Sailor Jack: Memorial Day

I was going to write about something that happened while I was at home last weekend, but my dad beat me to it. (Which is fine with me!) Read on down in this post to learn about Edmund Joseph Burke being remembered this Memorial Day.

Mac: iChat AV and QT 7.1

While I was at my parents' house, I updated their eMac with all the latest software updates, including the QuickTime 7.1 update. When I returned home to Florida, on our first iChat, my parents' frame-rate was 1 FPS, which is kind of amusing at first, but gets old pretty fast.

I recalled reading something at one of the Mac sites about the QT 7.1 update changing something in the bandwidth settings. So later on I used Remote Desktop to look into the QuickTime preference pane. I've forgotten what setting was showing, it may well have been Automatic, I'm not sure, but I changed it to 1 MBPS Cable, and that seemed to resolve the problem.

So if you're having a problem with iChat AV after the most recent software updates, this is just another reminder to check the bandwidth setting in the Streaming section of the QuickTime preference page.

One interesting thing, which may or may not be related, is that yesterday I was able to observe what my dad was doing on his computer through Remote Desktop, while still maintaining a very good iChat AV connection. Typically, iChat AV and Remote Desktop would each use so much bandwidth that using both of them together was nearly unbearable. It was great to be able to talk to my dad in real time as he moved the mouse around and I could see what he was doing. There was some performance hit, but it was definitely usable.

Cheese Sandwich: Adventures in Online Commerce

Here's an update on my Kodak P850 hot pixel issue.

I received an e-mail reply from Kodak's customer service center. They suggested I clean the lens, or the LCD, which makes no sense to me. They also said that if that didn't resolve the problem, then it was a warranty repair item, and they gave me instructions to use the online trouble-shooting guide to step through to an RMA.

So I went through that process, which was far more painful than it probably had to be. If I included a # to indicate my apartment number, it kept thinking I hadn't indicated a shipping country, and kept returning me to the shipping data page, which always had a country, but on return would be missing the # and my apartment number. So I used Line 2 and wrote "Apt." instead, and that went through. More brain-dead back-end web service programming that the user has to figure out.

After stumbling through that, they informed me of my RMA and indicated that it would normally be a 5-day turnaround, and they ship back by Airborne Express, 2-day air, signature required. So we're talking about 10 days without a camera, then dealing with the inevitable problems of signature-required delivery, which is just more hassle than I want to deal with. I've got USPS, UPS and Fedex calibrated where they'll just deliver my packages to the office, but now I'd have to deal with Airborne Express too, and everyone gets it wrong the first time. So possibly as many two weeks without the camera. And I'm not sure how thrilled I am about having a repair outfit disassemble a brand new camera, repairing it, and returning it to me in perfect working order; when I might be able to just return it and buy a factory-new one.

So I decided to investigate Amazon's return policy. The web page indicates they have an exchange program for defective merchandise. So I followed that process. Those web forms worked as advertised. At the end, I got a shipping label and another bar code to include in the package, but no indication of how I would receive a new camera in exchange. So I called the 800 number (1-800-201-7575) and instead of just using option 4 to get to a human being, I pressed option-3 for refunds and returns, which proceeded to use voice recognition to call up my account information. My phone number worked fine when I spoke that, but it couldn't find my credit card number, so after three tries it gave me a person, which is about the right number because if it had asked a fourth time, I'd have hung up and called back in a more testy mood.

I got "Andy" on the line, and explained the situation, though it's not clear he was paying attention. First, he explained they, in fact, don't offer exchanges. You just return the item, get a refund, and buy yourself a new one. So then I explained that I no longer had the original packaging, and asked if that would be a problem returning for a refund. This seemed to confuse him and he asked me again why I was returning the camera, and so I explained again about the hot pixels. At this point he seemed to register that I was returning a defective camera, and he said in that case, the original packaging isn't required. No problem.

Then I asked about the price adjustment I had received, and Andy said Amazon does not do price adjustments. And I explained that they just did one for me! This seemed to be too much for Andy, so I thanked him and went on my way.

I checked the Amazon listing for the P850, planning to order it again through Amazon, and just eat the price difference if I couldn't get an adjustment later. But then I noticed they had reduced their price to $275.00 already anyway, so it would only be a $15.00 difference from the adjusted price. But then I noticed that shipping time was 1 to 2 weeks!

That's not horrible, because I have 30 days from now to return the camera, but I wasn't terribly excited about waiting. I figured I'd see what Buy.com could do for me.

Sure enough, they indicated they had the P850 in stock, shipping in 1 to 2 days, and the price was $5.00 less than Amazon's. Plus, they had the lens adapter in stock for about $4.00 less than Amazon. So I went ahead and bought a new one from Buy.com.

I went with free shipping, so it may end up being about the same in terms of time. If Amazon got the camera in stock in a week, since I have the Prime member 2-day free shipping thing, it might arrive at the same time, or even earlier than the Buy.com camera, which is coming through free shipping, 7-9 business days. They generally beat that though. So I'm going to hang onto the Amazon camera till the Buy.com one comes in, then return the Amazon camera to Amazon.

At the end of the day, I'll have had a couple hundred pictures, nearly all with one or more visible hot pixels; the minor hassle of dealing with Kodak and Amazon for a repair or return; a new replacement camera as opposed to a repaired one at a cost of about $10.00 more than the original purchase and probably an hour or so of my time. Not exactly a painless shopping experience, but overall I'm not unhappy.

That is, of course, if the new P850 from Buy.com is in perfect working order. If not, well I suppose I'll just be unhappy.

And likely looking for a different brand of camera.

BSG: Interesting...

This is a YouTube video that was apparently a SciFi promo for the Battlestar Galactica mini-series. It's interesting because it contains some alternative dialog that wasn't in the mini-series as it aired, nor, to my knowledge, included as an extra in any of the DVDs. Adama's speech during the decommissioning, and his address at the end are different. There are also some CGI scenes that look like nothing I've seen in the mini-series. (Are those "blaster" bursts coming from the Vipers?)

Just couldn't go too long without a BSG post, dontcha know...

Competing Messages: Ever have a "conversation" with a mob?

Even if it's a "smart" one?

The railroad to hell is all aboard the ClueTrain™, and, like most roads to hell, is paved with good intentions.

We've seen this before though.

And we'll see it again.

One advantage of a "flat" world is that it's so much easier for the mobs to swarm. There's no getting bunched up on a steep, twisting road to the castle, getting poked by your fellow peasants' pitchforks and singed by their torches. Less "friction." Lower "barriers to entry." And with "smart mobs," possessing the "wisdom of the crowd," we'll all just have an intelligent "conversation" in the marketplace of commerce and ideas.

Be careful what you wish for.

Any Ideas?

My mom was going through some things that had belonged to her father and gave me this coin or medallion. The phrase is Latin for something like "The world wants to be deceived. Let it be deceived," or something like that. The other side is identical. It's almost exactly 30mm in diameter. There is no date on it.

Anyone have any ideas as to its origin or context?

Needless to say, I'm in great agreement with the inscription and so I'm pleased to have it.

Update: Well, I should have tried harder. I added "coin" to the search phrase (the inscription) and found some more information. Apparently they were coins used by magicians in their performances and as promotional items or souvenirs. Pretty cool.

Update II: Wow! That was fast! Both Ethan Johnson and Alonzo Mosley fired back answers to the coin question less than an hour after I posted it! Thanks, guys! Gotta love that "lazy web." Peggy from SquatCrunch also chimed in with the answer!

Stupid User Interface Tricks

E-mail correspondents, bear with me, I promise I will get back to you today. Right now, I need to scratch this particular itch.

My dad had some problems putting a post up on his new iWeb weblog, so I had to go back and review the instructions I left him and then play around with iWeb itself to understand where things may have gone awry. To help me understand iWeb better, I've launched a new instance of Time's Shadow using iWeb. I figured I'd dive right into Apple's silo and see what I could find.

So far, I think iWeb is a pretty impressive application, but there are some really annoying aspects and some brain-dead design decisions, two of which I will mention here.

The blogging scheme is pretty standard fare for most of the current crop of Cocoa-based blogging apps on OS X, I think. You click a button to get a form to create a new post. In iWeb's case, it's a little more robust, in that you kind of have access to all the elements that make up a post. The downside is that when you click on the Add Entry button, it presents you with the default blog entry template. This would seem to make sense, except the default template includes a picture placeholder, a lot of greek text, both in the title and the body of the post, as well as the header and tag-line!

So each time you add a post, you have a lot of extra work to do to make the header and tag line look like the rest of the blog, you have a lot of Greek text to delete, though if you just start typing it disappears, but it is disorienting to people like my dad, and you have a picture placeholder containing a photograph totally unrelated to your post that you have to deal with somehow. This is a nuisance and far too much work.

Okay, so the work-around is to just create a short boiler-plate post where you've deleted (or covered up, I'm not exactly sure what I've done yet) the template picture, and then you can just right-click on the boiler-plate entry and select Duplicate from the contextual menu item. This creates a new entry with the same title with a numeral appended to it to indicate what instance it is of that post. Then you just edit the title and type your body text, Save and hit Publish. No big deal.

