I’m just not getting the whole train concept. I got up early after spending the night in my room (instead of going back to the hotel) and got ready so as to make the 9:06 Commuter Rail into North Station. Only, oops, its a saturday! There is a 7:36 and a 10:16. Sigh. So after a 15 minute walk in the cold, I had to make a 20 minute walk back to the dorm. Sigh. Well, at least I have some nice new a capella music to listen to…

Somewhere around a week ago I wrote this entry while in Conspiracy class. Now it finally goes up, when my iBook gets plugged into the net again.

I have heard great things about the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show. Things working against it, in my book: It’s on the WB, I missed the first few seasons, and its totally implausible. Well, its on UPN, so I dunno if it switched or what, but my religion now allows me to watch it. I did miss the first few seasons, or perhaps many, but it might be recapped on Mighty Big TV, so I could catch up, plus it seems easy enough to follow thanks to all the flashback “previously on Buffy” things. So I’ve basically shown I know nothing of the history of this show. And of course the implausibility factor. You quickly realize when watching it that its not about being truthful or realistic, its about having fun.

All this introduction leads up to me announcing I’m in love with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Last night I had my TiVo record it because there was a special musical episode on that looked really cool. Well, it was. It was awesome. It was an hour ten of singing, dancing, and storylines. And they made fun of themselves a lot. And they (in general) really can sing (fairly well) without voice doubles. So this is an episode that I’m putting in my newly founded archives of wonderful TV, next to the season 2 finale of The West Wing. And, as much as it pains me to say it, I’m afraid I might have another television show to watch. Which is bad, because it sucks up too much time. I now have West Wing, Farscape, The Pretender, The Daily Show, and Buffy. I have stopped with the monstrosity known as Enterprise after three episodes. I’m giving up The Outer Limits unless an episode looks particularly interesting. And The Invisible Man hasn’t been on in a while. So lets do some math. Farscape (4) + Pretender (5) + Daily Show (4) + Buffy (1), and that’s 14 shows a week. But the Daily Show is only half an hour, so make that 12 hours a week, which isn’t terrible, although its higher then I would generally like. But then count TiVo time, meaning that I can watch them whenever I want (like when I can’t fall asleep at 3 AM), and I can skip commercials, making an hour show about 45 minutes, and now it adds up to 528 minutes, or 8.8 hours. So I’m watching maybe 10 hour a week if you include the junk between, the commercials I don’t skip, etc. Cool. I feel good now, I’m not a TV-aholic. And all the shows are worthwhile and entertaining, so I don’t feel like I’m selling out. Now just wait until Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, etc. start back up. Sigh.

So I did some math a little while back, justifying to myself and others my television viewing habits. And now that is all in disarray. Let’s look at what we had:

Farscape (4) + Pretender (5) + Daily Show (4) + Buffy (1), and that’s 14 shows a week. But the Daily Show is only half an hour, so make that 12 hours a week, which isn’t terrible, although its higher then I would generally like. But then count TiVo time, meaning that I can watch them whenever I want (like when I can’t fall asleep at 3 AM), and I can skip commercials, making an hour show about 45 minutes, and now it adds up to 528 minutes, or 8.8 hours.

Simple enough, right? And then some other good shows come on. First off, I don’t think I’m going to watch any new Buffy episodes, because I’m so far behind. Then look at this: FX is running the entire show from the beginning. I’m catching it about halfway through. But what’s this now? It’s running how many times per day? Oh, yeah, four. Two “new� shows and then the repeats of the previous day. Crap!

I’m also watching 24. But nothing else! NOTHING ELSE!!! So let us recalculate.

Farscape                                   4.0 hours
Pretender                                  5.0 hours
Daily Show                                 2.0 hours
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (AHHHH!!!)       10.0 hours
24                                         1.0 hours
The West Wing                              1.0 hours
----------------------------------------------------
SUBTOTAL                                  23.0 hours
(Assume 15 min/hour commercials)        x  3/4
TOTAL                                   ~ 18.0 hours

Eighteen hours or so. Hmm. I dunno, its too long, now I have to figure out what I can cut out. But I have no idea what I would cut. What I can do is assume that, since Farscape is getting nearer to their new season, this schedule should be reduced by next semester to 1 hour/week. Similarily, The Pretender is reaching the end of the line in anticipation of a made-for-tv movie, so that one should cut down. So starting next semester, I should be okay! I hope, I hope, I hope.

