Star Trek Back on TV

There's a headline going around that a guy is pitching a continuation of the Star Trek TV series of series. My first reaction: extremely cautious optimism. There are a number of problems that face the Star Trek fan of today:

1. A show at this stage of development has low success rate of getting to the screen
2. Science fiction is more expensive than regular programming, further decreasing the chance it will be picked up
3. The guy pitching the show isn't even on wikipedia
4. Most shows are bad

There are probably other things I haven't thought of, but that's most of my concern. From the hints he's dropped, it sounds like the guy cares about Star Trek, and has a vision for the show, which is cool.

Would I like to see more Star Trek on Television? Absolutely.

If it was completely neutered like Voyager? Maybe not.

Roomba Fun

We got a Roomba. First: it is good at cleaning, and is less noisy than a vacuum cleaner. Those are really the things that matter in such a product. It gets underneath furniture, and cleans places that we normally don't clean. Places like the Living Room, Kitchen, Family Room, Bathroom, Office, and the Bedrooms.

Supposedly, the Roomba doesn't generate a "mental map" of its area, it just uses a procedural system to clean at "semi-random". I call shenanigans. The Roomba does make a map, and it uses it to frustrate your attempts to get it to do what you want.

When we first set it up, it was next to the entryway, so it wasn't surprising that it ended up hanging out there, and seeming sort of "stuck" in the entryway. We moved it to the other side of the house, and it quickly recognized that fact. It scouted around for a minute, then quickly returned to the entryway.

Another time, I pressed the button that told it to return to its Dock, where it recharges. It promptly went to the place in the house farthest from the Dock, and only grudgingly left that room, only occasionally briefly issuing out to trick me into thinking it was going back to the Dock. To be fair, it did make it eventually.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is firing up soon. If you like to talk about it, then you are a stupid, bad person, and you should not be allowed to talk to people, go in public places, or be on the internet.

The entire thing is a fad anyway; you weren't talking about particle physics last week, and you won't be talking about it next week.

Grah, Computers

So, I've gone through the most thorough computer surgery possible. Every file has been replaced, and the hardware has been thoroughly cleaned. Can you guess what didn't happen? I'll tell you. The computer sure didn't get fixed. It must be a hardware problem at this point.

I hate computers.

Compy Times

I'm trying to work on the stupid computer right now. This is the reason I like consoles: they just work. With a computer, there's always some new problem to make your life a living hell.

Big Dog

So, this is pretty unbelievably awesome. At times, it seems that it must be fake, but it seems to be real so far as I can tell.

Microsoft Word

You have to love Windows, its applications mesh so seamlessly. Example: I was editing a speech Ronald Reagan gave, and Microsoft Office was all too eager to schedule a meeting for the D-Day Invasion.




Word automatically formatted all of this, including meeting at "the shore of France". This is actually pretty impressive, since Reagan mentions the shore in a previous sentence, with lots of information between the date and the place. This reminds me of the popular saying: "computers would be geniuses if they weren't such idiots".

PS. The Gamespy games of the year are just stupid. Bioshock above Orange Box? I'm not a huge fan of Half-Life Two, but at least the Orange Box comes with multiplayer. Come to think of it, I think Orange Box would have been a better offering without Half-Life 2, since its flaws are so obvious. Portal, Ep. 2 and TF2 would be a solid product for 30$. (They actually planned on doing that, and calling it "the Black Box", but they realized that they like money more than their fans.)

I guess I shouldn't say that the entire list of games is bad, just the prominence of Bioshock as #2. I wonder how much it costs to be Gamespy's second best game of the year? I think they should have splurged and payed the extra 50$ to get #1.
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Now playing: Eric Clapton - White Room
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