Hopeless Geek

Having just come back from Indiana Jones 4, I have but one thing to say:

Mr. Lucas:

Please get out of the business before you ruin another childhood memory. It’s obvious now that it’s a compulsion that you can’t quit as long as you’re involved with movies, so please just go away now. You’ve lost the touch. We’re done with you. Shoo.

Thanks in advance.

-The World

Russell T Davies is to step down as executive producer of Doctor Who, the BBC has announced.

Oh say it ain’t so…

At least the replacement is the guy that wrote the Blink episode (the weeping trans-dimentional angel statues) and The Girl in the Fireplace. I’ll trust him to do it justice.

There’s some good stories over at 365 Tomorrows. It’s one-a-day and they have a full-text RSS feed. Great stuff.

The ship’s computer revived me from stasis. It took hours for my body to fully awaken, and for my muscles to respond to my wishes. But what could you expect from a woman that was 345 years old? We had volunteered for this one-way ambassador mission in the year 2136, shortly after the space probe Tycho Brahe passed through the Alpha Centauri system. The probe had sent back images of an Earth-size planet orbiting in ‘The Goldilocks Zone,’ approximately 1.1 AU from Alpha Centauri A. But the most amazing images came from the planet’s night side. It was lit up like a Christmas tree.”

I have no idea why, but last night God drained his pool on us. For four to six hours we had nothing but wet coming down on us.

Normally, I like a good storm, but the first wave from that storm included what the National Weather Service called “quarter-inch hail” that, by the time it got to us, was golf-ball-sized hail. Of course, I only realized this when I saw it on the ground … and heard it hitting the house and car.

Oh, did I mention the garage was full because we have things we have no place for just yet? So the two of us hit the garage and pushed it all towards the back and made room for the car. We got it mostly in and away from the storm (save a few inches that were protected by the roof and such) only to look at the hood and realize we were a little late. Three dents.

Of course, that’s for the whole car, so it’s not so bad. I managed to get some photos and video of the fun, though.

I started blogging on the desktop with Kung-Log, the precursor to ecto. It was hackish, but worked. Then ecto came out and I was joyous. Then it lay still and broken for years with promises of ecto 3. Then I saw ecto 3.

I bought MarsEdit today. It’s much more Mac-like than ecto 3 is and is, overall, a much cleaner and more usable program than ecto.

If you’re using a Mac and use a website package that accepts an XML-RPC client, hit up Red Sweater Software and take a test drive. Things are much easier with this beast.

There’s a piece over at Space Westerns (found on reddit) that breaks down the Last Supper photo released by the BSG folks during their long hiatus. I’m not sure I believe the conclusion, but I do agree that the water glasses probably mean something along those lines.

But I have some other ideas based on the quote from the Hybrid that they listed:

Several years ago I had television service through Grande in Austin and was overall very happy with their digital TV service. It had some downsides (the STB, for one — I wasn’t used to that) but was overall a great experience.

Some time later I got a TiVo off eBay and how I used TV changed forever. I loved the gadget and what it enabled me to do (that is, almost never miss a show). I got the 40GB model but after some time I got the upgrade kit from weaknees.com and crammed an 80GB in alongside the original. I’ve been running that same 110-hour TiVo ever since.

With Grande I could use the serial cable with the Motorola box they used, and that was really great. It wasn’t hard to setup and made it reasonably possible to change channels quick enough to browse (though, not really). However, I had to move to a new apartment and Grande did not service that apartment, Time-Warner did. They wanted over $200 on the first bill (install, sign-up, first month, last month, something else..). I said that DirecTV didn’t want any of that and would do the install for free. After talking to various people the unsaid answer was: “Well, then do it.”

So I did.

I used to love Digg. I really did. Every day, possibly several times a day, I’d hit the site and run down the front page opening all the interesting articles in new tabs and then the comments as well if it was something I wanted to know more about. It was quite nice for a few months.

Then they got money. Ever since that day, Digg has been going downhill quite fast. First came the popularity, and then the trolls that come with it, then the exodus of the good comment-writers because of the trolls. Later came the large upgrade the money paid for that alienated a large number of users and generally killed the features I used frequently.