Well, if you look at the contextual menu you're presented with when your right-click on an entry, you'll see "Delete Blog Entry" right above "Duplicate." Delete is a destructive action, Duplicate is a constructive action. Presumably, one is potentially less desirable than the other. If you click on "Delete Blog Entry" by accident, you're not presented with a dialog box asking if you're sure you want to delete the entry, it just goes ahead and deletes it!

Now, two of the items in the contextual menu are "Add Blog Entry" and "Delete Blog Entry," which seems kind of odd given that there are two dedicated buttons in the blog page window for just those purposes. Since Delete is so destructive, I think you'd ether leave it out of the contextual menu, or offer a confirmation dialog box. In any event, I think that's what my dad did, he accidentally hit Delete instead of Duplicate, and "poof!" the entry was gone.

Now, this might be a recoverable error, because in the File menu, there's a "Revert to Saved..." menu item. But guess what? It's located right below the "Save" menu item. So if you're a little shaky or a little off in your mouse-clicking, instead of recovering from the "Delete" error, you've just made it permanent!

Ironically, while both the contextual menu Delete Blog Entry, and the dedicated Delete Entry button will summarily delete the entry without a confirmation dialog, Revert to Saved... will ask you if you're sure you want to do that!

Gah!

So, maybe the human interface wizards at Apple have a better idea, and I'm all wet. But I'm going to write up a little feedback to Apple and suggest that they at least add a confirmation dialog to the Delete Blog Entry contextual menu item, and Delete Entry button.

Bummer

Took some pictures of the sunset this evening, and finally started looking at the pictures I had taken while I was up in New York. It turns out I have three hot pixels on the P850, forming a medium-sized triangle in the lower left quadrant of the frame, two red, one blue. Once I noticed them, I started seeing them everywhere.

I've submitted a feedback form at Kodak's support page. Hopefully this is covered by the warranty. Naturally, I've thrown away all the packaging, making a return problematic.

I really like the camera, apart from the LCD display, which is a minor disappointment. But this is a big disappointment for a product that is supposed to be just a little bit better than a typical "consumer" product.

Hopefully, they'll do right by me. I won't mind sending it off for a repair, though I guess I'll miss the 6490 right about then. But I hope they don't tell me that three hot pixels out of more than five million is not a "defect." They're definitely quite noticeable.

Here's what sunset looked like:

Naturally, you don't see them in this, much reduced, image. The point of this picture was just to suggest that we had a decent sunset this evening. I took a screen capture from iPhoto using SnapzPro. It's not the usual way I do this sort of thing but I wanted to see how it would turn out. I'm not happy with it, so I probably won't do it quite this way anymore.

Sailor Jack: Back on Deck

My father is back blogging again. He had a blog up for quite some time at the old editthispage.com service. Then I got him set up on .Mac using Rapid Weaver as the blogging tool. While I was home this weekend, I moved him over to iWeb, which was an educational experience in itself. I may offer some thoughts about that as I find time. I will say iWeb has some pretty nifty features, but it's not as intuitive as one might like (no blogging software is, in my experience), and parts of it seem brain-dead to me. I still have some things to learn about it, and then pass that on to Dad, so bear with any glitches you happen to notice.

But Sailor Jack's back on deck, and you can find him at http://web.mac.com/sailor_jack. There are some pictures of the Canastota WW II War Memorial dedication event there, and I'll have some up here at some point as well.

BSG: Museum of Television and Radio Panel Discussion

By way of The Unofficial Battlestar Galactica Weblog, my favorite television series is to be the subject of a panel discussion including cast members at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City, on June 2, 2006.

That would be a lot of fun to attend.

Back

I'm back, I'm tired and I have quite a bit of e-mail I need to answer.

It was a good trip, although I never saw the sun in San Diego. Brought the camera hoping for a spectacular sunset over the Pacific since I was staying right on the beach at La Jolla. Denied! They said the "June Gloom" came early.

The red-eye to Pittsburgh was painless. Slept pretty much the whole way. Flight seemed shorter, and was definitely more comfortable than the 1 hour and 15 minute torture session in a turbo-prop to Syracuse, in which virtually every piece and panel of the plane seemed to vibrate, loudly, at a different frequency, creating a teeth-rattling cacophony of mechanical mayhem. Add to that my seat partner who tried to "sleep" by resting his head against the window and shoving his ass into mine. I love my fellow man, but I don't want to be joined at the hip.

Syracuse was sunny when I landed, but had clouded over by the time I got to my folks' house, and stayed that way until I left. Must be me. It was cold too, I don't think we reached 50 degrees after Friday, until the day I left, when it went over 70.

The Kodak P850 was waiting for me at my parents' place. I enjoyed playing with it and taking a bunch of pictures. Gave my 6490 to my brother Mark who is the photographer in the family. One disappointment of the P850 versus the 6490 is the LCD display. While the P850's is physically larger, it has significantly fewer pixels, and doesn't seem as bright as the 6490's. As a result, pictures seem grainy and washed-out. When you had a good shot on the 6490, you knew it before you took it. With the P850, you're mostly hoping. It's a surprising and disappointing deficiency for a camera that is, in all other respects, a significant upgrade from the 6490.

I'll think twice next time I book a flight home. The 6:20 a.m. departure time didn't seem that bad until I realized I had to be up by 4:30 a.m. to get there on time. Anyway, made it back to Jacksonville in one piece. Pretty pleasant flights, each leg. Never had a luggage problem the whole trip. Happy to discover the sun still existed when I left the terminal in Jax. The car started right up, which it should have, but I always worry anyway.

The cats seemed happy to see me, judging by Squeaky's squeaks, and the amount of time Karma seems to want to spend in my lap. My neighbor did a great job looking after them.

Went to Chris's high school graduation last night, then out to dinner afterward. We're very proud of him.

I've got the usual travel paperwork to do, complicated by contiguous business/personal trips. Some loose ends to tie up on my parents' eMac. I upgraded them to iLife '06, and it seems to have introduced some problems I hadn't anticipated. For some reason, I still feel exhausted. One of the crowns I received seems likely to require a root canal or something, as I have a persistent, low-intensity toothache. Mandy is limping again, badly. And I've got the aforementioned bunch of e-mail I need to answer. I should be caught up by the end of the long weekend, so if I owe you something, please be patient a bit longer.

Anyway, it's good to be back.

Time for me to fly...

Got to take a little business trip out to the left coast, and then I'm off to upstate New York to see my parents. Blogging may be nonexistent for the next ten days. Then again, I might drag the Tinderbox files over to the iBook and take it all along with me... We'll see.

Be well.

(Think about that last thing.)

BSG: Roslin for President

If you change your searches around a little bit, some things pop to the surface that don't always appear in the normal results, though I don't really know why.

Here's a little article that appeared last week at the National Post of Canada.com: Who on Earth is Fit to Replace Bartlet?

No spoilers. ;^)

Dave TV

I had to fire up the Western Digital 320GB external hard drive to make sure it worked before I left. If there was going to be a problem, I wanted to get that issue resolved right away.

At first, I thought there might be a problem. I connected it up via the Firewire interface, then went to format it in HFS Extended, Journaled format and Disk Utility would just hang. I let it do whatever it was doing for over an hour and then just forced it to quit. I wasn't sure what could be wrong, but knowing that Firewire is sometimes flakey with an iSight camera connected, I just switched over to USB 2.0 and tried again. Reformatted just fine.

At first I thought I would rip a lot of my movies to this HD, and then experiment with the iBook as a kind of media center, thinking that if I liked the way it worked out, I might buy a Mac Mini to perform that function full time.

I still plan on trying it, but I think I've changed my mind about ripping movies to it, and instead I think I'll rip as many of my TV shows as I have on DVD to it. That would include a couple of seasons of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Moonlighting, a large assortment of The Twilight Zone, Jonny Quest and Loony Tunes cartoons, and probably some things I'm not remembering at the moment.

A lot of the time, I'll be channel surfing and there won't be anything on that I want to watch. It's usually too late to put a movie on, but a 30 minute or 1 hour TV episode might be just about right. Most of the time, I'm too lazy to dig out the boxed set and then try to pick out disk with a particular episode. But if they're all available on a HD, and I can just pick one out with Salling Clicker from the comfort of my couch, then that might be a good way to go. And Saturday morning cartoons would be back!

On the other hand, I could read a book.

BSG: Another Fan Down Under

Heard from David Golding today that he'd started watching Battlestar Galactica because of my ceaseless harping about it. He's enjoying the show, though he's reserving judgment on whether or not it's "great." And that's fine with me, I'm just glad he's watching it and enjoying it.

Cat Post: Karma's Well

Just to kind of close the loop on the upper respiratory infection issue, Karma seems to be fine. She sneezed once today, but I think it was just something in the air. She's otherwise completely back to normal, to include standing on the keyboard when she feels I'm not giving her enough attention.

