I was a fair fan of Farscape, though I joined it late as well. I'm glad to see it coming back, even if only for a short time. This may work out ok, though given the somewhat rocky Babylon 5 "movies", I won't hold my breath. At least we'll have an answer to the cliff hanger finale.

I did like the Battlestar Galactica mini-series that SciFi did earlier. I wasn't such a big fan of the original that I had hate for the remake, mostly because I was 6 when it was originally out. I did have the Dagget action figure, and a Viper (which Mom hated because it actually shot something). And the mini-series definitely had that "this is only the beginning" that had "pilot" written all over it. At least I didn't miss the second half like some friends did (poor guide listings by SciFi meant that the Tivo didn't realize there were two episodes, and I had to force it to tape the second one). So, I'm happy to watch some more of it.

Earthsea... I read it as a kid, and remembered liking it. When Tehanu came out, it seemed to miss me for some reason. It had been many years since I'd read the original trilogy, but Tehanu seemed to have more adult attitudes, or maybe I was just more of an adult. For whatever reason, I hadn't re-read the series like I had re-read so many others. Perhaps it is time to re-visit the series. Apparently, there are a couple more books to the series as well.

Worth watching, I think. And hope that the SciFi channel isn't only going for that monsters/horror or whatever schlock that people were afraid of. ]]> Brandon 2004-08-21 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=71 In another bit of nostalgia, celebrated three years of dating at Tequila 2004 by passing out on the couch. You'd think I was much younger... ]]> Brandon 2004-08-17 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=70 followup to an early article about RSS Growing pains. It makes it prety obvious that serving RSS with straight Apache for popular sites is probably a bad idea, but you won't know that until you "hit the wall" as he states.

RSS is too dumb to do anything to really stop this, but you would think that aggregators would be a bit smarter. Clients could just have a random walk setting in their fetcher, so it wouldn't fetch every hour on the hour, for instance. If the load was evenly distributed throughout the hour, you'd still have (clients * 24) extra load on your systems, but it could be as much a couple orders of magnitude less "pop".

Fixing the protocol, one could imagine server side aggregators (hmm, that is confusing terminology) which could combine multiple feeds, and then a client could request all of the feeds from the single source. This could be combined with pingers such that these "clusterers" (ugh) would get pushed updates from the people publishing the feeds. The original feeds could even contain pointers to clusterers which support their feed.

In a perfect world, those writing these clients would actually support their own clients in this fashion so their clients wouldn't wreck havoc on the world. They don't have to handle all the feeds, just the most popular ones. Ie, the client would fetch the feed from the primary source, tell the mother service all the feeds it fetchs (anonymously, of course), and then for any feed with more than say 1000 subscriptions, the mother service would tell the client to fetch the feed from them instead. Good citizen and all that. Plus, it would allow the client software to report aggregate statistics about subscribership across the rss world, much like Bloglines does now.

The next step after that would of course be some sort of P2P mechanism for distribution, hijack one of the existing protocols (BitTorrent has been mentioned in the past, but that seems too one shot to me, but I'm not an expert), though you should run this service maybe separate from the primary one (different ports or whatever, no need to clutter the service with rss feeds).

The most obvious answer from a server side is to serve your RSS feeds off of something like squid. It can handle a much larger number of simultaneous transactions due to its async nature, and the caching isn't a bad thing either. It might also help when you have a really large number of feeds. It should be interesting if the GG2 feeds become very popular, for instance. Well, interesting to me, since I'll have to fix the problem... ]]> Brandon 2004-07-22 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=69 Krystal Burgers, which appear (and taste) nearly identical to White Castle.

No clue about this movie.

Someone else's opinion on the difference between the two.

Hmm, here's a supposed recipe for White Castle Cheeseburgers, i'll have to try that...

The big treat in Vancouver though was DQ. Hmm, not the new Grill & Chill, though. And they didn't have Chocolate ice cream, in either the express or the full store. Yes, we had it twice in two days... ]]> Brandon 2004-07-21 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=68 Further disclaimer at the end of the commercial states "Car is a rendering for illustrative purposes and does not precisely depict the Volvo product."

