Standing On Boxes

Microsoft finally threw in the towel on the Zune media player.

I don’t think I ever saw one in the wild.

That’s when, after getting deep into the fan fiction of a new fandom, one where the fic churn rate is fairly high or the fandom has been around for years, you’ve finally read enough fics that they all start to blur together and the plots start to resemble each other.

I don’t expect to hit that point with BtVS fan fiction but that’s primarily because I mostly read crossovers and what little fic I write is in that fandom. But I rarely read non-crossover Buffy fics anymore.

I went through it with Harry Potter fics, Stargate fics, Highlander fics, and a multitude of other fic heavy fandoms.

I’m almost at that point with Glee fan fiction. There are approx. 10 ongoing stories I’m still tracking but over the last 4 months, more or less, I’ve gotten my fill of stories set in Lima, Ohio. I’ve had my fill of the sameness of most of the stories. That isn’t to say that there aren’t a number of good fic writers in the fandom but the signal-to-noise ratio isn’t getting better.

Less than 24 hours until Apple’s Fall 2011 iPhone event over at One Infinite Loop and the rumours get crazier by the second.

What’s Apple up to! Inquiring techno-nerds (and pundits in desperate search of hits) want to know!

Now, my iPhone 3Gs is getting a bit long in the tooth tech-wise, and my cell phone contract ran out several months ago, so there is definitely a new iPhone in my future this Fall/Spring. The only question is what will it look like and how much will it cost (Do I go for another 2 year contract? Or spend the extra cash on a carrier unlocked model?)

And what will Apple call it? iPhone 5? 4S? Wilbur?

We’ll see how things go tomorrow ( 1PM Eastern. Live blogged at your favorite tech blog, of course.)

After last week’s semi amazing episode ( A baby who wanted to rule the world? Can’t go wrong there.) with the brief, non-story appearance of Amy Pond, I’m not looking forward to the final episode of this series when it comes on in a few minutes. Based on the ending scene for the last episode, I think we’re going to find out why River Song’s permanent place of residence is a high tech future prison.

But at least we should have the whole gang back together again.

But, I hear you say, what was the Doctor doing in the several hundred year gap between the previous episode and when he dropped off Amy and Rory? The gap they ( Amy, Rory, and River ) noticed at the beginning of Series 6 Part 2. No idea. But I suspect something tricky.

Hopefully he has a trick up his sleeve and we don’t have to wait on Series 7 with a Series ending cliffhanger.

Semi-spoilers follow…

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Another Series 6 – Pt 2 episode of Doctor Who. Another River Song-less episode (though she gets a mention at the very end.)

Not a fan of the ending.  I won’t spoil it but he’s done that before.

And, looking at the promo for next week’s episode – Looks like he’ll be flying solo. Sort of. He drops in on someone from the Series 5 episode “The Lodger”. And still no River Song? Where is she?

Thanks to the wonder of iTunes – I now possess the first season of Scooby Doo.

Some random comments from watching the first few episodes:
( Spoiler warnings? For a 42 year old cartoon that’s been in constant rotation since the beginning? Really? )

It’s Scooby Do. Realism, there is not! And let’s not forget they are teenagers, even if they don’t really look like it.

Episode 1 – “What a Night for a Knight”

Why is there a laugh track?

Velma in research mode!

Daphne: “Shaggy’s the swinging’est gymnast in school!” (The Scoobies engaging in a little B & E at the museum in town.)

They sure are making a mess of the Museum. Good thing it’s just a cartoon.

Continuity error: Velma doesn’t have her glasses on when she trips the Black Knight and is about to give him some cold medicine (she thinks he’s Shaggy). So, we switch from Velma holding the spoon, no glasses, to Velma still holding the spoon, with glasses, stuffing the spoon into Shaggy’s face.

Classic Velma: “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Shaggy: “Leave it to Daphne to pick the wrong door!” “Zoinks!” “Zoiks!”

A bit of Scooby-Shaggy hijinks trying to escape the rampaging villain-in-disguise.

Shaggy does his “ventriloquist bit”

It’s X in disguise! But no signature line yet (“You meddling kids!”)