Squeaky thus far shows no signs of having contracted the virus, so I'm hopeful we've dodged that one. The abscess on Karma's leg hasn't gone down at all, but it doesn't seem to otherwise trouble her. I'll return to the vet once I get back from my little trip.

My downstairs neighbor is going to be looking in on Karma and Squeaky while I'm gone. I've been walking her dog for her in the evenings when she's working late, which is often. I enjoy walking her dog. He's a big, black English Lab and he's friends with just about everyone. I used to love walking Mandy back when I lived in my kids' house, so it's really a matter of just enjoying the company of a good dog more than ensuring I have someone to look after my cats when I'm away.

We usually stop by this part of the retention pond that has a little waterfall feature. There's been so little rain this spring that there's seldom been any water in motion, but there was some on Friday, and it was altogether simply a gorgeous day. It's fenced, so the big guy can't jump in for a splash. I stay away from the pond behind our unit because it's not fenced and he'll be in it in a heartbeat. He did that to me once. My neighbor was good-natured about it.

Anyway, it's nice to sit there and watch the clouds reflecting off the water and listening to the trickle of water over the ledge. The no-see'ems aren't out yet, and there's some shade there for the big black dog. He'll sit there and let me scratch his back, while I try to just take everything in.

When I get back to the apartment, Karma has to come over and make it a point to sniff my hands and see what other critter I've been paying attention to instead of her.

I dropped by my kids' house today to drop off some graduation announcements for my son. Mandy came up to greet me, and her leg seems fine. She's a good dog too, if a little more energetic than the Lab. One thing I like about the dogs in my life is that they all seem happy to see me.

Hardware: TX Update

Today I wanted to load some pictures onto the Palm TX. I'm sure there are a number of ways of doing this, but one way I wanted to explore was a sync conduit between an iPhoto album and the TX, via The Missing Sync.

I only sync the TX to my iBook. My iBook syncs to .Mac, so changes ultimately propagate to the PowerMac. My main iPhoto library is on the PowerMac. The only pictures on my iBook are some I imported from a camera once. But I thought maybe I could use iPhoto 6's "photocast" feature to good effect.

I created a new album called TX Pix on the PowerMac in my main iPhoto library, and then I dragged about 100 pictures into it. The photocasting command is in the Share menu, so you select the album you want to photocast, in my case TX Pix, and then select the Photocast menu item in the Share menu. You're given the option of requiring a user name and password to subscribe. If you elect that option, may I suggest you write down the user name and password, because if you forget what it was, I couldn't find any way to recover it easily in iPhoto. I ended up stopping the photocast for the album and starting it again without requiring a user name and password.

I also selected the smallest size for the pictures in the photocast, since they were going to end up on the TX at 480x320 anyway. Saves some space in iDisk. Once everything is configured properly, iPhoto starts talking with .Mac, and the pictures are uploaded. This took a few minutes. When it's all done, I got an alert and the option to send an e-mail notifying someone of the photocast, offering the URL. So I sent one to myself so I could just click on the URL from Mail on the iBook, and it automatically brought iPhoto forward and asked me to confirm that I wanted to subscribe to the photocast. Pretty easy.

Then I activated the iPhoto conduit in The Missing Sync (5.x), and configured it to sync with the photocast subscription album, TX Pix. Did a hot sync, and all the pictures moved over to the TX. I'm using Splash Photo right now, which I'm not terribly familiar with just yet, but I'll play around with that and get the pictures a little better organized. But I'm very pleased with the way they look on the TX's screen.

Next step is to install Salling Clicker and get that working.

Cheese Sandwich: Acquired Taste

I skipped taekwondo this morning because I had a number of other things I wanted to accomplish before I leave town on Monday. But I did stop by Sierra Grill for the usual Corona and Southwest Burrito for lunch.

I was more than a little surprised at how much difference it makes having that particular combination, not having worked out before. I look forward to it every Saturday. That first sip of the Corona usually tastes like something out of this world. Today, it was just another cold beer. Same thing with the burrito. It was just another burrito. It was good, but it wasn't something special.

Seriously, there's a qualitative difference in enjoying those two things between a normal, rested state, and a state of near exhaustion; and it's an enormous difference. I didn't really expect that, but it gives me another appreciation for the rewards of physical exertion.

Maybe it does for you, too?

"Oh, crap..."

See what I mean about dopamine? If I had just looked in the Kodak forums yesterday before I bought the thing from Amazon, I'd have seen this.

It's not a piano falling on my head, but still.

Check this out: Kodak P850 + Dock + Camera Bag = $229.00

Now what do I do? I guess I'll call Amazon and see if I can get a price adjustment. That'll be the easiest thing to do. I really want the camera for the war memorial dedication, but it wouldn't be cool to use it and return it.

Sigh. Let's see what Amazon will do. I'd have to pay a surcharge and sales tax, so the actual price to me would be about $256.50, and I don't really need the bag or dock, but those would be nice. I guess I'll see if they can give me a $40.00 price adjustment.

Last time I tried this, I think I had to do it by e-mail, but we'll see what they can do over the phone...

Okay, that was easy.

Amazon's official policy is that they don't do price-matching. But they understand I could just return the camera and buy it from Costco instead. They said they could credit me the difference, but they couldn't give me the dock or the bag. I said I didn't even want the whole difference because I'd have to pay sales tax and a surcharge for being a non-member, and the extra items weren't important to me; but if they could credit my account $40.00, I'd feel better about keeping the camera.

So she did.

And I'm getting that pleasant feeling again...

Uh oh.

Dopamine

I had a pleasant day today. Not that most days are unpleasant, they aren't. Just that today was pleasant.

Beware pleasant days!

I had to take Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds into the dealer because it was low on transmission fluid. Mitsubishi, "the best backed cars in the world," has a special formula for their automatic transmission fluid that isn't offered at the base service station, though the mechanic there said I should be able to get it at any NAPA store. Well, no, you can't get it there either.

I have a negative view of dealer service, and it may be wrong or out of date. In the past, whenever I took a car into a dealer for service, it always seemed as if I paid more than I would from another garage, and invariably something else would go wrong shortly after the service, and things that should have been warranty repairs never were for one reason or another. So I wasn't looking forward to having to visit the dealer. In addition to all the foregoing fear, uncertainty and doubt, it's just damn inconvenient to take the car to the dealer. I figured I'd have to be without a car all day, and I'd have to inconvenience someone to follow me up there while I dropped it off, then returning me back to my apartment where I could get something useful accomplished while my car sat there having God-knows-what done to it.

So I planned on taking the whole day off from work, and called the dealer to make an appointment. I told them that my mechanic said the car was low on ATF, and I couldn't seem to be able to buy any anywhere, and, by the way, why would it be low on fluid? The guy on the other end seemed like a nice enough guy. He asked me if I had the 30K mile service done? I said no, and he said that's probably why I was low on fluid. Now, I'm not exactly persuaded by the (non-)explanation, but what we've really just exchanged was a query and a rejection regarding warranty coverage for getting my transmission looked at. So he says the transmission service is $129.00, and they can do it while I wait if I get the car in first thing in the morning.

Still not expecting anything positive, I left the apartment early and arrived at the dealership about five minutes before the service department is supposed to open. The guy waved me in through the window, which I thought was nice. Most of the time, people seem to insist on not unlocking the door even one second before the posted opening time. So I tell the guy I'm here for the transmission service and he took my information. The office number I gave him told him that I work at Mayport, so he said, "You work on the base?"

I said, "Yeah, you ex-Navy?"

"Nah. Marines."

So I said, "It's all good," and I recall thinking that I liked this guy.

He asked me if there was anything else that I wanted them to look at while I was there. Well, my mechanic also told me I had a leaking cam shaft seal; but I wasn't planning on getting into that with the dealer because it should be a warranty item, and I figured they'd just stiff-arm me on that, and it always seems like more things wind up broken when they start fixing stuff. But I liked this guy, so I told him about the oil leak.

He said, "Yeah, that's about the only thing that goes wrong on these engines, the rear o-ring seals start leaking."

He said that'll be covered under warranty, takes about an hour, hour and half to replace if I want to hang around. Or, he can drive me someplace, but he can't come pick me up when the car is done. I told him I'd taken the day off, so let's just go ahead and get it done.

It took about two and a half hours for the whole thing, which is about 15 minutes longer than he initially told me. But that was great! Again, I'm used to not getting the car fixed on the same day! So he hands me the invoice and it was $129.00 plus tax, two cam shaft rear o-ring seals replaced for free under warranty, and the transmission serviced, and I'm out of there by 9:30 a.m.! Woo-hoo!

So I drove home, kind of listening for new funny noises, trying to sense if the transmission was shifting funny or anything. Nothing. Shiva sounded great. I got back to the apartment and answered some e-mails and goofed around for a while before deciding I needed to take care of some errands. So I went out to the car and I looked down underneath it. I was afraid they had failed to tighten the sump drain on the transmission. Sure enough, there were two puddles under the car. The one nearest the front I was pretty sure was water from the AC heat exchanger. The one behind it was suspiciously near the transmission.

