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Saturday, September 07, 2002

Yeah, this whole "installing a doorbell" thing might take a while. Meanwhile... distraction:

Which Evil Criminal are You?
Erin Finnegan @ 10:20 AM :: Comments []

Thursday, September 05, 2002

Friday

How My Job is Extremely Similar the Cowboy Bebop Movie

** This post contains NO spoilers. It is spoiler-free. I assure you I won't ruin anything from the movie, because, in all fairness, it won't hit theaters until next year. **

Cowboy Bebop, for those of you who may not be in-the-know, is an anime television series that has recently gained popularity in the U.S. as it is broadcast on Cartoon Network on Saturday nights. It takes place in the future, and centers around the lives of 4 bounty hunters who have been brought together by circumstance, and a common interest in earning money. The creators of the television show claim that it is a revolutionary new style, and this may or may not be the case. In reality it borrows styles and themes from science fiction, cyberpunk, westerns, action genres, and film noir.

The four characters (and one dog) make up a kind of loosely knit family-unit. Jet is burly ex-cop with one cybernetic arm and a large spaceship that he chooses to share with the others. Spike is an extremely thin ex-yakuza man, and wears a slick, Lupin-style suit as he kicks ass with his superior martial arts skills. Faye is a femme fatal with impossible breasts and serious gambling addiction. She's constantly chased by debt collectors, or at least she has been since she got out of that expensive cryogenic freeze that erased her memory. Ed is an athletic 13-year-old girl hacker who types with her toes as often as she types with her hands. The dog, Ein, is an escaped science experiment. Even though Ein is super-intelligent, he never talks or acts too cutesy, he does sometimes answer the phone by hitting the "enter" key with his nose, and putting whoever the caller wants to speak to on the line.

In the Bebop movie, the inner-workings of this group are very obvious. Each member is really out for his or her own good, and no one is particularly interested in functioning as a closely knit team. The characters split up to gather information in order to solve a crime and catch the culprit and (hopefully) collect a bounty. They don't split up because it's more efficient, or it's part of their overall "plan," and no one is assigned a lead which to follow. In fact, none of them even say where they are going as they leave the ship to look for clues. Rather, each person instinctively does what is in their area of expertise.

When the do share information, it is almost begrudgingly that they do so, and it is a frustrating experience. "That ends another episode of Wasting Time with Faye!" Jet bellows after one such encounter. Herein begins the similarities to my workplace.

Everyone at ISO has a tiny bit of information, or many tiny bits of information, that, by themselves, aren't very useful. On a daily basis, as things go wrong, one must seek out the information others have that will be useful to oneself. The trouble is, sometimes one must go through 12 people before one has all the data one needs to complete a task. Half the time, the people you come in contact with don't know what information you need, and give you a lot of static.

Comparably, in the Bebop movie, Spike talks to a useful person who sells him a giant vase, and then disappears. The vase appears useless at first, but later it becomes an intregal clue for solving the crime.

The major differences between my job and the Bebop movie are as follows:

1. My job is not cool at all, whereas the Bebop movie is the coolest ever.
2. I eventually get paid, but the Bebop crew very rarely collects a bounty.
3. My coworkers are unattractive and somewhat overweight, whereas Faye and Spike are easy on the eyes, and everyone on the Bebop is thin, and typically out of food.
4. My job has a lot of benefits and is not particularly life-threatening.

You get the idea.

Fri Sep 6 17:13:18 2002
Erin Finnegan @ 3:07 PM :: Comments []

Q. What time are we gaming?

A. 7pm.

But I might not be able to make 7. I kinda want to work out. Lifting dice and rolling them may contribute to my character's health, but it doesn't contribute to mine.
Erin Finnegan @ 3:06 PM :: Comments []

Tuesday, September 03, 2002

Dear blogger,

Please stop eating my posts.

Sincerely,
Erin F_______

Wednesday

My post for today is written in the style of a high school kid giving an impromptu oral report in a Current Events class.

A big deal in the news lately is information sharing among goverment agencies. You know, it's that thing where local cops, the FBI, and the CIA have all this information, possibly information about terrorist, but they have no way of sharing the information in a useful or timely way. They're just out there, gathering tons of surviellence data on everyone, and it takes way too long to filter out all the noise and get to useful things.

For those of you paranoid conspiracy-theorist and/or libertarians out there, this might be either scary or reassuring. Its scary that government agencies are capable of gathering so much data about you, but reassuring that they can't make much sense of it, and then frightening again that if these databases are shared, the goverment might actually have some real spy-like abilities.

All that aside, I can't help but think how the governement really needs as ISO-type agent to make their data more useful. ISO, Insurance Services Office, is the company I work for. Insurance agencies all over the country give us data they've collected about their customers (for free) and we compile it in a country-wide database, then sell it back the insurance agencies in a form that they can use. If only there were an ISO for the governement, it could collect data about people from the FBI, the CIA, the INS, and local cops, then compile it, predict trends, and so forth, and terrorist would be easy to catch.

The reason such a statistical agent does not already exist is one of economy; it is very worthwhile for insurance companies to pay out big bucks to ISO for our accurate actuaries, but who would foot the bill for a similar governement agency? (Obviously, the tax payers.) Unfortunately, there would no real consumer-product relationship in such a company, and no profit at all, really. No wonder such a company doesn't already exist.

Wed Sep 4 15:48:31 2002

Yes, I'm aware of how bad my spelling is, but Snor Comments is giving me a hard time. It keeps bringing me back to the stupid log in page, even when I ignore the "click here" nonesense.

Wed Sep 4 15:53:36 2002
Erin Finnegan @ 3:37 PM :: Comments []