Episode 2 – “A Clue for Scooby Doo”

Shaggy’s first toy was a garbage compactor?

Yumm! Scooby Snacks!

A clue! Glowing seaweed.

Shaggy: “Like, speak English!” (said to Velma)

The gang in “scuba” outfits — they look like something from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Must have some kind of intercom system so they can talk to each other. And hours and hours of air capacity. So, Daphne’s is form fitting but Velma looks like one of the guys in hers.

Shaggy must be contractually obligated to say “Zoiks” at least once (or even twice) per episode.

Ooh… an underwater chase! In the middle of a ship graveyard. And a secret passage to an underground cavern.

Continuity oops – Shaggy has blond hair very briefly when he sits down on that stump.

“Teenage Sleuths” (according to the local paper) – hanging out at the local Malt Shop to discuss the case.

Episode 3 – “Hassle in the Castle”

The gang goes boating. In the fog. Shaggy makes a Super Shaggy Sandwich. Too bad Scooby grabs it before he can take a bite.

Oop, run aground on Haunted Isle. Freddy should turn in his pilots license. And there’s even a castle (Vasquez Castle (Built in 1612 by a pirate?)).

Fred: “It looks like we’ve found ourselves a mystery!”

Poor Daphne. Fell thru a trap door in the castle.

Strike a pose! Daphne, stylish as always even lost in the castle.

The clues? A little too obvious aren’t they? A large key that refers to a boo. The book refers to a location in the castle.

(This is a 3 Scooby snacker!)

Watch Scooby pull a rabbit out of a hat!  And a magic carpet?

Fred, the MacGyver of Villain traps. (The trap is more Rube Goldberg than MacGyver.)

Velma: “What a Ham!” (Re: Scooby and his disguises/clowning around.)

Villain is a magician – Bluestone the Great?

Which is probably a good thing.

Thanks to the wonder of the Internet I’ve been browsing the fashions on display in NY for the fall fashion week ( confusingly, to a fashion heathen like myself, some of the blogs are calling it Spring 2012. Or maybe they’re referring to assorted designers spring collections being on display? Heck if I know. Or care. So don’t tell me. I prefer ignorance in this case. Thanks. )

Some of the models are scary looking. With their wet plastic looking hair ( That’s what some blogger called the look ), slicked back to look like boys at a 60′s prep school. About a quarter of the runway models I’ve seen pictures of, for multiple designers, had that mannish androgynous look. I found it distracting to say the least. And not in a good way.

Maybe that was the point? If you’re recoiling in horror at what they’ve done to those poor models you can’t see how ugly some of the clothes are? I’m sure I’m wrong about that.

There was one designer who had their models all wearing garish neon lipstick. And another had every model wearing some ugly hat.

And why do the bloggers seem to be focusing so much on which celebrity showed up for which showing? And what they were wearing? The ‘Cult of Celebrity’ baffles me almost as much as fashion. Why should I care what some actor from Glee was doing at Fashion Week?

One magazine (New York Fashion?) has an online opinion poll for a few designers. Rate every dress in their show ( Zac Posen? Is that some famous designer? Not bad. Diane Von Furstenberg? An example of a clothing material style i don’t understand. And never have. ) No fashionista credentials required to play. That was fun.

I’m tempted to go back and rate the individual designers but, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t know anything about fashion so it’d be pointless IMHO. I think I liked 10% of what I’ve seen, if that much, so far. Fashion designers aren’t exactly going to come banging on my door for my opinion. I’m not their target market, even remotely, and I’m not going to be buying anyone anything by these designers.

Is that Sid the Dummy from BtVS in the promo for the next Doctor Who episode?

I smell crossover potential!

“Unauthorized resident detected!”

Another episode of Doctor Who (Series 6 Pt 2) and Amy Pond is on the run. Again. At least they haven’t killed Rory yet – but it’s early in the episode.

Freaky hedges! Multiple time streams. Hand Robots. Run, Amy Pond, Run!

Spoilers below…

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It’s been raining out since last night, at least 18 hours. It isn’t quite at the level, remotely even, to the quantity that hit the Northeast with Hurricane Irene last weekend but the Weather Service has put out flash flood warnings for this area.

