This isn’t news, but I just found out. Fox has cancelled Dark Angel to make room for a Whedon show, Firefly.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Dark Angel, but this last season, with the show getting a kind of hip-hop feel to it and the whole ‘mutants vs mundanes’ thing taking off, I was starting to enjoy it. And the season finale was a real cliff hanger. Now we’ll never know…
Sunday night (June 16) TNT has a 2 hour season premier of Witchblade (8:00 pm ET/PT). This was a great series that was tragically overlooked when its first season ran.
Yancy Butler, who stars as Sara Pezzini, had to take some time off to go into rehab partway through the shooting of season 2. Let’s hope she comes back healthy and strong, and still kicking ass.
Well, I finally finished China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. (Yes, I’m a damned slow reader… after staring at several monitors all day at work, these old eyes tend to get tired fast when I sit down with a book at the end of a day.) Regular readers of this blog (are there any?) might recall me ranting about the author’s fascination with shit and his pompous use of obscure words a few weeks back.
The bad news is, I haven’t changed my opinion about these aspects of the book. The good news is, it’s a damned fine story. In fact, when things get exciting, Mieville’s style becomes much more streamlined and enjoyable. You can imagine him writing faster and faster and not stopping to try and shoehorn in the subject of his most recent “Word of the day” email. Hopefully as he matures as a writer, his wonderful imagination will stay the same and he’ll realize his job is to tell a good story, not dazzle us with his vocabulary.
It’s a dark tale, no doubt, and the city it takes place in is old and grimy and corrupt. It can all get to be a bit much after a while (another reason it took me so long to read it… I had to keep stopping to take a shower so I could feel clean again). The technology is a wonderful spin on ‘steampunk’ and is way, way fun. None of the characters are particularly lovable, so if you’re into Real Heros you might want to pass on this one.
Otherwise, fascinating stuff. A twisty-turny story set in a downright weird world. Gets my thumbs up (I’m sure Mr. Mieville will let out a great sigh of relief when he hear’s about this! Heh.)
It all started innocently enough. I was placing an online order. When I went to check out, I noted, dimly, that the shopping cart was powered by PayPal.
Filled out a page of info, hit submit and was told that I already had a PayPal account, and to log in. Now, I think about 2 years ago when PayPal was new, I did create an account, and never used it.
So I can’t log in. And my email address from back then is long gone. They do have a way to deal with this: give them the old email address and complete the credit card number that you signed up with.
I no longer have that credit card. So now what?
I go to the help page and fill out a form explaining the situation. What do I get in reply? An email saying I should log into my account in order to update my credit card info.
Irritated, I go through the whole order again, this time using a different telephone number. They STILL flag me as having an account. They must be using my address. Now, my name is Peter Smith. If you go to any moderately large high rise apartment building in America, you’ll probably find that over the past few years 4 different “Peter Smiths” have lived there.
OK, back to square two. The email they sent me telling my to log in and change my credit card number has the URL of a help page. I click on that, and I’m told I must be logged in to get help. In the event I can’t log in, it gives me an email address to write to.
I explain my experience in an email and send it to the specified email address. And what happens? I get an auto-response saying that they don’t accept email at that address and that all correspondence should go to through the web site, and they include 2 links, one to the page I can’t go to because I’m not logged in, and one to the page that I started out on.
No where can I find a phone number or a person to talk to. All the choices on the help form are going to get me autoresponses. I’m totally fucked. My only resort is to contact the vendor and ask them if I can phone in an order….
PayPal… you totally SUCK.
A Tale in the Desert is a MMRPG that just crossed my radar for the first time. It seems to be a lot different than most of the incoming MM games (The Sims Online being the exception). There is no combat in the game; it seems to be more about politics and social constructs. GameSpy interviewed the Andrew Tepper, president of eGenesis, the developers of A Tale in the Desert. The article is worth a read.
Oh, and while we’re talking tech, I should do my part to pass the word that Mozilla 1.0 is finally out.
Here’s a little hack that’ll enable Quartz’ font smoothing technology for all Carbon apps under Mac OS X. You’ll need 10.1.5 to run it.
I’d love to attribute this to the original author, but I have no idea where it came from:
——-
A furious lightsaber duel is underway. DARTH VADER is
backing LUKE SKYWALKER towards the end of the gantry. A
quick move by Vader, chops off Luke’s hand! It goes
spinning off into the ventilation shaft. Luke backs away. He
looks around, but realizes there’s nowhere to go but straight
down.
Darth Vader: Obi Wan never told you what happened to
your father.
Luke: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!
Darth Vader: No, Luke… I am your father!
Luke: No. It can’t be. That’s not true. That’s impossible!
Darth Vader: Search your feelings Luke… you know them
to be true.
Luke: NOOoooo!
Darth Vader: Yes, it is true… and you know what else?
You know that brass droid of yours?
Luke: Threepio?
Darth Vader: Yes… Threepio… I built him… when I was 7
years old.
Luke: No! … Wait, huh?
Darth Vader: Seven years old. And what have you done?
Look at yourself. No hand. No job. And you couldn’t even
levitate your own ship out of the swamp…
Luke: But… I destroyed your precious Death Star!
Darth Vader: But that was when you were 20! When I was
10, I single-handedly destroyed an entire Trade
Federation Droid Control ship!
Luke: Well, it’s not my fault…
Darth Vader: Oh, here we go… “Poor me… my father never
gave me what I wanted for my birthday… boo hoo, my
daddy’s the Dark Lord of the Sith… Nobody loved me…
waahhh wahhh!”
Luke: Shut up!
Darth Vader: You’re a slacker! By the time I was your age,
I had already exterminated the Jedi knights!
Luke: I used to race my T-16 through Beggar’s Canyon.
Darth Vader: Oh, for the love of the Emperor… 10 years
old, winner of the Boonta Eve Open… the only human to
ever fly a Pod Racer… right here baby!
Luke looks down the shaft. Takes a step towards it.
Darth Vader: I was wrong… You’re not my kid… I don’t
know whose you are, but you sure ain’t mine.
Luke takes a step off the platform, hesitates, then plunges
down the shaft. Darth Vader looks down after him.
Darth Vader: And get a haircut!
Here’s a neat page for web page builders who use Mozilla or Netscape 6. Add CSS2 and HTML4.01 references to your Sidebar. Handy stuff!
Beautiful day out today and I *gasp* actually went outside. I really need some outdoor activities to get me in the fresh air more often. In this case, it was as simple as walking to the grocery store to get something to eat. But its amazing what fresh air and sunshine does for your mindset. Problem is, just taking a walk with no meaningful destination seems like a waste of time to me.
Anyway, did some pondering while walking and realized that I really don’t hate what I do (see last blog entry). I just hate where I’m doing it. In fact, I really enjoy developing things I can take pride in, but where I work the developers are just tools to be pointed at things to do. Often… incredibly often… we’re pointed at stupid things, or only given time to do things half-assed (after which we get pointed at the half-assed things that have now broken and need fixing). Basically, there is no management there, and that’s what I hate about it. They waste my (and everyone else’s) time, then they complain that nothing significant ever gets done.
They say the recession is over (though it doesn’t look that way to me) so maybe there’ll be better jobs coming along soon. I’ll hope that’s true.
I watched The Great Escape for the first time today. What a great movie! That’s another head-clearer… losing yourself in a film like that. All good stuff.
Today was a pretty OK day.