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Yay!

Yay for my (real) website being down!

Silwenae.com, that is.

Grrr.

Badger Football

Took Alex to his first college football game yesterday, Badgers vs Gophers at the Metrodome. Gophers won on a last second field goal, but Alex had a ball. Pretty good seats, corner end zone, upper deck, so we had a nice clear view of the field.

I had as much fun watching Alex and his reactions to the game as I did watching the game. Great football game (even if the wrong team won) – Badgers stormed back in the second half, Alvarez had a gutsy time out call on the Gophers last drive, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Didn’t even realize until today when I was reading the sports page that the Gopher’s starting QB got hurt.

Great time, will have to do that again with Alex. :D

Coupling – The Good and Bad

So I missed the news last month, but the BBC had a press release on Oct 14th that Coupling is coming back for a 4th season.

I never could make the transition from the (much better) BBC version to NBC’s version.

NBC’s version got the axe this week. Done. Caput. Over with. Oh well. The worst part about it is the perception problem that “Coupling’ is bad – when the BBC version is absolutely hilarious.

Oh, and the Season 2 DVD just came out. Must get.

Top 5 80's Albums

One of my favorite parts of Nick Hornby’s great book, High Fidelity (and the movie adaption with John Cusack was pretty good too, but his books are better), are his Top 5 lits.

So here’s my first one. Inspiration hit me last night when flipping through the radio dial (If I hear Coldplay’s new live song one more time….) and I heard Prince’s Purple Rain.

Here we go, Top 5 Albums (yes, I said albums, this is the 80’s, and I’m talking a complete record here, not one with just 2 good songs, in no particular order:

  1. Prince – Soundtrack to Purple Rain

  2. INXS – Kick

  3. Def Leppard – Hysteria

  4. Van Halen – 1984

  5. Depeche Mode – 101

There’s so many other ones that I could mention, but those are my personal faves.

Dominating

How about those Packers?

As a friend said in an email this morning ripping on the Twin Cities media:

Bum bum, ba ba ba bum: GO PACK GO!

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Back in the saddle

Back home after traveling 2 out of the last 3 weeks. And the last 3 weekends in a row.

Florida was nice. 80 every day. I could get used to that.

Messed around with Netjuke a bit last night to see if I could get downloading to finally worked. Installed gzip on Apache. The good news, you can now d/l one file at a time. The bad news, you can’t d/l more than one file at a time.

Looking at the gzip log files, it appeared to be an Internet Explorer thing (ha, there’s a surprise). IE 5.5 doesn’t read gzip encoded web pages right, nice bug. The pages are loading a lot faster though in IE and Mozilla, so a part of it is working right.

But in Mozilla, I couldn’t d/l multiple files either, so I think I need to play with my Apache configuration. (Ugh).

So I’ll add that to my to-do list, which keeps growing. And growing. And growing.

Alias

So the 3rd season of Alias has started, and it’s now Alias v3.0. Let’s recap:

1st season: Sidney works for SD-6, where everyone thinks they’re a supersecret subset of the CIA. They’re actually terrorists.

2nd Season: Sidney, having become a double-agent for the CIA in Season One like her father, still works for SD6.

In January, having the post-Superbowl timeslot, Alias v2.0 comes out. SD-6 is dismantled, and Sidney now works for the CIA (still) as a regular agent, with her father, and now, her love interest / handler Vaughn.

Season Finale: Blow up Alias and start over for Season 3, v3.0. Sidney has a climatic battle with her former best friend (who had been replaced with a double), and at the end of the show wakes up and two years have gone by unknown to her, with Vaughn breaking the news to her. And he’s now married.

3rd Season (now 2 episodes in) Alias v3.0

Thoughts so far: I was pretty annoyed with blowing it up at the end of the second season, after they had just done it. Said I’d give it one more change. (Ok, be real, who can’t watch Jennifer Garner?) I agree with critics / ratings that the show was too serial and hard for new people to jump into who hadn’t seen it before. The show still has that challenge, in my opinion. But it is a little less action oriented so far.

Things that irk me:

  1. After being gone for 2 years, not only is Sydney an agent again, but she’s already out in the field. (I know, her mystery is central to the plot again).

  2. In the first episode this season, she goes rogue and gets the item the CIA wants. She uses this to get her father out of false imprisonment he’s been in for a year since she was gone.

  3. Her father is a senior agent again already. After being gone for a year in lockup.

  4. Another love triangle. Last year, it was Will and Vaughn. Will is now in the Witness Protection Program (good excuse since he’s not on the show anymore I suppose). Now it’s Sydney, Vaughn, Vaughn’s new wife (who is the NSC liasion to the CIA in their office). Oh, and Vaughn had left to be a French teacher. He’s back in the CIA now. And saved Sydney on the second episode.

Overall, it’s a well-written, tight show. I just wish they’d stick with a plot line. But I do understand that as good as it is, it hasn’t pulled in the amount of viewers ABC has hoped for. Let’s hope this formula works (this time).