(no subject)
Mood: sickish?
Posted on 2006-11-01 09:29:00
Tags: netflixprize
Words: 363

Last night djedi and I went down to Fell's Point in Baltimore for Halloween festivities. Met up with his boss and we wandered the streets for a while. It was fun! Lots and lots of people there, and lots of good costumes. Off the top of my head, I remember seeing two different Duffmans, two Homers, Mario and Luigi, the Three Musketeers (who I had seen earlier at work!), Rainbow Brite(sp?), Jem, a bag of Jelly Bellys, Christopher Reeve (a guy in a wheelchair with a Superman costume...clever or tasteless?). I even saw Aqua Teen Hunger Force! (I took a picture - we'll see how it turns out) We also saw no less than four people wearing wall clocks as a necklace - like Flava Flav back in the day, right? Anyone know why this was so popular? It was very odd...

Also, we had our first ever trick-or-treaters! Our apartment complex had distributed bags with a few pieces of candy and instructions to "hang the necklace on the door" if you wanted trick-or-treaters. We're still confused by this, as (I can't stress this enough) a plastic bag is not a necklace! But we carved a pumpkin and put the fake candle-like light giving object that came with the carving kit inside (irritatingly it doesn't stay lit up but blinks, and not too frequently either) so apparently this was enough for these parents and kids to knock on our door. (although they mentioned the thing about the necklace...)

I'm still working on the Netflix Prize - I implemented a new scheme that used both movies and users, and ran it, and it did no better than using just movies (.98 or so - stopped it before it was done). So I tweaked some of the parameters and had it look at 8000 similar movies instead of just 300. This means it's going to take like 10 days to run completely. If that doesn't work I'll probably give up for good. Oh well!

I'm feeling a bit achy and such today - hope I'm not getting sick. Might be allergies, but it's hard to say.

Nintendo announced the games available on the Wii Virtual Console - looks like good stuff!


11 comments

Comment from onefishclappin:
2006-11-01T10:58:51+00:00

Cool - re Trick or Treaters - it's hard to get them in apartments - we got a fiar number last night (though I think we missed most of them because we didn't get home until 7:30 & most of the little ones are already in bed by then).
Did you ask the parents about the plastic bag/necklace thing?

Comment from gregstoll:
2006-11-01T11:33:26+00:00

Aw, neat :-)

I didn't, because I was struggling with the candy (it's my first time!) and I was a little flustered. I should have, though!

Comment from onefishclappin:
2006-11-01T13:19:26+00:00

Re. struggling w/candy - I made David hand ours out because the kids scared me.

Re. Superman in wheelchair - clever if he was really disabled and needed the wheelchair, tasteless if he got the wheelchair specifically for the costume.

Comment from cifarelli:
2006-11-01T14:07:12+00:00

The kids scared you?

We actually got a decent number of trick-or-treaters this year ourselves, and all but one of them were wearing costumes. This made me happy. :) And the one who wasn't wearing a costume was at least with his little sister who was wearing a costume, as opposed to in a group of 4-5 early-teen-aged boys none of whom were wearing costumes, which is all we seemed to get last year. The first trick-or-treater we had was a girl in a princess costume, whose parents were walking around with her. They had their little dog with them, dressed in a devil costume. Very very cute! :)

I did turn the light off at 8:15 though, as I figured all the cute little kids that I was interested in handing out candy to were probably done by then.

Comment from onefishclappin:
2006-11-01T15:28:31+00:00

Since we didn't start handing out until 7:30, we had more older kids (6-15), and there was something about them that scared me. I think they knew what they were doing more than I did ("Happy Halloween! Oh what a cute costume! What do we have here? Ooh - a scary ghost!"). I missed getting to see all the young kids who were out earlier - we did get to show off our little "Superman" at Whole Foods - I think his most impressive feat in most people's opinions was climbing a flight of stairs!
(And we didn't get any kids not in costume - I don't mind old kids, if they go to the effort of wearing cool costumes. Apparently there was one group going around that David saw after he had turned off our porch light.)

Comment from cifarelli:
2006-11-01T15:35:23+00:00

I don't mind the older kids either...if they bother to dress up. I was just disgusted last year as we didn't get very many trick or treaters at all, and the ones we did get were all older boys in groups not wearing costumes. I think I remember having ONE cute kid in a costume that came to our door. I was very disillusioned. This year was much better!

Comment from wildrice13:
2006-11-01T12:23:55+00:00

None at my place, and I was in all night snurfing and playing FFXII. WHICH IS AWESOME, by the way! :)

Perhaps the bag was supposed to include a necklace that was missing from yours?

Comment from skimmerduk:
2006-11-01T16:48:59+00:00

Rainbow Brite is spelled correctly...good job!

And Jem! She's truly outrageous and beautifully bold! I'm glad someone's keeping her alive...

Comment from wonderjess:
2006-11-01T19:47:05+00:00

flava flav is back because of flavor of love (http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/flavor_of_love/series.jhtml). how have you missed it? hehe. carrie's a fan.

Comment from gregstoll:
2006-11-02T10:17:04+00:00

See, I knew there had to be a reason! Thanks, I feel much better/less crazy.

Comment from onefishclappin:
2006-11-03T15:19:01+00:00

See, I had never heard of this guy before your post the other day, and then today I came across this.
Sigh.

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