I’ve been watching the first few episodes of the new Fox series Standoff over this past week, as a kind of experiment in the lower rungs of television entertainment. There are a bunch of really well-produced shows out there that I really enjoy — Rome, House, Arrested Development, The Shield, to name a few — "Standoff" is not one of them.

The premise is simple, kitschy and fairly cheesy. From the site:

MATT FLANNERY (Ron Livingston) and EMILY LEHMAN (Rosemarie DeWitt) are the top-ranked negotiators in the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit. They’re trained to talk their way through volatile situations. They’re experts at knowing what makes other people tick. They’re also sleepingtogether… a secret that they agreed to keep to themselves, until Matt revealed it to the entire world during a tense hostage standoff. The public revelation causes friction between Matt, who doesn’t take much seriously and relies on gut instinct, and Emily, an academic who analyzes every move. [ … ] STANDOFF advances a fundamental idea: that in life and in love, "everything is a negotiation."

I’ve only seen the first two episodes and it’s pretty much what one would expect. Matt is a follow-your-gut kinda guy and Emily is a careful, calculating skeptic. They stage office shouting matches so people won’t think they’re continuing their relationship, and have cute little tiffs during critical negotiations. Hostage situations exist more as a backdrop for their romantic calisthenics, and (as yet) do not seem to be very relevant to the two leads other than as an excuse to squabble.

What interests me, ultimately, is how long this show will be around. The cast is tiny and the plot, when you really think about it, is a total dead-end. Consider: we are essentially watching these two principal characters oscillating endlessly around the fact that they want to be together, but can’t, kinda. It’s a situation where the final resolution is boring compared with the problems it creates, therefore, the situation can never be resolved. In other words, it’s fairly standard pop romantic drama stuff, disguised as a cop show. (Personally, I’m expecting a new character to be introduced somewhere during the second half of this season, probably along the lines of a talented, hotshot negotiator whose sole purpose on the show is to challenge Matt’s alpha-male status.)

Amusing and utterly moronic at the same time, watching this show is a lot like watching a retarded person write a poem. You know it’s gonna be terrible, but you just gotta see it.

A quick peek at my reading material over the past few months has indicated a very troubling selection of titles. I really have to start branching out to other areas of interest I think.

1. Naked Economics, Charles Wheelan
   Really interesting fundamentals-type book that attempts to explain the "dismail science" without using a single graph or formula. (More semi-related ramblings about Naked here.)

2. Interface-Oriented Design, Ken Pugh
   Pragmatic Programmers is my all-time favorite technical publisher, and this book, which talks about conceptual interfaces (on the code level) as well as people interfaces (on the human, graphical level) is no exception. It’s a bit involved to read so it’s not very good bathroom reading though.
3. Harrington on Hold ‘Em Volume 3, Dan Harrington
   If there was ever any doubt that Hold ‘Em is a deeply strategic game, this is the book to prove it. Harrington analyzes noteworthy tournament plays from some of the masters of the game with an almost pedantic level of detail. Featured players include Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen, Chris Ferguson and my personal favorite Daniel Negreanu. (As an interesting aside: after reading this volume, I ended up losing about PhP4000 playing online. Apparently, reading a book and understanding a book are two different things.)
4. The Zen of CSS Design, Dave Shea
   Published over a year ago, this book is a good learn-by-example type of guide for designers who are just starting to get into CSS-centric design. Shea uses CSSZenGarden as his main case study, so it’s certainly not the end-all, be-all of CSS inspiration. Good bedtime reading, if well-formed, standards-compliant code gives you pleasant dreams.
5. Dot.com Success!, Sally Richards
   Interesting book about what it takes for an internet startup to succeed. The funny thing about it was that it was written in 2001, as dozens of big dot.com’s were crashing and burning all around. As I read this book a good 5 years after it was written, it’s surprising to see how much of it is still pretty relevant. Sure, the average startup capital lost a whole zero in terms of the amounts, but many of the key ideas (how to pitch your vision, how to properly develop your brand, how to make technology choices, etc) haven’t changed at all. The writing style is a bit tepid, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Straplines are funny things. The really good ones ("Just do it" or "Don’t leave home without it") gain a life of their own in the consumers’ minds, and really resonate throughout the life of a brand. The bad ones, well, they tend to be made fun of on blogs like this.

Interesting examples of straps I’ve come across over the past 4 years:

1. Eye Institutes

Asian Eye Institute - Asian care for asian eyes

American Eye Institute - If you or someone you love needs eye care, We Care. (sic)

I totally understand the need for any healthcare brand to affirm their commitment to TLC, but when it’s as in-your-face as these two local rivals, it tends to sound clunky as hell. The Asian eye strap is insipid, but the American Eye one is just horrible. It doesn’t have any rhythm, uses repetition inappropriately, and actually capitalizes "We Care."

The interesting thing is that these eye institutes — especially with their Lasik procedures — have become successful by commoditizing eye care such that each patient will rarely get more than a few moments with their doctors. In other words, if you’re looking for a lot of handholding and backrubbing, you might have a better chance of that somewhere else.