So I backed the car up and pulled into the next spot over to get a better look at the puddles, all the while wondering if I could beat the traffic and get the car back to the dealer and get it corrected before they closed. But, much to my surprise and relief, the second puddle was water too! Probably just ran back on the frame a bit through capillary action, or maybe it accumulated back there while I was driving, I don't know. But it wasn't transmission fluid!

So now I'm all happy again, and I ran out and did my errands.

I got a new bag for the laptop since my old one is starting to fall apart. I carry way too much crap around that I never use, but I like to be prepared. For what, I don't know. I carry enough electronics around to support an Apollo moonshot. I can't find anything like the bag I already have, that I bought for next to nothing several years ago, which is almost perfect. I ended up getting a fairly expensive Samsonite thing with wheels! I figure the wheels may come in handy on this cross country trip I have to take. My right shoulder is bothering me anyway, and it could probably use a break. They also happened to have a set of the Griffin EarJams there. Not a great price, but I figured since I just bought the Griffin AirClick and the Griffin TuneJuice, I might as well get the Griffin EarJams.

Who knows what I was thinking? Personally, I think it was the influence of the reward sensation your brain experiences from dopamine because of the positive experience I had with the car.

Next I was off to the Navy Exchange to buy a pair of shoes and some groceries at the commissary. I found a pair of shoes I liked, and they were listed at $49.99 on the price tag. It wasn't bad for that pair of Timberlands. On my way out, I figured I'd buy another bath towel, again, no idea why. I didn't see any colors I liked, but there was a bright pink one that I thought Caitie would like, and then she'd have her own towel to wipe the toothpaste off her mouth with, instead of using mine. So I went to check out and it turned out the shoes were $10.00 off, and the towel was $2.00 off, so I got both for less than $50.00, and I'm like "Wow!" (It takes so little to thrill me these days.)

As I'm driving home, my phone rings. I answered it and it was my neighbor asking me if I'm okay, if I needed anything? I told her "I'm fine, why do you ask?"

She said she had come home earlier in the day to get something, saw my car in the lot and figured I must have been sick or something. I said, "Nope, I'm fine, but thanks for asking!" And I'm thinking, "What a nice day this has been!"

One of the things I did while I was goofing around before running my errands was looking over the good deals at Dealmac.com. They had Office Depot offering the Canon Powershot S2 IS at $349.00, with a coupon dropping it to $320.00. I really like the S2, and $320.00 is a pretty decent price. The Exchange is still listing it at like $389.00 I think. So I started doing this thing I do all the time, never really planning on buying a camera, just sort of comparing different models at similar prices, usually the "trailing-edge" models that are being sold at steep discounts from their introductory prices. So I looked at the S2, a couple of Panasonics, the DMC FZ20K and FZ30K, and the Kodak P850. After reading a lot of reviews, I figured if I was going to buy a new camera today, I'd probably buy the Kodak P850, which was available at Amazon for $300.00. With the S2, I'd be paying $20.00 more, plus sales tax and shipping.

I'll tell you what, comparison shopping for digital cameras is a fruitless activity. There is no perfect camera. The Panasonics actually looked like the better cameras, strictly from a picture-quality point of view. But they're very big, and the 20K was probably a better deal overall, but, in the end, it was just too big, too heavy, and I like Kodak and Rochester, NY too much. Plus, I can use my existing 6490 LiON batteries, and it'll fit in my current camera bag. It's not a perfect camera, but it's better than the one I have. 12x zoom, image stabilization, 640x480 movie mode, hot shoe for an external flash, 5 megapixels, plus a few other features the 6490 lacks.

Which should probably tell you what happened when I got home. I went ahead and bought the P850. Not only that, but I joined that Amazon Prime Membership thing, so I get free 2-day shipping. I figured I'd try for the 1-day "Want it tomorrow?" thing, but the camera wouldn't make it. Monday at the earliest, and I'll probably be on the left coast by the time it showed up.

So I had it delivered to my parents' house, which is where I'll be a week from tomorrow.

See? This is what happens when I'm in a happy mood. I spend money. Naturally, looking at the Kodak site just now, I see they have a reconditioned model available for $249.99. (Scroll down.) I suppose I could cancel the Amazon order, but I won't.

I blame the dopamine.

Of course, I'm sure tomorrow a piano will fall on my head! Hey, at least I'll save some money!

But today was a very pleasant day.

Forgetting History?

I watched National Treasure last weekend with Caitie after Last Holiday, (When I first wrote this post, I had written "Lost Weekend." Freudian slip?) just because it's a good popcorn flick, and I really like watching Nick Cage.

There's a certain amount of American history in the movie, and one of the plot points that kind of struck me as topical was the reliance on the Silence Dogood letters.

It seems one of our founding fathers was fond of writing letters to the editor under a pseudonym. These days, that kind of thing seems to get people into trouble.

Which way should it be? I have no idea. I suppose it depends on the character and intent of the person concealing their identity. But it seems to me that it ought not to be consistently and uniformly an offense against journalistic integrity or standards. But that means making a judgment call, and then sticking by and defending that judgment, and we seem to much prefer binary, black/white, go/no-go approaches to difficult situations. All the easier to abdicate any responsibility for exercising judgment, and just sticking to the checklist and declaring we're upholding a standard of some kind.

But I really haven't been following the issues that closely, so I probably shouldn't jump up and down about it either.

BSG: Grace Park Interview

Yeah, I know, I know... Give me a break!

Anyway, interesting interview with Grace Park who plays Boomer/Sharon in Battlestar Galactica. Contains spoilers.

BSG: Pretty Damn Cool

Don't know how long this will escape the copyright cops, and it contains numerous spoilers if you haven't seen all of BSG to date, so be warned. But it is pretty damn cool.

I guess it's what the cool kids call a "mash-up" of various scenes from BSG set to a song. It's called Battlestar Galactica: Trials of the Few.

Repairs

For a long time, the navigation leaks that formerly had occupied the bottom of the page had gone missing. I thought something had changed in the export codes for Tinderbox, and my page template was wrong.

I futzed around with it for a while, becoming confused and frustrated in the process, then just put it aside and forgot about it.

Well, someone at The Unofficial Battlestar Galactica weblog left a comment that they wanted to read more of Groundhog Day, but they didn't know where the other stuff was!

That was kind of embarrassing and flattering at the same time.

So I pulled up the page template in Taco again, and then I had a thought... (I know, it doesn't happen often.)

I went back into Tinderbox and checked the prototypes for Navigation and Copyright, the two notes that weren't publishing. Somehow they had both changed to "DoNotPublish" prototypes, and, sure enough, they don't publish. How that happened, I don't know. I haven't touched those notes in ages, other than to change the year from 2005 to 2006 in the Copyright note.

Anyway, changed the prototype to the correct one, and navigation is restored! Feel free to browse the archives! Or not, your call.

Anyway, it's nice to get that off my "to-do" list (where it's been gathering dust for far too long). Now maybe I'll get around to implementing a little category summary for all those keywords preceding the colons in the post titles. A link to all the BSG posts on one page, all the Social Hygiene posts on one page, etc. Maybe real soon now...

FX

Alwin mentions some FX shows that he enjoys as much as (or more than?) I enjoy Battlestar Galactica. And truthfully, The Shield, Rescue Me, and Thief are all excellent series from the standpoint of television drama, no question about it.

I've become something of a fan of The Shield, over the last two seasons, but it's not the kind of show I'm excited to tell other people about. It's great drama, but it's depressing, in a way. While, Battlestar Galactica deals with a topic likely more depressing, it's obviously a fantasy, and many people behave nobly in it. The Shield is meant to appear realistic, and in many ways, it's all too credible. I don't mean to be naively simplistic here, but there are no good guys in The Shield. A couple of the secondary characters, both women, are probably the closest things to unambiguously good cops, but everybody else seems hopelessly corrupt.

I've never seen The Sopranos because I don't get HBO, and I'm really not interested in organized crime, but I imagine The Shield is a lot like The Sopranos, just told from the other side of the badge. But I can't say I've ever watched an episode of The Shield where I felt good about a particular plot development. It's fascinating, it's very well done, but it's depressing.

I never got into Rescue Me, though my son-in-law, who is a firefighter, loves the show. It doesn't help that FX has some weird season scheduling that I can't seem to keep up with because I don't watch enough TV. I think Dennis Leary is great, and the clip that Al links to is hilarious. I watched a few episodes dealing with Leary's father, played by Charles Durning, being married to a very creepy woman, and I just couldn't get into it. Again, I don't recall an episode where something happened that didn't just make me cringe. I've had enough of that in my real life, I'm afraid. There are a lot of laughs, and there's no shortage of heroics either, from what I recall, but it wasn't enough to keep me wanting to tune in week after week; and then trying to figure out when it was going to be back on the air again.

Finally, Thief looked promising, and I think Andre Braugher is a great actor. But again, it just looked like it was going to be relentlessly depressing. I mean, it's hard for me to really develop a lot of sympathy for a professional criminal, though I'm sure I have in the past. I've caught parts of several episodes, and I may be mistaken, but I think even the cop that's pursuing him is corrupt, so again, there are no good guys.

