Go to YouTube and enter ‘Planet of the Apes’ in the search box. Browse.
Enter ‘Terminator’ in the search box. Browse.
Type in ‘Land of the Lost’. Larf.
Go to retrojunk.com and waste time.
Go to Google and type in something like ‘24.5 kilometres in miles’ or ‘1 hogshead in litres’.
Seven words you won’t be able to say on TV anymore.
I will always laugh about Cardinal Glick.
(more…)
I just discovered that Buffalo’s PBS station, WNED, broadcast 17, cable 61 (Rogers, downtown) is rerunning The Vicar of Dibley and the exquisite mid-1980s Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett in the title role.
Dawn French is almost flawless in The V of D, (en passant, closing credits include “Dawn French supplied by: Saunders and French Productions”) and Jeremy Brett is the best Sherlock Holmes ever. Ever.
Over the last two nights, on Space (Rogers Cable 50, downtown) they showed a two-parter that took place entirely in the ‘Mirror, Mirror’ universe from the classic series.
There was the usual duplication of people in nearly identical capacities or roles (but working for the Empire not the Federation), and the link to our universe was the Defiant, which had been lured through a transverse spatio-temporal discontinuity (I made that term up) by the Tholians. They captured the Defiant, killed the crew and began to dismantle the ship which was technologically advanced.
Mirror Archer (no evil Cartman beard) and his crew captured the ship from the Tholians (no beards), and so on.
Scott Bakula’s acting was horrendous, but the show was good. Grim and sad, even the ending, but much more satisfying than the other episodes that I saw before I just stopped watching it.
Okay, score one (and only one) for Braga and Berman. Lucky dummies.
…while I was housesitting for Peter and Leslie. Go on. Guess! (more…)
I was getting so sick of switching over to CNN during commercial breaks and hearing them dissecting every little aspect of every little primary and every little caucus and every little mouth-fart and every little tic and twitch and hiccup of the candidates, their staffs, the exit-polled, and the results, that I was hoping for different news, real news - an earthquake or a tsunami, maybe.
Well, Gott sei dank, I got a metaphorical one.
You’d think, I mean don’t you think you’d think, that if you were a Democratic politician in a high position, that you won partly by claiming the moral high ground during your earlier career and your campaign, that you’d know better than to schwanz a hooker on the public’s clock. Multiple times. I mean, vey iz mir.
Next thing it’ll be CBC and the Olympics. And the Olympics. And the Olympics. And no weeknight Coronation Street.
What a world.
Late the other night/early the other morning on TVO, I saw this National Geographic produced show about Greece’s Rion-Antirion bridge, the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world. And it crosses a fault line beneath the sea.
It links the two towns across the Gulf of Corinth, replacing an old ferry.
The construction techniques to earthquake-proof the bridge (as far as that’s ever possible) are fascinating and the progress of the construction is amazing to watch.
One of the coolest aspects of the whole plan is that the foundations of the piers on the bottom of the Gulf are not secured in bedrock (or even to bedrock) at all. They sit on many meters of sediment stabilized with huge steel posts driven deep into the muck, and then topped with several meters of gravel.
It’s a beautiful structure, too and looks very good and fitting in this, the Future.
The divine punishment problem was with my client machine and it’s more or less fine now.
After I’d finished that religious observance, I began to have problems with my server, whereon reside the WAMP family of divine servants, Apache web-server, MySQL DBMS and the delightful sprite, PHP.
Well, WAMP started to fail intermittently. It appeared to be associated with Google Desktop Search’s indexing operations so I disabled that. It seemed to be okay for a while. Then it happened again.
There appeared to be a connection with Windows’ own screensaver kicking in. When that happened, the MySQL server would fail, but not consistently. I disabled the screensaver and the frequency of the problem lessened. (I was testing all this from the ritually restored client machine, in case there was a networking component to the failure.)
I thought, ‘Dear Gods, screw this’ and I reinstalled WAMP, being careful to back up my databases and websites. (For simple laziness I have taken to installing a separate instance of Mediawiki for each project; it’s easier to plan and navigate the project, the harddisk footprint is small and they all use the same MySQL, so the processor overhead isn’t all that bad.)
The reinstall didn’t help and when I restored my databases, it saw the tables but said they didn’t exist if I tried to SQL them from the management interface. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, thinks I. (It’s an ancient expression of dismay and concern among my people.)
I analyzed the Windows system logs, the MySQL error logs, the ini files. I examined the database files as if they were simple text files to see if the data was there; I was terrified I’d lost it all! Everything was where it should be, yet it wasn’t working.
Long story short, about 3:30 this morning I reinstalled WAMP again and everything worked as if there’d been no problem in the first place. I have no idea what I did or didn’t do rightly or wrongly; it just started to work.
My people’s ancient gods at work again.
I got this from Anneli, and as she said, ‘Fantasy Overload‘!
Wait for the ending!
Every year during the winter solstice holiday season, I celebrate my people’s ancient Sacred and Revelatory Restoration of the Crashed Operating System.
This year, as an atheist, I was planning to forgo it as outmoded and irrelevant to this, our modern world of the future.
My people’s gods are angry and petulant, capricious and heedless. I was forced to repeat the primal, days-long ritual.
Finally, on Friday I succeeded to my gods’ satisfaction.
Again I am blessed. For a year.