MiguelitoNet

Anyone that knows me, knows that I love Sci-Fi. Unfortunately, there haven’t been very many good sci-fi TV shows lately.. or at least ones that are allowed to continue… Firefly was great.. and Fox, the network that was founded on giving shows a chance to build an audience (X-Files and Simpsons just to name 2) killed it before it even got going. Heck, there’s very little _new_ TV that I watch at all.. I’m content most of the time to play back old Simpsons episodes or toss in a DVD instead of watching any of the crap that dominates the air these days. I mean sheesh… “reality” tv? Bah! Shows like “The OC?” Ewww…

On the sci-fi front, there’s Stargate SG-1/Atlantis, but I didn’t have Showtime when it started so I’m way off on the story and can’t just jump in. Will probably starting buying the DVD sets soon.

Babylon 5 was probably the last *really* good sci-fi show in a long time. Great writing, good acting (past season 1.. but most show’s season 1 has the actors getting used to the characters) and decent effects.

There’ve been the Star Trek shows of course.. but they’re just entertaining, not really great anymore. Though Enterprise has just started to ramp up… now that it’s been cancelled, of course.

Enter the new Battlestar Galactica… damn fine show. Sure, there are purists out there that just refuse to even give the show a chance, thinking the 70’s original is the One True BG(TM). There were similar nay-sayers back when Trek’s The Next Generation was getting started too. Hell, I grew up on the 70’s BG, even bought the DVD set with the box shaped like a Cylon head… but that’s due more to nostalgia and the kitsch factor more then anything else. Of course, the original had 2 strikes against it… far less technology for effects, and low budgets. But I remember getting tired of the constant reuse of the same few effects sequences.. and I was but a little pup then.

Even though some just hate it, I’ve been totally sucked into the new series. The mini-series was great, and so far, the writing has been excellent as the first season has taken off. I looked at the imdb entry for Ron Moore who is the main person responsible for developing the new series.. and I can see why I like the writing. The list of episodes he wrote for ST:DS9, the ST movies.. and even ST:Voyager are practically a perfect match for my favorite episodes of those series. I still haven’t seen concrete info on the net that the show’s been renewed for a 2nd season.. but unless there are cost issues, they’d be stupid not to do it. The show is the top (or #2 just behind Stargate) in ratings for SciFi in both the US and UK. Even with all the people in the US that downloaded the eps off the net since they aired in the UK first.

I just hope the writing stays solid. The first series episode, 33, was just phenominal if you ask me. They’ve kept enough of the original universe intact, but made some changes, all of which, I think work pretty well. Of course the effects are about a thousand times better too.

Here’s to seeing how they play out the story if they’re given a few seasons vs the short run the original had back in the 70’s.

Oh, and for a non-sci-fi show.. I’ve actually gotten pretty hooked on House MD. Another Fox show. Sure, it’s another medical drama, but I think the stories are more interesting there where we get to follow them trying to figure out what’s wrong with a single (or small group of) patient(s) instead of the show being a soap opera about the characters with some medical bits woven in.

*Update:* Sweet.. and it’s official, SciFi has for a 2nd season. No mention of air dates yet.

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Wow, December already. I guess it’s time to really start thinking about gifts to get for family and friends.

Seems like just yesterday we were having family BBQs at my house.

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Jumped into IRC with the local linux user’s group I know (KPLUG if you care… #kernel-panic on freenode if you really care). One of the regulars was in there, and goes by the nick ThunderChicken. The nickname made me think of the classic Superchicken cartoon, and specifically it’s theme song.

I mentioned in the chatroom that I now had the song stuck in my head, with “thunder” in place of “super” of course… and of the 3 or so people active in the room at the time, none had any clue what I was talking about.

Now I remember catching episodes of that cartoon fairly often on Saturday mornings.. was on the same show that featured other greats like George of the Jungle. I had to show the webpages to the guys in the channel before they had any clue, and most of them had never seen it, nor heard of it before.

sigh

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I spent last week in San Francisco attending the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo at the Moscone center. While there, I stayed at a nice hotel, right across the street from Moscone. The hotel is marketed as super “hip” and “cool”… whatever, it was a hotel. Sure, it was decent, though I found it ironic that for a hotel marketed with ipod parties and such that there was a big lack of available electrical sockets, zero near the desk where the internet service’s ethernet hookup was. And $46 a night for parking?!? with no self-parking available (which seems to be the norm in downtown SF IME)… ouch.

On my last night there (Thursday night) I decided to get room service for dinner. I always like to get it at least once when I stay in a hotel, just for kicks. The food was great, made at the restaurant off the lobby from what I understand. The meal was delivered on a wooden tray with a placemat on it. For some reason I turned up the corner of the placemat while eating, and noticed some papers underneath. 2 of them were a printout (and carbon) of the kitchen’s copy of my order (I’m guessing).. the other was a slip of paper that the person who took my order had used to take notes as I ordered. When I flipped this slip of paper over, I was shocked to see that it was the torn off, top of a printout of a past guest’s bill/summary. It was dated from last December, and what really bothered me was that it had the last name of the guest, and the guest’s entire visa card number!! That’s right.. no numbers were blocked out, or just left blank, but it had the entire card’s number.

Talk about careless handling of people’s very important information. If this is how they save paper at this hotel, by reusing such printouts for scraps… they need to take a serious look at what they’re doing. I held onto that paper and made a point to give it to, and let the staff know what I’d found when checking out, and they sounded sincere.. but who knows, they might just continue doing it anyway assuming people won’t notice.

This is just an example of the kind of thing that makes me just laugh when people say they’re afraid to buy things online, for fear of their credit card number getting out there and being used for fraud. Just make sure the site is well known, and definitely that the checkout forms are encrypted (look for the little padlock and make sure it’s closed). People are still scared to use online shops… but they’ll let a waiter/waitress walk away with their card at a restaurant, or a hotel keep their number on file.

Whatever…

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So I’m heading to Vegas this weekend with some friends. Man I’m looking forward to it. 🙂

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I’ve been running mrtg on my host for awhile now to keep an eye on usage of the networks. I’ve got seperate data for my cable modem connection, my internal wired network, and my internal wireless network.

Sometimes it’s interesting to see the charts and relate the patterns to what I (or someone else) is doing. Here’s the last 24 hours of my internal net:

The plateaus (well, this detailed they’re spikey, but the fairly level outbound/blue bits) show when I’m streaming music to my audiotron. I had the one in my bedroom streaming all night while I was sleeping. The smaller one earlier in the day is when I had music playing while getting ready for work on Friday morning.

Here’s a weekly chart:

The spike you see on Sunday was during the fires. The data rate is so high because I was doing an emergency backup of my really important data (everyone’s email, my website stuff, databases) to my laptop just in case we had to evacuate this area and I didn’t have time to pull my server to take it with me.

If you look at the charts you’ll note that the cablemodem connection (top left, labeled www.miguelito.org) always has a constant input rate. That input rate is the massive amount of arp traffic that’s always visible on the cable modem connection. If you click on the chart and look at the yearly one, you’ll see that it really ramped up around Aug… I think the arp traffic has increased due to the newer windows worms out there that started this summer, and are causing hosts to scan for open relays, exploits, etc like crazy.

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I just love Apple sometimes, they do some great ads from time to time.

This, on their current homepage, is just classic:

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