Monday Random Foo!
Sep. 25th, 2006 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Time for another big random foo.
Had a semi-dream, except it wasn't so much a dream as a thought upon still waking while half-asleep. Not sure what caused me to think of it (maybe I had a dream related to it that I have no memory of). Might already exist. Probably does, in fact. But an idea for a business that basically ties an e-mail address to a physical. A remailer, so to speak - you sign up for their service, and people can mail you physical stuff by addressing it to myemailaddress@mydomain.com (or whatever your e-mail is), with the address being the address of the company (which ideally would be something easy to remember). Then all received mail gets extra packaged and sent on to the real address. I suspect you'd have to pay for the postage of remailing (in addition to a small fee for the service itself). So people could send you mail without them knowing your actual address.
Although I suppose one could mail a GPS tracker to an email addy and track you down, theoretically, so it wouldn't be terribly secure.
And I suppose an unscrupulous company would set it up so you don't even have to sign up for an account - people can mail any email address, and when physical mail arrives an email is sent saying 'you have mail on hold at our distributer. Please pay for remailing postage or it will be marked return to sender'. Then it would encourage people to send mail to their email friends using them. Or if extra unscrupulous might even have something junkish mailed deliberately with an e-mail address label so they could send out the email and get curious people to pay for it to be passed on, but really it's worthless - but the company claims since it never opens mail to inspect the contents, it had no way of knowing the message was junk.
Meh. I have a gut feeling that something generally along these lines could be big if marketed right and set up right, but I'm not going to do it, too much of a hassle for me.
But if someone steals this idea and makes billions from it, all I ask is a small .1% of net profits for life!
Have to go to my stepsister's wedding on Saturday.
Moving on to TV! Well, the first really big TV week of the new season is over. Quick, spoiler-free bites:
Simpsons has been meh as it has been for the last few years. This week's was especially dumb. Family Guy/American Dad was okay but I think I've gotten a bit tired of them. I mainly just watch for the random sudden jokes.
Prison Break's been new for a while, but still entertaining despite having already escaped. I think I've totally called where the show's going next, based on the commercial
I saw last night. Tonight is the debut of HEROES, too. 4400's also running the latest season here, but it's just started. About the same level of quality as previous seasons, although I'm a bit annoyed at the sudden change in the cast.
Tuesday... was there anything on Tuesday? Veronica Mars reruns, but that doesn't count. Boston Legal, I guess, but I've kinda gotten sick of that, too. I'll watch it so long as nothing else is on at that timeslot. Oh, House, okay, but it's also the type of show I could take or leave, and would if anything else happened to be on at 8.
Wednesday we had the premiere of Jericho. I already saw it online, but I'm cautiously optimistic about it. It's pleasant enough - sure, it hits a lot of post apocalyptic cliches, but I can enjoy them. And it stars Skeet Ulrich, the male Johnny Depp. Have to see how it goes. Oh, and I'm annoyed that I keep seeing people argue it as a loose adaptation of Alas Babylon. Okay, sure, the basic concept is similar (town has to live through a nuclear apocalypse while luckily being spared the direct blast), but none of the characters are even remotely similar. 'Inspired by', _maybe_, but in no sense of the word an adaptation.
Been watching Justice at 9 a little, but I know that's going to stop as soon as LOST starts so I'm not getting attached, even if it does have Victor Garber who is ultra cool.
Thursday: My name is Earl/The Office make a good pair for Thursday at 8, and saves me from having to watch Survivor out of boredom. Interesting twist on how they handled the Office cliffhanger from last year. Grey's was okay, but nothing really special, and I think the flashbacks on the whole detracted from the ep more than they added (especially since one of them seemed to violate established continuity, a big nono in my book!).
Friday there was nothing new on, another S1 Veronica Mars rerun on WTV which was enjoyable of course.
And that wraps up the week, save the Stargates which I'll talk about a little later in the post with more spoilers. Oh and my planned TV watching schedule for the fall:
Sunday:
8pm-9:30pm Simpsons/American Dad/Family Guy
10 (maybe, if it stays on this timeslot): Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (I think a Canadian channel plays it Sundays though the American channel didn't seem to).
