Just s a quickie but the first post of my new weekly column is up over at some other castle which you can find here. As time goes on a history of my column will be available at this link.
We’ll see how this goes!
Well that’s it for Battlestar Galactica. I liked the finale overall but I have a lot of problems with it, here are my random thoughts about those problems that I sent in an e-mail to my wife just now (she liked it more than me):
- opera house meaning hardly important, hera was walking into CIC anyways
- why was the opera house teased at use for 4 seasons?
- no idea what starbuck is (an angel?)
- Head Baltar and Head Six are also what, angels?
- “god did it” is a terrible explanation for all the questions left unanswered in the series
- convinced 38,000 to just give up everything
- fact that they did give up everything, all those raw materials
- anders didn’t get a choice to fly into the sun and die or not
- adama had to leave for some reason?
- everybody decided to settle way apart from each other
- robot montage/current day footage way too heavy handed
I liked it a lot on a macro level, stuff was wrapped up, but when you look down on a micro level at the various events it falls apart for me. Sure stuff wraps up but I don’t like the explanations for how they got wrapped up.
Ah well, at least Baltar gets to be a Farmer now
My friend Andy wrote what might be his best piece of literature ever today, I highly recommend people go and check it out, so for the 2 people who might read this here is a link – World for Willies And Wangs
Also this is Andy’s tooth, he’s a pretty gross dude.
Wisdom Tooth of Terror
tweet tweet
Small update today. I fixed a couple things that were bothering me and cleaned up the right frames a bit. The big new feature is that I’ve added my twitter to the page (oooo aaaaah). So that is kinda neat, there is a pretty decent plugin to wordpress that snaps right in.
I also added the my blogroll back onto the right side, that was giving me problems a couple of weeks ago but today I realized what I was doing wrong and boy do I feel silly. In any case now there is a link to say Ben’s page, my sentiment in the post below still stands.
Back in June I wrote up some thoughts on Battlestar’s season 4.0 finale. I didn’t really like the episode at all and felt it was really just a large let down. Well 8 months later I still agree with most of that post and a lot of that sentiment carried over into the season 4.5 opener.
Overall I thought this was a good show but boy did it move slow as molasses. It was worth watching and I’m very curious to see how things unfold this season. I really enjoyed how the 5th cylon was unveiled and I have a number of theories about it that I’ll keep to myself for now. There is a major thing though that I don’t like about this season that I mentioned in the last post. What is with all the chumminess between the Cylons and Humans? Also Tory continues to be the least interesting character on the show and the dumbest choice as a cylon, she murdered Cally and it doesn’t seem like there will ever be repercussions for that, which is really a shame.
The preview for next’s weeks show made it seem like it was going to be action packed so I have high hopes, we’ll just have to wait and see.
So this is the second time I’ve had to post this because I’m an idiot and somehow published it originally while stripping out all of the text. Pretty annoying. To that end this is the short version.
So on the recommendation of a friend i switched to Gandi for my hosting a year ago when I was looking for a new host. They were just launching their hosting service and were only charging $7.50 a month for it. This seemed pretty good and although it was a ‘beta’ featured they seemed to be on top of things. Unfortunately although things started good on Gandi they had a huge datacentre failure early on and my server never seemed to recover. Gandi support claimed everything was fine but it wasn’t and there were serious 24/7 slowness issues with it. They recently announced that their beta period was over and starting in January they would be changing the price to $16 a month. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I immediately decided it was time for a new host.
Snazzy Logo
On the recommendation of a number of friends I settled on Dreamhost. Their service is pretty cheap but there was a of caveat, to not pay any sort of setup fee you have to pay for a year in advance which costs about $120. I wasn’t really happy about this but luckily my friend had a coupon I could use to get $47 off of that price (it turns out these coupons are actually fairly common and he gets a kickback, which is fine by me). In the end that works out to about $7.50 a month which I was already happy with so I decided to go for it. After a year you can switch to monthly payments which I’ll probably end up doing as I don’t really like the concept of paying for 12 months of something in advance.
The migration to Dreamhost itself went great, very slick and easy. My domain name was about to expire and they even had a promo on where if I switched them to be my new namehost they would renew it for another year for free, so that was a nice bonus. Unfortunately I did run into a major problem though. There was some sort of serious bug with my new server communicating with the mysql databases, it was causing massive slowdowns/internal errors. (basically the site was completely unusable) I reported this to Dreamhost last night and at first they replied back that from what they could tell everything was fine! This was obviously not the reply I was hoping for as this wasn’t the case so I replied back to that effect.
