I love The Wire, HBO’s show about the drug scene in Baltimore. I refrain from calling it a tv show, because it’s nothing like television. It has nothing in common with television except that it’s shown there first. What it really is, is a televised novel written for the screen with unimaginable depth. It’s hard to explain, but the depth of the show is so staggering that one can scarcely understand it on first pass. Maybe the best way to look at it is that each season is like a well produced 12 hour long movie from a creator who truly loves his subject matter.

That subject matter is the streets of Baltimore, and the cops, dealers, citizens, politicians, and drug users who impact and are impacted upon by the streets. The main focus is with the police but it’s so unlike any filmed cop show I’ve seen that I can’t really compare it to any movie or tv depictions. Eventually you realize that the theme of the show is systemic organizational failure in various organizations — within the hierarchy of drug gangs, within the police stations, within the political structure, within the educational system.

The characters in this show, from the dealers to the cops, are so well written and acted that they seem beyond realistic. They seem real. When I watch this show too much, I feel like these are real people and I care about them way too much, as if what happens to them is happening to my friends and family. I start to think in their lingo, mentally replacing the n-word with “dude” (that works surprisingly well).

The fifth and final season is now airing on HBO… I’m still working my way through the fourth season (for the first time). If you are looking for a show, not just to watch, but to fall in love with… I can’t recommend The Wire in strong enough terms. Rent the first DVD, and watch it twice.

Today while watching a new episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent I saw the credits roll at the start of the episode.  When the guest starring splash said Amy Acker, I immediately predicted that she would be the guilty party even though her character hadn’t be shown yet — and wouldn’t end up being shown for a few minutes into the programme.

But of course, I was right.  My Law & Order foo is strong.

This caused a traffic jam on the I-5 this weekend when I was visiting a friend in Portland OR.

Probably from the jerk who took the picture linked above.

But I would buy the  DVD too.

Via everyone’s favourite Toronto-based Musician Poet Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr, comes:

The Whole Point of Television

Part of my job is to answer questions that the executives have which are difficult to determine, so I set up a little website which has a dashboard of various different queries and graphs I created. Of course, this leads to more requests and sometimes this falls outside the bounds of what I can easily do. For example, I couldn’t determine how many people were using a particular tool on our website because I didn’t have access to the the logs.

After pestering our IT department for several months, I finally got them to create a new database account for me so I could parse the statistics from our websites for reporting purposes. It’s a proprietary windows app which uses a MS-SQL database for storage, so I hooked it all up and started looking around at the tables.

It all looked pretty straightforward… for each website there was a set of tables named logical things like sumVisits and sumPaths, etc. And I could even find the results from custom reports I had already designed, making it very easy for me to gather the data I required. The table looks like this:

----------------------------
| DateVal | Visits | Views |
----------------------------
| 2454020 |   1304 |  1632 |
| 2454021 |   1124 |  2553 |
| 2454022 |    502 |   964 |
| 2454023 |    707 |  1388 |
| 2454024 |   1164 |  1332 |
----------------------------

Pretty simple, right? Now all I have left is to figure out what the hell this DateVal references. Normally these things reference another table so I check to see what it is a foreign key of. If you don’t speak database, that’s jargon for “lookup value referenced in another table”. Except in this case, it didn’t exist. And after poking around in every single table I determined that no, it simply wasn’t referencing anything else.

So what the hell is this DateVal anyhow? Just scanning the table visually shows that they are incrementing by one per day, so it’s a date counter of some sort. So what was 2454020 days ago, and why do I care about it? I read the documentation but it was not helpful in the slightest.

Since I work in MySQL quite a bit, I check there first to figure out what the original reference date is: “SELECT date_sub(current_date, interval 2454020 day)”. Except MySQL refuses to return a result for that, its date_sub routine isn’t built to handle such large numbers. Fine, I’ll try it in python. “print datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(2454020)” Damnit, that overflows too.

This is getting ridiculous… this stupid application is issuing dates which I can’t seem to process, and can’t even figure out what the hell it’s doing. As a last ditch effort to try to figure out what the hell is going on, I consult the oracle of our times, google. Searching for one of the DateVal values with the word “date” finally told me what I was looking at: a Julian Date Count.

“The Julian Day Count is a uniform count of days from a remote epoch in the past (-4712 January 1, 12 hours Greenwich Mean Time (Julian proleptic Calendar) = 4713 BCE January 1, 12 hours GMT (Julian proleptic Calendar) = 4714 BCE November 24, 12 hours GMT (Gregorian proleptic Calendar)). ” — ref

That just happens to be about 2.5 million days ago, which this stupid application helpfully uses to tell you what day the results happened on. It’s extremely useful for a website analytics program, in case an archaeologist happens to find a 6000 year old webserver which uses Apache Common Log Format logs, they won’t have a problem at all.

As a footnote, I should also point out that when I finally implemented that feature it was in the language PHP. PHP is well known for having way too many function names, and it just so happens that they have a built in feature to serve the extremely common purpose of converting Julian Date Counts into standard timestamps.

print jdtounix(2454020);
?>

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Because I am not sure it’s not April 1.

via Iaiain

Via my dear friend mns comes the following best image evar:

But this is crazy scary

.

Yeah, it’s overhyped today, the media talks about it way too much, blah blah blah.  But right now I don’t care.  Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age, who knows.
This is a picture of Manhattan that I took in Feb 1998 from the observation deck at the World Trade Center when I was visiting NYC with my good friend (and sometimes commenter) Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr.  I still can’t really believe it’s not there anymore, even though I’ve been to the site since then.  Pictures of the NYC skyline just seem like they are missing something, even five years later.

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Miss me?

To celebrate my return, here is a picture of Margaret Thatcher with a hilter mustache.

Semi-prominent linux hacker mjg59 has a rather apt humourous description of burning man and web 2.0.

Salon has an article up announcing their winner of the Buffy award for unappreciated television shows — the winner in this case being the wonderful Battlestar Galactica.   Their delightful “ten reasons not to watch Battlestar Galactica” includes one particular gem:

10. I like my science fiction peopled with multi-nostriled characters sporting thick, blue, leathery skin. Too many of the “Battlestar Galactica” characters are preposterously hot, and stubbornly refuse to ooze green, viscous liquids. Who wants that?

Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr writes to inform us that comedian Steve Carrell and that insane racist dude who runs Iran are actually the same person!

As a gift to my good friend joh3n whose first child was born just a few days ago, I made for him a Book of Zogg. This was one of the coolest things I have ever done — though I give credit for the idea to my lovely wife. Read more for the pictures in all their glory!

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The latest in the ryanthiessen.com family of websites, http://flagwavingbeaver.com/

It’s also the first website located on my brand new server. Gotta start with the important things first, eh?

You can be the proud owner of a book that the Premier of Alberta threw at some guy.

Buy now!