Just in case you weren't sure about those things. ]]> Brandon 2004-07-21 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=67 New Orleans, and then Vancouver. I know, an odd combination.

In New Orleans, we wondered around in the heat and drank cold beverages and ate good food. First night we ate at Olde N'awlins Cookery, which we just wandered into. It was surprisingly good. Second night we ate at Bayona, which was also quite tasty. Third night was Emeril's, though the chef was no where to be found. All around good food.

Vancouver was beautiful (well, except for the patch between Gastown and Chinatown that we wandered through, which seemd to include a crack alley). Seemed like as many homeless people as in SF, though their routine was a bit different. The weather was perfect.

You know, this trip made me think of showers in hotels. For some reason, showers in hotels are generally bad. I'm not sure if this is just a hard thing (plumbing for so many), but being tall and liking hot showers with lots of pressure, I'm usually disappointed by hotel showers. We stayed at the Ritz Carlton Maison in New Orleans, and the shower was fabulous, while Courtney loved the oversized bath tub (complete with candles, no less). The shower in the Pacific Palisades in Vancouver on the other hand... the shower head was too low, the pressure was ok, but the temperature kept varying from cold to scalding hot. Unpleasant. It was better than our hotel in Monterey last year where some crap bubbled up through the drain.

The other amusing thing to note is how the prices of hotels don't vary all that much. You can spend $150-200 on a crappy hotel, or on the Ritz Carlton Club hotels, depending entirely on fate. Did I mention I hate airline pricing too?

[1] Weird, didn't know that there were two ways to spell fiancé, one male to female the other female to male. Definition ]]> Brandon 2004-07-20 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=66 article about John Edwards earning release, where they tried to paint a picture of tax evasion by the use of a "so called S corporation". S Corporations aren't rocket science, they are one of several types of incorprations allowed under most states. These types include partnerships, sole proprietorships, LLC's (a relative new comer in the states), S Corporations and C Corporations. Most big companies are C Corps, and lots of small businesses are S Corps. Neotonic was actually a C corp, though we debated being an S Corp instead. An S corp is limited to 25 share holders, so it only works for small companies, but it allows you to "pass through" the income of the company to the shareholders, so you don't have to pay taxes twice (ie, the company and you pay taxes in a C corp, but only you have to pay taxes in an S corp). The main thrust of the NY Times article was that Edwards "avoided" paying about $500k in Medicaid taxes by using this scheme: he only took $360k in income and had the rest paid in dividends from the company. I didn't know that Medicaid taxes applied to your full income, I assumed that it stopped around $70k like FICA, but we'll assume they are correct. But, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to have a salary of $360k (I know, it sounds like a lot, but this is a personal injury lawyer), and then any profits of the company would be distributed as dividends, which are taxed at a lower rate (and apparently don't apply to FICA & Medicaid). That's not "tax avoidance", that's just following the tax rules and running a company, something a lot of people in the US do.

The second was from USA Today (I was in a hotel, of course), where an article about people still using P2P services called them "unauthorized services". There is no "authorizing" authority for software, unless you're talking about the "Made for WinXP" label or something. You might be able to use eDonkey and Kazaa to get unauthorized copies of movies, music, or software (or knitting patterns, for that matter), but that doesn't make the software itself "unauthorized". ]]> Brandon 2004-07-20 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=65 Group of Lawyers Seek to Overturn 10 Patents-Report. Yes, that's actually the Electronic Frontier Foundation, defined on their own page as "a nonprofit group of passionate people - lawyers, volunteers, and visionaries - working to protect your digital rights". Guess whomever wrote the Reuters article just stopped at the "lawyers" part. Could you imagine a news organization saying a "Group of Lawyers" when talking about the RIAA or the MPAA? Or the Cattleman's assocation or even the American Bar Association?

So, is this biased reporting, or just plain bad reporting? ]]> Brandon 2004-07-05 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=64 Nathanael Robert Herman, 6/16/2004, son of Stacie Michelle Long Herman and Jason Herman. ]]> Brandon 2004-06-18 http://www.fiction.net/blong/article.hdf?article=63 Morgan Le Faye Minick, 6/1998 - 6/11/2004 ]]> Brandon 2004-06-18