Disorderly Content

And now for the conclusion of my little Reno adventure. When I went to bed on Wednesday, the weather was still cooperating. There'd been some snow during the day, including low visibility conditions, but nothing that stuck. Still, I was stressed enough about it that I managed no sleep that night. And when I looked out the window at 2am, I was surprised to note that the world had gone white.

That made for a long night. Finally, around 4:30 I reconnected my PowerBook to the phone line (primitive 20th century hotels...) and took a look at the Caltrans website for highway news. The news wasn't at all good: Interstate 80 was closed to the Nevada state line, and those roads that were still open over the Sierra Nevadas were requiring chains. (I'd bought a set that day just in case. But I really, really didn't want to use them. And the other roads are scary even when there aren't blizzard conditions.)

With predictions of between two and four feet of snow over Donner Pass, getting out of Reno was going to be a problem. So I looked for an alternate solution. Checking roads further north didn't look any better; things appeared to be a mess all the way to Oregon. So I started checking highway information on the Nevada side. And there the news looked better. Assuming I could get out of Reno, the roads to the east were reporting no precipitation. I figured I could get to Las Vegas in about ten hours, stay somewhere there overnight and then take the southerly route back into California. I'd be home by Friday night.

(Parenthetically, I discovered something about myself. I'm no good at waiting, at least in situations where I don't know how long I'll have to wait. Given the choice of waiting patiently for hours for a chance at a five to eight hour drive (assuming worst possible conditions going over Donner Pass) and perhaps twenty hours of easy driving, I'll take the latter. I'd much rather be moving toward a goal.)

So off I set at 5:30 in the ayem, having long since given up any chance of sleep. I figured I could make good use of the hour and a half before the sun came up, assuming it was gonna. Driving out of Reno was kind of a mess, which only got worse as I drove south to Carson City. My plan was to pick up US 50 just north of Carson, take it east about 45 miles to get to US 95 Alternate and then follow that about 400 miles or so to Vegas. The snow was heavy and visibility was not great on the drive to Carson City, with flashing lights insisting on the use of snow tires or chains, neither of which I was doing. I made the turn onto US 50, where the big challenge was figuring out where the lanes were. But about 20 miles east the snow eased off. And by the time I got to US 95 it was clear. So I put the cruise control on, started my iPod playing and prepared myself for a long day of driving.

Then I had a bit of luck. I stopped around 8am for breakfast at a McDonald's in Hawthorne, Nevada. And got talking about the weather to other drivers heading south out of the snow. One suggested that I didn't have to go all the way to Vegas to avoid getting stuck. He was sure that Mongomery Pass would be open, which would get me back into California at Bishop and save me a good eight hours of driving. So that became my new plan.

The road over Montgomery Pass was clear in Nevada and was perfectly drivable all the way into California. Aside from visibility issues from being stuck behind one eighteen wheeler, and from getting covered in crud from trucks going the other way, it was a pretty pleasant drive. A long drive; I had to go almost to Los Angeles before I could make the crossing west to pick up Interstate 5 and head home.

But I did get home, 13 hours after leaving Reno. Driving through torrential rains during the last hour of the trip, I heard a report that Interstate 80 had finally reopened, although chains were required. So all in all, I think I made the right choice. And I discovered some new places I'd like to revisit and photograph, some time when I'm not so worried about incipient exhaustion. But I did learn an important lesson. Driving to Reno in winter: a very, very bad idea.

Heck, I don't even ski.

I must admit to a fascination for casinos. Not the table games; despite my fondness for classic James Bond in Monte Carlo or somesuch place, I don't like the stakes. No, I'm strictly a slot player. And penny ante at that. Literally; I like to keep my bets at two bits or less.¹ But I enjoy the occasion visit to Vegas or Reno, where I am typing these very words.

It used to be that you'd put coins into the slot machine and it would pay off the same way. The machines had metal trays for receiving your winnings, which would make quite the racket when you won big. And that was the point, of course. They wanted everybody to hear the big winners. (The losers weren't nearly so noticeable.)