But certainly too much wetness to inspire me to get outside and run the few errands I had planned for the last day of this 3 day weekend. Who wants to go shopping in the pouring rain? Even if it’ll help the economy.

(Would it be cynical to say that I suspect if a Republican gets elected in 2012 that the name of the holiday (Labor Day) will change to something to celebrate our corporate overlords? And why don’t those union hating types (libertarians/conservatives) work on Labor Day, the holiday brought to us by the dreaded socialist leaning unions?)

as a real Doctor Who (11th Doctor) episode if River Song doesn’t appear?

I think not!

The new episode, about the boy afraid of monsters, wasn’t bad but it was missing something without everyone’s favorite time traveling archeologist.

So, dismantling an iMac yesterday? Not enough with the nostalgia.

I’ve got an old Mac PowerBook G3 (aka Wallstreet I) It’s an odd screen configuration (12″) supposedly for the Education market.

Grabbed it and another PowerBook off the shelf.

233MHz G3 / 96MB RAM / 2GB Hard drive – sort of like the original iMac except it pre-dates the whole Apple shift to USB. So, basically it’s an evolutionary dead end. But somewhere I have a ZIP drive that fits in its expansion bay. And it does have ethernet. And a floppy drive. Used to run VirtualPC on it (though I can’t seem to find the Win95 image I used to have. Must be on a zip disk somewhere?) The Wiki claims it can run OS X but I’ve never tried that with it. I don’t think it has enough RAM and disk space)

The 12″ PowerBook G4 (Aluminum) was the smallest (screen size) Mac laptop until the new 11″ MacBook Air came out this year. It was my primary personal laptop until my current MacBook (I had a (real) IBM ThinkPad for work at the time.)

1.5GHz G4 / 1.25GB RAM / 75GB hard drive / USB / Firewire 400 OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard – last version of OS X that’ll run on it.) Not a bad machine – if I was only doing e-mail. A bit slow for web browsing the Javascript / image websites out there.

(I also have a PowerBook 100 – haven’t turned it on in a while & it doesn’t want to start ATM. Probably  a dead PRAM battery. 68000 CPU. external floppy.)

For some reason, unknown even to myself, I decided to spend the day poking around in an old iMac (1st gen – 233MHz G3 PPC, 168MB RAM, 6GB HD, 1024×768 CRT) in my possession.

It actually still worked. At least long enough to make a copy of the contents of the drive (Mac OS 9.2.2). None of which is really usable on a modern Intel based Mac. (I do have an old PowerBook that should be able to run the stuff… hmm…)

And then, probably thanks to way too much iced coffee while watching 2 episodes of Doctor Who, I took it apart, down to its component parts. Not sure what I’m going to do with the pieces. The 6GB EIDE hard drive? I don’t have anything it’ll work with. Or the CD-ROM drive. The RAM? Nothing the sims will go in. I think I’ll keep the case and throw out the guts. Maybe keep the CRT? Nah… I bet I can find an LCF that’ll fit inside the case.

We’ll see. Might make a nice project for that week between Christmas and New Years.

In which we find out a bit more about River Song‘s past (her childhood this time), following up on the huge revelation at the end of Series 6, Part 1 (You’ll have to go watch that episode ( A Good Man Goes to War ) to find out what that is. I’m not going to spoil it if you don’t know already.

Okay… this episode ( Let’s Kill Hitler ) puts River Song in the top 3 of my favorite companions (I think she counts as a companion, don’t you? Even though she isn’t with him every episode.), dropping Martha Jones and Rose Tyler down one (tied for 4th). Not sure where to place Amy Pond. I like her but not as much as other recent companions. Oh? The other two in the top 3? Sarah Jane Smith (Of course) and Romanadvoratrelundar (Romana II specifically)

(Oh wow – speaking of companions – Freema Agyeman (aka Martha Jones) is on Law & Order UK next week!  (Okay, the Wiki says she’s been on that show since 2009. I guess BBC America is a bit behind in broadcasting it.))

About an Australian tv show staring shape changing kangaroos. They were secret agents, saving the world.

No, it wasn’t an episode of Tank Girl.