Seen on LiveJournal, via MacRumors:

I love it. Tomorrow’s announcements at WWDC should be very exciting.

And finally, the date for the continuation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series on BBC Radio 4:

September 21

Fans of the original series must, must, MUST listen to the preview audio clip. It’s got mostly the same actors as the original series 25 years ago. Sadly, Peter Jones, the voice of “The Book,” is no longer with us. You can hear their solution to the problem in the clip, and it’s brilliant.

[edit 7/26/04: fixed moved link]

of sorts…

It’s exceedingly rare, but once in a great while, a spammer comes along who can make you really feel special about yourself:

Not quite a week late, I finally got to watch the season 3 finale of “Enterprise” tonight. Okay, that was fweakin’ weird. The last five minutes of that show certainly left things in a completely unexpected way.

Now there are rumors out there that Brannon Braga, writer of a few great Trek episodes and a boatload of average ones and a rather large handful of crappy ones, may be taking a back seat for season 4. Which suits a lot of the Trek faithful just fine. Taking a more active role will be one Manny Coto, who has penned a good number of quality Enterprise episodes this season, so things may be on the rise.

Still, there’s that bizarre season 3 ending, and poor Manny’s left holding the bag. Well don’t fret Mr. Coto, I’ve got Season 4, Episode 1, Act 1 all sketched out:

T’Pol: Primitive Earth airplanes? Are you positive?

Trip: Shuttlepod’s got the bullet holes to match. What the hell’s going on?

T’Pol: Ensign Mayweather, scan for any remaining anomalies, particularly temporal in nature.

Mayweather: I’m detecting one off the starboard bow. But it doesn’t look related to the spheres.

T’Pol (looking in her little scanner thingy): It’s increasing in size and approaching the ship.

Admiral William T. Riker: SHIELDS UP! RED ALERT!

Trip: Who the hell are you?

Daniels: My apologies. I think I can explain… If you’ll just give me a moment.

[Daniels fiddles with the PADD he’s holding. Riker disppears, and is replaced by a Gorn.]

Gorn: Arrrrr!

Daniels: No, that’s not it either. Hold on.

[The Gorn disappears, and is replaced by Archer, who is wearing a flowery Hawaiian shirt and holding a coconut containing some enjoyable beverage and a little paper umbrella]

Archer: Aw, Daniels, I was just starting to feel relaxed.

Trip: Will someone PLEASE tell me what the hell is going on?

Daniels: My apologies everyone. As soon as the Xindi sphere exploded, I managed to remove Captain Archer from the timeline. I figured he needed a vacation, so I sent him to Tahiti for a week.

Archer: Sort of.

[Daniels stabs at the buttons on his PADD]

Daniels: Unfortunately this THING isn’t working very well, and he went on a few… detours. As, I understand, have all of you. Anyway, everything’s back to normal now. I think. Well, I must be going. Captain, you probably won’t see me again. It’s been nice working with you.

T’Pol: What about the “Temporal Cold War?”

Daniels: Oh, that little thing? We fixed that all up last week. I thought I mentioned it.

Archer: No, but I’m glad to hear it. Now if you don’t mind, we’d like to go home now.

Daniels: You got it. [Disappears]

Hoshi: We’re being hailed by Starfleet!

Archer: On screen.

Admiral Forest: Congratulations to all of you. I have new orders for Enterprise. She is to dock at the shipyards for a complete overhaul while her crew relaxes on Earth.

Trip: About damn time!

Admiral Forest: But don’t relax too much. Once the Enterprise is back to 100 percent, we’re sending you to the Tellarite homeworld. It seems they’re having some difficulty with the Romulans.

Lt. Commander Worf: Romulans. They are without honor!

[commercial break]

Manny, twenty bucks and it’s all yours.

[update 10/25/2005: Nearly a year and a half later, and I just came up with the final line to this script. Had to come back and add it in.]

AT&T Wireless has just sent me a brand new cell phone to replace my T68i. How nice of them! Except that unlike my old phone, this one doesn’t have Bluetooth, and can’t synchronize with iSync. Rather than rant about it myself, I’ll let these links do it. Grr.

You know, the web designers of sports.yahoo.com apparently wouldn’t know a Mac if you beaned them in the nose with an 17″ TiBook. I can’t think of any other explanation for them only supporting the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, a browser which hasn’t had a major update since it was released in 2001. I’d suspect backroom dealings with Microsoft, but even the Microsofties have abandoned development of the browser, so what would be the point of restricting access to modern browsers like Safari and Mozilla?

In the past year, the only improvement I can find of the audio streaming broadcasts Yahoo provides is that Windows Media Player for Mac is now actually able to open the streaming files, rather than claiming that the “codec is not supported.” Granted, being able to open the files is infinitely better than not being able to open them, but now the challenge is to find the magic sequence of links that takes you to the file itself. I find a page with a list of games available to listen to. I click on the audio icon next to “North Carolina vs. Illinois”. Do I get to listen? No. I get: “Follow North Carolina all season long!” Advertising their broadcasts. I click on “You are already signed up for College Pack”, which is the only available link on the page. I get a page with a list of games available to listen to. Looks familiar. I keep this up for ten minutes or so trying to see if there’s a link I’ve missed somewhere. Eventually I give up.

With about ten minutes left in the game, I go back and try logging out and logging back in again. Bingo. Media window comes up. As usual I have to reload the page twice to get the stream to actually start playing, and there are no player controls anywhere in the window.

I ain’t paying $4.95 a month for this crap. [edit 5/31/04: This is, sadly, a complete lie. I eventually caved. But I wasn’t happy about it, dammit!]

I wonder if Yahoo has exclusive internet broadcast rights? Seems to me that UNC, which, by the way, pioneered live internet streaming broadcasts, should be able to offer it too. I’d forgive all of UNC’s various administrative sins and humbly join the General Alumni Association if they’d make basketball games available free as a benefit. Hear that, GAA? You know my price.

So, Mac geek that I am, I went to the Panther party at the local Mac dealer Friday night to get OS X 10.3. Backed up the whole system and installed it after work on Saturday. So far, I haven’t encountered too many bugs, though I did notice the Finder has trouble scrolling horizontally if you’ve got a QuickTime movie or sound file playing as a preview. Although it’s slick and has a lot of nifty new features, sadly I can’t think of any compelling reason to recommend we buy it for our computers at work… at least not yet. I’m sure some reason will appear before 10.4 arrives.

So anyway, it means that I’ve got Panther on my G4. As for my old 6500/250: