I have become a watcher of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It started by watching the reruns while I was waking the kinder in the morning, pretty much like I got hooked on 90210. Which, by the way, I'm over. As I mentioned, interesting minor characters, but main players I'd rather throw into the sea. Not the case with Buffy.

Anyway, in seasons past, we've seen the First Evil, which tries to convince you (in the past, Angel) to do bad things by attacking your self-worth via deception and psychology. I'm not sure that this is Satan, but it certainly follows the modus operendi of the Snake in Genesis, which, considering vampires have shown aversion to crosses, tends to argue for a more-or-less Judeo-Christian bent to the Buffyverse.If this is so, then the First Evil must be the Snake, which isn't necessarily Satan, but if he isn't, he was under orders from him. How this is to be taken in the case of Angel is unknown.

And now he's harassing Buffy, Spike and the Scoobies. Wow. And, by having his minions bleed Spike, he brought out the First Vampire, which, as everyone says, looks an awful lot like Max Schreck in Nosferatu, which I can see, but it's even more primal than that. The thing that gets me is that we now have, as dramatic persona, the First Evil, the First Vampire, and the First Slayer. I'm forseeing a back-to-the-beginning flashback, and possibly something very creepy occurring to explain or justify Buffy's attraction to dead men. I think this will have to happen, and it will likely show us the death of the first Slayer. We've seen 3 die (Buffy, by the Master and to stop Glory; Boxer Rebellion, by Spike; Shaft, by Spike) and been near when one other (Kendra, by Drusilla) died. Slayers die, and Buffy seems to have lasted longer and studied the meaning of being a Slayer more than Slayer yet (if one had, she wouldn't have had to do so much primary research, methinks). This would just be the icing on that cake.

I'm not sure why Buffy attracts me. The comment I always hear, "best-written show on TV" is part of it, but I don't always follow well-written shows. If the writers are great and the directors and the players are not, and sometimes even if they are, it can still be cold. Buffy does play more on continuity than any series I can name, and it does it in such an offhand manner. For example, in Season 2, Buffy had to kill Angel, who was controlled by his vampire self, Angellus, in order to save the world. Willow was trying to find a way to turn him back. Xander is sent to tell her that this is happening, and instead, tells her to "kick his ass". Reference to this was made this year, in "Selfless". The First Evil, the Big Bad of this season, returns from Season 2.

I'm glad to see some of Spike's interaction in the new series. I've long thought that seeing real horror doesn't de-sensitize you, but less-horrible violence does. In a sense, the animated violence of G.I. Joe and the A-Team are worse than things that bring up a whole fistful of death and violence and rub 'em in your face. There are variations on this: I wouldn't suggest a Friday the 13th movie to anyone, and I can't truly explain why Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer breaks this rule, but it's brilliantly directed and acted, so don't watch it. But, people get caught up in the romance of vampires and forget the violence and horror that would be part of that life, if it were true. I've seen complaints that people die in Buffy, but when you're dealing with things that turn people into vampires and destroy worlds, death happens. I expect people to die in Buffy like I expect people to die in the Shield, which is pretty much how I expect them to die in the War on Terror: controlling evil, crime and terrorism is a reactive, not a proactive, game. By the time you know the threat, the threat has presented itself and people are in danger. At the beginning of Season 3, Buffy, who ran away from home after sending Angel to Hell, gets pulled to Hell with a bunch of other runaways. She escapes, she brings some of the runaways with, but she isn't able to get everybody. She's human; she's not perfect. She tries and is largely successful, but she's not perfect, so there's failure and pain and death. If there wasn't pain and death, it'd be a sitcom: Buffy and her Kookie Pals.

