Talk about synchronicity! I do a post about television I’ve been watching, and today I hear that the second series of the incredible “The IT Crowd” has started. I’ve been showing the first series to anyone who comes over and sits down long enough to watch. I’ll post more once I’ve had a chance to see it. The first series will be out on DVD in the US in September. It’s classic. ...
My dad was a big fan of cheesy 70s shows… Wonder Woman, Emergency, CHiPs, The Six Million Dollar Man… Maybe that’s where I got my geekiness. There was no way we could miss Lindsay Wagner’s “Bionic Woman”, where a woman also got both her legs, an arm, an eye and an ear replaced with bionic implants. That wasn’t that much of a coincidence – lots of hospitals had “Leg, Arm, Eye and Ear” wards back then. Happened all the time! These days, though, Kaiser Permanente gets charged $50 million for the whole bionic refitting. ...
Reposted from my Shapeshifter blog. I do plan to post more here – in fact, I’m going to start posting daily, Just been really busy lately. Anyway, enjoy a little Shapeshifter fan-fiction :P – I had gotten what I thought was an easy level 54 puzzle, and let Kvho have a shot at it, certain he’d be done with it in no time. Hours later, nothing. Puzzled, I let Shifter at it — STUMPED! ...
“The screenplay is attributed to three writers. That means if the film’s funny parts were divided evenly among them, they each wrote zero.” From Eric D. Snider’s review of “Daddy Day Camp”. Not that I was planning on seeing it anyway :P Andy and I are going to see Stardust tonight, though… Neil Gaiman… how could that be anything but wonderful?
LinuxMint, that is… Baph (my Linux machine) was getting less and less stable… so much stuff on it… she needed to be cleared up. I had just been fiddling too much with it! So I backed up everything, went to DistroWatch.com, looked at all the new & notable Linux distros, and settled on Linux Mint, a variant of the popular Ubuntu distro, tuned for watching movies, listening to podcasts or music, and hmmm…. yeah, I wanted all those things. ...
According to this post over at Ars Technica, Vista will be pushing a couple of updates that should, among other things, make games work better under Vista. I haven’t been able to play EverQuest (1) since I got my Vista laptop – it just refuses to get past the patcher. It’s clearly crashing when EQ tries to change video modes, something that works fine on every other game, but not EQ. The update claims to fix a bug in nVidia laptop cards (mine has an 8600 in it). So… maybe I’ll be able to play EQ again without having to take my Linux box offline to reboot it into Windows XP, which I have installed just for things like this. And 2-boxing. ...
Then apparently I’d be voting for Dennis Kucinich. Pick Your Candidate pegged him as holding my position on nearly every issue aside from Net Neutrality. His Wikipedia entry describes him as a vegan who opposes a knee-jerk military response in the Middle East, is for universal health care in the US, and so on. Good stuff. He’s an Ohio representative, and former mayor of Cleveland, so he’s got all the experience he needs to do the job. Opposes the Democratic machine when he doesn’t agree with it. That makes his shifting opinion of abortion rights (was against it, now for it) seem like a real change of heart than a hearkening to the polls. ...
I raised two kids, and I don’t think either one of them got much out of school. My son, in particular, was shuffled through a ‘special ed’ system far more concerned about teaching kids to behave well in school than in learning to think and solve problems. I talked to both my kids’ teachers about the yawning gaps in their general knowledge, but the teachers only wanted to emphasize how well-behaved (or not) they were in class. ...
More on this later… TONS of pics… here was BOC’s setlist: Opening > This Ain’t the Summer of Love > OD’d on Life Itself > Burnin’ For You > City in Flames (with Rock and Roll) > Shooting Shark > Godzilla > Don’t Fear (the Reaper) Was nice to hear some of their earlier stuff. It was a very short set. Eric Bloom on the left, Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser on the right. ...
Blue Oyster Cult opening for Deep Purple here in Connecticut? Brilliant! This will be my fifth time seeing BOC, but the first for Deep Purple. This will be the first time for my son; this is the first time I haven’t seen BOC in a bar, and he’s never been 21 in his life. I know BOC will play their mega-hits, and I know as well that they’ll open with the main theme to Blade Runner leading into “Stairway to the Stars”… I hope they skip “In Thee” this time. Songs I want to hear: “Astronomy” (duh), “Last Days of May” (sigh), ““When the Old Gods Return” (pleeeeease!), “Harvest Moon” (still luv ya, Buck!)… and if they do “Godzilla”, I hope Eric gives it a BIG lead in. They only did “Take Me Away” once since I’ve seen them, but I loved the opening Eric did for that one as well. Oh, I dunno… I’ll love whatever they do… oh yeah, “Veterans of the Psychic Wars”, please. I know it’s cliche, but its a crowd pleaser. “Cities on Flame”, “Seven Screaming Dizbusters”… they did “Golden Age of Leather”, complete with the a capella opening, once… ...