Oh well.
SciFi has announced that BSG season 4 will premiere in January 2008. The season 3 finale aired on Sunday night. Shrug. I'm surprised at how indifferent I feel about this long wait. I was a big fan until about halfway through season 2. The recent episodes have been pretty mediocre. And painfully so.
I threw the viewer ratings of each episode from TV.com into Excel. I can't say it's 'not scientific' because that would use some form of the word 'science' which is tacky at best and blasphemous at worst. But the graph validates my take on the show's decline so I'll go with it. Oh, the trend line is third degree polynomial.
Check out the first 15 seconds and the last 10 seconds of this video from Break.com. The rest isn't very interesting.
When in pursuit of a goal, don't forget to ask a key question: When happens after you achieve the goal?
US foreign policy and CIA goals in the 1980s were to kill Soviets and generally make life miserable for the USSR in Afghanistan. The CIA funded and helped organize the mujahadeen, the anti-Soviet group most effective at fighting the Soviet army.
After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the CIA continued to provide financial and material support to the mujahadeen in its war to topple the Soviet puppet, Najibullah. The US achieved its goal. Within a few years, the mujahadeen and Afghani Arabs toppled Najibullah and took control of most of Afghanistan.
The mujahadeen despised the US and Godless Soviet Union equally. Both existed in a state of jahiliyya. Jahiliyya describes Arab society before the introduction of Islam in the 7th century. It's loosely translated as the unenlightened or primitive state of existence without the divine.
By the early to mid-1990s, Afghanistan was run by a group of virulently anti-US and anti-Western extremists. How's that for myopic policy? What if the US policy makers asked what comes after Najibullah? (Like what comes after Saddam?)
As early as the mid 1980s, Ed McWilliams saw and spoke up about these flaws he saw in US policy. He was effectively fired.
I'd like to think that people are just stupid and not malicious
I take the T to work every day. People stand in the doorway all the time. It bothers me but I'm saving that rant for another day. (OK, I'll vent just a little. One person standing in one doorway on one car can double the time the train is in the station. A six-car train with four sets of doors per car can have a steady flow of people in and out of 23 of those 24 doors. But the 24th door is operating at only half capacity because some dope is standing in the way. That one dope can easily add 5-10 minutes to the commute for several hundred passengers.)
Something special happened a couple of days ago. At Park Street, only one door of the two-door set opened. And someone was standing in the doorway, not behind the door that remained closed but in the path of the one open door. What kind of synapse firing results in a decision like that? And what level cognitive dissonance is required to remain there while person after person squeezes by?
The caption points us to Wegmann's fork. I wonder where it is.
Pic from Cyclingnews.com
It recently came to my attention that a friend of mine has been checking his favorite blogs for updates by actually going to each of the blogs to see if there was anything new.
I gave him a brief introduction to RSS. My Yahoo! was my first RSS aggregator so I'm still partial to the Yahoo explanation of RSS. An RSS aggregator like My Yahoo! allows you to 'subscribe' to blogs or other websites you like and monitor them for updates without having to visit each site.
I switched from My Yahoo! to Netvibes a few months ago. Netvibes offers an AJAX UI (you can click and drag in your browser window - very neat). And easily customizable content modules. I wish it had a global setting with which I could apply one preference to all my modules at once.
Netvibes has a handy Firefox extension that allows you to add content to Netvibes with two mouse clicks. More information on the extension here. Or just download it here. With Netvibes, I subscribe to between 30 and 40 feeds in seven tabs. It's a fantastic site.
Other RSS aggregator options:
- Bloglines
- My Yahoo!
- Google Reader
- Any other favorites out there?
The NPR fund raisers on WBUR have been frequent in recent years. I admire the hosts' ability to sound chipper for hours on end while they ask for money. But they may need a stronger tone.
Now it's Bob Oakes : "We have just a few short minutes before we return to the news. Please call now. Your pledge will be doubled."
It could be Jack pulling pliers from his pocket (and the radio listener would somehow perceive this peril): "We are RUNNING OUT OF TIME."
Apparently, being "like a mini-mall" is a good thing. Good enough to mention. A lot.
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