Monday:
8: Prison Break
9: Heroes
10: The 4400
11-1 (well, I'll be recording it and watching it the next morning): Deadwood. They just started airing this from Season 1 here, a couple weeks back, 2 episodes per week. I'm enjoying it quite a bit actually, more than I figured I would.
Tuesday:
Schedule's not entirely set. Veronica Mars S3 hopefully if I can get it live and not download it. And maybe House and Boston Legal if I can fit them around it.
Wednesday:
8pm: Jericho
9pm: LOST
10pm: ?.. I'll check out 'The Nine' after Lost, but I'm not optimistic about it being worth watching. You know what would have gone perfect here? A weekly zombie apocalypse series.
Thursday:
8/8:30- My Name is Earl/The Office
9: Grey's Anatomy
10: Probably Stargate reruns
Friday:
So far seeming like a dead night.
9pm: Veronica Mars S1 reruns
10pm: Numb3rs
Saturday:
7pm: Supernatural
9pm: Battlestar Galactica
Book Foo!
Finished: Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card (reread)
Started: Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card (reread, at home occasionally)
Dies the Fire, by S.M. Stirling (reread, Friday and Sunday at work/while walking)
Still Reading: Swan Songs: The Complete Hooded Swan collection, by Brian Stableford (reread, Wednesdays)
Rereading DTF in preperation for reading the sequel for the first time. Anyway, no real new specific thoughts on Shadow Puppets, and I don't think I'll do a selected quote either I must have forgotten the page number of the quote I was thinking of using, nor could I remember the general gist so I could try to find the location. This is already getting to be a pretty long entry, so I'll move on.
If the world were chocolate, and a shark came up and tried to bite me, I don't know that I'd say, "I'm chocolate, I invite you.". If anything, I'd try to bite him (and hey, why the hell wasn't the shark chocolate, anyway?)
Stargate Thoughts! The Midseason finale of SG1 S10 and Atlantis S3. Spoilers ahoy!
More spoiler space for those reading from inside a cut...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
So we had two part one of twos. Stargate had the crew looking for Merlin's weapon by undertaking a quest full of simple logic puzzles (it's amazing how often the fate of the galaxy comes down to an Indiana Jones style adventure!). Really, the plot was a little more silly than I'd like (you'd think lots of people would have figured out the tests, including both Baal and the Ori's superhooker). But the journey there was enjoyable enough if you put that aside.
Atlantis was better, both giving us a RDA guest appearance, some cool technical extrapolations with the transgalactic gate network, and a story with some meat on it, with the Atlantis crew being forced to go home (if they somehow undo it in the second part with 'it was all a replicator delusion, I will be ultra-pissed off, but I'm thinking that's not going to happen).
The galactic gate network is a cool idea, incorporating elements from previous episodes (the forwarding macro), although security-wise it must be a bit tricky, both for the reasons stated in the episode, and others. For example, the Iris. Since the gate system relies on the gates forwarding the matter stream to each other in sequence, you can't have a direct communications channel between Midway and the SGC (or Atlantis command). It would only get forwarded after the gate closes. Which means you're already en route, and have to trust that your gate code was received and that you're not going to be smooshed. Although, I suppose you could set up a protocol where you dial in first but don't go through, then the dial back and send a recorded data burst back confirming, and then you can go through. Wasn't stated in the episode, but I guess that'd work.
A little more tricky is how they handle addressing - addresses are supposed to correspond to the gate's location in space, roughly speaking. I suppose the correlative updates could be deliberately uploaded to the gate network making, for a few specific gates, the gate's natural address correspond to a widely different location in space (out of the galaxy, in face).
