Shows, Shows

So I touched on the fact that we’ve got some new shows coming up but I didn’t elaborate enough it now seems to me. The Walking Dead is stumbling back into the fray after a rather long mid-season hiatus. Season 2 resumes February 12th. AMC is also letting us know that its flagship show, Mad Men, is coming back starting March 4th. The Killing, AMC’s “so-so” show, is also returning, April 1st, after intriguing and disappointing fans with its first season and cliffhanger/let-down finale.

HBO’s new show, led by David Milch (Deadwood, NYPD Blue), starts up THIS Sunday starring Dustin Hoffman and a slew of other talent. I noticed a lot of familiar Deadwood faces while watching the previews/trailers.

I should also point out that Touch’s pilot is freely available for download via iTunes, a testament to Fox’s faith that Touch, if awarded a big enough audience, could be a big-ass hit.

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State of the Union

Here’s an excellent summary of the SOTU address if you’re interested. I actually didn’t watch this year, though I normally do watch. I think Obama is sitting really well in foreign policy, especially with the recent raid into Somalia and the killing of Bin Laden. The economy, while not improving as quickly as we’d all like, is improving. And let’s not forget how bad it was when Obama inherited it from “Dubya”.

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The Value of an Apple

(Reuters) – Apple Inc is well-known to be the world’s largest technology company by market value, and rivals Exxon Mobil Corp as the largest U.S. corporation by that measure.

On Tuesday, it took the wraps off another stellar set of numbers, pulverizing Wall Street’s targets on everything from earnings to margins and sending its shares 10 percent higher in after-hours trading.

Wow. What an achievement.

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New Show, Touch

There’s a new show PREVIEWING (what the hell is up with a 1-hour preview?) tonight on FOX called Touch and if the previews are to be believed there is a lot of possibility here. Imagine a child that can see all the quantum entanglements, the presence of Time as it really is. Looks like this show could be worthy of our attention, or at least our DVR’s for a while. Here’s a link and be sure to check out the available videos. If you’re intrigued by science (particularly the microcosm, quantum physics, etc.) you would do well to give this one a chance. I just hope I don’t watch a few of these and wind up eating my own words!

Cheers,
MG

 

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Ruby, Ruby on the Wall

So I’ve done a bit of investing in Ruby (specifically Ruby on Rails) now–not here or anywhere where you can see such claims, mind you. I am developing on the Mac (and oh yes, even that is better!) and enjoying it immensely. There are just some things the UNIX crowd can do far better (God, did I just say that? Seems heretical coming from this staunch .NET advocate). Anyway, I have a small set of eBooks, a TekPub video subscription download, and my development environment is all set to go. The first “Hello, World” was long ago accomplished so I’m moving onto other things, namely some scaffolding techniques and then onto the real nitty-gritty of things, test-driven development, etc.

Here’s an interesting aside: Steve Jobs (and hence many of the Mac product line) leaned in the Buddhist direction; and, Ruby, the language I am currently (albeit slowly) learning is a native of Japan, birthplace of modern Zen–non-Western, that is. This is merely a coincidence, I assure you.

More importantly, it should be noted, this newfound interest (not really new so much as recently acted upon) is as a direct result of having been thrown onto a project a while back that sullied me against coding. Not .NET in general, but coding itself.  I had to do something to try and ramp up the fun again and this is one of my attempts. I need to make it enjoyable again and whether it means I change frameworks, either to Ruby or Objective-C, or eventually return home to C#, it doesn’t matter. FUN is the end-game I’m focused on here. I don’t want to code-for-a-living right now so much as I want to just have fun with it.

http://rubyonrails.org/

Cheers,
MG

 

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Occupy This

I’m not certain but I know that my ballpark is right. I paid in about 30%, probably more last year in taxes. This guy, Mr. Millionaire-Republican-frontrunner paid far less despite making a giant stack of cash. Fair? You decide.

 

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Site Performance Issues

I am aware of the major lag getting the content to load and will be addressing that with GoDaddy today as soon as I can. I’ve done everything I can do to make things as efficient as possible but this is shaping up to be a sluggish server issue and it’s unacceptable.

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Reading

Enjoying the hell out of this one by Stephen Batchelor. I’ve read his previous book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, and am equally impressed with this, his semi-auto-biography.

From “Publisher’s Weekly”: Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997) described a secular approach to the Eastern philosophy stripped of doctrines such as karma and rebirth; how a young British monk ordained in the Tibetan tradition turned into a Buddhist atheist is revealed in this new book. On the dharma trail in India and Korea, and later as a lay resident at the nonsectarian Sharpham community in England, Batchelor was beset by doubts about traditional Buddhist teachings. Finally convinced that present-day forms of Buddhism have moved far beyond what founder Gotama had intended, Batchelor embarked on a study of the Pali canon (very early Buddhist texts) to find out what the Buddha’s original message might have been. Batchelor’s own story of conversion is woven effortlessly with his analysis of Buddhist teachings and a 2003 pilgrimage to Indian sites important in the Buddha’s life. He is candid about his disillusionments with institutionalized Buddhism without engaging in another new atheist broadside against religion. While Batchelor may exaggerate the novelty of his Buddhism without beliefs stance, this multifaceted account of one Buddhist’s search for enlightenment is richly absorbing. (Mar. 2) 
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I typically read two books at the same time (sometimes more), a practice that really needs to be discontinued. Often, though, I’ll be reading a non-fiction piece alongside a fiction one. In that vein, I am also enjoying Stephen King’s latest, “11/22/63″. Here’s a great page which gives a potential reader the low-down on the book.

 

 

 

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