WALMART: This is a letter I've been sending to every Walmart email address I can find in hopes of getting an answer from somebody. I can't even start talking about it beyond this because I'll just start ranting and cursing. I'm usually hesitant to post personal stuff about other people here but I'm trying every avenue to get somebody from Walmart to see this. So here's the letter, if you happen to know somebody higher up in Walmart who might listen, please pass it on to them.

Subject: Appalling treatment of a loyal Walmart customer

My aunt was in store #151 in McAlester, OK a week ago and at some point during the 2+ hours she was in the store a $3 bracelet she was intending to purchase fell into her purse. When she went to pay for her other items, the security people at the store stopped her and had the police called to have her arrested for shoplifting. The police declined to arrest her because she requires an oxygen tank and is in a wheelchair. Apparently the store security berated her in front of the store before the police let her go and fined her $150 plus some charge Walmart has for calling the police. The final insult was that she was told she is banned from going into Walmart again, which is one of her great pleasures in life. My aunt is in ill health and almost had a stroke from the increase in her blood-pressure during the event and she also had a severe panic attack. She jumps every time the phone rings thinking Walmart is sending the police after her and doesn't like to leave the house since the incident.

I can understand your security people have to be hard on shoplifters. But I think your stores probably have enough actual theft going on that they would know the difference between a sick woman who accidently had something fall into her purse and a real criminal. The way she was treated is absolutely insane. I hope it was the actions of an over-zealous security officer rather than Walmart policy. I will be contacting everyone I can find at Walmart until I get my aunt an apology for the treatment she has suffered. I can only hope that someone will recognize the over reaction of this store's employees and attempt to make amends for it. An apology and assurance that she can once again visit your store is all it would take. Please email me at matt@mattorama.net for her contact information. Thank you.

- posted by Matt @ 4:29 PM permanent link |

 
BRAINS: No, this isn't a post about zombies. :) I'm a sort-of armchair neuroscientist. I love studying the brain. Because of that, I've been looking forward to Jeff Hawkins's new book 'On Intelligence' about his theories on the larger overall workings of the brain. I was surprised in reading the book that his theories seem to mesh with what I've always thought about the brain works. The big addition he made to my personal theories (along with adding a huge amount of technical details) is that the patterns are also used to predict the future. When you're walking, your brain is not only telling your muscles how to move based on previous walking patterns, it's predicting how your body and the world is going to react based on those same patterns. If you've ever missed a step on the stairs, you've experienced this. Your brain predicted one thing and prepared you for that but you experienced something different.

Like I said, it meshed really well with how I've always looked at things and has caused me to reexamine a lot of things I previously explored such as AI. As a computer scientist, Mr. Hawkins's natural focus is on how we can make machines that use this pattern-prediction framework to think the way we do. He goes beyond the old ideas of having a human-like AI and moves to real applications like a weather predicting brain. His idea is to build a pattern-prediction system and then feed it data from say, weather satellites, instead of eyes and ears and the like. Then the machine would learn to make patterns and predict the weather the way we predict what we're going to see in a room even before we turn on the lights. This would allow the machine to see deeper patterns in the weather without having to be a human-like being. A fascinating idea and one I'm hoping to learn more about in the coming years. Hawkins has formed a company called Numenta to build products from these ideas and I'm going to be watching them closely. This is the guy who built the original PalmPilot and my beloved Visor handheld so he's not to be ignored. If I knew enough to work with him and his partners, I would jump at the chance. I really believe it'll turn out to be ground-breaking work. - posted by Matt @ 12:10 PM permanent link |

 
SITE: For the 5 or 6 of you who visit this site, I just wanted to say that the site hosting my comments, Haloscan.com, has been having trouble recently so it's causing my page to look like it's loading slowly. Hopefully they'll get their stuff straightened out soon and it'll go away but thanks for putting up with the weirdness for the past couple of weeks.

If you really want to avoid these types of issues, I suggest subscribing to my RSS/Atom feed at Bloglines.com. It's a great service. And if you have something you have to say, feel free to email me. - posted by Matt @ 10:16 AM permanent link |

 
TREK: I've been meaning to write about Star Trek: Enterprise for awhile now but some recent rumors Warren Ellis has heard spurred me on to finally make this post.

The rumor Warren heard was that the final episode of Enterprise was going to reveal that the entire show had been a holodeck novel watched by ST: The Next Generation crew members. This smacks of the typical crazy internet rumor but the problem is that the actors who played Troi and Riker are confirmed to be playing parts in the finale. Also, Warren apparently got an email from a friend saying he saw 2 actors in TNG uniforms coming out of a soundstage. Of course this isn't proof but it's enough to lend at least a little backbone to the rumor. The real problem is that something like this isn't out of the realm of possibility given the people running the show. If the showrunners had shown any sign of knowing what the hell they were doing, people would dismiss something like this out of hand. As it is, we can't be sure.

Enterprise started out with a perfect setup. Trek, without the baggage of Roddenberry's vision of a conflict-free humanity and little continuity. Things were supposed to be dangerous, not as sterile, etc. Immediately this went out the window. When they did the 'Han Solo & Pricess Leia' story only 3 or 4 episodes in, I knew things were doomed. I didn't watch a lot of the 2nd season. The 3rd season once again had a good premise (once you got past the too-obvious Space Arabs allusions to 9/11) and squandered it. Come on, a region of space that warps and twists and obeys different laws of physics and all that happens is the walls buckle and crates fly around? Please. I wanted to see people merged into the wall, parts of the ship disappear and expose everyone to vacuum, etc. Real danger. But no, the leash had to be kept on the writers.