One would think they'd be a little more worried about people other than them using the gate network to cross galaxies, since there's nothing in the concept that inherently requires the gate to start from either Earth or Atlantis. Theoretically anybody could get into the intergalactic gate network. However, I don't think it's as bad as that, since in the space between galaxies, the gates probably only have the power to connect to the nearest gates in the link. Which means they'd have to have the address of every gate along the way, in order, to make the trip. For Earthers that's easy, because they designed the system, but for everyone else, the farthest they'll likely get is stranded out in the void (well, they could always get back, I suppose). So it's not _so_ bad as long as the addresses aren't compromised. However, to make it more secure, one would want to put irises on at least some of the intermediate gates, so that if a special code (changeable by Daedalus at will) isn't input, a trip will fail, even if they're skipping by Earth and going somewhere else in the Milky Way galaxy. I like the idea of the midway space station being under construction, though.
Yes, I realize this was ultra-geeky of me, but I'm a geek, and I find examining the technical side of SG's ideas a lot of fun).
Now, back to the plot. I would have been a little more wary of the Lantians claims of being who they say they are, mainly because they decelerated so fast upon detecting the Puddlejumper. If they could decelerate fast, they could accelerate fast, which means their whole 'travelling so close to light speed', _could_ have been started at any time - hyperdrive out to intergalactic space, then accelerate to near lightspeed so it can be spotted. I'd be worried they were Pegasus Replicators trying to get their way into Atlantis the easy way. Now, I don't think that's where they're going (since otherwise allowing a handful of Earthers to stay behind, and then faking a Replicator attack would seem a little pointless), but it's still something I'd be worried about from the getgo (and if that is what happened, I'll be disappointed). But the real nutmeat of the plot was everybody being forced to go home suddenly, and that was handled pretty well, and it was nice to see everyone going their separate ways, and trying to keep in touch (though I would have liked a little more cool stuff like Rodney visiting his sister, or something). But hey, it made me smile, and the cliffhanger was a little better than SG1's too, so Atlantis wins this week.
And that's it. End spoiler space!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Why does Dairy Queen come up with much cooler sounding burgers than the regular burger places? And why are there no Dairy Queens anywhere near me? Well, there probably are some near me theoretically, but I define 'near me' as being 'along any of my regular routes, such that I don't have to detour for more than a minute to reach the entrance'.
Had a semi-dream, except it wasn't so much a dream as a thought upon still waking while half-asleep. Not sure what caused me to think of it (maybe I had a dream related to it that I have no memory of). Might already exist. Probably does, in fact. But an idea for a business that basically ties an e-mail address to a physical. A remailer, so to speak - you sign up for their service, and people can mail you physical stuff by addressing it to myemailaddress@mydomain.com (or whatever your e-mail is), with the address being the address of the company (which ideally would be something easy to remember). Then all received mail gets extra packaged and sent on to the real address. I suspect you'd have to pay for the postage of remailing (in addition to a small fee for the service itself). So people could send you mail without them knowing your actual address.
Although I suppose one could mail a GPS tracker to an email addy and track you down, theoretically, so it wouldn't be terribly secure.
And I suppose an unscrupulous company would set it up so you don't even have to sign up for an account - people can mail any email address, and when physical mail arrives an email is sent saying 'you have mail on hold at our distributer. Please pay for remailing postage or it will be marked return to sender'. Then it would encourage people to send mail to their email friends using them. Or if extra unscrupulous might even have something junkish mailed deliberately with an e-mail address label so they could send out the email and get curious people to pay for it to be passed on, but really it's worthless - but the company claims since it never opens mail to inspect the contents, it had no way of knowing the message was junk.
Meh. I have a gut feeling that something generally along these lines could be big if marketed right and set up right, but I'm not going to do it, too much of a hassle for me.
But if someone steals this idea and makes billions from it, all I ask is a small .1% of net profits for life!
Have to go to my stepsister's wedding on Saturday.
Moving on to TV! Well, the first really big TV week of the new season is over. Quick, spoiler-free bites:
Simpsons has been meh as it has been for the last few years. This week's was especially dumb. Family Guy/American Dad was okay but I think I've gotten a bit tired of them. I mainly just watch for the random sudden jokes.
