Strip-Mining the Past: Music Videos from the MTV Stoneage
By now we're used to the 80s being raped for retro commodities. VH1 did it, then all of sudden girls were once again wearing Strawberry Shortcake t-shirts and The Turtles returned to Saturday Morning television. But, this Devo cover group is disturbing. It's Walt Disney Presents Kid's Bop Devo Edition, and I can't for the life of me imagine the point. (Via Eric Gunnerson)
My CECS 550 Project: Reimagining the Speed School Student Council
I believe Kevin Price had mentioned it once or twice last semester, but it really hit me when Dr. Ragade himself told me (as I turned in my final project during finals week, last semester) to start thinking ahead of time for a CECS 550 ("Software Engineering") project. He was right, and the ground was hit running in the first week of this semester. I had been thinking about things and looking for something that might be challenging, but most likely would be "easy". The idea was to find a "real" project with an actual customer and actual deliverables (to do actual life-cycle analyses and software metrics work with). One of the things that had been on my mind, as I was working on this year's E-Expo website, was how badly the entirety of the Speed School Student Council's website needed rewriting and modernizing. That's when I decided to go ahead and mention it to comrade-in-arms (fellow CECS 550 student) Tony Harper who is the current Director of Administration as a possible project for the class. He was excited by it (the website is the DoA's responsibility, and he knew it needed doing), and agreed to work on it with me. This makes the project work, as Tony can act both as the Project Manager for the project as well as the "Client" (both metaphorically, as in the Extreme Programming methodology, and literally).
The original plan was to do it just as it has been done before (and as the E-Expo site was done): PHP code with MySQL databases. I have become extremely tired of PHP over the years, and have this general feeling that in PHP I "keep making the same mistakes over and over again". A lot of that feeling comes from my work ...
The Viacom Split
I follow corporate intrique, particularly the too-large media companies that control all/most of our daily entertainment, and the Viacom split is particularly intriquing. Partly because it is the first major split in recent years (mostly we've just seen consolidation, excluding the pending DreamWorks split, but that begs the argument if DreamWorks SKG counts as "major"), but also partly because I've been a Viacom employee. Anyway, the split is more than a little weird, but I'm not sure I could offer a better one of the top of my head. I'll summarize the StarTrek.com article (via some Digg):
| Viacom | CBS Paramount Television (!) |
|---|---|
|
|
The new CBS Paramount Television Corporation (ugly mouthful with ugly conjoined logo) takes on almost all of Paramount's TV holding minus the lucrative Cable division MTV Networks. This is interesting mainly because CBS Paramount Television may as well be named the Star Trek Entertainment Corporation, as all of the major divisions are somehow tied directly into Paramount's Star Trek property. This is probably just because Star Trek has been heavily marketed across media and is a long enduring franchise, but it is interesting.
The Wikipedia Article on Sumner Redstone is a real intriguing read into the incestuous nature of our media companies (Viacom was spun off from CBS as their syndication department, Viacom later became big enough to swallow its once parent CBS, and now Viacom is spitting a larger CBS back out...). Even more fun ...
Greetest blonde joke evar?
Some say that this way leads to the best blonde joke ever (or evar in common internet lingo). Take a look at that, and if you want to cheat, well... here is the real punchline.
