Zathras' Great Machine

Hmm. I did it again.

OK... well, you wouldn't want me to become unpredictable and start blogging regularly, would you?

Mutant X and Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda are going downhill. A recent ep of Mutant X, briefly summarized.

A serial killer who has been captured and convicted is kept in a cell that has three glass walls and one rock wall. He talks thru vents in the wall, attempts to creep everyone out with cheap psychology, and gives hints about murders with anagrams. This is a ripoff so cheap that it's beneath contempt. But it gets worse... the ending to the ep was even more obvious than the so-called "surprise ending" to Soylent Green.

It's an ongoing trend, and it's annoying: a great SF series has a wonderful first season, a so-so second season, and then all subsequent seasons are weak at best and dreadful at worst. It happened with Gene Roddenberry's: Earth: Final Conflict, and it appears to be happening again with these two shows. Some have said that the same thing is happening with Enterprise, but I still think that show is pretty good. I hasten to add, though, that I am in an increasingly small minority on that score.

November 17 is Governor Arnold day. Please send Denise congratulations. She is thrilled about this. *Parrish runs away, covering his balls to prevent Denise from kicking them*

Haven't looked any further into Linux right now... my main computer projects are getting the documents on the Hieronymous Bosch organized (which is long overdue) and trying to get an OS running on this damn server. Denise and I have been tackling this together and haven't made much progress. The box requires proprietary SCSI drivers, but the server isn't taking them for some reason... I'm still wondering why. I'm mulling over various ways to tackle the problem, from installing an IDE drive, to trying other OSes (so far I've tried Win ME, Win2K Pro, and Win2K Server, and none has worked), to selling the damn thing and using the cash to buy the parts to build my own damn box. *chuckle*

So the new Matrix flick is out, I've read several reviews, and they seem to be mixed. I'm planning to see it, but I'm also planning to be disappointed.

Time to start thinking about what to do for Thanksgiving this year... can't go to my folks place, obviously. That's actually more of a relief than anything else, but it does leave me with nothing much to do. Maybe I'll rent a car and go out of town for a couple of days.

Saw "Scary Movie 3" on Saturday. It's mediocre. Wait for video. Don't bother watching it if you haven't seen both "Signs" and "The Ring" -- the jokes will be over your head.

I'm mulling over a career change, since it's a pretty good time to get out of IT. The two main things I'm thinking about are photography and "smelly stuff" (scented candles, soaps, aromatherapy preparations, and so on). Right now I'm mostly in the "investigation" stage (thanks to Denise for giving me lots of help). For photography, in particular, that's fine, since looking into stuff for a few months is just a few more months that prices will drop on cameras. I also briefly thought about doing something with hookahs, but dropped the idea because the market is already pretty well saturated. Plus I suspect it's a fad that's going to fade in a few years.

Here I am just starting to get serious about studying OS X 10.2, and Apple releases OS X 10.3 -- good thing I'm not the type of person who upgrades OSes very often. OS X 10.3 is getting a lot of good reviews... some critics have even said that it's the OS that truly makes the case for switching from Windows, which I regard as a bit overenthusiastic, to say the least.

Posted by Zathras at November 5, 2003 11:24 PM