HollyKing's Journal

Last Saturday cheesentoast and hollyqueen wanted to go shopping for ladies unmentionables. Being the gentleman that I am I drove them to University Village and then went browsing around on my own. I had successfully navigated several stores without spending money until I got to Barnes & Noble. Even there I was resisting all the temptation... Until a voice floating down from heaven mentioned that a lot of foreign DVDs were 50% off of their regular price...

Now I own the entire Rumpole of the Bailey series starring Leo McKern. I've loved this series since I first caught one on PBS one random night. I've only been able to catch a few here and there and now I have them all. Soon I shall have watched them all.

I had high hopes for Harper's Island. A murder mystery show with only one season so there was no need to worry about cliff hangers and dragging things along to keep people interested in a second season. They could have really stepped out of the TV mold and made something interesting and compelling. I keep seeing the show compared to Twin Peaks, which I find offensive for Twin Peaks. I've watched the two episodes that have been broadcast and I'm struggling to care enough to watch anymore of them.

The big problem the show follows the standard formula. Poor boy who worked summers cleaning boats on an island off of Seattle ends up engaged to the girl of the wealthy snob who owns the boats. They come back to the island for a week long wedding ceremony where people start dying. Oh, and don't forget that some years earlier 6 people were killed and hung from a tree from a madman who is buried in the bush because the island folk wouldn't bury him in consecrated ground. The father of the bride doesn't want his little girl marrying the poor chump so he secretly brings in her ex boyfriend and helps him to try and "save" his daughter. The brother of the groom is the bad sheep. How do we know? His hair is black and he has tattoos. On and on its so cliche it's not even funny.

Oh well... I had hoped for a unique story and some good television. I got a stupid soap opera where they can't kill the cast fast enough for my taste.

I just have to take a moment to say how much I love Rowan Atkinson in The Black Adder. I watched The Archbishop at lunch today and had a great laugh.

Like hollyqueen I am really enjoying Dexter. Unlike her, I haven't read the books. Yet.

I miss good sitcoms. While I enjoy a show with depth and a good story it is nice to be able to sit down and have a good laugh. I was hoping that Welcome to The Captain could be that show. While it has some good laughs they are too few and I find the situations annoying.

I have two suggestions to improve the show. Less Jeffrey Tambor and more Raquel Welch. A lot more Raquel Welch. No, even more than that. In fact you could just oil her up and have her stand on a spinning platform and I would be a very happy boy.

Today the next BallyK disc should be here so I will have some good comedy to watch. No Raquel in it though…

I have had a general feeling of… I’m not sure what word to use. I’m not unhappy and in some areas of my life things are outstanding. There’s just this feeling of “more” that I could accomplish. Having spent the last few nights without sleep I’ve had a bit of time to think about goals and how I spend my time.

I spend too much time playing games like WoW and EVE. The problem isn’t playing games, but that MMORPGs like that don’t end so they keep stealing time I could use for more productive things. I can play console games and give up a week or two as a break between projects. And the DS is always good for those times when I’m waiting around and don’t have enough time to unpack the laptop.

Television doesn’t take too much time because I split the time with other tasks. I catch up on some reading or work on the laptop while watching. With the Tivo I can push off watching if I have more important tasks. The number of shows I watch will probably drop as they are not keeping my interest.

With the time I’ve regained my plan is to:

1. Complete my first Perl module, Math::Interval, and upload it to CPAN. The API is set and the tests pass. I just need to write more documentation.
2. Learn about writing XS modules for Perl to expose the floating-point functions in <fenv.h>. In particular Math::Interval could benefit from fesetround() and fegetround(). I’m sure some other modules could use it too.
3. Update Math::Interval to use the floating-point module. The tricky part of this will be creating tests that correctly deal with the inexact nature of IEEE 784 floating-point math.
4. Write up a talk, article or paper on what I learned about writing Perl modules and dealing with that inexact nature of IEEE 784 floating-point math.

After that my longer range plans include getting some quality time with Parrot and Perl 6.

I’m not sure if I’m ashamed to admit it or not but Ice Road Truckers on the History Channel looks interesting. I’ve added it to the Tivo.

In other TV news the new season of Eureka on [SciFi] starts next month. It’s about damn time. I really enjoyed the first season and have been looking forward to this new one for a long time.

What is it with good shows having year long breaks between seasons? I can understand it with a new show that has a huge amount of production, like The Venture Bros., having a long gap between season one and two. But they know they’ve got us hooked so why did they wait so long after season two was done before they even started working on season three? 2008?!!

I enjoyed The Dresden Files but in a podcast Jim Butcher mentioned that there isn’t even any talk of a second season. He also mentioned that the episodes were shown out of order. Well I’m sure SciFi will release the DVDs eventually and I can watch them in the correct order. Update: They will be released on August 7th according to Amazon.com.

Don’t even get my started on Doctor Who or Torchwood… Thankfully my Netflix queue has plenty of TV shows to keep me busy.