I’ve also realized (not for the first time) how useless cable TV is to me. If I had my way I would pay the same money for, say, 6 channels, all commercial free. Give me NBC, ABC, CBS, SCIFI, Comedy Central, and HBO. And maybe throw in Discovery Channel and TLC. Eight channels. I’ll give you eight bucks a month, now dump my commercials. Please?

Nothing witty to say today. Went to a nice Thanksgiving dinner, met Aunt Linda and Ercil, and Ercli’s daughter Ursula (sp?) and her fiance Matthew. Had some fun in Connecticut, and in Boston. Took the T a bit. Missed a train, hurt some muscles…slept in a hotel, decided I like my room better. Except the food there is better, although Aramark has poisoned me so that any “real” food I eat makes me feel icky. Its a good reason to eat less, though. 🙂

Yes, I’m still obsessed with Buffy. It hasn’t passed yet.

Television gets a bad wrap. Just because there are stupid publications doesn’t make people say “books suck.” And just because we have the Boston Phoenix doesn’t mean people say “newspapers suck.” And just because we have Rush Limbaugh doesn’t mean that “radio sucks.” The medium and the message – argue all you want about how they are tailored together, or at least theoretically should be, but one message doesn’t poison an entire medium.

I watch television a bit. Or perhaps more then a bit, but certainly less then the “average” American, and I am not ashamed of my watching habits. I watch shows that I consider to be either meaningful, distracting, or both meaningful and distracting. I like shows that are epic, as opposed to episodic. I like larger-then-life tales that span multiple shows, where plot is intricately and delicately developed over time and mysteries are revealed. Where you care about the characters, where multiple motivations are and ethics are represented and explored and understood.

I don’t watch sitcoms, I don’t watch adventure. I watch social satire, I watch drama, and I watch epic adventures. Things that have a point, morals, meaningful stories, or at least a lot of humor. Yeah, so, television gets a bad wrap. There is good and bad television, just like every other medium. Just because of some of the incredibly terrible storylines, characters, blatant product placement, and whatnot, that doesn’t mean the entire medium is evil. Okay, and that sentence was really…bad.

I write this because I’ve been catching up on Farscape on SciFi and the character of Zahn just died. So she is a tall blue alien plant thing from a distant galaxy. So what? I feel the loss, and that makes it good TV.

Oh, and Farscape Rocks!

Andrew, this one is for you! After great effort I am nearly finished integrating PHPix, bplog, and my new commenting system. Its all very rudimentary, but it looks good, works cleanly, and is not so complicated as to be hackable. So hit the media link now, buddy, and by very impressed. All of my old galleries are gone, but all of the pictures are still there, now it just remains for you all to caption them! Ain’t that a treat? 🙂 So caption away! And this new system means adding more images is as easy as dragging and dropping, so expect pictures to go up much more quickly in the future. Plus the great scaling features of PHPix mean I can drop the huge 1600×1200 shots in a folder and it will convert them to thumbnails and smaller sizes all on the fly. Wowsers, I am quite impressed with myself and this software. I’d better sit down before I hurt something or someone.

Happy clicking!

There was a cool meteor shower-thing last night, so we stayed up to watch. Phew. I ended up going to bed about 3 and getting back up at 4 to see the sight from a rock formation behind the castle. It was pretty fun, although quite cold (because I wasn’t dressed for it. I need gloves!) After a while of everyone saying “Ahh!” after seeing a hit, we switched to saying various words including “fart,” “Jehuda,” “Aramark,” and my personal favorite, “Lithuania!” after each occurrence. We started cycling through various countries, then just shut up and watched the sky for a while.