They've not been consistant over the years, but not very often have vampires been as creepy as they could be. Near Dark is my favorite vampire movie, because it shows vampires in a different light than you expected (rural American, not European; low-class, not aristocratic; thuggish, not manipulative; clannish, not individualistic; desperate, not in control), and that has been a big influence on the redesigned vampires that inhabit Buffy. I don't think Spike, the big bad swaggering vampire who likes the Ramones and killing Slayers wouldn't have been possible without Jesse and Severen, and I kinda think that Angel wouldn't be possible without Caleb, a vampire that, from the beginning, never himself kills anyone and is thus, with the help of his veterinarian father, able to undo the process. (Movies like resolutions; TV likes recurring characters. In the Lost Boys, you're able to undo vampirism by killing the sire, but that's particularly rare in the literature. The line including Spike, Dru and Angel started with the Master, who died 6 seasons ago. Darla was Angel's sire, and he sired Dru, who sired Spike. Killing the sire doesn't kill, or cure, the descendants in Buffy.)

I used to be really into all this dark death stuff; vampires, Jack the Ripper, Danzig. What really convinced me to look the other way, and take the stance I do on consumer violence, was when I was doing a research for an English report on Jack the Ripper. Jack killed at least 5 victims, and the fifth was a horrible insane bloodbath, and one of the sources had a picture. When you read Saberhagen's Dracula series, or do trivial research into the Ripper, you can get really into it. Thing is, when you see the pictures, a you can't take a "this is neat" intellectually-curious position. You have to be either repulsed or attracted, which is where the problem comes in. Spike, in the last episode, presented the unromantic, repulsive truth of being a vampire, mostly in order to convince Buffy, for his sake, for her sake and the world's, to stake him. The curious thing is that he did most of this through conversation. He fronts and lunges, but mostly, it's via conversation, and with this he brings out the inhumanity of Spike that's been hidden since he helped her defeat Angelus and Acathla. It's poked out on occasion, but you haven't seen him revelling in torment, with the exception of fool for love.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I've been told that just writing can be useful, but then you go back, after writing, to edit and think and craft. I think the core is that, for the most part, reading or watching horror fiction is about experiencing the revulsion and reacting against it, but for some, they just dive right in. The sleep of Reason produces Monsters.

Ed Feiten says

More and more, our "technology news" isn't about technology at all. It's about stock prices, earnings reports, lawsuits, and executive hiring and firing. In short, it's an annex to the business page, reporting on companies that just happen to make high-tech products. This seems to be true at all of the major newspapers I have seen.

I hate to say this, but duh! A central concept to news is "If it bleeds, it leads", and that isn't talking about "bleeding edge" technology, but things that actually bleed -- humans. Here are some things that decide importance of news stories:

• Size - A 2-car accident is less important than a 40-car pileup, which is less important than an airplane crash which kills hundreds.
• Proximity - A car crash in your hometown is more important than a similar car crash in LA, which is still far more important than a bus plunging off a cliff in India.
• Celebrity - A car crash that hurts Julia Roberts is more important than a car crash that kills someone who isn't famous.
• Conflict - Someone meaning to intentionally kill people violently, even if unsuccessful, is more important than a fatal car crash.

Thursday is when my local paper, and likely other Gannett papers, release the Technology section, (e, which is so original), and what isn't business news ("$company heads in new direction", "$ceo heads $company in new directions") is either vaporware or editor-blessed advertisements. What I'd like to see are likely the things that Ed would like to see: much more of the "how this law affects technology", or "this technology affects peoples' lives" things. Richard Stallman goes to India to convince them to use Free software, then Bill Gates goes to India to give away lots of Windows software to change their minds back. Slashdot told me that. I'm sure someone in Information Week will tell me that. I don't imagine that I'll ever see that in the e section of my local paper, just like I didn't expect to see Linux mentioned on a TV commercial until IBM picked it up to sell it's big iron and consulting services.

Yes, it takes special writers to convince us that science and technology, independant from human uses and effects, are even remotely interesting. But it takes a special reader, who usually reads specialized media like Slashdot or O'Reilly books or the Crypto-Gram newsletter or comp.risks or the like, to take most humanity-removed science and technology reporting and place this information and integrate it into his or her life. Focusing news by audience is as hard (or easy) as focusing advertising by audience: to a Slashdot reader, the release of a new and faster processor isn't an ad, it's news; to a Maximum Rock & Roll reader, the release of the new Fugazi release isn't an ad, it's news; to a standard newspaper reader, a story on either would likely seem an editor-sponsored advertisement. My wife has a Ph.D in American Studies and is bored stiff with half the stuff I come up with my tech talk. I doubt that the newspapers would fare better.