Now, I don't expect the "good guys" to be squeaky clean, but all these FX shows seem to go hard at the anti-hero angle. Nobody's even trying to find redemption. Mostly, everybody's just trying to avoid getting caught. And, as a commentary on our times and our culture, maybe that's more "relevant" than anything else on TV.

In a sense, the humans fleeing the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica are trying not to get caught too. But a number of the characters in BSG are figures of conscience, and they try to do right because it's right, even when it costs them. They don't always. And sometimes, it's hard to tell what "right" really ought to be, but it seems as though at least they're asking the question. That's more rewarding to me as a viewer. Maybe it's not as realistic as the FX series, but it's what keeps me tuning in.

Hardware: The TX

A few impressions of the Palm TX...

It's substantial. I haven't weighed it, but it feels a little heavier than the Clié TG50. The body is plastic, but it doesn't feel cheap. It also won't dent, like the cover of the Clié did. It's a little wider and thicker than the Clié, I have to push it into the Case Logic PDA case that I used for the Clié, which would just slip right in. The stylus is substantial as well, thicker and heavier than the Clié's stylus.

The screen doesn't seem as bright to me as many of the reviews suggested. But that's probably because the TG50's screen is incredibly bright. It's certainly bright enough, but it won't dazzle you.

I don't like Gaffiti 2. It's just different enough to be annoying. I won't say it sucks, but I really want to.

I haven't had much time to get into really playing with it. I want to see if I can install some different fonts because the smallest font the system uses is pretty heavy/dense. I prefer the Clié's fonts for the contact and calendar applications. Smaller/lighter fonts are available in the web browser, and the Documents to Go apps, but they don't seem to be available system-wide.

Bluetooth and WiFi work as advertised. I've surfed the web a bit with it. Rotating the display to landscape orientation offers a reasonable view for a mobile device.

The 1GB SD card arrived yesterday. I hope to get around to installing some applications this evening, and using The Missing Sync to put some pictures and MP3s on the thing. So more after that.

So far, I love the larger display, battery life seems decent enough, wireless connectivity is nice. First impressions are that it's a good device.

BSG: "Tigh would... kick Riker's ass... without putting down the bottle."

A salient observation on the evolving nature of television science fiction.

(And parenthetically, that's a bout I'd love to see...)

Competing Messages: That "Intention" Infrastructure

Did a little vanity search this evening using Technorati, you know, the "authority" on what's going on in the "blogosphere." (Was it just my imagination, or did they used to have a page showing the members of their "advisory board?" Can't find it now. Must have been my imagination. Hallucinating again, I guess.)

Anyway, I got a kick out of these little "sponsored links." I guess there are still a few bugs in the "intention economy" infrastructure. On the other hand, I'm both encouraged and frustrated to learn that all I need to do to find myself is fork over $9.95!

But listen, shop around, and let me know who's giving you the best price on me. I can beat it! I'm cheap, but I'm easy. I guess those mavens and boffins at "the authority" really have my number!

Yeah, those ol' manifesto theses are ever so manifest... Oh.

Roll on, mighty ClueTrain™, roll on...

(Tags: comedy, irony, tragedy, road2hell)

Social Hygiene: Hucksters of the "I"

I fear that to view the attention economy as "more than just a subset of the financial economy" is to misread it, to project on it a yearning for an escape (if only a temporary one) from the consumer culture. There's no such escape online. When we communicate to promote ourselves, to gain attention, all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the "I."

Far from existing outside the financial economy, the online attention economy is its fulfillment, its perfection. It's the place where marketing ceases to be marketing and becomes life.

Which is, I think, a necessary consequence of the view that "markets are conversations."

Now, I don't know that I agree with everything Mr. Carr offers here, but I am great sympathy with it. I also think that attention and authority are inextricably linked, though perhaps in more subtle ways than I have discussed. Perhaps attention is the desired object, and assertions of authority are sometimes merely a means of trying to receive it. But I do think dopamine has a big part in this.

When I shuttered Time's Shadow in December 2003, it was mostly out of frustration, chiefly with the nature of the "conversation" dealing with controversial topics, like war with Iraq, and others. But also with the lack of "success" I enjoyed competing with blowhards. Watching attention-seeking behaviors being rewarded, no matter how transparent, kind of turned me off on attention in some ways.

Obviously, I still desire attention. Everyone does, and it's essential to social creatures like ourselves. But I desire a certain amount of freedom from anxiety over how much I'm getting compared to everyone else, and I also want to like myself, and have a little self-respect. I wanted to beat the blowhards, but I didn't want to play their game either. So I just quit. After a few weeks, I figured I still had some things to say, and I could come back and just say them, and not worry about the attention. So I did away with the SiteMeter hit counter, the comments feature, the "blogroll," and the gratuitous "shout-outs" to high attention earners, except when I wanted to direct a little negative attention their way. I later learned that, from the standpoint of a dopamine receptor, there's little difference between positive and negative attention. So mostly I quit trying to feed their addictions. Most of the time, perhaps not often enough, I let things go that I formerly would have rhetorically scorched the earth about. Still, perhaps too often, I do indulge my desire to poke people in the eye.

Anyway, I'm not here to sell anyone anything, least of all myself, except perhaps on the unexpected qualities of a certain TV show and the rewards for watching it. As for the attention I receive here, it's nice, and I appreciate what I get, but I've cultivated other avenues for receiving modest amounts of attention as well, and continue to do so, which facilitates balance here I think. If there's any regret I have, it might be that neither I, nor Mr. Carr, nor anyone else for that matter, has had much success in stemming this drive to turn life into a commercial enterprise. Perhaps I'm merely naive.

I know most of the people responsible for the commercialization of social intercourse are "nice guys," but there's an old cliché, probably as old as caveat emptor, that says "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." You'd think they'd get a clue about the time they started selling an intention economy.

But, then again, maybe not.

Cheese Sandwich: Saturday Matinée

Caitie wanted to watch Last Holiday this weekend. Normally, it's not the kind of movie I would be interested in seeing, but Caitie's movie picks have surprised me before. This one was no exception. It's not great cinéma, but it's a fun movie to watch with your daughter on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Well, it wasn't too lazy, I folded a ton of laundry that had been accumulating on top of the dryer and the dresser.

Karma seems to be feeling better. Managed to get a purr out of her this morning, though she still has the sniffles. Squeaker hasn't shown any symptoms yet, but I'm not optimistic.

I ran into some midshipman from the Naval Academy at Target yesterday while I was picking up Last Holiday. It confused me because I thought they would still be in class, but apparently there's a "spring intercessional" or something. Then they go back for finals, Dead Week, then June Week - which has been in May ever since I was a Mid. They were looking for iPod accessories.

BSG: Toys

Can a 12-Step program be far behind?

Found them at Target. $4.99 a piece.

Law of Conservation of Acquaintances

A brother and sister used to take taekwondo with me a few years ago. They stopped going when they earned their black belts. I used to see the sister quite often working at the local Publix supermarket. I stopped seeing her at some point, but then her brother started working as a store security guard at the local Target, and I'd see him fairly often.

Well, I ran into the sister again at the vet's when I took Squeaky in yesterday to be de-wormed. She's an assistant or attendant there. I mentioned that I saw her brother all the time at Target. She said I wouldn't see him there anymore, since he just quit.

I don't know, it just kind of tickled me. It's not like this is a really small town or anything, but every now and then it kind of seems like one.

BSG: Interview with James Callis

Interesting, and funny, interview with James Callis who plays Gaius Baltar in Battlestar Galactica. He does a pretty mean impression of Edward James Olmos as well. The occasion is the Saturn Awards, where Callis won for Best Supporting Actor.

He gets a little lost at one point near the middle of the interview, describing why the series has such resonance; but, to give him the benefit of the doubt, it's not a very formal interview. It's much in the vein of "citizen journalism," and there are other things going on off camera and a great deal of noise.

Mind of a Marketer

I don't understand Seth Godin.

Or rather, I think I understand him well enough, I just don't understand why more people don't challenge him.

In this post, he offers a screen capture of some Continental Airlines online customer service or relations software, noting the characterization of the user as "non-elite," calling it "bad news," and then posing the rhetorical question, "What about you, are you non-elite?"

Well, I guess it depends on which "you" Mr. Godin's pronoun refers to.

If it's the "you" Mr. Godin refers to in the text appended to picture below, then I suppose he thinks "you" are elite, or "you" ought to consider yourself so. Instead, I think the "you" being referred to by the Continental Airlines application is the same "no one" depicted by the picture, that Mr. Godin seems to view as the "average" person. The person who will allow a marketer to tell him or her a story to make them feel good about buying a junky plastic Christmas ornament, or that bottled water is "fresh" or "pure," though the plastic bottles it comes in litter our streets, consume our resources to produce and transport, all the while perfectly acceptable water is available nearly free right from the tap. Those are "good" examples of marketing, according to Mr. Godin, while the stories marketers told that helped people decide to buy SUVs are "bad" examples of marketing, because they're "lies."

