When I read a review in The New Yorker that said “The Sarah Silverman Program” is “much the meanest sitcom in years — and one of the funniest,” I knew I had to tune in. Reading further, when I noticed that Brian Posehn plays one of Sarah’s “red-bearded gay neighbors,” well, I was pretty much sitting by the Tivo waiting for the little red light to pop on. Then, when I finally tuned in and Zach Galifianakis came on screen, I knew I was in for a treat (if these names don’t ring a bell, then check out The Comedians of Comedy, one of the funniest comedy films I’ve ever seen — the best way I can think of to describe it is crude comedy for geeks and comic book nerds with unnatural music obsessions, and the people they love.)

The episode I watched is described as follows:

Sarah takes in a homeless man to prove that she’s a caring person. Brian learns karate, but fails to use it at critical moments.

The running gag in the show isn’t called out in the synopsis, but it’s about as crass as it gets. Best of all, Brian does use his karate at one critical moment, in an inspired fight scene with Zach Galifianakis that surely ranks as the best ever between nerdy comics (maybe the only one). Here are some screenshots — check out Brian catching some air:

  

So, “The Sarah Silverman Program” is highly-recommended. If it feels a little too crass for your high-brow tastes, remember that you can always fall back on The New Yorker review to justify your indulgence. Prepare to be embarrassed by your own laughter.

I have a prior commitment that night, but for you Brian Posehn and Comedians of Comedy fans in the Bay Area, there’s a show on Sunday, March 4 as part of the Noise Pop festival.

Back in December, I wrote about Kiva.org and microcredit, a concept that drove last year’s Nobel Peace Prize award. Kiva.org allows anyone to make microloans to enterpreneurs in the developing world.

Read my last post on Kiva.org for details on the loans I made, but I just wanted to note that I got my first repayment notices earlier this month from both people to whom I made a loan. The email explained a little more about how the repayments work:

This repayment will be divided amongst all the lenders who helped to fund this business, depending upon the percentage each lender contributed. Note that you cannot actually withdraw or reloan these funds until after the loan term is complete.

The loan term is as long as 18 months for both of my loans, and the payments are coming in on time and for the appropriate amounts. I’ll continue the updates over the next several months — this is both fascinating and uplifting.

The folks over at FTD blew it for me this Valentines Day. They managed to charge my credit card, but the flowers never showed. Nancy and I had a good laugh about it and wondered how such a mishap might affect a shakier relationship. I’m considering calling FTD and telling them that their mistake has me sleeping in the garage and fending off costly divorce proceedings. Just for fun.

In the end, the FTD fiasco meant very little and we enjoyed a great dinner at Town Hall in SF. . . but FTD, you still suck!

Update: when it comes to cataloging FTD suckitude, the blogosphere delivers.

Update 2 (02/16/07): FTD is trying to kiss and make up — but what, no flowers?

Dear      Valued Customer [nothing warms me up like an oddly-spaced generic greeting! – CD]

We regret to inform you that we were unable to fulfill your order for delivery on Feb 14.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused and we will be issuing a full refund of all charges made to your credit card as a result of your order.

In response to this issue, by clicking through the following link [link redacted] you will be entitled to receive $15.00 off on all orders placed with FTD.com through May, 30, 2007.

Once again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

FTD.COM.
Customer Service

When Tim O’Reilly calls a product “a milestone in the history of the internet,” something really, really cool is happening. Here’s what the coolness is all about:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Yahoo! Pipes was built by Pasha Sadri, Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Kevin Cheng, and Daniel Raffel. I work in the row of cubes right beside the team and it’s been inspiring to watch Pipes go from idea to reality (I was lucky enough to work closely with Ed and Jonathan last year when we released the Checkmates prototype at eTech).

Jeremy nails the big picture as usual, so I’ll just point to a mashup that I built. The most exciting thing is that I didn’t really have to know how any of the APIs worked that I used — they are rolled into the product and all I have to do is feed data into the mix from my choice of RSS feeds, set up the pipeline with various parameters, and the data I want transforms and flows out of the other end like magic.

Here’s basically what is happening behind the scenes. I took the Upcoming.org RSS feeds for the Fillmore and the Warfield in San Francisco (two music venues) and joined them into one feed, then piped the unified feed through the Content Analysis Term Extraction API to pull out the keywords in the RSS feeds. Then I looped through the Flickr API to run queries for photos on those keywords. My logic wasn’t perfect, but all I know is that I saw a photo of George Clinton and sure enough, he’s playing at the Fillmore on March 9. It’s 1:20 am as I write this, and although I have been meaning to go to bed for about three hours now, I’ve just been having too much fun reconfiguring these pipes. Yes, fun.

A big congratulations to the team and Bradley and Caterina for carving out the space for the team to do their magic. This is a proud moment for Yahoo!