cobolhacker.com

I have a case of this, right now, as well as a cold.

It is absolutely frustrating.  I try to write something and it comes out shitty (pardon me, shittier than usual).  Hopefully it doesn’t last long because I doubt there are any treatments.

CNBC financial commentator Jim Cramer, to his credit, had the balls to face up Jon Stewart about his dumb investment show’s failure to warn people the markets in the U.S. were going to tank last year.  Cramer used to be a hedge-fund manager and has a certain amount of sleaze about him.

I want the Jim Cramer on CNBC to protect me from that Jim Cramer.

Stewart goes to work on the guy and it is savage.  This is one of the few times I’ve watched Stewart and he looked as if he was having trouble controlling his anger and contempt frustration.  He methodically exposes Cramer’s bullshit and by the time Stewart is done with him, Cramer is quite contrite, and hopefully reprogrammed.

I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game.

Fantastic interview.

This is my edit for the end of BSG.  A lot of the ideas they had were good, just played out too long.  I personally would have gone for a much shorter, more classic ending.  YMMV, this was slammed out real fast, but I have to get it out of my head.  I’m not RDM, but I’ll stand by this hack.

The flashbacks are okay, but I would have wound them all up before the final ending.  The final ending goes down with all the gun fights but when it all gets bad Cavil orders all of his remaining Basestars to destroy the Galactica.  Galactica gets away in the nick of time as the Basestars jump in.  The nukes go off and the extreme amount of debris and gravity shear destroys them and plunges them all into the black hole.  If you are going to have a black hole in a sci-fi show it might as well be a hungry one, even if this is not so realistic.  Classic baddies get what they deserve.

The last bits are tied together with narration.

Galactica jumps into orbit around Earth, her back broken, never able to jump again.  It is Earth.  Lush and beautiful.  They have made it.  At the CIC Starbuck realises that Sam is dying along with Galactica.  Admiral Adama narrates as she holds him and cries.  Sam has agreed to take Galactica into to Sun to dispose of it and himself; the rest of the fleet is to be stripped down and used to start off developing the Earth.  Sam whispers, “I’ll see you on the other side,” as she leaves him.

From there more narration and a focus on starting over, forgiveness, thankfulness and family.  Dr. Cottle tells Romo about the primitive conditions that will result, even with what’s left of the fleet.  Romo replies, as he plays with his dog, that he had been looking forward to a more simple life anyway (starting over).  Helen narrates as Admiral Yoshi releases the remaining Red Stripe Centurions and allows them to go on their way in the Rebel Basestar.  Yoshi and his staff salute them and they salute back (forgiveness).  A montage of the vast amounts of life on the world, interspersed with happy civilians, Cylons and crew (thankfulness).  Helo and Sharon happily running through the grass with Hera (the family).

Baltar and Six along with their Angels are told of their part.  They look at Sharon, Helo and Hera from on top a hill and ask if this breaks the cycle and the Angels reply they don’t know for sure, but it looks promising; they leave.  Six asks Baltar what he was planning on doing, and he replies, “Farming.  I know how to farm and it seems like an honest trade.”  They leave holding hands, “I don’t know anything about farming,” she says.  “It’s not that complex once you get the hang of it…”

Yoshi gives the Admiral back his bars while Tigh, Galen and Ellen look on.  He says they were never really his, plus he is planning on retiring anyway, perhaps to raise horses; he leaves.  The Admiral shakes Tigh and Tyrol’s hands and briefly hugs Ellen.  He says it was a pleasure to have served with them all.  They ask Galen what he’s going to do and he says he doesn’t know, maybe go north.  “So what are you going to do now, Bill?” Tigh asks.  “See about a cabin.”

The Admiral boards a Raptor where Roslin is waiting.  She is clearly sick, but he takes her to the future location of the cabin they had planned together.  He holds her as they sit on the hillside, watching herds of buffalo and she declares that it is beautiful.  She is now too weak to move.  He holds her close for a while until he realizes she has died.

Somewhere else, Lee and Starbuck shoot the breeze for a minute or two before she blurts out that she’s pretty certain that she’s done what she came back to do.  She kisses Lee on the cheek and says she has to go now.  She leaves him and begins to walk.  He turns away at first, but then says, “But what if you stay….”  As he looks back she is gone. poof, gone.  I liked that bit.

Bill Adama comes up.  Without anything being said Lee knows that Roslin has died, so he says that “She had to leave,” refering to Starbuck.  The Admiral understands too and asks what Lee has planned.  He’ll explore the planet, he says, but do you need help with that cabin?  Bill puts his arm around his son and they leave the stage.  This is the end of the show.

Obviously there would be more dialog than this, but we are talking about a 10 min wrapup — tops.  I care little for the idea that the Colonials become our ancestors.  This hardly matters. Why leave it like I say?  The Adama’s were sort of at odds at the beginning of the show, but during the course of it they accepted each other and went their own ways.  The show kinda focused a bit on family anyway, so why not?  Also, these two core characters have lost someone special, but they still have each other.  You can choose to focus on any number of stories in the show run, but this one is the most enduring, the love of a father and son and all the possibilities of them working together to build a new world.  Will the ‘Cycle’ be broken?  Doesn’t matter, really, audience is left to decide whether our good guys have broke the cycle and will survive in their new lives.

Last night was the end of Battlestar Galactica, one of the most important shows on on air today.  Important enough to warrant having a pre-show and a post-show for the final two hour special.  Not a lot of TV gets that kind of respect.  It took me a little while to digest it all but i think I’m ready to offer a quick review.

