Geek On The Mountain

I can’t possibly not mention that the Battlestar Galactica season 3 premier is tonight. I can’t wait. I have to admit, I’m not actually all that impressed by the previews that they’ve been showing, but considering the situation that they’re in and how wonderful and intense it’s been in the past I’m sure it will be great. Hopefully.

They’ve been doing these “webisode” things for the past couple of weeks now. They’re little video clips of a couple of minutes each that all deal with the resistance that’s taking place on Cylon occupied New Caprica. If you haven’t seen them and don’t want to or can’t, here’s the gist of them:

Tigh and Tyrol organize a resistance movement. Tigh takes a very “I don’t care what chances we take” attitude throughout. The end up hiding weapons in the tent that serves as their temple, which apparently is a place that the Cylons don’t enter. They end up finding out, shoot the place up, and people die. Specifically, Duck’s wife is killed. Jammer is in on the resistance as well and he gets pulled into interrogation. We don’t really know what happens with that, but the implication is, of course, that he’s turned in one way or another. In the end, they decide to start making explosives under the grain storage tent, which is right next to the hospital. I assume this is where it’ll pick up tonight. I don’t really remember Duck and Jammer…. I assume they’re two of the newer pilots that never really stood out to me, though I’m sure they’ll play a bigger part now.

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If I’m remembering correctly, Sci-Fi Friday has new seasons starting tonight (SG1, SG-Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica).
I’m most interested in BG…it’s my favorite show currently on the air (except for the Simpsons, which kind of doesn’t count. Although the show demands great respect for all it’s done over the years, the “newer” episodes are nowhere near as good as the earlier ones. So the current season of it really isn’t as good as the current season of BG.).

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It’s been a long, bad week. I’ve been mostly unproductive and I’m glad that it’s over. But then, it’s never really over. If nothing else, I’m working all weekend, again. That kind of makes the week never end, but at least I don’t have to worry about going to class for the next two days. A friend of mine from HS is getting married today. I had wanted to go, but I can’t. At any rate, I decided to start the day off by doing some stuff around the house that I’ve been meaning to do for some time but have never gotten around to. In particular, I was doing some painting, which I generally hate doing. I know that Milenka will be happy to see the painting done in the dining room when she sees it though, and that’s really why I did it.

One of the few positive notes of the week is that I’m continuing to lose weight. I’m down around 6 pounds from where I was two weeks ago, which is actually lower than I’ve been in a long time. I can mostly attribute this to actually eating properly (or at least, not over-eating). This has been helped out by the fact that, due to the way our bills have fallen, the past couple of weeks money has been tight. This has made it unwise to stop off for fast food or order a pizza, which for some reason we had gotten into the habit of doing fairly regularly over the past month or two. This week the budget shows a surplus again, but I’m pretty sure we’ve decided to continue the trend.

I finally started watching Babylon 5 again as well. I’m actually starting watching about half way through the third season (half way through the show as well, actually) to expedite matters a little. I actually saw up through the end of the third season when it was on the air, but then it got dropped from the channel it was on (it was syndicated) so I never saw it again. The show has a very strong arc, so it’s not really something that you can just jump into the middle of and expect to have any idea what is going on. As such, I’ve turned to The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 to read up on the older episodes to get me up to speed. I actually do remember some of it, but it’s been a long time. I’m not a big fan of soap operas really, but I love the format…

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One of Fox’s new shows this year is Reunion (I can’t believe fox is so cheap that they serve up cheesy flash ads at the top of their show’s site). The pilot aired last week and it was pretty interesting. This show’s claim to fame is that each episode is one year.

It’s about a group of 6 friends who graduate from HS together and what happens to them over the next 20 years. The show starts in present day (2006 actually….it will be present by the time the show is over) where we find that one of the 6 has just died. We then flashback to just after graduation where all of them are together and partying. To quickly summarize, things get interesting. Two of the guys have known each other since they were little kids and are best friends. They’re out driving later on that night when they run a stop sign and get hit by a truck. The driver was drunk but the passenger wasn’t. The driver convinces the passenger to say he was driving so that he doesn’t get a DUI. The passenger agrees and everything is OK….until the next day when the other driver, who had been fine, dies of internal bleeding that the doctors had missed and the guy who wasn’t driving (but said he was) gets arrested for manslaughter. They were going to come clean after this, but the actual driver’s father convinces the other guy to just plead it out. They strike a deal with the DA for 90 days community service or something like that. The only problem is, the judge rejects the plea and sentences the guy to 12 months in jail…whoops.

To add to that, there’s some interesting love triangle kind of stuff going on. Plus, we sometimes flash back to the present, where a detective is questioning one of the 6 people about what happened. It ends with 5 of them leaving for college in different places and the last one leaving for jail. It looks like someone shoots someone else in the second episode….it all makes for good entertainment..

The pilot seemed to only spam a small portion of the year. I’m left wondering if future episodes will be the same or if they will skip around to make it seem like more than only during a couple of weeks out of the year anything worth noting happens to these people.

Since the whole thing is like this murder mystery through time, it’s rather essential that it doesn’t get canceled or else it kind of ruins the whole thing. Therefore, I’m taking this opportunity to say that you should watch it!

It’s on Thursdays at 9…a truly crappy time slot to put a new show in since it’s the top slot. Check out episode 2 tonight. Well, that was a good idea when I thought of it anyways. Now it seems that everyone’s favorite public speaker is going to blunder through a speech about Katrina during prime time, so all of the networks have shifted their programming to accommodate him. The show will be on next week instead, which is a bit of a loss for Fox since I believe that’s when CSI is starting back up.