Immediate payoffs are mostly a thing of the past. Now the machines hold your coins so you can keep placing bets without having to take them from the hopper and drop them back into the slot. Eventually, assuming you haven't lost everything, you hit the Pay Out button and out come a flood of nickels or quarters or silver dollars. (Which haven't had silver in them for ages. And aren't even silver colored any more. But we still call them that. Nostalgia, I suppose.)

So the big noise from the big payout was delayed. But it still happened. There were a couple of problems, though. Like the machines jamming before they finished dumping a couple of hundred coins. Which happened quite frequently, at least to me. And then there's the mess of handling all those dirty coins, if only to dump them into the plastic bins provided by the casinos. Those wet towelette things did a fair job, but your hands still smelled of all that metal.

Things have changed again, if my experience this week is any indication. There aren't so many coin machines around. Now the slots pay off in certificates. And they accept them as well, so you can move from one machine to the next without having to touch dirty money. And you can put your certificate into a change machine that will turn it back into cash. Mostly worthless American cash, thanks to government fiscal policy. But spendable, which is the main thing.

But what of the psychological factor of all those coins clanging against metal receiving trays to remind gamblers that there's money being won all around them? Can't lose that, can we? So the certificate printers on the slot machines all have little speakers. And they play recordings of clanging coins while you wait for your scrip to pop out of the slot. What's next? Artificial scent generators to add the aroma of cheap cigars?

1. For any non-Americans who are confused by the expression, two bits refers to a quarter dollar. I believe the phrase comes from a Spanish coin called an ocho Real, which was designed to be broken into eight separate pieces to make change. So two bits are a quarter of the whole. It's also the source of the pieces of eight phrase so beloved of pirates. At least the movie versions thereof.

One of the many benefits of living in Silicon Valley is that it's close to some other interesting places. So with my employer shut down for the week, I went looking for cheap hotel deals in Reno. (And no, I never shot a man there just to watch him die.) Not the best time for such things, what with so many other people looking for a place to go between Christmas and New Years. But I did okay, getting a pretty good deal at the Silver Legacy, one of the nicer downtown casinos. There was only one potential fly in an otherwise unsullied ointment: the weather. To get to Reno means crossing Donner Pass. Donner Pass, as you may know, is named for the Donner Party. And the Donner Party was not a party in the sense of cake and balloons and presents. (Sorry; I was listening to Lemony Snicket on the drive over.) No, it was a collection of people who became trapped in the snow, some of whom survived by partaking of the others.

Not wanting to repeat their mistake, I kept a close eye on both the Caltrans highway info website and the weather reports from Truckee, the town just east of the pass. And as of nine this morning, both filled me with confidence. So off I went on my five hour journey, armed only with my trusty Acura and what passes for cold weather gear when you mostly try to avoid anything that qualifies as cold weather.

Things looked just a wee bit grim as I got within an hour of the pass. Caltrain was broadcasting news of snow at the pass and making dark suggestions about carrying chains. Never having driven with chains in my life, I debated turning back. But that would be sensible. And I've never been all that good at sensible.

As it turns out, there were no more than a few flakes as I drove over the pass. Certainly, there was plenty of snow on the mountains and everywhere but the highway. So there was snow. And, one must assume, there will be snow again. Just not right at the moment.

So I arrived in Reno full of confidence that, having made the journey here without incident, I might have the same luck going home on Thursday. Said confidence lasting about ten minutes after my arrival in my room. At which point I looked out the window, noticed that everything looked very, very white and that the flakes were both larger and more numerous than they'd been at fabled Donner Pass.

Things cleared up a few minutes later and there hasn't been any more snow today. But if my luck at the slot machines today is any indication, I'm in for a heck of a drive home.

I didn't pay attention to the original story of a Colorado man who'd set up 17,000 Christmas lights around his house and then put together a web interface so visitors could turn sets of lights on and off and see the results. After all, it seemed eminently doable if kind of pointless. So I'm more than a little bit surprised to discover that the whole thing was a fake. It seems the perpetrator of this little bit of technology just took a set of photos of the house with various lights turned on and off and just served whichever picture corresponded to the visitor's settings. And when a Channel 7 news copter took him up for a look, it was his wife who was playing with the lights, not an Internet full of netizens.

