Category: Geeky Fanboy

Last night’s Buffy was hit-and-miss at best, vacillating between hilarious, uncomfortable, lame, and crapfest. Ahh well, they can’t all be gems.
But the music was fun. Here’s the ones I could identify:
[1] Theme From A Summer Place (particularly funny if you remember how Oz describes his perfect woman).
[2] The Shins – “New Slang”
[3] The Breeders – “Little Fury”
[4] The Breeders – “Son Of Three”
[5] Coldplay – “Warning Sign” (I really should get some more of their stuff.)
Substance to this post? Not at all. Just felt like displaying the geek plummage for all to see.

For those of you that are curious, here’s the order that the Firefly episodes that have been filmed so far were meant to be aired in:
0) The legendary unaired pilot, “Serenity”.
1) The Train Job
2) Bushwhacked
3) Shindig
4) Safe
5) Our Mrs. Reynolds
6) Jayne’s Town
7) Out of Gas
8) Ariel
9) War Stories
10) Heart of Gold
Here’s the order they have aired:
1) The Train Job
2) Bushwhacked
5) Our Mrs. Reynolds
6) Jayne’s Town
7) Out of Gas
3) Shindig
“Safe” is next week, which means that for better or worse we’ve seen seven of the first 8 shows.
Shindig was fun. My only real annoyance is that I’ve read the script for the unaired pilot (I’ll email it to anyone who wants to check it out) and knowing that, I know how much more I would have liked Shindig if I’d seen the pilot episode: the pilot takes place on the same planet with several of the same characters involved. The ties between this episode and the pilot are pretty strong, and it’s a real shame we don’t get to share that.
Anyway. Back to the wordmill.

Everyone needs a clock utility for their Palm; that’s just a fact. Yeah, there’s a little clock you can pull up on the menu bar, but that’s not a “real” clock, at least not to me. You need an alarm clock function, plus a timer… preferably several of each…
Well, Dave shot a file to me a few months ago and showed me that BigClock, by Jens Rupp, is exactly what I wanted.
The version he gave me was 2.2, which has worked great but is a bit glitchy at times and flat out refused to respond in the Timer mode today, so I set about finding myself my own copy of the donate-ware.
Turns out that Jens is up to something like v2.83, and I can’t say enough good about it. Avoid the extra little plug-ins, they’re pointless, but the added functionality in the Timers section is great (for instance, set up your hourly contracter work rate, start the timer, and it’ll tell you how much your client owes you when you’re done).
Anyway, for palm geeks like me, there’s your product recommendation for the day.

If you haven’t yet sampled Fox’s gonzo space Western, Firefly, its creator, Joss Whedon, would like to make one small request: Please do… and preferably tonight at 8 pm/ET. “This week definitely matters [to the series’ future],” the celebrated writer-director-producer tells TV Guide Online. “[Network prez] Sandy Grushow said to me before we ever started that this [show] is going to be a slow grow, and [the World Series] is going to hurt us, which it has. Fox has a lot of shows that are underperforming because of this weird season.

“So,” he continues, “I’m not like, ‘My future is assured!’ But it’s also not like the death knell chiming.”

Far from it. In fact, Fox just commissioned three additional scripts from Whedon, the mastermind behind UPN’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its WB spinoff, Angel. However, Firefly has yet to get a full-season pickup. “[The script order from the net] is a vote of confidence, and it’s a way of not making a decision,” Whedon theorizes. “The next few weeks will be important, and this week I’m particularly stressing because I think it’s such a good entrance into the world [of Firefly]. That’s why I’m all hyped about it.
“It has a number of flashbacks to how the crew got together,” he continues, “so it’s a really good way to learn how it all began. For somebody meeting the characters for the first time, it’s a real insight into who they are. There’s not all this [plot] information to process, which is a problem because the pilot was never shown. People are like, ‘Um, what’s going on?’ The idea was never to confuse people.”
Just so Whedon doesn’t add to viewers’ consternation, he quickly notes that the backtracking scenes are not highlights from the debut that Fox shot down. “These flashbacks are to before the pilot,” he clarifies. “The pilot was the story of how this crew picked up a few wayward stragglers; [this installment] flashes back to how [the original gang] first found the ship itself, what the ship is and what it means to Mal, because [the ship] really is the 10th character on the show.”
Now that that matter has been cleared up, Whedon hopes that viewers will be able to sit back, relax and enjoy the show… for years to come, ideally. For the moment, though, he sighs, “Everything is kind of in flux.”

I dig this show. I want it to prosper. I’m also really annoyed that Fox is forcing Whedon to air certain kinds of episodes, where “force” implies a passive aggresive action:
(a) They rearranged the air-dates on the episodes so that the ‘easy to view’ episodes are all at the beginning.
(b) By not airing the pilot, they’ve force Whedon to write ‘easier’ scripts to understand, since virtually no one’s seen the pilot.
This means (to me) that the show comes off as less story-oriented, less connected, and much more episodic than the stuff Whedon normally does, which is really a shame, since it’s not playing to the strengths of his writing staff. They can write fantastic one-offs, but the truly best episodes are those that tie into the major storylines — which they aren’t able to WRITE right now.
Gargh. Tune it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Remember a few weeks month ago when I was bitching about trying to get MT going on any machine/server that had anything to do with work?
Yeah. Finally got that worked out TODAY. Mandrake, running Apache, FINALLY running all the patches and directives I needed to get the frelling thing to run.
10 minutes later, I had the start of the page.
Then it was 5pm and I realized I’m out of the office doing training until Monday, November 4th.
That insane cackling you hear, echoing the sadistic irony of the scene? That would be me.

While babysitting Katherine tonight, working on a thing for Rey’s game with Jackie and doing the last-edit-before-the-queries on Strange Weapons, we turned on the TV and caught some Buffy reruns on F/X.
Season Three. Not the best stuff out there, but still it was pretty damn good stuff. Shocking how much Jackie and I remember from each episode.
Man I miss Oz. He was cool.

Really cool Firefly promo for this Friday.

Just for kicks, I picked up a used copy of Resident Evil a few weeks ago at E/B. I’d heard that the interface was sort of weird (it is), and frankly that’s the sort of game I’d rather play on my PC than a console but hell, it was only 5 bucks.
I started fiddling around with it a few days ago.
Holy sweet criminey, but they do know how to crank the freak-out dial up to 11, don’t they?
Gah.
I say again: Gah.