This morning there was unfortunately no new reply and my server was still completely screwed up. I submitted a new ticket to Dreamhost with very specific details and eventually they did get back to me that they were detecting a problem and would try to figure it out. Almost 24 hours after I reported the problem they did get finally get back to me and were able to resolved the problem. As I suspected there was a pretty big mysql db issue and dreamhost kept kicking it up to higher level analysts and then to an engineer who was finally able to solve the problem. It bothers me that it took 24 hours to fix the problem as I was a brand new customer and not expecting a problem, it also pisses me off that they didn’t believe me when I first reported the problem, but eventually they did fix the problem and as of right now the site is running very smooth. It’s already much faster than Gandi ever was so I hope it stays that way. We’ll just have to see!
Well I’m back from my post wedding PAX/Seattle trip (I still don’t know how I convinced Melisa to allow us to go to PAX before we go on our Honey Moon) and like last year I had a great time.
Unlike last year though I didn’t really have that much fun at PAX and instead had much more fun in Seattle. I’m not sure why, all the games in the expo hall that I was interested in I felt like I was going to buy anyways, I didn’t really feel the need to see anything that was there. Maybe because now that I’ve been before it sort of just seemed like more of the same. The Enforcers were more annoying this year, there was almost no swag, the developers didn’t seem as interested in talking to normal people about their games, etc etc. Most annoying of all though is that every event with a major line started at least 30 minutes late, they didn’t start letting the thousands of people into the main theater until after scheduled times for the starting of events had already past, and it takes a long time to let 2000+ people into a big room in an orderly fashion.
The whole thing was fun but I may skip it next year. With that said I still saw some awesome things and boy do I crave Fallout 3. Bethesda by far had the best expo section, they seemed like the only company to actaully put any money into their show.
uh.. also I got married last week (and still got to go to PAX, yay my wife), should probably post that.
So, The Dark Knight.
It was incredibly good, I saw it in IMAX over the weekend while Melisa was out of town, and then on Monday when she was back I saw it agan in a normal theater.
I highly recommend it. I was most impressed with the Harvey Dent story, I had no idea they were going to put so much stuff into this movie, thankfully it was two and a half hours long (although it never feels it)
I believe in Harvey Dent
Well we finally pulled the trigger after months of thinking about it, I’m picking up my new Black Mazda3 Saturday morning and it’s pretty exciting. We got a pretty good deal in the end after some negotiating but it was tough, we came in off of a referral so we were already getting “employee pricing”, the problem being that employee pricing is higher than it used to be. It really seems like over the past 6 months dealerships are really not negotiating as much as they used to. Ah well, we still got some good savings on the car and they “threw in” all weather mats and wheel locks. As a bonus we also are getting to drive around in a loaner mazda3 for this week until mine comes in (it’s being delivered from Victoria) which is pretty cool and seems to be a pretty rare thing.
We ended up with a Black Mazda3 GT with the Luxury package. What’s nice is the GT includes everything in the GX/GS trims as well as the comfort package. All the specs are below and I bolded what I think is especially awesome.
Base GT:
- 2.3L engine with sequential valve timing
- 156 hp
- 150 lb./ft torque
- 17″ alloy wheels
- 205/50R17 tires
- ABS with Electronic Brake Force Distribution (EBFD)
- 4-wheel disc brakes
- Dual front air bags
- Side Air Bags
- Side Air Curtains
- 5 Speed Automatic with Tiptronic
- Anti-theft system
- Exterior temperature gauge
- Auxiliary Input
- AM/FM/CD player with MP3 capability
- 6 Speakers
- Front heated seats
- Leather wrapped steering wheel
- Leather wrapped shift knob
- LED Hannabi taillights
- Sporty bumpers
- Side sill extensions
- Body coloured grille
- Sporty fog lights
- Tri-mode electrominescent gauges
- Piano black interior trim
- Air conditioning with micron air filter
- Map lamp
- Driver and passenger sunvisor with illuminated vanity mirror
- Glove box lock
- Front rain sensing wipers
- Auto light control
- Lumbar support
- Trip Computer
- Cruise control w/steering wheel monted controls
- Rear center armrest with 2 cup holders
Comfort Package:
- Power door Mirrors
- Heated Mirrors
- Power Locks
- Central Locking Switch on Driver and Front Passenger Doors
- Keyless entry with 2 key fobs
- Power Windows
- Power Window Switch Illumination
- One Touch Down Driver’s Side Window
- Illuminated Entry
- Steering Wheel Mounted Audio Controls
Luxury Package:
- Leather seats
- 6-Disc in-dash CD changer
- Automatic climate control
- Xenon headlights (HID)
- Power driver seat with (8 way adjustable)
- BOSE sound system
- Sirius satellite radio
- Speakers (7 vs. 6)
- Chrome finish on exterior door handles
- Moonroof
I’m pretty excited, hopefully Saturday goes without a hitch.