Speechless

I'll just quote a post from Joss Whedon's blog and let it speak for itself:
So..... The bag is catless. During the strike I started writing a musical intended as a limited internet series, 3 episodes of approximately 10 minutes each. Writing with me was my brother Jed, his fiancee Maurissa, and my other brother Zack. To my shock and surprise, we finished it. To my greater shock and surprise, we managed (with the help of many people I'll be praising at length soon) to drag it into preproduction (yes, just as DOLLHOUSE was given a start date two months away and all my comics were due.) And today, after a grueling week of writing everything ever while trying to be a producer, I got to start shooting. A musical. This much I will say: It's the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he's too shy to talk to. And I'm having the time of my life. "DOCTOR HORRIBLE'S SING-ALONG BLOG" Neil Patrick Harris.....as Dr. Horrible Nathan Fillion..........as Captain Hammer Felicia Day.............as Penny And a cast of Dozens! Coming soon.
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OK, fine if I drink the Kool-Aid will you all leave me alone?

I should come clean. I've had a 16 Gigabyte iPhone for just over a week now. "But Tim," you say, "didn't you explain why you didn't want an iPhone, and why you still didn't want an iPhone? And didn't you get a new iPod Classic for Christmas?" And then I would say back to you, "Hey, stop using my blog search function!" But yes, all these things are true. Several things happened. The most important one is that Sprint decided to see if they could piss me off enough I'd shut off my Sprint account, damn my Treo. Turns out they could. Huzzah! The second thing was the iPhone SDK is substantial enough that I believe all my iPhone complaints will be resolved come June. As a minor third thing I actually wanted to develop stuff for iPhone, and didn't figure Karin would take kindly to me grabbing hers and debugging on it for long stretches of time. (Yes, I assumed it would be easier to get the hardware certificate than it appears to be thus far.) So yeah, now I have an iPhone. I really and truly blame Sprint. I don't want to get into the whole thing, but the short version is that they claim that I did something to the billing in 2006 that re-upped a 2 year commitment on both my Treo and Karin's 2003-era phone. So when Karin got her iPhone for Christmas they charged me an early termination fee, despite the fact that I hadn't terminated the account or even tried to change the plan I was using. During that conversation I confirmed that because I hadn't sent in the $50 rebate paperwork on my Treo 700 that I *wasn't* under a two year contract, and that my phone number was released on March 5th. Exactly one week before my birthday. Hmmmm. Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. It is a slick little device. I'd just prefer it to be a little less internet-oriented and a little more Tim's-data-oriented. The fact is that the biggest function of my Treo was probably the Calendar, and iPhone's calendar is less functional that the Treo, much less iCal. But I gotta admit, it is a fantastic video iPod.
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Microsoft's programmer docs never have a sense of humor

From the Cocoa Application Tutorial:
Objects with id as their type are dynamically typed, meaning that the class of the object is determined at runtime. You can use id as the type for any object. The dynamically typed object’s class can be changed as needed, even during runtime, which should invoke a sense of both excitement and extreme caution in even the most grizzled OO veteran.
Just so.
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Lost's official podcast - surprisingly refreshing!

So I've been listening to the Lost podcast lately. I've gone through the handful of season 4 podcasts and actually went back and downloaded some of the season 3 ones. I don't even remember what it was that prompted me to check out the podcast originally, I tend to have a dim view of "official" TV show podcasts. This mainly stems from the Battlestar Galactica podcast, which got some discussion in blog comments here and here. My original objection to the BSG podcast was mainly that I didn't want to watch the show twice, and I as understand the BSG podcast it is designed to play alongside the episode. As time wore on I got increasingly annoyed at the fact that important story information seems to be revealed in the podcasts. If you browse around BSG fan web sites you'll run into things where you say "I didn't know that!" and it turns out that you didn't know it because it's not in the show, it's in the podcast. So the Lost podcast isn't like that. For one, it's much shorter than the show, usually less than half an hour. But the part I like best is that it turns out that a large part of the podcast is Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse reading questions submitted at an ABC online forum. And they make fun of the questions, they make fun of the posters, and they occasionally reveal something interesting and insightful. They'll often say something like "This question comes from LockeIsTheBest48, who has posted 400 times in the last 90 days. That's a bit too often with the posts, you may want to get outside for a bit." or something to that effect. My favorite so far was somebody asking whether the injuries inflicted in the hatch explosion were based on the "four monkeys". They went on to explain that Locke was mute, Charlie was deaf, Desmond had been blown into the jungle naked, and thus they predicted Eko would be blind. (This was early on in season 3.) Carlton and Damon discussed this a little, running down the Hear No Evil, Say No Evil idea before there was a pause and Carlton said, "Wait, what's the fourth monkey? Don't be naked? THERE ARE ONLY THREE MONKEYS!" After a pause then Damon said, "Yeah, so interesting theory, but no." Then they move onto the next question. I don't know how I existed without the internet to feed me a constant stream of mockery-worth content. To find out that it comes *pre-mocked* in the Lost podcast. Well, that's exciting! On a more serious note, they do say interesting stuff. One of my favorites so far was that they say they knew that ABC couldn't resist promoting the episode where Eko dies as "Somebody on Lost will DIE!" promos and the whole "Don't miss this episode!" sort of vibe. So they claim that's why they introduced Nikki and Paolo when they did, that basically the audience would assume that Nikki and/or Paolo would die and the whole thing would be a big tease. That way, when Eko dies it was even more as a surprise. I have to say, that warms the cockles of my cold, marketing-hating heart. The idea that they deliberately inserted "red shirt" characters into the show just to confound the marketing expectations is brilliant. It almost makes up for the fact I hate Nikki and Paolo for their spider-throwing ways! Both of them got exactly what they deserved if you ask me.
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