I know, I know. I often rail about the free spoiler services the Internet provides. Especially since I have a TiVo and I often watch things a few days (or even a few weeks) after they air. However, I would like to make a public announcement of a policy change. If any show I watch ever has an episode where people throw spiders at each other, please go ahead and let me know ahead of time.* Particularly say something like "Don't watch this week's episode of Lost right before you go to bed, or you'll be awake another hour after that."

Seriously. I watched several minutes of just the upper left corner of the screen, with my hand in front of my face like a schoolgirl watching Freddy Kreuger for the first time. Not a happy camper. And now I'm tired because I was already staying up late to watch the show and the extra hour calm back down was just not what I wanted to do. Gah, creeps me out to even write about it. Why is always spiders?

*On a "practice what I preach" note - the premiere episode of Planet Earth (Pole to Pole is the title) has several shots of a great white shark catching seals. In my opinion it was much tamer than deliberately tossing spiders at people, but your mileage might certainly vary. If you thought sharks were a problem for you. And you lived on an island. Because, y'know - sharks and islands go together like corn and pizza.

technorati tags:television, Lost, spiders

Blogged with Flock

So I know at least one blog reader is a Charlie Stross fan, but as far as I can tell I've never talked about The Atrocity Archives. This will not do. I just started reading it again over dinner (books get read, good books go live on my bookshelf, great books get read again).

Where Accelerando can feel almost like work to read - a struggle to keep up with all the concepts coming in at a significant fraction of cee, Archives is just goofy fun. The simple idea is that esoteric math (the sort that computers are really good at) can contact other dimensions and then various crufty Cthulhu-oid critters come out and play. Well of course there would be secret government organizations keeping a lid on that, and that brings us to Bob - who works for the the Laundry. The Laundry is a bureaucracy first, and he has to deal with matrix management, accountants who break every PC they touch and all the usual. Then he can worry about the dark dimensions if he makes it through those horrors.

Anyway, I'd like to quote one sentence:

This is what you get to live with when you share a house with Pinky and the Brain: I said it was a geek house, and we all work in the Laundry, so we're talking about geek houses for very esoteric — indeed, occult — values of geek.

When you read that you either A ) at least grinned if not chuckled, B ) have a family relationship with me, or C ) are completely lost and I don't know why you're at my little corner of the Intarwebs. (Hey, welcome and stick around - but I have no idea how you got here. Hiyas!)

I've said before that Stross is isn't accessible to SF newbies and I stand by that. The Atrocity Archives is a mash-up of spy thrillers (specifically Len Deighton, who I have never read) and horror (specifically H.P. Lovecraft who I have read, but don't really get - horror just doesn't turn my crank) and I suspect you need to have a passing familiarity with at least one of them. If you don't do spy stories and you can't spell Cthulhu (or at least get close) then maybe it's not for you. On the other hand if you did grin at the quote above pick up a copy The Atrocity Archives. And get the sequel - The Jennifer Morgue. And loan that one to me - I haven't picked it up yet - and I haven't read any James Bond novels, but I have seen the movies.

technorati tags:CharlieStross, AtrocityArchives, SciFi

Blogged with Flock

My mail over the past few days has brought ill tidings. First up: Ticketmaster. I know I'm supposed to hate Ticketmaster, and yes the fees do seem excessive. On the other hand, they let me buy concert tickets from my desk with a cup of coffee in hand, and I quite like that. Karin and I got tickets to see the Police in June, which I'm very excited about. Yesterday Ticketmaster sent me this email explaining how I could scalp my tix through Ticketmaster. I did the "TicketFast" thing where they email you a PDF file with barcodes as the tickets. You print the barcodes and take them to the venue where they scan them and let you in. Well Ticketmaster figured out they could broker me selling my tickets, then they could invalidate my barcodes and print new ones for whoever buys them. They are very careful to couch it in terms of "if you can't go, pass your tickets on", but still - they want me to scalp my tickets and they are happy to help (for a small piece of the action of course). That's bad Ticketmaster, no biscuit. The other email was this morning I got a note saying that Best Buy is buying Speakeasy. Apparently they are doing this because they want the VOIP unit for some Best Buy business sales business, but still . . . I can't believe that Best Buy isn't going to ultimately screw up SpeakEasy. Bleargh.

technorati tags:TicketMaster, BestBuy, Speakeasy

Blogged with Flock

So then. Last night's season finale for Battlestar Galactica warrants a sound Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. What was that? I guess it wasn't as bad as last season's "let's skip the end of this very interesting story, jump forward a year and present this stupid environment - something so dumb we'll spent most of the next season carefully undoing it all". But still, that's not a high bar to jump over to just be "better than last year's fiasco".

