Standing On Boxes

Part 6 of ‘The Apprentice’ has escaped into the wild…

I’m not really thrilled with it… the whole training thing falls flat… for me anyway…

Almost to the point where I’ll stop for the summer… Part 8.

Part 9 is so vague… I’m not sure what to do with it… but I can’t revise/post part 10 without it… and I haven’t even started parts 11-? (Having the epilogue half written doesn’t count. I wrote that a long time ago)

Later…

And Part 7 just needs a once-over – maybe tonight. Part 8… might need a little bit of Amanda-exposition at the end.

I’m 2 books closer to having the complete set of Ian Fleming – Bond books (9 down, 5 to go)

Found a copy of “Battle Angel Alita ( Gunnm )” #1 – I don’t normally read manga, preferring anime… but this one… I think I’ll follow if I can find them (Preferably used… much cheaper)

Found one of the original “Saint” books by Leslie Charteris (With Roger Moore on the cover – even though the story is from the 1930′s)

Okay… The Apprentice Parts 4 & 5 are up elsewhere. One more place to post them this week and then on to the next couple of parts (thru part and then some other fics for the rest of the summer…

Hmmm….

Okay… Part 4 of ‘The Apprentice’ is now Parts 4 and 5. And the parts afterward have all been shuffled up one.

Later…
Part 4 posted to TtH… and eventually ff.net.

Managed to shove part 4 of ‘Apprentice’ far enough along that it qualifies as a first draft… Might even finish before the end of the weekend… hmmm… might even get all the way thru part 7 before next Friday… not sure though… they are mostly done… though a bit short compared to several other parts. (Part 4 doubled during the journey from rough to first draft – not necessarily a good thing… probably should split it in half… )

Oops… looks like it might not have been updated here… (Fixed… only took me 10 hours to notice)

Rachel Ray has been doing her FoodTV show “30 Minute Meals” for at least 3 years. There are at least two things to use when determining what year…

These things vary by year…

• Her clothes (she used to mostly wear earth tones)
• Her communication style (hand waving, smiling, voice, etc.) (She’s gotten more flamboyant)
• Her appearance (she’s gotten thinner over the years)

Yes, I could have this all wrong… but considering there are very few “Food TV Babes” worth the label … does it really matter?

Bratwurst

“Brats” – Unnamed national brand (I think) – there is a huge difference between the uncooked and “pre cooked” ones… I like the uncooked ones… (Yes, I cook them first before eating them!) but they have gotten expensive… the pre-cooked ones for this brand name… (I bought a package of “Stadium Style Brats”) … it’s like a huge sausage. One of those fatty, greasy, tiny things you get in restaurants. We all know those… edible but if feels like eating a tube of meat flavored fat.

On the other hand… there’s a pre-cooked bratwurst that i’ve been buying for years. Two kinds – a dark bratwurst and a white variety that has a high veal content. They are very “smooth” in texture. But very good with mustard and sauerkraut. Yum. is it the “real thing” No idea. Probably not in Wisconsin.

Gum

I’ve started keeping gum in my car… I chew a piece on the way home… The “curiously strong” kind. Had the strangest experience today… had a piece dissolve in my mouth. Yuck! I’ve never had that happen with ANY kind of gum before.

This week’s Penn & Teller – Hair….

Hair removal – They sent a couple people (they found thru some blog) off to a hair removal place and showed them having their hair removed with hot wax. Two guys and a woman. All together now…ouch! Did we really need to see naked people having hair removed? Oh wait… this was on Showtime…

Hair replacement…

Infomercial hair product specialist company…

Comb-overs…

It was a triple-threat day budget-wise – groceries, haircut, gas….

Gas is a weekly… thought I would fill up before it goes up even more (gotta love the gas industry – oil futures are up (because of winter heating oil), the Saudis claim to be pumping as much as the refiners can take, the refineries are making as much gas as they can, and it can’t get to the pump any faster than it is…. and the price of gas STILL goes up. Something is wrong with that picture…

What’s this Coke “Zero” stuff? Tastes sort of like diet Coke… not my favorite Coke flavor but was 25 cents/liter cheaper…

New Flavor

The Wal-Mart Superstore I go to… carries a brand of stuffed olives (Santa Barbara Olive Company) . Until now – they only carried the Jalepeno and Garlic stuffed olives. They’ve suddenly added 3 more – blue cheese, chipolte, and combination (garlic and jalepeno) (According to their website they also have habanero stuffed olives… and a ton of other things… I need to get a catalog…)

I prefer my garlic cooked (yum!)… so I haven’t tried that stuffed olive. Thought I would try the chipolte… very nice… if you like that smokey spiciness… (I do)…

And now I’m wondering if Sunnydale had an equivalent family business…

Not sure why but I spent some time this weekend working on a fic I hadn’t planned on The Apprentice. I didn’t get a part done (still a scene or two missing from the part I did work on) but a lot of revising went on.

figured out how to modify Radio.root so Safari (in Mac OS X 10.3.9) is the default web browser.It even opens up safari if it isn’t running already. (Too bad it doesn’t do WYSIWYG editing.

What did I do?

