the questions in the first 15 minutes and then the upgrade ran with out any hand holding. It took 2 hours. It still did that thing where the progress bar stalls for long periods of time and then races forward. It would have been nice if 7 was more clear that I didn’t need to watch it install, but that might just be the tech geek in me.

I’ve literally only used the OS for 10 minutes but it seems snappy. It also seems to only take about 6-700mb of ram instead of the 8-900mb that vista took up. The task bar seems super slick. I like the idea of pining applications in place in theory but the open programs seem hard to distinguish from the programs that have yet to launch.

I’ll try and keep more notes as I have more first impressions.