Now comes the 4th season and they get somebody else to run the show. The new guy has done a really good job I'd have to say. Starting out by wrapping up what was supposed to be the over-arching story of the entire show, the Temporal Cold War, in 2 episodes by blowing something up wasn't the best way to handle that and the nine-millionth retelling of the 'Ancient aliens learn humanity' story was terrible but other than that, I liked it. Unfortunately, they basically told the new guy 'The Titanic has broken in half and is mostly underwater, want to be the captain?' There was little chance of anything turning the show around by that point.

The reason the 'holodeck novel' rumor smacks of truth is that the people in charge of Trek are capable of it. But if it's true, they deserve the wraith of every Trekkie in existance and to never work in any creative medium again. Doing that to the people who have watched you bumble your way through one of pop culture's most beloved franchises and turn it into a laughingstock would be the ultimate insult. It's hard to think of that as anything but a middle finger to your fans. To steal a joke from Warren Ellis, they might as well just go ahead and replace that episode with a black screen and the message 'FUCK YOU FOR WATCHING. -THE MANAGEMENT'.

But even if it's not true, Trek is going into cryogenic sleep for at least a few years. Hopefully long enough for somebody with a creative bone in their body to take over. I'm available, by the way. :) - posted by Matt @ 5:30 PM permanent link |

 
MUSIC: I was tempted to file this under STUPID. It's a tossup. I bought the new Kings Of Leon album today (it rocks) and found that it was encumbered by some very stupid "copy protection" software called Media Max. It's meant to keep those mean old pirates from copying the disc and spreading it around to cheap Kings Of Leon fans on the internets. Of course it doesn't work and just causes people like me a hassle. It's very easy to disable (click here for how), meaning that real pirates who are copying and selling the discs will just disable it. Other people who just want to rip the disc to MP3 to listen to it on their ipod (me) or mythtv home theater (me again) either won't be able to do it or will be subject to an unneeded hassle. When I buy CDs, all I ever do is fire up Exact Audio Copy and rip it to MP3. Then I listen to the MP3s and usually never see the physical disc again. I'm not pirating, not distributing, not doing anything illegal or wrong. But the music industry chooses to subject me to a hassle for absolutely no reason. Like I said, the real pirates are just going to disable the stupid copy protection or more likely use a real CD duplicator that doesn't care about the crappy DRM they used. Some day they'll stop treating their customers like criminals but it's not coming soon enough. I'm tempted to go return the stupid disc now that I have it ripped and buy a tshirt directly from the band to make up the lost money.

I've seriously curtailed my buying of big label CDs in recent years specifically because of their idiocy. I've bought more independent CDs in the last month than I have bought label CDs in a year. I used to buy a CD a week, not any more. Now I buy from guys like Brad who includes MP3s on his discs and wants you to give them out to people because he knows that more listeners == more money. I've also bought CDs from Winston (the site they use let me just buy the MP3s and download them, DRM free), Manda & The Marbles, and Slim. All of those I found because they gave various podcasts the right to play their music. Go find some artists who appreciate their fans and labels that don't thing applying pointless hassles to paying customers.

The dumbest thing about it, I fired up my favorite bittorrent search site and guess what, 2 copies of the new album ready to be downloaded. Idiots. - posted by Matt @ 8:25 PM permanent link |

 
VACATION: Just returned from our family vacation at what they're now calling The Disneyland Resort. I used to go to Disneyland all the time when I was growing up in San Diego but I hadn't been but once since they added the new California Adventure park and the Downtown Disney outdoor mall. Both are awesome. We stayed at the also-new Paradise Pier hotel (I would love to stay the Grand Californian mission-style hotel but it would have almost doubled our trip cost). Our package included a 4 day "Park Hopper" pass so we could go in to both parks anytime we wanted, which is the way to go if you visit the Resort. Being able to go in the morning right when they open and take advantage of no lines and then go back to the hotel and sleep and go back in the evening is infinitely easier than trying to do everything in one day like we used to when I was little.

The only bad part was that they're still getting ready for the 50th Bithday of the park so it seemed like half the things we wanted to do were closed. No Space Mountain, no Splash Mountain, no Playhouse Disney show Allison wanted to see, etc. I wish they would have told us that up front.

One of my favorite moments was the teenagers behind me filming their ride on Big Thunder Mountain (formerly my favorite coaster at the park). They held their video camera and commented the whole time, which was fun to listen to. Then at the end I hear the kid go 'AAAHHHHH!' and 'AAAAAHHHHHH!' out of nowhere and he tells his friend "I did two aaahhhs there at the end so we could edit them in if we want." Beautiful. I love that these guys are making movies at home like that. I wish I could find it if they put it up on the net.

My other favorite moment was my new favorite coaster, Screaming, in California Adventure. It's all done with electromagnets so it's totally silent. It's got huge drops, a loop, and background music. My only complaint is that the restraint kept me from putting my arms all the way up. Still, no hands the whole time. Yee-hah.

All my pics from the adventure will soon be up on Flickr in my 'Disneyland 2005' set. - posted by Matt @ 10:15 AM permanent link |