1. Make a backup copy of Radio.root (I didn’t but I should have – oops)
2. Added a system.verbs.apps.Safari to Radio.root (Basically a subset/copy of the msExplorer one with all MSIE and msExplorer.id references changed to Safari.id or ‘sfri’ – All I have is appInfo, id, bringToFront, openUrl, openDocument, and quit.
3. change system.verbs.apps.Safari.openURL so it matches the return in system.verbs.builtins.webBrowser.openUrl for MacOS in the os test.
4. In system.verbs.builtins.webBrowser.supportedBrowser I added ‘sfri’ as a supported browser AND changed:

   if system.environment.isCarbon

   To:

   if defined (system.environment.isCarbon) and system.environment.isCarbon

   (This is a copy of a change made by Userland in webBrowser.getDefaultBrowser to support Mozilla/Firefox.)

5. In webBrowser.getDefaultBrowser I changed the default browser to Safari.id and ‘sfri’
   (Used to be msExplorer.id and ‘MSIE’

6. I added an ‘sfri’ and Safari to system.verbs.builtins.webBrowser.launch under the case sys.os – MacOS – just copies of the IE ones -renamed.

I think that’s it… not sure it’s enough info for anyone to do it…

Something Blue & Doomed

Something Blue

Not my all-time favorite episode but it has its moments:

‘Poodle hair’ Buffy (I prefer SMG’s looks during seasons 4 & 5 (Maybe because she wasn’t dressed like ‘jail-bait Buffy’ anymore?) but who picked that hair style in that episode?)

We see a window of what could be a dress shop or bridal shop (no name – just the single window with a wedding gown in it and some “wedding things”( tuxedos, etc.) listed on one side.) It was a store or two away from the Magic Box.

A wild guess – the entrance to it was on the side “street” the Magic Box was on – I wonder if it was the same store Cordelia worked at during Season 3?

Poor Riley – he does his driving as sex subtext speech and Buffy doesn’t quite get it at first.

Doomed

We can see the name of the pizza place Xander worked for on his shirt – “Mr Smith’s Pizza Delivery”

Giles seems to have a decent map of Sunnydale for his ‘commando tracking’ – I wonder where I can get a copy.

Why don’t they put names on all of the mausoleums in Sunnydale? That one with the eye in a pyramid (The Illuminati’s ‘All Seeing Eye’?) – none of the other tombs we see in the cemetery in that episode have readable names.

Is it “Historical Museum of Sunnydale” or “Sunnydale Historical Museum” ? It could be read either way. Or maybe “Historical Museum – Sunnydale”. And is it the same one from “Inca Mummy Girl”?

Location stuff…

At this point… I must have 30 or more places on my working list that I’m not ready to put on the posted list. Finding places in Sunnydale is easy – putting them in my list… is taking time. I’ll do another big chunk this weekend – hopefully clearing things off of my working copy. Watching episodes to double-check things takes time… maybe ‘end-of-summer’ was too optimistic for getting this done…

The Buffy Trivia website has quite a bit of interesting or unexpected information about the show. It seems to be fan-driven so the trivia that is there is there because someone suggested it to the site owner.

This does mean that it isn’t an exhaustive list of all things Buffy. For the thing that currently interests me… my location/directory list – what it has is correct but not even close to complete. I only saw one thing I hadn’t thought about myself yet – the store selling bridal gowns in “Something Blue” – but I would have gotten it eventually as I work my way thru the episodes.

It’s list of educational establishments is very incomplete. It includes different places at UC Sunnydale but is missing several local high schools.

And its list of hotels is missing a couple. Including the one Ethan stayed at which we actually have a name for.

And I have doubts about a number of things it has listed – Is the Espresso Pump really on State Street? If the Sun Cinema is, then it is. There is a cinema/theater on State street but I haven’t seen any proof that it and the Sun Cinema are the same place.

And is Sunnydale Park really the name of the park with the lake that is next to the cemetery where Tara is buried?

I think I’ll stick with my plan. Confirming my information via canon (actually watching the shows) even if it is in a transcript or from a trusted source. It’s just more satisfying that way. (And I don’t want anyone to claim I “stole” the info from someone else.)

I’ve played with Frontier over the years… and not done much with it. Radio, my blog tool is built on top of it and the company that makes that also makes a CMS Tool (Content Management System) for managing/creating complex websites called Manila that also sits on top of Frontier.

It’s one of those cool but complex things…

The Frontier kernel was open sourced last Fall and can be found on Sourceforge. It has some things that Radio doesn’t – like the ability to add/create new object databases (Frontier stores everything in its database files) -A lot of the references to the manila stuff hasn’t been stripped out of the current open source version. So some things on the menus work but a lot don’t.

Not for the faint of heart… but I would really like to use it to build a tool to manage my stories in a much better fashion than Radio – which is meant for your basic blog and is a bit slow if you try to use it for things like the outliner (On my iBook anyway)

For whatever it’s worth… and assuming it even works… I’ve added “feedback” comment links to the main pages for the following stories:

• Red Raider – Part I – The Pilgrimage
• The Other Girl
• The Apprentice
• Summoned
• The Bond Girls
• The Two
• Out

These seven (yes, seven) stories are the ones I hope to write a part or more for this summer. In a perfect world I would finish them all this summer. But right now… I’m hoping to finish the 2 short ones before September and one of the three long ones by Christmas.
(Finish, unfortunately, is a relative term. What that means depends on the story. We’ll see what happens.)

Note:This is a manual process… I don’t want comment links on every single page on my blog – which is what the automatic comment link macro in Radio would do.