Prison Break's been new for a while, but still entertaining despite having already escaped. I think I've totally called where the show's going next, based on the commercial
I saw last night. Tonight is the debut of HEROES, too. 4400's also running the latest season here, but it's just started. About the same level of quality as previous seasons, although I'm a bit annoyed at the sudden change in the cast.
Tuesday... was there anything on Tuesday? Veronica Mars reruns, but that doesn't count. Boston Legal, I guess, but I've kinda gotten sick of that, too. I'll watch it so long as nothing else is on at that timeslot. Oh, House, okay, but it's also the type of show I could take or leave, and would if anything else happened to be on at 8.
Wednesday we had the premiere of Jericho. I already saw it online, but I'm cautiously optimistic about it. It's pleasant enough - sure, it hits a lot of post apocalyptic cliches, but I can enjoy them. And it stars Skeet Ulrich, the male Johnny Depp. Have to see how it goes. Oh, and I'm annoyed that I keep seeing people argue it as a loose adaptation of Alas Babylon. Okay, sure, the basic concept is similar (town has to live through a nuclear apocalypse while luckily being spared the direct blast), but none of the characters are even remotely similar. 'Inspired by', _maybe_, but in no sense of the word an adaptation.
Been watching Justice at 9 a little, but I know that's going to stop as soon as LOST starts so I'm not getting attached, even if it does have Victor Garber who is ultra cool.
Thursday: My name is Earl/The Office make a good pair for Thursday at 8, and saves me from having to watch Survivor out of boredom. Interesting twist on how they handled the Office cliffhanger from last year. Grey's was okay, but nothing really special, and I think the flashbacks on the whole detracted from the ep more than they added (especially since one of them seemed to violate established continuity, a big nono in my book!).
Friday there was nothing new on, another S1 Veronica Mars rerun on WTV which was enjoyable of course.
And that wraps up the week, save the Stargates which I'll talk about a little later in the post with more spoilers. Oh and my planned TV watching schedule for the fall:
Sunday:
8pm-9:30pm Simpsons/American Dad/Family Guy
10 (maybe, if it stays on this timeslot): Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (I think a Canadian channel plays it Sundays though the American channel didn't seem to).
Monday:
8: Prison Break
9: Heroes
10: The 4400
11-1 (well, I'll be recording it and watching it the next morning): Deadwood. They just started airing this from Season 1 here, a couple weeks back, 2 episodes per week. I'm enjoying it quite a bit actually, more than I figured I would.
Tuesday:
Schedule's not entirely set. Veronica Mars S3 hopefully if I can get it live and not download it. And maybe House and Boston Legal if I can fit them around it.
Wednesday:
8pm: Jericho
9pm: LOST
10pm: ?.. I'll check out 'The Nine' after Lost, but I'm not optimistic about it being worth watching. You know what would have gone perfect here? A weekly zombie apocalypse series.
Thursday:
8/8:30- My Name is Earl/The Office
9: Grey's Anatomy
10: Probably Stargate reruns
Friday:
So far seeming like a dead night.
9pm: Veronica Mars S1 reruns
10pm: Numb3rs
Saturday:
7pm: Supernatural
9pm: Battlestar Galactica
Book Foo!
Finished: Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card (reread)
Started: Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card (reread, at home occasionally)
Dies the Fire, by S.M. Stirling (reread, Friday and Sunday at work/while walking)
Still Reading: Swan Songs: The Complete Hooded Swan collection, by Brian Stableford (reread, Wednesdays)
Rereading DTF in preperation for reading the sequel for the first time. Anyway, no real new specific thoughts on Shadow Puppets, and I don't think I'll do a selected quote either I must have forgotten the page number of the quote I was thinking of using, nor could I remember the general gist so I could try to find the location. This is already getting to be a pretty long entry, so I'll move on.
If the world were chocolate, and a shark came up and tried to bite me, I don't know that I'd say, "I'm chocolate, I invite you.". If anything, I'd try to bite him (and hey, why the hell wasn't the shark chocolate, anyway?)
Stargate Thoughts! The Midseason finale of SG1 S10 and Atlantis S3. Spoilers ahoy!