I wonder what the implications of this little stunt will turn out to be. If he was running ads on his web pages, does that make it a matter of criminal fraud? Is he in trouble with the community for making a mockery of holiday goodwill and all that? Will most everybody have a good laugh at their gullibility? Or will they do the sensible thing and ignore it?

I'm betting on any possibility except the last one.

Having seen The Incredibles on Thanksgiving Day (I'm not much of a football fan, so what better to do while waiting for the feeding frenzy to commence?), I was looking for the right movie to attend today. I find Christmas to be an excellent day for this sort of thing; the crowds are even smaller and the selection is even wider. I'd settled on A Series of Unfortunate Events, having enjoyed the first couple of books in the series. Yes, I read children's books. You got a problem with that?

The reviews have been less than inspiring. That would be a worry under normal circumstances. But when a film stars Jim Carrey, it's like a big red warning label. Still, I decided to be optimistic. And besides, the reviews for Phantom of the Opera were even worse. And besides, both the reviews and the trailers made it clear they'd got the look right.

Okay, so it's not the most brilliant film ever made. Not even the most brilliant adaptation of a children's book. But I have to say that it wasn't half bad. It's beautifully visualized, well acted (and if Jim Carrey hams it up, he is playing an over the top ham actor) and has moments of real excitement and terror. And if it comes to too happy a conclusion that goes on a bit too long, I guess I don't mind paying that price for what came before. Or what comes after: the most beautiful and stylish credit sequence I've seen in years.

And the important lessons from the book have been preserved: that there are two kind of adults in this world: well meaning, stupid and gullible on the one hand; and grasping, contemptible and ugly on the other. And the only thing you can count on are yourself and your siblings. Assuming you have siblings, of course. Otherwise you're stuck.

If you've been keeping up with this blog (and who but me can make that claim? or would want to?), you know that I'm a fanatic Scaper, and that one aspect of my fanaticism is a little non-business I have going where I make Farscape-inspired pins and offer them to other equally obsessed fans. Anyway, having just received pin #5, it finally occurred to me that there has to be a better way to get the word out whenever a new pin comes out than to post to my usual web hangouts (here and here) and hope people notice before newer posts roll mine off the front page.

The answer, obviously, is to set up a mailing list. So I went to my web provider to see what they already have set up. They've done so well with every other service; surely they've taken care of something as common as mailing lists. And so they had. Sorta. It seems they've had a mailing list system in development since 1998 or so. It's been in beta almost that long. And it requires manual setup by one of their administrators before I can get going. Which wouldn't be a big deal, except that it's Christmas Eve. And somehow I don't think my mailing list request will be at the top of anybody's priority list.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. One posting mentioned a package called Dada Mail, available at mojo.skazat.com. Dada Mail is both free and simpler to install and use than the Mailman package my web provider has been beta-ing since the Clinton Administration. I had it up and running in a couple of minutes. It even provided me with a form, complete with the ever popular opt-in verification, to add to my pins page, as well as a setup for inviting all my Scaper buds to join the list.

Once again, free software comes to my rescue. And once again, the best thing about my web provider, beyond their utter reliability and their excellent prices, is that they let me control my own destiny. Freedom is a wonderful thing.

With all the digital cameras I've been through over the years, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they'd occasionally do too good a job taking a picture. But that's what happened. The camera is my old Olympus C-5050Z; the subject is a pin I had made to share with my Scaper buds. The problem: the offset printing process.

Having made four previous Farscape-inspired pins, I wasn't anticipating a problem with pin #5. The design, living ship Moya entering Starburst, was provided by a very talented Scaper artist. But unlike the other pins, this one was too colorful and detailed to be rendered as a cloisonné pin. So I agreed to an offset process, where the design would be printed and then applied to the surface of the pin. I waited impatiently for the pins to be manufactured and shipped. And when they arrived, I pulled out my camera to get a good picture of the pins to show people.