I have been working on the problem of using Conditional Get in Perl using LWP. Conditional Get is a way of telling HTTP to give you a page if and only if a condition isn't met. For example, you can keep the Last-Modified information and check the server using If-Modified-Since, and it should give you a 304 Not Modified error, which tells you not to do anything and doesn't give you the content. I've not been able to make it work with ETAGs, which is, in essense, a hash of the document, which makes it a near-unique identifier, but I have been able to make it work with If-Modified-Since, as long as I keep track of the Last-Modified header field.

#################################################################
# an implementation of Conditional-Get for Perl,
# using LWP and used to minimize the amount of
# bandwidth taken by those doing repetative web
# tasks, such as RSS aggregators and creators.
# From what I've seen, ETags are not as effective
# in this as Last_Modified dates. Too bad,
# I suppose, but Last_Modified DOES get the job done.
#################################################################

sub conditionalGet {
  my $url = shift ;
# firewall-specific code
my $cglog = $config{"login"} or undef ;
my $cgpas = $config{"password"} or undef ;
my $cgadd = $config{"fw_addr"} or undef ;
# firewall-specific code
  my $cgtim = $config{"timeout"} or undef ;
  my $cgagt = $config{"agent"} or undef ;
  my $rh = new HTTP::Headers ;
  my $agent = new LWP::UserAgent ;
  $cgtim and $agent->timeout($cgtim) ;
  $cgadd and $agent->proxy(['http'] => $cgadd) ;
  $cgagt and $agent->agent("$agent") ;
  if ($lmod{$url}){$rh->header(IF_MODIFIED_SINCE=>$lmod{$url})}
  elsif($etag{$url}){$rh->header(IF_NONE_MATCH=>$etag{$url})}
  my $request = new HTTP::Request('GET',$url,$rh) ;
  $request->proxy_authorization_basic( $cglog , $cgpas ) ;
  $request->proxy_authorization_basic( 'USERID' , 'PASSWORD' ) ;
  my $response = $agent->request($request);
# I've not been able to make the $cglog and $cgpas stuff work
# so I hardcode it. if someone knows how to make it work, tell me
  my $h = $response->headers ;
  my $c = $response->code ;
  my $et = $h->header(ETAG) ;
  my $lm = $h->header(LAST_MODIFIED) ;
  my $rr = $rh->as_string;
  my $et = $h->header(ETAG) || undef ;
  my $lm = $h->header(LAST_MODIFIED) || undef ;
  $etag{$url} = $et ;
  $lmod{$url} = $lm ;
  return $response ;
  }

#################################################################

The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. In the case of a well-known conversational programming language I have been told from various sides that as soon as a programming community is equipped with a terminal for it, a specific phenomenon occurs that even has a well-established name: it is called "the one-liners." It takes one of two different forms: one programmer places a one-line program on the desk of another and either he proudly tells what it does and adds the question, "Can you code this in less symbols?"---as if this were of any conceptual relevance!---or he just says, "Guess what it does!" From this observation we must conclude that this language as a tool is an open invitation for clever tricks; and while exactly this may be the explanation for some of its appeal, viz., to those who like to show how clever they are, I am sorry, but I must regard this as one of the most damning things that can be said about a programming langauge.

The Humble Programmer, E. Dijkstra

Conditional Get might make my aggregator code suck less.

http://www.pocketsoap.com/ weblog/ stories/ 2002/ 05/ 19/ bdgToEtags.html http://www.w3.org/ Protocols/ rfc2616/ rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.26 http://www.w3.org/ Protocols/ rfc2616/ rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.19 http://www.drop.org/ node.php ?id=944 http://www.oreilly.com/ openbook/ webclient/ ch03.html

Now, to explain, I had checked Insight Cable's for TechTV, and it didn't seem to show up. I want my TechTV, so I called Insight to see, and got a few questions answered.