A considerable amount of air-time was spent on trying to wrap up various stories.  They failed to deliver on a lot of them but I don’t entirely blame the writers; I’m pretty sure a lot of stuff was dropped to the floor for this last season.  My current theory is that the production simply wasn’t given the time or money to wrap up all of the stories they had hatched throughout the run so they settled as best they could.  On this account they did okay and most of it comes together okay too.

Part of the story is balls-to-the-wall action and part of it is introspective and sentimental.  None of those things are bad necessarily, but the pace of the two hour episode was uneven and the end of it really dragged on, perhaps beyond its own proper ending. I have my own bias here, obviously, but I feel too much was spent on the mechanics of the ending rather than the actual ending itself.  Yeah they finally get to Earth, the real Earth.  But then they hang out for a while, shoot the breeze, reflect on life… Did they really need to film those bits?  Lots of deus ex machina stuff too and you’ll never get an explanation for it.  Are the bad Cylons still out there?  Who knows?  What happens to the good guy Cylons?  Who knows?  Are Baltar and Six divine?  Who knows?   Is Starbuck is an angel?  I guess so, and we’ll just have to leave it at that.

My feelings are mixed. I had hoped for a more succinct and definitive ending but maybe this was always the way it was going to work.  BSG was all about defying audience expectations anyway, and given the quality of their show, they had every right to go out the way they wanted.  The few quibbles I have about their soft ending matters little, given how much the show has accomplished during its run.

So I’ll miss watching it and will have to content myself with Dr. Who re-runs and Dollhouse until I find a show which captivates me as completely as Battlestar Galactica, flaws and all.  Like saying goodbye to an old friend.  Guess that’s why it was a great show.

A snow shower has just begun and it’s already starting to pile up on the sidewalk in front of the shop.  I go outside to shovel it.  The city actually has a by-law: merchants are supposed to clear the walks in front of their shops by 10am on weekdays.  But for us, our building also has a reputation to uphold.  119-123 has the cleanest patch of block on Ontario street.  At the beginning of the winter, Pat, Sean and I (the only merchants left in the building) attacked the snow with such vigour that other store owners on the block actually stepped up their efforts, lest they look bad.

A lady gets into her car using the large gap I just cleared at the curb.  “You know, you’re just going to have to do that again in 10 minutes,” she suggests.

I sort of nod and smile and keep working, meticulously scraping down to the concrete of the sidewalk.  She doesn’t know about the Strategy of Salt.  It’s Saturday for starters, I don’t really have to be out here, other than to keep up the rep.  I’m doing this for myself.  I plan to leave and go home soon, but I don’t want a weekend worth of snow stuck to the sidewalk when I get back here on Monday.  Then I’d have to use the metal scraper and my wrists always hurt after using the metal scraper.

I don’t know the exact mechanism, but if the sidewalk is really clean and rock salt is put on it, additional snow won’t adhere to it all that well.  Small amounts of snow just melt, but even larger volumes of icy snow are denied a toehold.  It will come off nice and easy come Monday morning and our little building will continue to have a curiously clean stretch of sidewalk in front of it.  Best part is, pedestrians do much of my work for me.  Their boots kick around and crush the little nuggets of salt, smashing it into the concrete, spreading it out fairly evenly.

A lot of people in Stratford don’t realize that the walks in the downtown of the city are kept clean by the people working in all the little shops, not by the Public Works people.  But we have our little tricks to make it easier.

In response to this article about Windows 7.

I’m a professional computer technician and I’ve been at it since the days of DOS.

The problems I see with Vista, or what I believe people don’t like about it, is it seems to offer very little new stuff and yet adds all this extra baggage.

Oh, computer people gush over all the new features Vista has, new interface, better security, smarter caching, etc, etc… but regular users don’t care about that.  They want web, email, Facebook, MSN, Skype and video games.  Maybe the odd bit of word processing.  Vista doesn’t do these things any better than XP.  In fact, when it comes to video games it is often worse, because some of your old favourite games simply don’t work.  I don’t think users even care that Aero Glass looks awesome because it doesn’t make the web – what they care about most – look any better or go any faster.  Youtube looks the same on basically every browser.

They notice faster, though.  My old Athlon XP with 512MB of RAM can pull up a working XP desktop from a cold start in around 30 seconds.  I have yet to see a Vista machine do this.  Even a modern Vista box with 4GB of RAM is ponderously slow at times and users hate this.  Worse, Vista doesn’t always tell you when it is ‘working’ so inexperienced users are left scratching their heads, wondering if they double-clicked fast enough.  I don’t know about you, but when I click on something I want to at least know the request was understood and is being worked on.

Computer geeks will say, “Well, it needs more resources because it has all kinds of new features.”  To a typical user, such a statement is meaningless.  They want their MSN to come up in 10 seconds just like it did on their old rig.  They don’t want to have to wait, or buy an extra gig of RAM to not wait.

Computer geeks might also be inclined to say, “Maybe they should just stick with XP.”  Well except that they can’t.  Their computers break down for good, need a new one and their only choice is Vista.  Can’t re-install the old OEM copy of XP, oh no, that would be in violation of your software licence, to say nothing of the fact that the vendor provides no XP drivers for the thing anyway.

The unwritten promise with XP seems to have been, “You give us better hardware and we’ll give you a better OS.”  In my opinion, XP lived up to that and more.  With Vista, the promise seems to be, “You give us bigger hardware and we’ll give you the same OS, only prettier.”  From a functional standpoint, this is not an improvement.