More Galactica Theories
I’m mostly writing this to see how good or bad I can predict. I’ve been pondering the whole death of Starbuck and the line that’s supposed to come up in tonight’s episode about “We’re all cylons.”. Of course, the second Starbuck bought it, I thought “she must be a cylon then”. Why spend all those episodes talking about her destiny only to have her die. Putting myself into a writer’s shoes, it just doesn’t make much sense.
But of course you listen to Ron Moore’s podcast and he’s all dramatic about how they felt you know what, she need needs to die. And the part about how the called her up to break the news to her. There’s also the fact that she grew up and had a mother. Of course, one could argue that either
- those memories are fake
- the final 5 cylons are hybrids
What’s stuck in my brain now is the part where the cylon tells her about there being nothing wrong with death and some line about the space in between life and death. Which is of course where the Deanna model of cylon kept trying to get to to see the final 5 cylons.
So I say Starbuck might return tonight and change everything. To what, I have no idea. If they are all cylons, then what? Why race the other cylons to Earth after all. Why continue the series? Unless they take a tack of “well, we’re the good cylons” or something equally ridiculous. I don’t know. Guess I’ll know in an hour or two!
Stargate on Blu-ray
Last night I watchd Stargate on Blu-ray. It looked really good, but I’m wondering why the heck the subtitles didn’t show up when they were talking “Egyptian”. I had to manually turn them on, which of course, then gave me subtitles when they were saying everything. Scanning the web this seems to be an issue with the disk (I hope — it would be unfortunate if it were a blu-ray limitation and would likely flip me to HD-DVD). I’d hate that you couldn’t get partial subtitles on a movie, as you need in this one or possibly at the beginning of Hunt for Red October, etc.
One amusing note was that I started listening to the commentary track for a while and they were very adamant they had nothing to do with the series. That’s sad to me as I really enjoy the series (though since Sci-Fi’s had it it hasn’t been as good). It’s not unexpected though that they don’t like from past stuff I’ve read.
Another interesting thing is that in this version (which I also have the DVD of), they show extra scenes, including glimpses of some petrified ‘gods’ that apparently tried to come through the gate and got embedded in the rock. I had thought they were just buried with the stargate after the revolution, but the commentary says they tried to come through. It certainly isn’t clear from the movie, but I like that explanation a lot better.
And of course, you always have to wonder as you watch it why the computers were already set up for 7 symbols when he cracks the secret of the glyphs. That takes so much away from it. I realize they want to get on their journey quickly, but they could have at least had a scene or two in-between where they figure out how to dial it. I dunno. Something. Anything.
Anyhoo… geektime over.
Yahoo! Widgets 4 Released
We’re done with Yahoo! Widgets 4! Read all about it on our official Widget Blog. This release took a while to get done, but the team is ramped up substantially. We do still have three engineering reqs. to fill, so if you know someone who’s a wiz at doing framework-level development, send them our way. The next couple of releases are really going to change things.
Hey! That ain’t right!
Check out this picture. On the left, Konfabulator/Yahoo! Widgets. On the right, an Apollo sample. As you can see, they stole our images verbatim. Not cool.
I should point out that their Widget takes 26MB of RPRIV on Mac OS X, our Weather Widget takes 3MB. Booyah. Yeah, i know it’s alpha, but still.
It’s been a while…
I’ve been away from blogville lately, and it’s not from lack of caring. I’ve been incredibly busy on our imminent Yahoo! Widgets 4 release. It’s going to be pretty kick-ass if I do say so myself. Does it do everything I’d like it to? No. Will it in the future? You betcha!
But this post isn’t about that. Or anything much really. Just a sign that I’m still here. I was actually just looking through the Flickr ‘Interestingness’ photos on their site, and I have to say, there are some amazing pictures on there. I mean, I have a really good camera and all, but it’s not the equipment that matters. It’s the eye. Some pictures on there just stop me in my tracks. Amazing.
If you don’t know Flickr by now, you really should.
Lenovo Strikes Back!
So, if you read my previous post about my Lenovo fun, you’d know that I had a tablet PC on order. BTW, noone ever responded to my nastygram that I sent them. They are swell people. But anyway, as of late I’ve been thinking maybe I don’t really need a tablet and I should get a larger machine. I’ve been pricing out one of their ‘z’ machines. I figure it’s more powerful and cheaper. So I’ve been going back and forth and back and forth on this because the tablet wasn’t shipping for a while. Yesterday, I decided you know what, maybe I’ll get the z. But I had a few days left before having to do anything about it. I went out last night and got an email on my phone…
The tablet shipped. Fate has spoken.
Battlestar Galactica Theories
Last night I was watching BSG and as they were talking about seeing the faces of the 5 cylons, I all of a sudden had this weird OMG moment where I realized that the temple was called the Temple of Five. It cannot be a coincidence that the same temple where the hybrid tells Baltar and Deanna she can see the faces of the missing 5 cylons has just such a name.
Then I started to think… There are 12 models of cylons. There are 12 Lords of Kobol (12 signs of the zodiac). Um, hello? Now I’m starting to think the gods were cylons and then the humans left them and created a new race of cylon, etc. and this all plays out in some cyclical fashion or something (they keep alluding to the fact that ‘all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again).
What does it all mean? It means that these two races are far more intertwined then we ever would have believed before. Anyway, that’s where my BSG mind is right now. We’ll see how it plays out I guess.
Did I Mention XCode Sucks?
OK, so tonight I’m trying to get some work done. I’ve been annoyed that command double-click doesn’t work, so I figure out code sense isn’t turned on. I turn it on… crash. OK. Restart the app, open the project… crash. Third time’s a charm tho, so I open it again… crash. This is single-handedly the buggiest dev tool I’ve ever used. There was another bug I’m reminded of where I was showing someone how to set command line arguments and I had added a blank argument. Well, every time you went to run the target program, XCode would crash. Surprise! We didn’t realize it was that until I remember we played in there and I turned off the argument (it was checked). Worked fine.
XCode, I hate you. From hell’s heart, I spit at thee!
And now I have to now spend time figuring out what the f*#$ is going on with this piece of crap now. Yay! Time-saver!
UPDATE: The problem I had was related to indexing the project. Recently I tried using indexing again and it all finally seems to be working. Yay! But I still hate it 
Vista on MacBook Pro II
I now have Vista running a bit better on my MacBook Pro. But the journey was long and arduous and fraught with peril.
I didn’t actually set out to get everything working better. In fact, all I really wanted was a slightly larger partition. I was running out of room since I only had made the partition 15GB to start with. I thought resizing it would be easy. After all, there’s a built-in “Complete PC Backup” and restore in Vista. “Sweet! This will be cake!” I said foolishly. I should actually point out that I first tried to use iPartition to just resize things, but it wouldn’t hear of it. So down the backup/restore route I went. (more…)
