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TV: Battlestar Galactica is over
Mon, 23 Mar 2009

This is the part of the programme where I bag on a TV show. The following is all spoilers (insomuch as I can spoil what they have already spoiled... zing!)

Now, before I get into it I must admit that I've greatly enjoyed much of the show the last few years; its has generally pretty tight writing, and they managed to even make you think they'd plotted a lot of the action out in advance. I will accept (though loathe) that the studio made them write in a bunch of filler, and I will accept that like a lot of this new style of show the last few years that are mystery, character and high drama driven (Lost, Desparate Housewives, etc and so on) that pacing is a difficult thing. All in all, an excellent and gritty science fiction show that I'd recommend to others. I will miss it, but I'm glad its over so I can have a piece of free time back :)

It is hard to end a dark show since you naturally want to end on a light foot; it is hard to end a show that has primarily been based in 'mystery' and fear of the unknown, since its a big switch to suddenly start revealing things without it just looking like you could stitch the first and last episode together and ignore the rest. You don't play a chess match for 19 hours and then switch it to checkers at the end .. the transition is tough. But mostly I think the writers got very good, got into the flow, of writing dark and gritty and when it finally came to spinning a happy thread at the end.. they just didn't know how to keep the gravity. To keep that tense and tight writing. They opened the door into fairy land and well through it. They admitted by their lack of tight finish to "we didn't plan it so much ahead, we're just going to cap off as much as we can and hope for the best!"

Spoilers!

I can sort of deal with the explanation that the two 'ghost' characters were just that - angels from god or some really advanced speces or whatever. Seems like a biiiig set up with a cop out ending, but okay. Seems like they were a little too personally motivated or felt (perhaps assumed by the watcher?) to be on one side or another, but .. okay, I can deal with that hand.

I'm not really sure I can accept that these little dreams and visions that characters have been having the whole show, that have been built up into something large, that really they just were planted by God or whatever to help the characters do a 20 foot walk at the end. Thats it? Find the girl, walk her through a door, you're done. Great, thanks, glad you set that upf ro 5 years. OKay, sure, maybe all this ghost and vision business was to guide Baltar to stick around and give a speach at the end.. but weak sauce. Course, Cavil decided it was all a trick at the end, so the speach was for nothing, and thus the whole multi-year plotline was basicly for naight. Yay! Seems the writers sure didn't know how big a part these visions were to play in the end, but they did know how it would play out.. so write it big, and then.. fizzle.

After battling for several years for the very survival of the species, they all decide to just give up all technology and rough it with some primitivies. A romantic idea for sure, especially after the hardships endured... but realistic? Ignoring for now the fact that bad guys were left out in space (and the Centurians were trusted to not come back and exterminate everyone), you're a society fighting for survival who just says 'hell, shit, lets destroy our ships and gear, and see if we can survive the first winter and guess which berries are safe to eat.' Seriously? We're supposed to believe that would happen? And that everyone goes along with it? Sounds like they wanted to write another half season about this, but just rushed it into a 5 minute sequence at the end since they didn't plan their timing out many episodes in advance. Maybe the military could handle hunting, but we'd love to see how Baltar's cult fairs alongside the other startups. Take those used to high tech living and let them scrounge for food.. good odds! (Queue up playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, however.)

Now, as Lee put it, this could be a way to break the cycle; by starting from scratch and basicly ignoring the entire history of both species so that no one learns anything.. just a random shot in the dark, and thats the future. As opposed to perhaps taking this new situation of Hera, and the two allied species, and trying to make a go of it together, say. Of course, this whole show was a set up for how Hera was the agent for survival for both species ..... and so what, are they saying all the other humans die out from starvation, disease, war with the natives, childbirth, etc, and only Hera's children survive long term? Thats pretty bleak, but it sure didn't seem that was suggested. It really just seemed like hera was..... fizzle. Another fizzle. The other humans have babies, too, yeehaw.

I can accept that Kara was some short term ghost, unlike the long termed head-vision ghosts. But with all that writing that she was going to carry both species to their doom.. and really it was she was going to lead them to their happy place. Fizzle.