What I'm saying is, the same contempt for the average person that is on display in the Continental Airlines application, is the same contempt for the average person that Mr. Godin displays in his picture of "no one" and in his little anecdote about "Blanche" and "Betty" and their "junky plastic Christmas ornaments." But that seems to escape most people, I think.

"Mass marketing works best when it assumes that everybody in the entire chain is just plain average. Or even a little bit less. Sorry to lower your expectations."

"The secret to success in life is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made." I don't know who said that, but whoever it was had the mind of a marketer.

"Conversations" or "stories." What no marketer ever says is that marketing has anything to do with the truth, except as something to skirt.

GBSM: Trivia

If I'm not mistaken, GBSN stood for the Good Buy Shopping Network in Holy Man.

Cat Post: Resting

This just in...

The Karma kitten managed to make her way out to the couch to lie on my stomach this evening, which I take as an encouraging sign. She hasn't moved since I got up about five hours ago though, and I haven't seen her eat or drink anything since I've been home, so she's still down pretty hard.

She still does this kind of pathetic panting/coughing/sneezing thing from time to time, but no runny nose, no discharge from the eyes, which I think is a good thing. But what do I know?

Groundhog Day will keep you updated with condition reports of the Karma Kitten as we receive them...

This has been a Groundhog Day Special Weblog Cat Post.

We now return to our regular programming...

GBSM: More Stuff...

Buy.com sent me a 10% off coupon after noticing I hadn't ordered anything from them for a while. Like, not since Tuesday, when I bought the Griffin AirClick and the 1GB Secure Digital card.

But 10% is 10%, and shipping is free, and there's no Florida 7% sales tax (well, 6% plus the local 1% surcharge, or something like that).

I've got to take a transcontinental trip this month, and I figure I'll bring the iPod along to listen to (isolate myself from my fellow human beings) while I'm sitting in a narrow tube hurtling through space. So I checked out an auxiliary power source for my 3G iPod, which has never been known for its excellent battery life. Griffin also makes the TuneJuice external battery device for iPods with a dock connector. All it does is allow you to connect a standard 9 volt battery to your iPod for a couple hours more playback, and I can carry along a couple of extra 9v batteries. Their retail price is $19.95, while Buy.com offered it at 10.95, so I figured I'd get one of those.

But 10% of eleven dollars isn't very impressive. So I thought the Western Digital Dual-Option Combo 320GB USB 2.0 / Firewire Hard Drive with Built-In USB 2.0 Hub sounded impressive at $159.95. I figured I'd be getting my money's worth in product name alone! The 10% off coupon had a max value limitation of $15.00, so I didn't quite get the full 10% off, but still, it looked like a pretty good deal. "You can never have too much magnetic media," my Grandma used to say. Actually, she didn't say that, I just like saying "magnetic media." You'll probably be able to buy this thing for $99.99 in a few weeks, at the rate HD prices are falling, but for now I think it's a decent price for a dual FW/USB2.0 interface, with a little USB hub action built-in.

BSG: Snowflake's Chance in May... in Florida...

Not much more accumulation or accretion in the "free the Battlestar Galactica mini-series!" meme/snowball.

Steve Vore joins up, offering some additional worthwhile thoughts.

I really didn't expect anything to happen; though I would have been delighted, and surprised, if it had.

Cheese Sandwich: TX is Here

The Palm TX arrived in Tuesday's mail. I didn't pick it up until after six, and then had to charge it for three hours, which was fine since it took me longer than that to pound out that interminable screed, Clash of Authority.

Add in unplanned an trip to the vet, work, taekwondo, and ordinary quantities of the other distractions and dramas that are my life, and I haven't had much time to play with it. Maybe tonight, but I'm behind on housework now, so, maybe not too.

I did get it to connect to the internet before I hit the rack Tuesday night, so that works, and, as a first impression anyway, it works pretty well.

Did some research on upper respiratory infections in cats, and wasn't pleased with what I found. In the five years I've had Karma, she's never been sick like this. It's a viral infection, but they gave me an antibiotic that I'm not sure how successful I'll be at having her take, to combat opportunistic bacterial infections that often accompany upper respiratory infections. It seems very likely she contracted the infection at the vet's, and I don't know what to think about that. I guess it's almost to be expected, since that's where sick cats have to go, but I'm not happy about it. She's also not eating and I'm supposed to try to encourage her to eat. Ever try to "encourage" a cat to do anything the cat didn't want to do?

And the chances are very good that Squeaky will get this thing too. It takes seven to ten days to run its course. I've got to leave town for about 10 days in the middle of the month, (Naturally! Murphy, you bastard!) and a neighbor is going to look in on the cats; but if Squeaky requires an antibiotic as well, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. You can't board a sick cat. Well, maybe you can, but I'm sure you wind up boarding them with other sick cats, in something like a cat hospital, and she just gets exposed to more crap.

Sigh.

Cat Post: Another Trip to the Vet

It seems like taking a pet to the vet is like taking your car to the dealer for service. You go in with one problem, and come out with another.

Now it appears Karma has an upper respiratory infection. I thought she was trying to expel a hair-ball, except it went on all night. So I called the vet and took her in. They made us wait in the car since I said I thought she might be coughing. Don't want to infect any other cats, you know.

Except Karma was never around any other cats, other than Squeaky, until she spent the night at the vet's, where I assume she probably contracted this upper respiratory infection. She's pretty miserable, and running a fever. I have some new medicine I get to struggle to get her to take now. And it looks like the abscess is going to require some sort of surgical procedure. On top of all that, she has worms!

And if Karma's got 'em, then Squeaky does too. So Squeaky goes in on Friday to get weighed and get a dose of worm medicine.

Apparently, all it takes is the bite of one infected flea and they get them. I keep them indoors, and I haven't seen a flea in here since I moved in. Go figure.

I've been to the vet more times in the last few months than I have in the last several years put together. It's a little frustrating, and not much fun for the animals either.

BSG: Free the Mini-series Update 5/3

A few more flakes - Ethan Johnson joins in, and the idea gets a link at the Unofficial Battlestar Galactica Blog.

I hope that those who help spread the idea are also sending feedback to the SciFi channel at their feedback page. Suggestions or comments for the SciFi channel e-mail link is just about smack in the middle of the page.

The Unofficial BSG Blog makes some legitimate points about iTMS downloaders being likely a much smaller segment of the "mainstream" audience than mainstream as a whole, and I think they're correct about that. They seem to suggest that a DVD available at BlockBuster might be a better avenue, and I think it would be; but I think it would also be harder to convince corporate accounting types to approve it, and, bless their little bean-counting hearts, I understand their point of view.

The iTMS version is of lesser quality than the DVD version, so iTMS downloaders have an incentive to go on and purchase Season 1, which includes the mini-series, on DVD. I don't know how much Apple might charge the SciFi channel or NBC for bandwidth associated with a free mini-series download, but I suspect it's probably less than the production and distribution costs of a promotional DVD version of the mini-series.

And, just to reiterate, as Ethan Johnson also did, the nature of the storytelling in Battlestar Galactica almost requires beginning at the beginning, and the mini-series provides the proper introduction for people who might otherwise be hopelessly lost if they just started viewing at the beginning of Season 3 in October. There's time now, during the hiatus, to attract new viewers and to allow them to get up to speed before the third season.

Finally, I think that the attention alone that would be generated by a major mainstream media outlet making a significant title "free" at the iTMS would be just as valuable in generating new viewers as being able to download the mini-series for free. Battlestar Galactica has the artistic authority of being a compelling, well written, well acted contemporary drama that would command a large mainstream audience. But the first requirement in exercising any authority is seizing attention.

So get with the "gestures" already. We've got a snowball to roll!

BSG: Free the Mini-series! (redux)

Make that three flakes. Still a few million shy of a snowball, but it's progress.

BSG: Clash of Authority

All of what follows presumes you've seen the Battlestar Galactica mini-series, and at least the first four episodes of the first season. In the interest of time, and my fingers, I won't be recapping every single event, but there will be spoilers if you haven't seen the show yet. (Later note: Well, actually, it seems I presume no such thing. I pretty much tell you everything you need to know. But obviously, it would be better if you've seen the mini-series and the regular season.)

I enjoyed reading Jonathon Delacour's reactions to the mini-series and the series itself, as they're different from mine, and they help me to think of things about the series that I hadn't thought about before, or not very much. In a reaction to Bastille Day, episode 3 of season 1, Jonathon related that he was "was amazed at how easily I fell into accepting the idea that elections (and civil liberties) might have to be suspended if the Cylon threat were to be adequately addressed."

The central premise of the series is that a race of androids, called Cylons, were created by humans to serve humanity. In a sort of Frankenstein writ large, the Cylons rebelled, and a long and bloody (at least on the human side) war was fought with them. No clear result obtained, and an armistice was reached between the opposing sides. The Cylons seemed to disappear, repairing to some other world and not heard from again in over 40 years. Until the day they returned and began the extermination of humanity.