And that's when I got my surprise. It turns out that offset printing uses weird patterns of shapes to get the apperance of continuous color. And my camera sees much better than my eyes. Because it captures those shapes, not what I see. Fortunately, I was able to scale down the picture to lose all that detail, which you can see in the circle at right. But it makes me wonder how much else of the world we perceive incorrectly with our limited faculties. Is the world really as smooth and continuous as it appears? Or are we just projecting our need for order on a universe that much prefers chaos?

Deep thoughts. Much too deep for a holiday weekend, I'd say.

Way back in the dark ages of home video, shortly after VCRs but many years before DVDs, there were laserdiscs. And I remember going to a laserdisc rental store in the San Fernando Valley, where they had a sign warning of fees that would be charged if the discs weren't rewound before they were returned. Seeing the picture at right on someone else's blog caught me short. How wonderful to know that even gags roll with the times. But even better, it turns out that the DVD Rewinder really exists! A Google search found this writeup, which even provides a link to the maker's website.

Despite all the time I've put into my iTunes Music Store blog, which is a desperate attempt to become wealthy by getting all sorts of people to funnel their iTMS purchases through me and reap the rewards of 5% commissions ("And how's that working out for you?" "Not at all well. But thanks for asking."), I run across sources of music that are worthy of mention but that don't involve any compensation other than the chance to share a cool discovery. (Whew! And to think I said all that on one breath!)

Anyway, that's a longwinded way of mentioning a cool website called Bollywood for the Skeptical, which is intended as an introduction to the music of Indian cinema. About which I know very little, although that's changing even as I type; the site has MP3 files of nineteen classic tracks that try to cover the breadth of Bollywood. No idea if it succeeds, or even if that's possible in 92 minutes of music. But it's fun to experience the attempt.

Oh, and if you want to burn this stuff to CD, someone has even done CD cover art. Thanks to Boing Boing for the links.

Slashdot provides a pointer to a truly inspiring tale of completing a development project even when no one in authority knows or cares. Having spent a little time at Apple myself, and having been rejected like an organ transplant that went horribly wrong, I can only marvel at the determination of a fired engineer who somehow managed to stay on the job to the bittersweet end. It's a tribute to his determination, as well as to the sloppiness and incompetence of his (former) employers, that he succeeded. And I mean that in the nicest possible way; if only other employers were quite so inept. Or could engender a fraction of the loyalty we see here.

Is this a great country or what! Thanks to Boing Boing for the news that M&M's will do custom message printing on your own very special special mix of colors. As with most things in life, the fine print takes some of the fun out of it. And you're limited to two lines of eight characters each. But it just means you have to get creative.

Do you think their censors would have a problem with "Eat Me"?

One of my Scaper friends sent me a holiday card from the Hallmark website. It had the most honest rendition of a seasonal song I've heard in a while: offkey and with half-remembered lyrics. Starring these guys, who may have been hitting the eggnog a little bit harder than is proper.

Since I've been running my blogs, I've been checking my access logs to discover how people come to visit me. And I've noticed regular visits with URLs like this: <http://www.xopy.com/friendslinks.php>. Since no such page exists, and since the site at www.xopy.com consists only of a cryptic "We'll be back" message, I decided a little investigation was in order.

Very little investigation. A Google search found the explanation, courtesy of Visual Intensity. It seems that the links I saw were part of yet another attempt to find candidates to spam. Their technique is to rely on site owners who are foolish enough to leave their access logs where other web spiders can find them. By embedding their URLs in an access log, they hope that other people will find and follow those links and discover whatever it is they do. And although xopy.com is down, they have a bunch of other aliases that one assumes are still active.

The fix, beyond making sure your logs are hidden from your web server (as mine are), is to prevent these slimebuckets from accessing your site. Visual Intensity includes a how to on their site. Remember: only you can prevent spam. Well, you and Hormel, of course.

The world of Farscape fans is reeling from the news that Ben Browder has been signed for a regular role on the next season of Stargate SG-1. There's more than a bit of irony here, since Farscape's cancellation by the Sci Fi Channel was at least in small part due to SG-1's better price-performance: higher ratings at a lower cost. To make matters even more interesting, SG-1 star Amanda Tapping will be away for the first part of the season, taking care of her upcoming arrival. So Farscape's Claudia Black, who has a guest role in an SG-1 episode this season, will return for at least five more. Ben and Claudia together; just the sort of thing to gladden any Scaper's heart. But did it have to be Stargate?

