Sometimes they’re really weird. Night before last, I was dreaming, and woke up. Looked around, realized I had been dreaming, plopped my head back down and fell right back asleep. Although instead of going into another dream, a message popped up (almost as if I was using a computer) saying (via white text on a black background):

If you would like to continue this dream, a charge of $19.95 will be applied to your credit card. Do you want to proceed?

[Yes] [No]

But my brain knew it was dreaming, and the absurdity of it made me laugh hard enough to wake me up again. So +1 for “weird dreams”.

P.S. Oddly enough, usually I can’t read in my dreams. The words are almost always confusingly jumbled, not just in word/letter transposition but in physical orientation and alignment. Sometimes if I focus I can pull them together (literally: they move about in what I can only describe as brownian motion) and make sense of them, but not often. It’s an interesting enough phenomenon that I often try to look for newspapers or books in my dreams when I realize I’m dreaming, and it’s a great litmus test for when I’m not sure.

The NetFlix Prize

I remember reading about it after it was announced (probably on /.), and promptly forgetting about it. I stumbled across it again listening to one of the Google lectures on MapReduce, and started poking around, thinking “maybe this would make a good test project for my new (I-just-want-to-play-sized) Hadoop cluster”. But then I needed an algorithm before I started parallelizing it, and, hey, what do you know, I’m getting really good numbers.

Of course, I’m getting my good numbers on a very small randomly selected subset of the entire project. So it could be just a fluke. And it’s slower than molasses in an Adirondack winter (current estimate: 10+ years to calculate the entire qualifying data set). But hey, it has my attention.

So in my oh-so-finite free time, I’ve discovered two new TV shows that are both unique and well written, and I thought I’d share…

Dexter is about a serial killer (protagonist) who graciously kills only other murderers. Sounds cliche when I put it like that, but it’s the best saga-drama I’ve seen since BSG. My sister-in-law introduced me to it, oddly enough. Curiously (in the sense of the writer’s take) he’s not motivated by humanitarian concerns, simply survival by staying under the radar. Lots of dry sarcasm, which if you know me you know is the cornerstone of my sense of humor.

The second is Breaking Bad, where a chem teacher decides to go into the meth business to pay for the chemo for his stage-3 lung cancer. I was literally tearing up watching the last episode. (I’m a sucker for drama involving family/marriage problems, what can I say)

“But Derek, you’re a poor college student…and you buy Showtime?” Hardly. I’ve abandoned Tivo, even my Myth box, for Miro. It auto-downloads new TV shows as they come out for you. Read about how to set it up.

Let me know what you think.

My mother sent me a link to my cousin’s blog yesterday… Reading it (and contrasting it with my own) I feel so dorky and boring! Note to self: cook more. You enjoy it, you’re not bad at it, and no one will ever love you for who you are, so bribe them with food.

I wonder why.
I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!
– R. Feynman