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Friday, May 25, 2007

TV Over

The season is over. The lost finale was ok (actually better than most of the season), Medium was ok, Ghost Whisper ok. Heroes was disappointing.

Fans are up in arms to get Jericho back on. I myself have never watched it. I agree with comments on Screen Rant about how fans would react if American Idol went on a four month hiatus in the middle of the show. I think the effort has as much chance as reviving Enterprise, especially since some of the same names are involved. But to not try at all guarantees failure. It's not a ratings gatherer, and to the network types, that's where the money is.

There is the inevitable criticism of the ratings system, known as Nielsons. I did a little digging on this. Nielson Media Research acknowledges the technical challenges and has some interesting solutions. They encode audio signals in the broadcast so that the box can tell what you are watching when (assuming you are one of the sampling families). So even if the show is taped or DVR'ed, the box records that you did watch it. That leads me to wonder how much of a stats blip would occur if you recorded shows and watched at 1 AM.

There are advantages to not being top rated show. April and Rachel watch American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. Without commercial skip, April would go crazy. Dancing with the Stars is really bad, it seems to go "one of these couples will be eliminated, commercials, recap, narrow the selection, commercial, recap, narrow more, commercial, recap, ...". They need to fill an hour, but most of it is repeats the last show. So lower rated shows actually have more content that the higher ones.

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Friday, May 18, 2007

Thomas on the News Again!

Stardate 60051.8
Big Buddha was at Union Station yesterday for Fox 13. Thanks to the Buttschardts of Roosters, the first and second grades of St. Josephs were there. We have it on the DVR. There were several cuts to Buddha. The first you can just see him at the end of the crowd of kids. The second shot has all the kids sitting on the lawn, and Thomas is right in the middle. It's fun to watch and name off all the kids I know: Jack (who was in the middle of every camera shot), Sam, Phillip, Orlando, Conner, etc. I had to drop Thomas off at school by 7:30 that day (he normally goes at 10 to 8). I knew Fox 13 was going to be there, and that he would probably be on TV. Patrick asked why Thomas gets all the chances. I don't know, just lucky, I guess.

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Monday, May 14, 2007

Uh-huh

An interesting exchange yesterday between Rachel and April, as April goes up to take a bath:
Rachel: "You can't leave. Then I have no one to talk to."
April: "Your dad's right here."
Rachel: "But all dad says is 'uh-huh'. Right, dad?"
Me: "Uh-huh." (What the heck, might as well play along.)
Rachel: "See?"
In the end, April stayed. I was left wondering if what Rachel said was really true. I know I am not a chatty person.

End of Entry

Friday, May 11, 2007

Genesis

Stardate 60051.1
This morning I was in the half awake, half asleep state, and this was going through my head:

public class Genesis
{
Universe universe = new Universe(new Heaven(), new Earth())
}

I don't know why this came up I have not read the Bible in a while, and not Issac Asimov's "The Last Question" in some time. I kept processing it in the shower. Should I use enumerated constants for the six days? Nah, it's a one time execution, just use a for loop. What are the operations? Separate night from day, earth from sea, etc?

May 5th was the first Friday of the month, which means free dress, no uniforms. Thursday was also free dress (for a dollar fund raiser). One of the problems with wearing uniforms is that when they don't have to, they don't know what to wear, more or less. What's even stranger is th my pre-teen daughter is pretty quick about choosing clothes, but my two boys can't decide. Growing up, I remember just grabbing what was on top of the dresser drawer. Thomas is just lazy. He got mad at me because I would not let him wear the same set of clothes for three days in a row. The I added insult to injury by making him take a jacket. Patrick now does not not want to wear anything with printing, which eliminates most everything.

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Saturday, May 05, 2007

Yes!

Stardate 60050.1
April is back home again. She got back today (Saturday afternoon). Patrick had a 9 AM soccer game, so we got to sleep in a little bit. Rachel stayed by a friends house again, and they took her to soccer. She and Thomas had a game at the same time. So poor Rachel had to be shuffled around by other people. Patrick was supposed to do a tournament in Centerville , but the assistant coach called to say that not enough players had committed to it. He called after we had left, though. He sent out emails as well, and fortunately I can get GMail on my cell phone. So Patrick went to his second double-header game.

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Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Quitter!

Stardate 60050.2
Monday the baseball coach handed out to the schedules. There are games Mondays and Wednesdays for the next month and a half

Tuesday I managed to get Rachel with the tennis lessons fifteen minutes late again. I retrieve the boys from day care headed back to pick up Rachel. Then we grab something to eat and went to Mount Ogden Park for Patrick’s game. When we got there, I discovered that I had two pairs of shorts, a pair of socks, and a pair of shinguards. No cleats, no shirt, and not enough time to go home and get them. (There might have been, due to a bad accident on highway 89, but I can’t say for sure. ) at that point I said forget it and we headed home. I called one of the guys at scouts to say we wouldn’t make it. I had no idea what Patrick was going to do. We talked about bowling ones, although I thought that was on May 9. April called one of the other mothers, only to find out she was at the mortuary us are mother had suddenly passed away.

I guess the game was a moot point anyway. I talked to the parents tonight, and one of the coaches is out of town with a high school team the other was caught up at work and couldn’t make it to the game. They tried to convince the referee that one of the parents could coach but since he wasn’t registered they wouldn’t let him . We ended up forfeiting the game but played for the fun of it. The team won six to nothing. Tonight little different the other team five to four, but the last goal really didn’t count because they were offsides. We’ll really kind of bothered me was the other parents were yelling at the referee and yelling in Spanish. Patrick got hit in the face with the ball, and broke his glasses were the screw goes in to hold the lens. He played the second half with only one lens, but still managed to almost get a goal.

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