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I haven’t felt much like writing the past few days. My blogging mind keeps on rolling though, so I keep on coming up with things and running through outlines in my head. At this point, it’s easiest to just write down one big jumble. So consider yourself warned..

Firefox (the cat, not the browser) had to have surgery last week. He had been having problems with an infected eye. We had been giving him some homeopathic crap which seemed to be helping (the swelling on his inner eyelid had noticeably decreased). Then suddenly, his whole eye swelled up quite badly a week ago from last Friday. This was labor day weekend, and apparently our vet didn’t want to bother answering pages for emergency service, so we couldn’t do anything for him until Monday (I’m not sure if it would have mattered or not though). He had to have the eye removed. He’s doing fine now, although he looks weird, not so much because he’s missing an eye, but because one side of his face (including whiskers) has been shaved and the other hasn’t. He’ll look pretty much normal once his hair grows back. The situation sucks really, but I’m just glad he didn’t die or anything.

In case you missed the news last week, they released a report on the data received from Deep Impact, the probe NASA sent to investigate a comet. What they found was quite interesting. Instead of what we expected to find, a ball of ice, there was more of a ball of snow. They found that there was no ice present in any size larger than small pieces. They’re saying that it is more like a snowball, or a ball of dust, and a ball of ice. The funny thing here is that the ESA launched a probe last year that’s due to land on a comet in 2014. If the findings from deep impact are consistent amongst all comets, the probe is going to be wasted as it is supposed to land on the surface of the comet. That is to say, if there is no solid surface to land on, the probe will just sink into the comet.

I picked up a copy of Staind’s Chapter V last week as well. Although it’s a bit on the light side (meaning I’d classify it as plain old rock, mind you), it’s pretty good. I had to listen to it a few times to really get into it (although that’s normal really..), but there are definitely some catchy songs on there. I would think anyone who liked 14 Shades of Grey would like this disc just as well.

The Simpsons started off their new season earlier than they have in some time this year. It’s been years since they’ve started before November (sometimes even showing the Halloween special AFTER Halloween… even if it falls on a Sunday during their time slot!). Fox is trying to get a jump on everyone else this year. The episode…..was OK. Homer looses a bunch of money betting on Football games (again). Of course, he was betting money he had borrowed from Fat Tony and when he couldn’t pay him back he had to agree to let Fat Tony use the house to make an “Adult Film”….Lemony Licket: A series of horny events. The rest of the show is all about Manatees….it was an OK episode. It had it’s moments. It’s nice to see a 17th season..

I finally got around to watching the last episode of The 4400 (I probably would have watched it sooner, but I basically knew what was going to happen). It was pretty good, and it set up what should probably be an interesting season 3 (if < 10 episodes really counts as a season I guess). And, as if the show weren't enough like a soap opera as is, we find at the end that one character, who was just a baby, is suddenly a teen-ager. I suspect they'll explain it though, rather than pretending that it's just normal.

Football is finally starting. There've been pre-season games for the last month or so, but it's just not the same. Maybe the Lions will do well this year. Probably not though. No team has ever played in a Super Bowl in their own stadium. I'm sure this year won't be an exception. Detroit is a truly crappy club. They haven't won a championship since the 50's, before they joined the leagues and starting playing Super Bowls. They currently hold a record for most games lost over the past 4 or 5 seasons. They've had some good teams over the years, but there always tends to be some critically weak link that holds them back. Most notably, they can never seem to get a good QB. Their current one, Harrington, is OK at best. When he's having a good game, he's truly an asset. The problem is that every other game, he's totally off and they're just screwed. Last year a significant portion of their offense was just returning kicks for TD's. It was pretty sad. On the up side though, they just killed Green Bay last night. It was actually a fairly even match-up for a while, but Favre was having a bad day for sure which of course helped immensely. They actually held GB to only 3 points, which is apparently the fist time they've had such a low score with Favre starting since 1992. Not bad…The Lions have a LOT of young talent right now. Hopefully they can turn it into at least a first round playoff game.

I also noticed yesterday that the Pentagon revised our nuclear strike plan to include use of nukes for going after terrorists (to stop an attack, that is) and to destroy WMD. Although I can say that it’s understandable, I can’t really say that using nukes, ever, is really a good idea. There tend to be these side effects, you see… I read an article in Popular Science a month or two back about nuclear bunker buster bombs. (this online article is nowhere near as detailed as the one I read in the mag). I see as well that they have links to a blast effects calculator and a fallout calculator. I in find it’s most interesting to put the blast on familiar geography….I placed it on the east coast, and with a 15 mph wind, a swath of land nearly the width of Virginia was in the “recommended evacuation” area. Nice.

Finally, iTunes 5.0 was released and they’ve somehow managed to make it even uglier than the last version. Things just don’t flow as well. It’s also rather odd, because they’ve actually put the menubar into the titlebar (which works because the title text is always centered in the bar and not left justified. On the upside, the “status box”, that’s my word for the thing in the middle of the upper part of the window that actually tells you what’s going on….what’s playing, what’s importing, what’s burning, etc., has gotten bigger and they seem to put more information in there. I can hardly believe Apple decided to ruing their “simple” design by putting more useful information in the interface, but they did. What will they think of next?

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