The Cylons were able to achieve strategic and tactical surprise by evolving themselves into near-perfect replicas of human beings. Parenthetically, some elements of the series are inspired by Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick's replicants. In the mini-series commentary, the series' creators Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, relate that it was Edward James Olmos' role as Gaff in the 1982 film that made them envision CDR Adama as someone like Edward James Olmos.

These near-human Cylons were able to successfully infiltrate Colonial defenses, and were able to compromise the defense network to the extent that they were able to employ cybernetic attacks, computer viruses, to disable all of the Colonial's defense systems. The result being the wholesale slaughter of humankind by nuclear bombardment from space.

The battlestar Galactica survived by virtue of its being obsolete and on the verge of retirement, thus making it a low-priority target. The Secretary of Education, Laura Roslin, survived the initial attack because her vessel was the beneficiary of a ceremonial fighter escort, returning to her homeworld Caprica, from the retirement ceremony aboard Galactica, where she represented the Colonial government. As a member of the cabinet, she was 43rd in the line of succession, and Colonial communications networks survived long enough to establish that she was the ranking member of the Colonial government, and thus it fell to her to assume the responsibility as the head of whatever remained of the government. This isn't meant to recap the whole mini-series, but to make those unfamiliar with the show or its premise at least somewhat familiar with it, and, more importantly, the nature and scope of what the protagonists are confronted by.

Thus, Adama and Roslin are established as the only two, separate and sometimes opposed, legitimate authorities still capable of exercising any authority at all. To the best of their knowledge, roughly only 50,000 people survived the Cylon attack, most being in space during the attack, a few others able to escape offworld in the early minutes of the attack. Only those in ships capable of making "faster-than-light (FTL) jumps" were able to escape from a second wave of attacks, presumably meant to mop-up any remaining survivors. The first life-or-death decision that fell on Roslin as "the decider" was to abandon the human survivors in ships that weren't capable of making an FTL jump when the humans' location was discovered by the Cylons. It probably can't be said enough that this is not your typical television science fiction program.

Adama represents military authority. He has the means at his disposal to impose his will by means of force. There is virtually no human force that can oppose him. Roslin represents civil authority. She holds the power of her office, but it is only real to the extent that others are willing to recognize it.

The necessity of recognition is marvelously portrayed in a scene in the mini-series after Lee Adama, CDR Adama's son, is rescued by Roslin's ship after his Viper is disabled defending against a hit-and-run attack by a lone Cylon Raider. One of the media people (I'm tempted to regard him as a "marketer," but he's really "public relations" - almost the same thing, but not quite.) aboard Roslin's ship is questioning her authority as she begins making decisions regarding search and rescue efforts for people in surviving spacecraft.

When Adama comes aboard Roslin's ship, he's confronted by the PR flack who expresses his relief that someone in authority is finally present. Apollo asks if there's something wrong with the ship's pilot, and the PR flack says there's not, except he's not the one in charge. Cut to the next scene where Apollo walks into the cabin where Roslin's pilot is discussing accommodations with Roslin. This actually takes place before she is formally identified as the next in line of succession, and takes the oath of office. Apollo shakes the pilot's hand, thanking him for the rescue, suggesting that he sees the pilot as the person in charge in that scene. The pilot tells Apollo he should thank Secretary Roslin. They exchange pleasantries, and she explains to Apollo what she understands of the situation, relates her directives to that point, and then asks him to begin studying navigation charts for a possible safe haven to hide from the Cylons. She turns and walks away from him, never once giving the appearance of entertaining a thought that her directives were anything less than orders. While the PR guy looks at Apollo with wide eyes, Apollo merely says, "Lady's in charge."

Apollo is, in the early part of the series, something of an idealist. It's easy for him to recognize Laura Roslin's authority, especially after she's sworn in as the president of the Colonies. He becomes something of a de facto arbiter in disputes between civilian and military authority in the series. He believes in the rule of law.

Adama and Rosin have differing perspectives in terms of how they regard the Cylon attack. Adama is the old warrior whose every instinct is to "ride to the sound of the guns." He knows his duty is to protect humanity, but his training and disposition is to engage the enemy, not run from it. His friends and shipmates are dying in horrific numbers, while he's relatively helpless to come to their aid. He takes the measures necessary to get his ship, unarmed and mostly defenseless, ready to get into the fight. We admire Adama, and we want to see him succeed. His air wing was wiped out by the Cylons in the opening attack. He has some pilots still aboard, and they're able to reactivate some antiquated Vipers on display in the starboard flight pod which is a static display for the museum Galactica was to become, so he's not totally defenseless, and they manage to defeat a Cylon attack, though still sustaining significant losses.

Roslin is a leader, but she's not a warrior. She knows the tactical situation is "we're getting our asses kicked." From her perspective, her duty is to get the surviving members of the human race to a place of safety, somewhere to hide from the Cylons. In short, she knows it's time to run, and run like hell.

At one point, in the confusion of the early battle, Adama believes his son has been killed in an attack on Roslin's ship. This is a dramatic moment, less so, perhaps, because the viewer knows it's not true. But it contributes to the mounting losses Adama is experiencing. Fleeing the Cylons, Roslin and the remainder of the "ragtag fleet" manage to rendezvous with Galactica at an orbiting weapons station, Ragnar Anchorage. In this part of the mini-series we have the clash of the two views of authority.

Adama, relieved at learning of Apollo's survival, meets with Roslin aboard Galactica. His demeanor suggests he hasn't made up his mind regarding her authority, and he's inclined not to recognize it. Critical to the success of this series, in my opinion, was the casting of Mary McDonnell opposite Edward James Olmos. The character of Laura Roslin is every bit a match for CDR Bill Adama, and Mary McDonnell is every bit a match for Edward James Olmos. Some of the best scenes in the series are between these two actors. For her part, McDonnell/Roslin, isn't cowed by the sole remaining military authority. She tells him the war is over and that they've lost. Adama says, perhaps in the finest traditions of the naval service, it hasn't begun yet. Roslin offers, almost in exasperation, that if humanity is to survive, they have to start having babies. Adama asks if she wants to run. She answers emphatically in affirmative, "Yes. Exactly. We run. We leave this solar system and we never look back." Adama says, "You can run if you like. This ship will stay. And it will fight," and he takes his leave of President Roslin.

Upon his return to CIC ( the Combat Information Center), Adama learns that the Cylons have discovered their presence at Ragnar Anchorage, and a numerically superior Cylon force is waiting for them. For the moment, they are protected by the nature of the nebula surrounding Ragnar Anchorage. "This is a bad tactical situation," Adama observes. As he looks across CIC, he sees Roslin's young aide, Billy, chatting with Petty Officer Dualla. Roslin's words come back to him and he utters, "We're going to have to start having babies." The chain of command looks at him as though he's taken leave of his senses, and the XO asks, "Is that an order?" Adama says, "It may come to that," and he decides to run, to follow Roslin's lead. In effect, it is Roslin who saves humanity. She couldn't do it without Adama, but first she had to make Adama see things her way.

Near the conclusion of the mini-series, after Galactica successfully defends the fleeing remnants of humanity from the Cylons waiting to ambush them, Adama meets again with Roslin. Roslin begins to say, "I suppose I should thank you," reluctantly acknowledging her relative disadvantage in their relationship. Adama tells her to forget it, allowing that she was right and he was wrong, itself something refreshing to see on television.

At a memorial ceremony for the crew members killed in the attack, Adama offers a speech in which he tries to rally the troops, telling them that he knows the location of the legendary 13th colony, Earth. It was a closely guarded secret known only to the senior leaders of the Colonial fleet. Its existence carefully guarded so that humanity would have a place of refuge should the Cylon threat re-emerge. It has the desired effect.

Parenthetically, in the commentary track to the mini-series, the producers disclose that this was the first scene that was shot with Olmos in it, and he threw away the script. His entire speech was of his own creation. It's pretty effective, certainly more so than the way the script was described as presenting that scene.

But in that speech and in that scene was the leverage that Laura Roslin would need to balance the scales with CDR Adama in terms of her authority versus his. She knows there's no such place as Earth, and she confronts Adama about it after he acknowledges that she was right and he was wrong. He explains why he deliberately deceived his crew. "It's not enough just to live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth." Roslin knows that if the truth were known, "They'd never forgive you." She agrees to keep his secret, but she asks in return that he acknowledge the authority of a government, a civilian government, "if this civilization is to survive."

In the script, Adama was to agree, and they were to shake hands over their bargain. Olmos, again proving his value as a collaborator in this endeavor changed it to, "I'll think about it, Madame President," leaving the answer somewhat ambiguous, and implying that if push came to shove, he was still the guy with all the guns. It's a wonderful scene, and Olmos' version rings closer to what the truth of that situation would be.

This tension between military and civilian, in a period of extreme peril and stress is explored again and again in the series, to good effect.