• Yes, Insight carries TechTV, as well as G4TV. It's part of the sports package, which means there's nothing else in that package I want to see.
• No, it doesn't seem to mention this anywhere on their website
• Yes, it would be quite useful if they did, if for no other reason than that you could use the online TV Guide to tell you what's available.
• Yes, there are other channels out there that I want. There's a bunch of kids channels that the kids would love (but do I want to encourage more couch-potatodom in them?) and a few channels, like BBC America and History Channel International (a while ago, the History Channel showed HCI for a day, which included a fascinating history of the British Navy, hosted by Prince Andrew. I now know where the Isle of Wight is, where Portsmouth is (and why the majority of the British Navy's seaports are on the southern coast), what the phrase Ship of the Line means and what you did with the Line, and who Admiral Nelson was and what the Battle of Trafalgar was all about. I even found some information about the Bonhomme Richard and why Americans shouldn't find it so incredible that they won that one. All-in-all, great TV.), (but do I want to encourage more couch-potatodom in myself?) and CSPAN-3 (but do I want to encourage more couch-potatodom in my wife?)
• Yes, they're serious about the extra $10/month for not having Insight Digital cable. Which means that it won't so much be a cost savings to go to Cable Modem for my internet needs.

We're already on the odd-side for TV ownership and usage, based partially on the usage of my late parents-in-law:

• large TV and VCR with VCR+, with DVD player feeding in (master bedroom)
• large TV/VCR combo (basement)
• large TV, VCR and DVD player (VCR is macromedia-impeded, so it is difficult to run the DVD player through the VCR) with TV Guardian (a black box that uses Closed Captioning to search for and mute curse words) (living room)
• small TV/VCR combo, with wireless headphones (Kerry's desk)
• small TV/VCR combo, with second VCR running through (my desk)

There's also another VCR with a split cable that's in storage, waiting for me to do a power-cable transplant. There is no Tivo -- Kerry doesn't believe in 'em. I'm convinced that they're great ideas, but in a house with 6 VCRs, Kerry feels Tivo is slightly redundant.

I've seen where you can take Linux, a small-footprint PC and a TV-Tuner card to make a set-top box that works as a homebrew PVR, and I'm stuck thinking a few things. First, can you record two shows at the same time with a homebrew setup? Can you read the Closed-Caption information, and make a show transcript? And, most importantly, how well does it handle scheduling? It seems that the online TV Guide is intentionally difficult to handle with LWP. Is there any way to say "I wanna watch Enterprise, Stargate: SG-1 and Saturday Night Live" and be sure that it'll know when they're on? Knowing the TV schedule is the advantage ReplayTV and TiVo have over homebrew so far.

I'm a geek. You know that about me, I'm sure. A Tech Geek, specifically, so I went to the Insight Communications to tell them I wanted TechTV on my local cable. Y'know, Call your local cable operator and tell them.... I got a call back:

Mr. Jacoby, this is Laura at Insight Communications.

They forwarded an email from me from Scott Pearl, asking me to get in touch with you. You were interested in our TechTV. If you could give me a call back, I'll see what I can do about getting this set up for you.

And again, my name is Laura. Thank you. Bye

That's it. That's everything. Notice the problem? No return phone number! I'd be glad to call Laura back, if I only could! Joy and wonder!

I'll likely soon call the local number and see if there's a Laura there. I do want my TechTV. But always remember to leave your return phone number.

This is a cute little thing that shows you the weather in your area. (Specifically, in this case, Lafayette. Hey, it's where I live. Set it up yourself for where you live!)

I'm considering setting up an RSS-making CGI that gives you local weather data in RSS format based on your airport code. KLAF is Purdue Airport. Also, maybe a sidebar, but I'd hate to hook it up to something that an actual human has to wait for, considering that, since I do not want to have thousands of unused weather sites clogging up my already-quota-tempting disk space, and pre-fetching is the price for user-interface speed. Anyway, it's cute.