If you're in the tech world, you may have been following the antics of SCO, the company that bought Unix from Novell, claimed ownership of Linux and then proceeded to sue IBM, Red Hat, Daimler Chrysler, Autozone and various other suppliers and users of Linux. (If you're not and are curious, head over to Groklaw for the whole sordid story.) Anyway, today a colleague sent me the picture at right, which describes the situation and its likely outcome better than all the analyses I've read. As for the title of this posting, that's my pseudo-Latin for "In photography there is truth." Unless of course you know how to use Photoshop, in which case all bets are off.

Joel Spolsky has a wonderful website called Joel on Software, where he writes the kind of reasoned and compelling articles on the software industry that I could write. Well, maybe I could, if I were a whole lot smarter, a whole lote more intuitive and maybe a little bit more articulate. Okay, a lot more.

His latest piece is called Camels and Rubber Duckies. And in spite of the title, it's a thorough analysis of how product pricing might work. If it did work, which of course it doesn't. Joel explains the reasoning behind various pricing models and their pitfalls. He considers all the assumptions behind the models and then points out why every single assumption breaks down.

If you've ever wondered at the way people assign prices to products, it's well worth a read. Heck, even if you find business topics to be as dull as a congressional speech; he's that good.

You can find all sorts of wonderful things on eBay. But it doesn't get more special (in the Special Olympics sense at least) than this: a one of a kind iPod signed by David Hasselhoff and preloaded with his Christmas album. Wow! As I write this, bidding sits at around $200 (the iPod is listed in UK Pounds), which is less than the price of an iPod that hasn't been smeared with his handwriting.

Oh, and if you go to the listing, you get a little audio from the man himself. How exciting is that? Not as exciting as that "Hoff in a Speedo" poster that's flying all over the net, perhaps. But still pretty wonderful.

Update 12/20: Amazingly enough, somebody paid over $500 for this desecration. I guess Mr. Hasselhoff has more (or at least more dedicated) fans than I anticipated. Then again, that's only £45 more than the UK Apple Store price for an unenhanced iPod. Not much to pay for a true believer. (In what, I have no idea.)

So I'm at TWoP, reading the recap of the latest episode of The O.C.. And there on page 12 I come across this little bit of brilliance:

Lindsay soon comes to the door holding a big-ass Physics textbook, and she walks outside and closes the door. He stares at her and then down at her feet, noticing she's wearing big, big slippers with little felt renditions of an old man with glasses on them. She tells him that they are -- wait for it -- "Freudian Slippers." Dude, whoever made those just sold 12,000 pairs.

So I just had to find out if such a thing exists. And five seconds later (I type slow), Google had found the real thing. Who says teevee isn't educational?

Ya cain't make stuff like this up. You could try, though. Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer to The Bitter Shack of Resentment, which tells us that Santa's Depot has nativity scenes made from s'mores. Much better than the Catholic version; I hear that's made from wafers...

It's December, which means among other things infinite repetitions of all those movies we don't have to put up with the rest of the year. But thanks to the guys at Angry Alien Productions, we can have a mercifully brief version of that Frank Capra moldy oldy, "It's a Wonderful Life". Yeah, it's thirty seconds of your life you'll never get back. But you wasted more than that reading this, right? Besides, this version has bunnies!

I doubt I'm alone in thinking that Flash is a blot on the web landscape. And it's not because Macromedia refused to hire me for that evangelist job last year. Well, not just because of that...

Anyway, think of this as Macromedia's way of getting back into your good graces. And if your ego needs a boost, there's always this. Yep, Flash isn't just for annoying intro screens on corporate websites any more!