To return (finally!) to Bastille Day, the series explores the issue of authority some more. Much of the appeal of apocalyptic science fiction is the notion of getting a "do-over." Wiping the slate clean, erasing all our sins and beginning all over again, wiser maybe, perhaps wise enough to avoid the mistakes and the failings that plagued humanity before the flood, or the asteroid, or the crack in the world, or the war. Battlestar Galactica has none of that, preferring a "no matter where you go, there you are" approach, though allowing for the chance to acknowledge and embrace wisdom when it is encountered and recognized.

The premise behind Bastille Day is a water crisis afflicting the fleet. Due to an act of sabotage, most likely performed by a Cylon, Galactica's water supply is nearly destroyed. The fleet is largely dependent on Galactica for fresh water. A planetary body is discovered with frozen water, but conditions are harsh and water collection is a manually intensive effort.

Among the survivors in the fleet are 1500 prisoners aboard the ship Astral Queen. The possibility of using prison labor to recover the water is discussed by the military and civilian authorities. President Roslin rejects just using the convicts as slave labor, and Lee Adama proposes offering the convicts the opportunity to earn their freedom by volunteering in the effort. CDR Adama is opposed to offering criminals their freedom under the present circumstances, where they're already dealing with Cylon predators, they lack a police force and don't need criminals loose in the fleet. Roslin tells Lee Adama to put his proposal into effect, and CDR Adama doesn't actively oppose the decision. In a confrontation in the passageway after the meeting CDR Adama tells Lee that sooner or later, a man has to choose a side to be on. Lee says he didn't know they were choosing "sides," and walks away. To no one in particular, CDR Adama offers, "That's why you haven't picked one yet."

This scene suggests that Adama still sees a clear difference between the goals and methods of civilian and military leadership. Adama would simply order convicts sentenced to hard labor to do hard labor recovering water from the ice moon. Roslin believes such an approach to be no different than treating the prisoners as slaves. Lee's recommendation is a reasonable compromise, but the implication is that CDR Adama sees it as his son siding with civilian authority against him.

Things get more complicated aboard the Astral Queen, where the prisoners turn out to be under the control of a charismatic terrorist cum political prisoner, Tom Zarek, played by Richard Hatch (who played Apollo in the original series). Modeled vaguely after Nelson Mandela, Zarek is a smart, egocentric, and ambitious adversary. The presence of CDR Adama's son, President Roslin's aide Billy, and two other Galactica crew members aboard the Astral Queen gives Zarek an opportunity to seize control of the ship, taking them all hostage. In the action, Lee Adama is beaten unconscious, and the others are seized and locked up in the cells.

Zarek dissembles a political rationalization for his actions by radio to the fleet, asserting that Roslin is not an elected leader and has no legitimate political authority. His demands include Roslin's resignation and immediate elections. Roslin refuses to even speak to Zarek, stating the usual approach that there will be no negotiations with terrorists. Aboard Galactica a strike team of marines is assembled and a plan is devised to board the Astral Queen, rescue the hostages, and kill Tom Zarek. Back on the Astral Queen, Lee Adama realizes that this isn't about new elections, it's about Tom Zarek getting a bloodbath to get his name back in the public eye.

Through a series of missteps by the prisoners, one of Galactica's crew members is shot after she bites the ear off a prisoner attempting to rape her. In the ensuing confrontation between Zarek, the prisoner, and Lee, Lee is able to gain the upper hand over Zarek, putting a gun to his head and asking him if he was prepared to die right then and there. Zarek says that he is, but Apollo doesn't kill him, instead presenting him with a deal. Zarek's men would surrender their arms. They would volunteer to perform the ice recovery mission, and those who did would receive their "freedom points" toward an eventual release. The Astral Queen would be turned over to the prisoners, its regular crew relocated to other ships. And there will be elections, in seven months, at the end of the previous president's normal term, because Laura Roslin is the president under the Articles of Colonization, which calls for elections every so many years. Apollo offers Zarek a choice, elections or "this bullet." Zarek takes the deal.

In the concluding scene, both CDR Adama and President Roslin are shocked and opposed to Lee's actions. Lee offers a brilliant little speech which includes, "I swore an oath to defend the articles, and the law says in seven months there's an election. Now if you're telling me we're throwing out the law, then I'm not a captain, you're not a commander, and you are not the president, and I don't owe either of you a damned explanation for anything."

It's a marvelous, tiny piece of rhetoric that exposes the moral and ethical context of the roles they find themselves in. An essential foundation that often goes unexamined, unconsidered and unappreciated until it is too late. Until the exigencies of a crisis cause a civilization to lose its moorings. Topical? You bet. Anybody talking about it? Not many that I've seen. But then, the topic probably doesn't appeal to a "mainstream" audience.

So here in the series, we've kind of joined rival military and civilian authority, and established them as being equal, inasmuch as each is subordinate to the authority of the law. Anybody paying attention yet?

In the final minutes of the conclusion is a small vignette that I truly love. Apollo feels as though he owes an explanation to President Roslin that he wasn't being disloyal to her. Before he departs her ship to return to Galactica, he visits her cabin, where Roslin is in bed with a book. She rises and receives him. Lee begins by trying to explain and Roslin interrupts him, "I understand. You're upholding the law. I admire it." Lee offers, "I believe in you, in what you're doing. And, for what it's worth, seven months from now, you'll have my vote."

Roslin then asks him to sit, and there's some exposition that I'll leave for those of you who haven't seen the series yet to discover, and that I'll probably discuss in Roslin's character study.

That's more than I planned to write. I guess I recapped more than I thought I'd have to. The next BSG post will look at this issue again in a little depth in episode 5 of season 1, You Can't Go Home Again.

BSG: Some Thoughts

Groundhog Day isn't going to become exclusively a Battlestar Galactica weblog, but it does occupy a great deal of my attention, and I think about it a lot. Much to the relief of marketers everywhere, I'd like to think.

I've been having a something of a discussion in e-mail with Jonathon Delacour regarding his reactions as he views the episodes from the first season. I've also had some discussions with Ethan Johnson and Steven Vore on particular issues. At Jonathon's suggestion, I'm going to kind of reply at greater length here, perhaps stimulating a wider discussion elsewhere in the blogosphere. (I still feel like putting that word in quotation marks. Mostly I mentally hold my nose when typing it.)

Of course, that kind of prompted a question of where to begin. Thinking about that gave me some ideas. One thing I'd like to do, and I hope I get around to it, is to describe how I see the development of the characters of CDR Adama and President Roslin over the course of the series. I see that as two separate essays dealing particularly with each character. Naturally, they interact a lot, and their interactions shape the course of their development as characters, but they're different enough and rich enough as individual characters to deserve separate essays. As that would involve discussing events up to the end of Season 2, I think I'll start working on it but refrain from posting it until I'm at least sure I'm not spoiling any surprises for Mr. Delacour.

Episode by episode critiques are an option, but these can get a little tedious in terms of the things I don't like, and the things I do like tend to deal with ideas or themes that cross episodes. So I think I'm going to try to focus on the interesting ideas I see, and perhaps just comment on how they're developed in a particular episode. And that's what I'm going to do in the next post, which, because this is a weblog, you've probably already read, even though I haven't written it yet.

BSG: Free the Mini-series!

I was pleased to read that Dr. James Vornov is also a fan of Battlestar Galactica, not sure I can claim credit for him though, and that he thinks that offering the mini-series as a free iTMS download is a good idea. He's also a fan of My Name is Earl, my other favorite show.

Okay, that's two "flakes," let's see if we can make a snowball in May.

GBSM (Going Broke Saving Money): Remote Control

DealMac indicated that the Griffin AirClick for the iPod was available for $10.00 from OnlyCoolToys.com. (Ignore the picture, it's actually the iPod remote, not the Mini remote.) But they add a $5.00 shipping and handling charge, making the total $15.00. Still about half price, I think.

So I decided to check Amazon and Buy.com to see what they had it going for, and Amazon listed it at $13.95, but indicated it was sold by Office Depot. So I checked Office Depot's web site, hoping to learn if one was in stock locally at that price, and they didn't list any in stock at all, even online.

Buy.com had it available for $11.99, and since it was being sold by Buy.com, there was no sales tax.

I also ordered a Kingston 1GB Secure Digital card for the Palm TX (which hasn't arrived yet), and with free shipping, the whole thing came to less than $50.00, not including the $13.00 rebate for the SD card. I do rebates, and I almost always get the check. I can't recall one recently where I haven't received the check. You have to watch carefully for them, because often they look like postcards, and they may get stuck in with the junk mail. So, all-in-all, not bad.

I often park my iPod in the dock and then park my ass on the couch and listen to music while Karma sleeps on my stomach and I solve the problems of the world. Invariably, a song will come on that I really don't want to listen to at that moment, and I'll have to get up and hit the next track button. So the Griffin AirClick will afford me the luxury of remaining on the couch, and I won't have to disturb the cat! I know, it's decadent, and not healthy, and who needs another remote to lose? But whatever.

In Flight

Sunrise wasn't shaping up to be much to write home about this morning:

But two cranes were on the wing. Missed the first one, but just happened to grab the second as it flew right over my head. It's not as cool as watching these large birds fl