I finally got to sleep again around 6 in the morning, and woke up again somewhere around 2 in the afternoon. So now I’ve been up for maybe three hours and its already dark outside again. I am so confused… And now I have to start my homework. Sigh. 🙁

I love it when people spin the truth for their own advantage. Everyone does it, and its a valid way of living, and oftentimes its all in good fun. But I don’t like it when people try to spin to me when we both know that I know its spin. Not that its a lie, because its not, but because it is spin, as opposed to the simple facts. So with that, I’m off to tell people to hack into the brandeis central web server but oh, by the way, don’t do anything bad. See, I’m discouraging! Because I care! 😉

Tonight is the second of this year’s Pachanga dances, put on by the international club for a purpose I really can’t quite fathom. I mean, I understand the whole dance aspect, but not why International Club does it…I think they get money from the A-Board because it is a “cultural” event. Heh.

Today Brandeis held their debate tournament, which I did not judge in because I forgot it was coming, despite numerous emails. Whoops. The consequence of a debate tournament is that lots of students from far away spend the night in our dorms. We had a group from Brown here on Cable 1. The group decided to have a party.

Now, North is a “dry quad,” although our floor does have signs stating quite clearly that we are a, “Wet Floor.” When a buddy of Abe’s from BU started vomiting after an extended stay in the Mods, BEMCO was called, and along with them of course came campus PD. Dana Baker, quad director, was also called up, I guess. She patrolled the hall, noticed the bit of a party in [**Name Withheld Due To Request**]’s room, and did her duty as a quad director, making them throw out the booze and taking names for some sort of “write up.” [Ed: False information about punishment removed.]

I found the whole thing quite humorous. I was in the room a few minutes prior but luckily I was in the hallway when Dana came by, and consequently I was not written up. Not that I was drinking anyway. So I did what any good geek with a weblog in my position does, I took pictures.

Our last Pachanga resulted in probably a dozen visits to the hospital, including my buddy down the hall Roman, the frat boy. I’m sure this one will keep BEMCO and Waltham Deaconess Hospital quite busy. Fun. Meanwhile I sit here and code… I’m really pathetic.

Good question. Finished and turned in Jerry Cohen paper, then got another one right after. Sigh. Went to an AMST/LGLS dinner celebrating Louis’s birthday (as I commented earlier, I think), listened to some guy speak, but it quickly got a bit…tiresome, with everyone debating capital punishment, which is interesting, but I wasn’t in the mood for a Gordie/Jerry debate.

Mock Trial tryouts went well, and it looks like we have a lot of good people for our teams. We’ve made it club policy not to discuss individual performances or decisions outside of our closed-door meetings, to respect people’s feelings. All in all I was pretty impressed with everyone’s ability to speak, improv, respond to questions, etc. Now we’re going through the difficult task of hashing out who will be on which team, and I hope to send out an email tomorrow.

I just realized that my recaplet of Buffy the Vampire Slayer never got up here, its still sitting on the laptop. So I’m going to get on that pronto…once I wake up.

And on that note: Watch the Buffy Musical Tonight at 8/7c on UPN!!! For every minute you don’t watch…I shall kill you!!! (Uh-oh, reference to Family Guy. I really should go to bed)

At 11 I meet with some folks to discuss the Brandeis web site. At noon is news on screen, and we’ve hit internet topics, so my insights are valuable, IMHO. At 1:30 is philosophy, and we just got another paper in there as well. Sigh, papers. Plus I soon have a COSI assignment due, so lots of work. But I’m happy and peppy, and somehow I was pulled into watching The Usual Suspects instead of reading Media Rants (which is somewhat outdated anyway), so I’m a bit behind on that. Typical. 😉

Staying up too late, waking up too late, not enough time in the day. Lots of lots of lots of reading to do. Plus lots of Mock Trial planning needs to be worked out. Plus we spent 1 hour holding tryouts (that went really well) then about 2 hours debating over who should be on what teams. Geez. It was hard making the decisions, and we’re still not done yet, we have four more people who weren’t able to make tryouts. In all I feel very happy and upbeat, I just have so much schoolwork that probably needs to get done, I have to figure out how I’m going to get through it all.