Another blog I discovered in passing mentioned an amusing meme idea: put iTunes in shuffle mode and report the first ten songs it picks. What a wonderful way to write a blog entry without actually having to do any of that hard thinking or creative work! And what a wonderful opportunity to embarrass myself, depending of course on what comes up. Here are the results of this little experiment:

1. Moonfall (from The Mystery of Edwin Drood) by Renée Fleming & Bryn Terfel
2. I Don't Want To Wait by Paula Cole
3. When I Look At You by Linda Eder for The Scarlet Pimpernel concept album
4. Call Off The Search by Katie Melua
5. I Resolve by the 1994 London Cast of She Loves Me
6. Senor Burns (the long version) from Go Simpsonic With The Simpsons
7. Lucille by Kenny Rogers
8. Waltzing Matilda by Peter Russell-Clarke
9. Never by the original Broadway cast of On The Twentieth Century
10. Midnight Confessions by The Grass Roots

Funny; I'm not ashamed of anything on that list. I'll have to work on that.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the blogger who pointed me to this story. Believe it or not, a group of actors in Irvine staged a live performance of Spock's Brain, arguably the worst episode of the original Star Trek. The title of this entry is my reaction to the news.

But it's more. It's also the brilliant line of dialogue invented by Pia Zadora in the classic Harold Robbins potboiler, The Lonely Lady. Or so sayeth Roger Ebert in his review of this travesty. He sees crap like this so I don't have to.

Seeing the new trailer for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Willy Wonka remake, makes me wonder at how much more sophisticated movie audiences are now, even children. In the first movie, all you had to do to create an environment that seemed strange and otherworldly and wondrous was to shoot in a place people hadn't seen before: Munich in southern Germany, for example. Now, you have to create that otherworldly place; we've all seen too much of the world to be impressed so easily by real locations.

The trailer looks great, by the way. I wonder what I'll think of the movie.

I just finished off a quick trip from one coast to the other: leave San Francisco Monday afternoon for Washington, D.C., spend Tuesday in meetings and fly back first thing Wednesday morning. We should have arrived at SFO around 11:15 in the ayem. Instead, we were still cruising along above the cloud layer. The pilot informed us right around that point that weather in San Francisco was slowing things down and that we'd be a half hour or so late. No big deal, at least for me; I didn't have a connection to worry about.

A little later we're down in the cloud and, I assume making our way for the airport. (There's so much cloud I can't see anything.) And then our descent takes a surprising turn: upward. My seatmate announces that we're going around again. And I realize he's listening to the conversation between the cockpit and the tower, something United and a couple of other airlines do.

So I start listening in. And hear a flight announce that it has marginal fuel left. And the control tower asks whether that's marginal fuel or minimal fuel. The answer comes back immediately: minimal. And a couple of seconds later we're listening to Muzak instead of the cockpit.

Turns out we were the flight with the empty tanks. And a few minutes later (a very long few minutes, at least where I was sitting), we hear the welcome sound of landing gear coming into place and can finally see the grey/green of San Francisco Bay.

I think this is what Holly on Red Dwarf once referred to as brown trousers time. Gosh, I remember when flying was fun.

And a Happy Chanukah to you too. But not too happy, at least not if you're driving.

That's sick! (But in a good way.) An artist named Michael Paulus has taken a range of cartoon characters from Betty Boop to Pikachu and shown us what they have going on under the skin. Creative, funny and disturbing all at the same time.

Thanks to Boing Boing and others for reporting this one.

Didja ever notice that companies always schedule their holiday parties for a Friday or Saturday night? Think that's because they'd rather you be useless on your own time instead of theirs?

As you may have guessed, my startup had its holiday party last night. And I'm feeling more than a little bit fragile as a result. Don't think I made too much of a fool of myself, if you ignore the weird maneuvers on the dance floor. (And boy, do my muscles ache! It's more than the hangover and the lack of sleep talking!)

One other valuable lesson: attempting to take pictures in a dark room is a waste of effort, especially when both you and the subjects have been drinking. Even if the camera can find something to focus on, any attempt to calculate a proper exposure with near and far objects is bound to wash out the former and not do much with the latter.

Still, it's not all bad. My coworkers thanked me for going to the trouble of taking pictures. Maybe they'll forget to ask about them and never know how big a mess I made. It's not like any of them have discovered this place yet, right?

It's stuff like this that reminds me of why I love the web. In case you aren't as web-obsessed as I, it's a takeoff on this.

Oh, and the title of this post? Clearly you need to get out more. Or I do. Definitely one of those.