But okay, all this is fine because they're safe now? A dead Racetrack accidentally launches nukes into the Colony; maybe the hand of god, or maybe Racetrack wasn't fully dead then.. whatever. Colony dead, or crashed into the black hole as later commentary suggested (they over-snipped the footage.. more proof of rushing it?) What is not explained is what the pile (a few? dozens? hundreds?) of Evil Cylon Basestars are up to for these thousands of years after the humans go all native on us. Do they just wander aimlessly in the big sky trying to find new Earth and die of old age? (Remembering that we don't know if the human-like Cylons age, but certainly the pure-machine ones do not.) Certainly, all those Cylons that took over the twelve colonies and New Caprica, they're still around. This pretty much seems a hard counter to the fealing of "we're safe now, lets burn our only defences."

Anyway, a great show with a pretty exciting ending. The show tried to feal realistic and consistent, and suddenly went implausible in the end. An okay ending, but just not where I'd hoped it would go.

Or maybe, as the SyFy (!!) channel likes to jerk with its customers and introduce filler and long delays between seasons, maybe this was deliberately a weighted copout, to leave room for the next two hour movie in the fall ("The Plan" from the Cylon perspective) or to lead into the new TV series ("Caprica", about birthing of the Cylons.)

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FamilyTech: Wee Ride 'Wallaroo' bicycle seat for kids
Thu, 19 Mar 2009

In the middle of last year we went out and picked up our first bicycle seat for our little girl. If you're up early on a weekend or have time before/after dinner and want to burn some calories for yourself and have a blast with the little one, biking is a great option. It was still alien for me to be out the door at 7am to the park, but it was a fun way to pass the time and we ended up going out probably 4 or more days a week every week. Awesome.

That was this post should you care.

Now that winter is coming to close we're all very sick of being couped up inside - Play-doh is good, and colouring is great, but she just needs to get out and run and dig and climb.. she's sick of her toys and its getting harder to invent ways to entertain her :) So I plugged her into the old bike seat and with her new found words she exclaimed 'too tight!' and 'too big!' so it was time to retire that awesome little device -- at least we got a few months out of it!

After reviewing options at Zellers ($89.95) and Walmart (I forget) and Canadian Tire ($89.95) I checked out Toys-R-Us again, just like last time. Usually not an inexpensive place (and always a challenge to get a small child away from after a shopping run) they nevertheless, just like last time, had a pretty good price on the "Wallaroo" sized bicycle seat. $59.95 CDN seems pretty good for a device we'll work over all summer and likely have to discard next spring..

The Toys-R-Us page is here

After our first outing last night I thought I would offer a few comments; let me break it down into positioning and balance, size, cost and construction.

Position/Balance

The Wee-Ride we had last year was front-mount, by which I mean the chair is in front of you (between your arms when driving the bike.) This is convenient and clever for a lot of reasons -- you can see the child (and any mittens they may toss aside) and they have an unobstructed view. As she got older she also learned to hole the handlebars and attack the brakes and gear-shift, which was cute after the first surprise braking :) The new device is rear-mount which makes me a little paranoid since I cannot see her, but at least she can see me. I worry that she will tire of staring at my back, but hopefully the landscape whizzing by will entertain.

For what its worth in last nights first trip out, she was crying out 'Weeeee!' a lot, so I think she enjoyed it :)

With both mount-positions it was trivial to get used to the different weight and balance, and as a guy it was still easy to mount the bike. (Most guys I know swing their leg over the back tire to mount, but now I have to go bent-knee'd in front of the seat due to the large throne out back.)

Momentum is a little funny though with the new arrangement; if you're parallel to a curb and then jog-left to go up onto the ramp to the sidewalk you may feel this seat jiggle and sway as you do the sharp turn, say. When going off a curb or doing any quick turns or drops, you wil feel the resistance as the seat swings around back, since its pretty heavy (30 pound child) and big (tall!) -- it wasn't a problem, but it did surprise me a few times to feel that 'drag.' See below.

Size

The previous seat was a great size; small, comfortable for the child, and had a little padded play area out front (I assume should the child get whipped forward its to cushion the blow.) The new seat is more like a small throne, very large and high-backed. I've seen smaller rear-mount seats around so thought this one seemed large, but it does seem very comfortable - I had my daughter sit in it at the store - and lets her sit back, or lean into the chair at the sides. The foot compartments are pretty deep and adjustable for a growing child. Overall the chair seems well made.

Really, the goal (aside from carrying) of these seats is to keep the feet out of the spokes, and this chair should be fine; the legs naturally dangle into the approproiate compartments, and the plastic is molded around to cup the child at all points so she'd have to go out of her way to get into anything .. just dawdling or kicking will not be a problem.

The chair can be removed from the bike pretty easily, as the previous younger-child model can be.