2. Real Estate

Landco Pacific - Look at what we’ve done to our country

This one is a real killer. Landco develops a lot of good-looking leisure/resort properties in Luzon and they’ve got a great eye for detail. But their main tagline friggin’ sucks. It’s the kind of wording you’d expect to see on a WWF ad (the organization, not the wrestlers) right next to a picture of an oil spill, a deforested mountain, or a barren landscape. When I first met these guys, they were telling me how the entire organization was excited about this new strapline they had cooked up. I was glad they didn’t hire me.

3. Consumer Products

Robinson’s Department Store - Fashion Everyday

Creativity is a gift, I guess. 

National Bookstore - The country’s national bookstore

The thought process that went into coming up with this bit of redundant tripe is just awe-inspiring. Notice that if you remove either "country" or "national" from the strapline, it still means the same thing. The bigger problem is that this strapline is conceptually equivalent to the name of the bookstore itself, i.e., "national," so it is a complete waste of space to print both the name and the strapline together on anything. (Which of course, they stubbornly still do.) I was pretty taken aback when I first saw this strap on their branding manuals, as they had just finished explaining to me how they had gone to a Singaporean design firm to reengineer the NBS look. I hope they got their money back.

From the website:

Welcome to the world’s FIRST real online poker room and community for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender poker lovers!

If ever you needed proof that online poker is crossing over, this was it.

The site we’ve all been slaving over for the past 4 weeks is finally approaching that halfway-decent point … at least, decent enough that I can now link it up without worrying about being hugely embarassed. MobiusLive.net is a social network focused on local independent music, currently featuring 4 dozen artists with a whole bunch of previewable MP3s. Notable groups include the Greyhoundz, Chicosci, Valley of Chrome, Queso, and Narda, among others. By October, MobiusLive will be our own little answer to iTunes, and will allow users to purchase songs for a very affordable PhP20.00 per track.

Feature-wise, MobiusLive is still pretty bare, but we’ve got a whole bunch of new features queued up over the next month that’ll blow your proverbial socks off.

From ABS-CBN Interactive (hehe):

At 2:00 p.m. Thursday, Typhoon "LUIS" was located based on satellite and surface data at 350 kms east of Basco, Batanes (20.4°N 125.5°E) with
maximum sustained winds of 150 kph near the center and gustiness of up
to 185 kph. It is moving west at 11 kph.

So for the 4th consecutive day this week I am the last person in our little office. With the only other full-time developer, Hunter, being 2 hours ahead of us in Sydney, I don’t even have the benefit of having someone to talk to over YM past a certain time.

I don’t particularly mind working alone of course; I’ve been doing this long enough that I actually get more done when there’s nobody else in the room. The annoying thing is that our client (who we’re sharing the floor with) still shows up for sudden, impromptu meetings after 6pm, so I have to stay on my toes until most of them have left as well. 

The social network we’re building for them finally went up yesterday, but I don’t really want to broadcast the URL until we’ve ironed out a few more bugs. It’s still in a fairly rough alpha state and is not going to be very impressive for at least the next 2 weeks anyway (although PinoyTechBlog preempted the whole alpha launch by writing about it late last week … ugh).

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Yesterday I gave a brief 45-minute lecture to a student org from UPD, on "persuasion technology," which is just a fancy word for Powerpoint presentations. It turned out pretty well, considering that I spent less than an hour the night before actually preparing any materials.

One of the funny bits of trivia I gave them, as a kind of funny intro, was this startling piece of information I found over at Wikipedia:

Being widely used by businesspeople, educators, and trainers, [ Powerpoint ] is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology: according to its vendor, Microsoft Corporation, some 30 million presentations are made with PowerPoint every day.

LOL. 

One of my all-time favorite indie acts, The Velvet Teen, recently released their third album, the rather interestingly-named Cum Laude. It’s a fantastic collection, easily one of the best I’ve heard this year. (Anytime I spend more than a full day listening to something, it’s gotta be good.) My personal favorite track is a synth-poppy number called "Noi Boi" but the real killer song is "Gyzmkid," which I can only describe as the audal equivalent of walking face first into a thunderstorm. Brilliant stuff.

An interesting quote I spotted at Bill Rini’s poker blog today, to round out my recent spat of poker-related entries:

"The only thing that separates us from animals is the fact that we can lay down middle pair to a check raise on the turn."

Hear hear.

Quad Aces make me smile. That’s me with rockets in the pocket by the way. My opponent, who had a gutshot straight draw went all in at the turn in an effort to scare me out of the hand. Since there was no straight possible with A,K,J,8 (unless he had rather foolishly called a big preflop raise with Q10), I gladly called his all-in with my (then) set of Aces.

Even with that big win under my belt, I still ended up losing this game unfortunately (I’ve been playing very badly this weekend), but the sight of those 4 cards did boost my morale quite a bit.

***

Just to kinda emphasize how horribly I’ve been performing: A few hours later, I drew quad Kings twice in the same game, and still only managed to make second place. Geez, what does it take, man?