Having just written about merged religious holidays, how funny to be reading the recap of last week's Joan of Arcadia on the wonderful Television Without Pity and be sent to the wonderfully named Finder's Kippahs, an all-yarmulkahs-all-the-time web store. I haven't enjoyed the narrowcasting nature of the web since I first discovered Paddle Palace, a store completely devoted to table tennis. Is this a great country or what!

What started as a joke on The O.C. has turned into yet another opportunity for e-merchandizing. I refer to Chrismukkah, that hybrid holiday celebrated by the mixed marriage Cohens now of Fox Thursday nights. Imagine my surprise to discover that there's a website selling Chrismukkah cards for the theologically undecided. But dreidels with Christmas trees and snowmen? Whatever happened to that thing about graven images?

Back in college we'd give each other Nonsectarian Winter Holiday gifts. If we'd been a little more clever, maybe we'd be the ones raking in the Chrismukkah gelt.

One of the Farscape forums mentioned a survey running at NBC to ask about viewing behavior. Like other Scapers, I filled it out in the faint hope that maybe we can have small influence on what's made and shown. But that got me thinking about what I watch, at least relative to the networks that broadcast programs I follow.

So here's the count, based on current programs (new episodes being produced) that my ReplayTV records every week:

• NBC - 1 hour
• CBS - 1 hour
• ABC - nothing
• Fox - 1 1/2 hours
• WB - 2 1/2 hours
• UPN - nothing

What's surprising to me is that I'm at that age that's supposed to move me into CBS's target demographic, not the WB's. Maybe it just means I refuse to grow up old.

A week ago, I wrote about my adventure changing a headlamp on my car. So what are the odds that less than a week later, a light would come on on my dashboard to tell me that one of my brakelights had gone out? I figured at least this one would be easy -- none of that dangerous messing around in the engine compartment.

Step one was to figure out which bulb was out. With no one to help me, I had to resort to ingenuity. An umbrella I keep in the car propped between the driver's seat and the break pedal answered that question: it was the right that had died. So off I went back to my trusty auto supply place to buy a new bulb. Got home, popped off the panel and looked at the bulbs. The manual says there are four of them; problem is, I could only find three. And when I turned on the parking lights, both lights came on! (The third was used for reverse.) Is a puzzlement!

Finally I stopped being stupid. I popped out the bulbs on the left side to see which one was the brake light. And discovered why I couldn't find it. Turns out that one of the bulbs has two filiments for two purposes. And only one had burned out. After that it was a few seconds to replace the bulb and verify that the brake light turns on when it's supposed to. And the warning light on the dashboard is happily off once again.

Now I'm just left wondering: don't these sorts of things always happen in threes?

I got on New Line Cinema's mailing list ages ago, probably around the time The Fellowship Of The Ring showed up on discs. They've offered some pretty weird stuff over the past couple of years. But this latest offering is something else: the One Ring. But not just any One Ring; this one comes mounted on Sauron's severed finger! How exciting is that! And do you think they'll be offering any other body parts in the near future?

I just finished watching the last of the extras on my season 7 DVDs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Buffy isn't a show I watched when it was first on; I got into it only when a friend lent me the first couple of seasons on DVD. And perhaps that was better than trying to watch an episode a week, with all the months of waiting for new episodes both at the end of seasons and whenever The WB decided to screw with the schedule. I think Buffy (and Angel and Firefly, if it'd been allowed more time) work better on DVD, when you can gorge on hours at a time, take however long you need to recover from all the angst and then jump back in for more.

Anyway, now that I'm out of Buffy and have seen all of Angel (I'll watch the season 5 DVDs just for the extras), I can't believe the entertainment biz isn't clamoring for Joss Whedon's next project. This guys is an amazing talent, one who goes beyond the "same old same old" that fills our airwaves. He should be kept busy until he drops dead from exhaustion.

I'm unsurprised to discover that a lot of my fellow Farscape fans are also Joss fans. Because as different as his work is from Farscape, they share a sensibility, a willingness to push the envelope and to tell big dramatic stories. Now if only more Joss fans would discover the world of Moya...