Construction

The chair is a strong plastic and seems fine for its purposes; a large lock-screw is used to hold the seat to the mounting bracket, so that it can be moved forward or back as the child needs, and can be removed alltogether. There is a safety strap fixing the chair to the bike, presumably for use if the bracket slides down the post .. seems dubious to me.

The main curiosity is the design -- it uses a U-fork that plugs its tines into a bracket mounted on the main post under the real bike seat. The bent part of the U then sticks up and back over the wheel and the seat mounts onto it. Pretty clever in a way, as its a free shock absorber -- drop off a curb and the chair just bounces an inch, no biggy. It strikes me they could pretty easily have run a bar down to the wheelmount axle to make it much stronger, but maybe they would have had to pad the chair heavily or otherwise provide shocks... still, as long as the bracket on the post holds it should be fine. If it slides down then at worst the wheel will start to rub on the seat bottom which should present no danger beyond your deceleration.

Cost

The cost seems good -- $59.95 for a bike mount seat seems fine to me. $100 was starting to cross my line of interest, but I imagine thats where you get shock absorbers and such in the kits, but this seems a well built and inexpensive solution.

We loved the previous front mounted seat so much it gave me some trust in the brand, as foolish as that may seam.

[ Category: / living / family-tech ] [link] [Comments]

Entertainment: Acquisition costs for media
Wed, 04 Mar 2009

I'm sure I've ranted recently about the cost of media in pure dollars (as opposed to in terms of entertainment guilt when you don't have time to consume all that you'd like.)

DVDs are the prime offender really; it used to be that Star Trek: The Next Generation seasonal sets were some $100 or more (Canadian), which was truly offensive. Now, I know that some series come in seasons of 10 while big ticket American shows are often in batches of 20 or 25 a year, so theres a cost increase there. And for geek material like ST:TNG the consumers are _perhaps_ more affluent or will grumble and pay up anyway.

Either way, it annoys me to find some very fine shows at $50ish per season, with others being far too high at $80ish, and some even more. It also annoys me that BBC labeled items are always in the $80ish area due to some supposed importing fee rubbish.

Anyway, when The Wire box set recently was on sale at Amazon.ca I put my money where my mouth is - the entire show (5 seasons, each comprised of 10 or so full hour long (not 40 min!) episodes) for some $100 dollars, that seems pretty fair, so I figure I can sort out some numbers for myself.

5 seasons * 10 episodes * 1 hour per episode (ignoring DVD extras which are nice too) .. so a good 50 hours for $100, or $2/hour of entertainment. OKay, that seems to be my number. The aforementioned ST:TNG season would be 26 episodes (guessing) * 40mins per episode (guessing) or 17 hours of entertainment for $100 (now about $60) .. or in excess of $5/hour, so thats way off my charts. Nowadays ST:TNG is $60 so thats about $3 and change per hour. Being ST:TNG it's near to my young heart, so I'd probably go for it.

I guess I'm willing to spend $2-$3 per hour on good solid entertainment, and will simply steer clear of high cost items outright .. I'm just not going to look $200 in the eye. (Consider Dr. Who .. how many decades of that is there? I just can't imagine buying much of it.. but if they made it cheap enough, they would get some money out of me. Theres a lesson there for the industry..)

Last night while browsing some ebooks and reviewing their usual rape-style DRM rules, I had a brainfart:

Base line: $2-$3 / hour of entertainment against video products (DVD)

250 page average novel, at say 90 seconds per page is approximately 6 hours, at $9.99 per book. That'd be a little over $1.50 per hour of entertainment, but pretty near the base line ballpark.

A video game used to be rated in the 50-60 hour range, but just as often nowadays a game is expected/designed to be sequal generating and so are broken up into smaller chunks of higher impact entertainment. Consider $60 for 30 hours as an average.. again, the magic $2 per hour spot.

Lastly, lets examine music; a typical CD might be say $16.99 for an hours entertainment. Ouch, thats why off the normal scale, but you do listen to music over and over and over more than re-reading a book. So maybe. I imagine if music was half that price it'd sell a lot more.. so ask Apple about that. (Note that if Apple is selling an album for $10US, they're pretty much establishing a cost to print and distribute and store physical media.. I wonder how well it stacks up against reality eh?) Is this $2/hour number a well known quanity, or vary wildly per individual? I'm in a rush now or I could throw some more values into the functions and figure it out.. but pass.

So there you go, now we have some concrete proof I'm a two dollar kind of whore.

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