Saturday, March 17, 2007

Buffy Buffy Buffy! (Season 8!)

With the first several episodes written by Joss himself!

It's a comic book....

From http://dir.yahoo.com/thespark/7987/buffy-revamped

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fans can be called many things -- vocal, prolific, perhaps even rabid -- but they're seldom described as "patient." In the four long years since the last episode of the show's seven-season run, they've had to satisfy their Buffy cravings by poring over old episodes, dressing up at conventions, playing along with a variety of games, and slaking their thirst with Buffy-related books and comics. Many have found diversions in Joss Whedon's other projects like "Angel" and "Firefly." But since the closing line of the Buffy TV finale -- "What are we going to do now?" -- many fans have been dying to know exactly that: What happens next for Buffy and the Scooby Gang? Some inspired followers have even taken matters into their own hands, creating their own fan films and dozens of scripts for a would-be eighth season. But now, finally, the wait is over for an official Season Eight, and the Buffyverse is no longer confined to the special effects budget of a minor TV network. The canonical Season Eight takes place on the pages of Dark Horse Comics, with Joss Whedon himself writing the first few issues/episodes.


Tuesday, March 13, 2007

No-No by a landslide!

No-No is in the lead in early returns... but it'll be another day or three before final results from people who mailed 'em today come in.

But I don't see anyway it turns out different from No-No, not with 29% of registered voters' ballots already counted.

And man, the tunnel sure got stomped. 30-70! Ouch! Guess we'll have a new mayor next time around. Bye Greg.... Peter Stienbrueck for mayor!

(In case you're completely baffled - which should apply to anyone reading this who does not live in Seattle - I'm talking about Seattle's special election on replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct with a new viaduct, a tunnel, or none of the above.)

Friday, March 09, 2007

"2.0"

It’s been a long time since there was a true generation gap, perhaps 50 years—you have to go back to the early years of rock and roll, when old people still talked about “jungle rhythms.” Everything associated with that music and its greasy, shaggy culture felt baffling and divisive, from the crude slang to the dirty thoughts it was rumored to trigger in little girls. That musical divide has all but disappeared. But in the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. It goes something like this:

Ok, I've only read the first page of this article.
But I already have to chuckle to myself. Y'know what we're going to call this generation? Something like "Youth 2.0"
Kinda fits, what with all our political movements being neo (-conservative, -populist, -lithic) these days.
Neo's just fancy talk for 2.0.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Bruce Sterling is so right - Web 2.1

(sigh) The grim realizations this brings me.... You know what? In ten years, I'm gonna be walking around with my googlemapping spimedetecting iPhone clone, dumping scraps of geolocative video into my socially-networking personality cult... I can smell that already.

[...]

Those *&&%$$ blogger revolutionaries! They're worse than the 90s dot-com boomers! They're more disruptive. They're violently disruptive. They are not just kiting stocks, they are really tearing into the fabric of reality.

What a thing to see.

Go read the whole thing.

Monday, March 05, 2007

One way to fix a video problem in Ubuntu

So, now that the Vista betas are over, I gave my home test PC a break from monthly (or sometimes weekly) reinstalls of Microsoft's latest, and installed Ubuntu. Ah, what a relief! It all just worked!

I even pointedly told some Microsofties how much less painful Ubuntu was to install and run.

All was good for weeks, until... all of a sudden, my machine would only display at 800x600 or 640x480! And the cursor was on the wrong place onscreen - it was offset by about 2" from the place the clicks would actually register. So, no good. And I get enough trolling google and RTFM'ing in my day job, I don't need more of that from my home PC.

So I put the Vista install DVD in the drive, and rebooted - but missed hitting the key to boot from DVD.

And what do you know, Ubuntu healed itself!

I guess it was scared of being replaced....