More spoiler space for those reading from inside a cut...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
So we had two part one of twos. Stargate had the crew looking for Merlin's weapon by undertaking a quest full of simple logic puzzles (it's amazing how often the fate of the galaxy comes down to an Indiana Jones style adventure!). Really, the plot was a little more silly than I'd like (you'd think lots of people would have figured out the tests, including both Baal and the Ori's superhooker). But the journey there was enjoyable enough if you put that aside.
Atlantis was better, both giving us a RDA guest appearance, some cool technical extrapolations with the transgalactic gate network, and a story with some meat on it, with the Atlantis crew being forced to go home (if they somehow undo it in the second part with 'it was all a replicator delusion, I will be ultra-pissed off, but I'm thinking that's not going to happen).
The galactic gate network is a cool idea, incorporating elements from previous episodes (the forwarding macro), although security-wise it must be a bit tricky, both for the reasons stated in the episode, and others. For example, the Iris. Since the gate system relies on the gates forwarding the matter stream to each other in sequence, you can't have a direct communications channel between Midway and the SGC (or Atlantis command). It would only get forwarded after the gate closes. Which means you're already en route, and have to trust that your gate code was received and that you're not going to be smooshed. Although, I suppose you could set up a protocol where you dial in first but don't go through, then the dial back and send a recorded data burst back confirming, and then you can go through. Wasn't stated in the episode, but I guess that'd work.
A little more tricky is how they handle addressing - addresses are supposed to correspond to the gate's location in space, roughly speaking. I suppose the correlative updates could be deliberately uploaded to the gate network making, for a few specific gates, the gate's natural address correspond to a widely different location in space (out of the galaxy, in face).
One would think they'd be a little more worried about people other than them using the gate network to cross galaxies, since there's nothing in the concept that inherently requires the gate to start from either Earth or Atlantis. Theoretically anybody could get into the intergalactic gate network. However, I don't think it's as bad as that, since in the space between galaxies, the gates probably only have the power to connect to the nearest gates in the link. Which means they'd have to have the address of every gate along the way, in order, to make the trip. For Earthers that's easy, because they designed the system, but for everyone else, the farthest they'll likely get is stranded out in the void (well, they could always get back, I suppose). So it's not _so_ bad as long as the addresses aren't compromised. However, to make it more secure, one would want to put irises on at least some of the intermediate gates, so that if a special code (changeable by Daedalus at will) isn't input, a trip will fail, even if they're skipping by Earth and going somewhere else in the Milky Way galaxy. I like the idea of the midway space station being under construction, though.
Yes, I realize this was ultra-geeky of me, but I'm a geek, and I find examining the technical side of SG's ideas a lot of fun).
Now, back to the plot. I would have been a little more wary of the Lantians claims of being who they say they are, mainly because they decelerated so fast upon detecting the Puddlejumper. If they could decelerate fast, they could accelerate fast, which means their whole 'travelling so close to light speed', _could_ have been started at any time - hyperdrive out to intergalactic space, then accelerate to near lightspeed so it can be spotted. I'd be worried they were Pegasus Replicators trying to get their way into Atlantis the easy way. Now, I don't think that's where they're going (since otherwise allowing a handful of Earthers to stay behind, and then faking a Replicator attack would seem a little pointless), but it's still something I'd be worried about from the getgo (and if that is what happened, I'll be disappointed). But the real nutmeat of the plot was everybody being forced to go home suddenly, and that was handled pretty well, and it was nice to see everyone going their separate ways, and trying to keep in touch (though I would have liked a little more cool stuff like Rodney visiting his sister, or something). But hey, it made me smile, and the cliffhanger was a little better than SG1's too, so Atlantis wins this week.
And that's it. End spoiler space!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Why does Dairy Queen come up with much cooler sounding burgers than the regular burger places? And why are there no Dairy Queens anywhere near me? Well, there probably are some near me theoretically, but I define 'near me' as being 'along any of my regular routes, such that I don't have to detour for more than a minute to reach the entrance'.