Somebody who is more familiar with the original show than me will have to answer one question: was that stuff at the end some sort of homage to the original? Karin seemed horrified, I was laughing by the end of it. The totally out of place electric guitars were odd. I was already giggling (and singing "Wayne's World") by the time the vocals cut in. And then the dramatic moment cut to two 70's era Viper miniatures? And the matte painting? I was waiting for the Batman "POW" graphic!

The thing is that the camera work was such that I don't think it was a miniatures shot. I think it was CG but CG done to look like a 70's FX shot. That had to be on purpose, but I can't figure out why. It was so disruptive to the mood they were building. Really. If they had cut the show at 58 minutes I would have said it was a solid closer with a lot of interesting things for next season to chew on. (Well - the trial was weak. But the other plot was handled well.) But then that last FX shot . . . seriously. That's the note you want to end the season on? Couldn't get the historians from Holy Grail to make an appearance? The plans to reveal Pee-wee Herman is one of the final five fell through?

Honestly, I'd watch a show that married the over-the-top melodrama with the deliberately-crappy-effects like that, if it was done for camp value. But I don't see how anybody can claim it's the same thing as season 1.

I'm still slighly hopeful for the next season - a lot of the dumb shit that tied up season three was junked. I hated almost every moment Starbuck on was onscreen this season, so fixing the whole "she's so self-destructive" thing had to be done. I think we're done with "Apollo plays lawyer" and that was dumb from start to finish, so good riddance. Baltar is in a more interesting position than he has been since the inception of New Caprica, and I could see that going to neat places. Season four has truly interesting plotlines to play with now, we'll have to see if they pick those up or go back to the romance triangles and all the other "Battlestar 90210" rubbish of season three. But it's reached the point where they have to rehook me, and they had better do it fast. I won't watch another season that was as bad a season 3. I won't even watch at the quality level of the finale, and I don't think this particular show can survive a switch to camp.

technorati tags:BattlestarGalactica, TV

Blogged with Flock

Let's take a moment and talk about backups. If a meteor hit your PC right now and incinerated your hard drive when was your last backup?

The funny thing about backups is I found I had to force a mental recalibration of my thoughts. Backups used to be something that was a major pain and required special hardware. (And yes, I've even had a tape drive installed on my home PC, back in the Windows NT days). But nowadays it's both easy and pretty cheap.

I'll 'fess up - I haven't to date been systematically backing up Tiny God. I've been spot moving files to Kool-Aid or to my iDisk (.Mac online storage), but I just now got around to buying the necessary drive.

Here's my thinking circa early 2007. Hard drives are cheap. I just bought a 500 gigbyte external drive that supports USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 from Newegg and it cost $210. This drive is the exact same size (storage-wise) as TinyGod's drive. I will be able to simply back up the whole damn thing weekly. I use external drives, so I can easily disconnect them. This way my backup can't be touched by some crazy rogue process/virus/OS upgrade - the drive isn't turned on most of the time. This doesn't cover me if a meteor destroys my whole office, but it does cover hardware meltdowns or an OS screwup and those are the most likely failure cases.

Software - OS X: I use SuperDuper. This program is awesome. It can clone an entire drive and do what it calls "Smart Update" where it only copies changed files. I back up Kool-Aid every week and it usually takes about 20 - 30 minutes. I run the backup over lunch often. So every week I have a complete, bootable clone of my laptop drive. The whole thing. I can just plug that into a different powerbook and boot from it. Highly recommended.

Software - iPod: I use iPod Access. I have a 300 gig external Firewire drive for Kool-Aid and it has a partition for Kool-Aid and a partition for my iPod. I only back up my iPod monthly, but I still have it backed up. In fact when I set up TinyGod I simply copied my iPod backup into iTunes.

Software - Windows: Windows is the poor man out (big surprise). I use Acronis True Image. It's not nearly as convenient as SuperDuper, but you can create a full backup and then weekly create Incremental backups. Not as convenient but it's easy enough to mean I never lose more than a week of stuff.

So if you read this blog and your backup is more than a week old - you know your homework. You don't have to use this software, but you have to use something.

technorati tags:backups, software

Blogged with Flock