Category: scifi

RiffTrax Live in SD

The RiffTrax guys will be doing a live event during the San Diego con this year, riffing on Plan 9 From Outer Space, at the Balboa Theater. This would likely be quite fun, though it’s on Saturday night, and there’s going to be a lot of other stuff happening on Saturday night. Of course, since this is a ticketed, off-site, event, this might be a good way to escape the craziness of the convention center for a little while.

free Doctor Who ebooks

The BBC has a bunch of Doctor Who ebooks available for free download. So that’s another three or four free books I’ve got loaded onto my Kindle now. I don’t know if any of them are any good, but they didn’t cost me anything, and they aren’t taking up much disk space, so no big problem there, right?

Life on Mars playlist

Life on Mars is a great little show on the BBC. I think season two is supposed to air on BBC America soon. They use a lot of great old 70s rock on the show, so, since I’ve been messing around with iMixes, I decided to try and create an iMix with all the music from season one. I used the episode guide on the BBC site to get the names of all the songs they used — there’s about 50 songs, over just eight episodes. Some are well-known, like “Baba O’Riley” and “White Room”, some are a bit more obscure. I managed to create an iMix with 45 of the songs. Here it is:

(Or rather, here it was. Embedding iTunes mixes doesn’t seem to work anymore.)

I only had about 5 of these songs in my collection already. I used up the last of my iTunes credit to buy a few more of them, and I’ll probably buy the rest by cashing in some American Express points for a new iTunes credit.

Listening to some of this stuff, I’ve definitely gained some new respect for bands like Thin Lizzy, T-Rex, and Deep Purple. Go ahead, laugh all you want, but this stuff is fun to listen to!

post 1001 – inbox zero

When I left work today, I’d gotten down to about 10 messages in my Notes inbox. Everything else was filed away into appropriate folders. I decided to pull up Notes on my iBook just now, and clear out the rest of my stuff. I have now achieved an empty inbox, for probably the first time since 1997, when we first installed a Notes server. Yay!

I did a pretty good weekly review today too. Probably closer to an ideal weekly review than I’ve done before, but still not quite what I should be doing.

On an unrelated topic, I picked up the Heroes season one DVD set today at Target. I was trying to resist it, since I already have all the episodes on my computer via iTunes, but Target had a special edition set with four notecards illustrated by Tim Sale, and I’m a sucker for Tim Sale stuff.

Heroes on Amazon

According to this article, new episodes of Heroes will be available on Amazon Unbox rather than iTunes this season. I bought the first season from iTunes, and I might find myself looking to buy digital versions of the show this year, too. It’s nice that they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot and choose not to offer it at all, which is what it was starting to look like after the iTunes thing fell through last week. I’ve rented a few movies from Unbox (downloaded to my TiVo) and the quality is OK. I imagine the quality on Heroes would be similar to the iTunes quality. It’s kind of annoying that Unbox doesn’t work on Macs though, so I wouldn’t be able to watch Heroes on my Mac if I got it from Unbox.

Hitchhiker’s Guide

“This must be Thursday,” said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” — see Wikiquote for many more Hitchhiker’s quotes.

I started listening to the audiobook version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy today. It’s read by Stephen Fry. He does a great job with it. I last read the book back in high school, probably, but I still remember a lot of the dialogue. Great stuff. It really made the commute into work today much more pleasant than usual.

And Stephen Fry lends his voice to this alarm clock too, which is pretty amusing.