Meanwhile, some people *cough* Andrew *cough* keep bugging me about getting photos online, so I’ll do that too, as soon as I get some free time that isn’t better spent working. I’m setting up Gravity Magazine’s online presence and will be doing some PHP coding for them, which is okay because it is part of my web project for News On Screen that is worth like 20% of my grade. JehudaDaddy.com, on the other hand, is just for fun.

I was just looking back on my TechTV interview (4.4MB Movie File). Heh. I look funny! They were supposed to give me five minutes but some “breaking news” cut it to 1 and a half, which I guess is why they ignored what I assume were some pre-planned questions and just opened with the terrible “so…tell us more about what you did?” which I was completely unprepared for. Way to go me. Anyway, it was humorous, and humor is good, so I figured I’d share! 🙂

Yes! DNS updates complete, agblog.com and www.agblog.com now work, I just have to figure out what was wrong with the wildcard *.agblog.com, not that I really need it anyway. So you can see me again! ::smile::

All this time I thought it was Lou-iss Brandeis, with a nickname of Lou-E. Turns out, according to local authorities, Louis is pronounced as the latter. So go figure. Point being, its his birthday. Happy Birthday Louis! 🙂

I’m switching from Granite Canyon, which for some reason wasn’t recognizing my domain on their servers, even after they claim to have the zone transfer all done, to zoneedit.com, which looks like an easier to use and in fact speedier service, also free. Cool! Now this should be back up, hope hope hope, by Tuesday. Yah!

And for those of you who just stare at this entry mysteriously, basically what happened is my domain name, agblog.com, is there, and my web site is there, they just aren’t linking up correctly, the name to the actual location. So DNS is what allows them to link together, and that is what I’m working out right now.

My DNS switch got snafu-ed somewhere, so no one is seeing this currently. I’m not quite sure what the problem is yet, but I’m trying to work it out, although Robin isn’t being much help…

I am also writing to point out that:

1. I’m only half-done with my evil 12 page conspiracy essay that I have pledged to turn in tomorrow, and thus I am still awake at this ungodly hour.
   
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Rocks! And I still haven’t gotten my entry on that, writting last week in class, posted…

Hello loyal readership. In my never-ending quest to please you, my visitors (and to avoid schoolwork), I have spent a good chunk of the day updating to a newer version of this weblog software. As a part of this upgrade I have moved to hosting on my Power Mac at Brandeis instead of my host in Kansas City, leaving that host basically only doing email, proxy, and some assorted junk. I’m almost at the point where I can dump the $20 a month virtual hosting, and the main reason I’m doing it is because they don’t support PHP 4, the web scripting language I use, and so I can’t run new scripts on their @#&)% servers! So if I were really to do this I’d have to figure out – do I want to host everything here? Or maybe at Maintex? Or somewhere else? Or find someplace to host the DNS so that I can move around? Cause when I go home or wherever for summer I’m gonna lose my Brandeis internet connection, and I don’t want my email, web, and such interrupted. Yet CommuniTech.Net really isn’t doing anything for me anymore…

Sigh. Oh, also, as a result of this upgrade, things are a bit cleaner, I can do better control over posting, but I also lost my admin stuff that I programmed, so for a little while I won’t be able to do admin stuff until I get that cleared up. Also I still have to make sure all of the commenting things are going to work right, and the format is a-okay. And of course I have to switch the site to point here… And maintain an uptime on my computer of something substantially better then 2 days…

And if you aren’t a geek, almost all of the above was completely unintelligible, so I might as well just stop now and go talk to Robin about it.

The point isn’t that they look alike or look completely different, it is that Buffy is HOT! 😉

Well, I have lots of time now! I have an essay still for Jerry Cohen, which is mucho important, but other than that I’m FREE! Which gives me time to make fun of Sophie! Cause she says Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Sarah Michelle Geller) isn’t very pretty. I told Sophie that I disagreed, and also that she herself looks like Buffy. Ha, she says! Well, take that – here is a comparison pic. What do YOU think?

You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a guy playing an electric umbrella.