I've heard about Dilbert as this corporate satire comic that is very funny. I've avoided it as much as possible, probably because I was afraid it would make fun of my way of life and find it makes valid points. Today, I succumbed to my curiosity and clicked a YouTube Dilbert video.



Conclusion: I am Dilbert...

I've just returned from a holiday spent in the lovely Bulgarian town called Obzor. At least other people say it's lovely, I thought it was full of them (people, I mean) which would explain both their assessment and mine. Anyway, my wife and I stayed at this hotel called The Cliff and spent 8 days together celebrating her birthday and 10 years of marriage. Happy birthday, love! These are my impressions of the journey.

First we had to get there and there are two major routes from Bucharest to Obzor: through Ruse and across Bulgaria and through Durankulak, after driving on the newly constructed A2 highway in Romania (the digit two coming from the fact that we only have two highways at the moment and this is the second). We went via Ruse and returned on the highway, with similar time results and positive feelings. The GPS did it again and chose a more scenic route running through small villages like, for example, Sindel. I shouted "Fatality!" when we exited the village, to my wife's dismay. Even so, it was a good quality road, which in Romania you rarely see in small rural areas and we enjoyed the wilderness.

Ok, we got there. The Cliff hotel is located just outside Obzor and is a four star hotel. That means... at the moment I have no idea what it means, I just assumed it would be way better than a three star hotel, but it appears it is about the same, only with a pool and a lot more expensive. Actually, I want to spend some time discussing The Cliff. It is one of those hotels that have so much potential and yet the experience is being spoiled by little details which I suspect are the fault of greedy little owners not understanding that they are serving people, that's their job, not just owning stuff and getting richer.

About The Cliff hotel in Obzor, Bulgaria

The hotel is situated on a cliff (surprise!) and is in fact a complex of buildings having a system of interconnected pools at the center. The buildings are nice and the pool almost great. Imagine this medium sized pool that has between 1.3 and 1.7 meters in depth, that connects to a smaller one via a jumping point which doubles as a waterfall. Then a small canal takes the water to an even smaller pool, designed for small children. Somewhere in the middle of the meandering canal there is a small jacuzzi. This pool alone and the way it looked make The Cliff a beautiful hotel. One can get to a rather isolated part of the beach via a long set of stairs or by going with the car in Obzor. A taxi can be employed, charging the enormous sum of 10 leva for a 2-3km run, or one could walk the same way.

The beach is one of those great fine sand beaches, only there are some unexpected rocks further into the water. This freaked me out a little, as I was starting to swim and I found myself hugging a gigantic boulder. The rock was covered with algae, not with razor sharp shells, so it was more of a psychological shock. I suppose that makes that part of the beach so remote and isolated. We didn't even try the commercial part of the beach because of all the people, the noise and the fact that we had a perfectly fine chlorinated pool inside the hotel! I didn't have to suffer floating garbage, stinging eyes or the smell of decaying algae and seashells, which other people find so endearing. I don't know about that, wouldn't the same effect be obtained with a bit of garbage in a salt shaker? But returning to the subject of the beach, can you imagine that 10-20m from the edge of the sea, the depth was still around my waist?

So, The Cliff is a beautiful hotel, isolated, with few people and a great pool. What could possibly go wrong? Everything else, of course.

The staff had almost no knowledge of English or Romanian, except maybe some of the folks at the reception. Even so, the others were morose unhappy people that kind of drifted, like some ghosts from The Shining. The reservation included free breakfast and my wife tried to drink the coffee, only to notice it was instant coffee. She asked for an espresso and was told she had to go to the bar and buy one.

Nobody can stand between my wife and her coffee! Civilisations rise and fall when she gets angry. I am an engineer, I can easily find what is the weakest point in a system and make it break, but she is the destroyer of worlds! She is like a cute sexy Dalek. She exterminates anything standing in the way of her daily coffee.

Also the prices from the restaurant were impossible for the quality of the food. I had to pay 25 leva for 5 shrimps in a plate. For the same amount of money I get a full platter of all kind of seafood at the Regina Maria hotel in Balchik, around 80 kilometres above Obzor. (BTW, I can't recommend that hotel enough, also four stars, but one feels good there).

The room had a TV, an old AllView with only 20 total channels that showed anything 10 seconds after you turned it on. That's OK, since we could only get 15 channels anyway with only BBC World in English and the rest in Bulgarian. Two of those were music televisions, but one had horrible audio and both had horrible music. Seriously, Romanian music television is no bastion of good taste, but that was utter crap. There was wireless Internet, only it only worked when not many people were using it and was slow as hell when it did work. We had air conditioning, but the windows could not open, just the main balcony door. There was easy access from other balconies and even from the hotel stair to our balcony so, in the interest of personal security, we had to choose between torpid fresh air and insects and no security or cool air conditioned stale air in a little safe cocoon. The bath was big and had these retro looking finishes, only they went too far. The bath curtain bar was rusted and stained all towels placed on it and the shower head was like a gardening implement with small pressured water jets that hurt rather than cleaned. The insect repellent smell of the bath went away in about three days.

The hotel also had a spa. That included massages with expensive cosmetics, colon cleansing, sauna, etc. The prices were huge, though. Imagine that you had to pay 80 leva for an hour of massage. What bothered me even more is that, after two days, a "promotional" price list was left under our door. They took 25% off some of the procedures. So if you are stupid enough to pay from the first two days, no promotion for you. So you go to a hotel with spa, you pay 80 euros a double room per day and then they tell you the prices are different for any spa procedure so they don't offer you any in the price of the room.

Now, all the hotels have those little annoying cards that double as keys. You have to place them in a slot in order to have electric current. So you can't charge your devices or leave the air conditioning on while you go to sun tan next to the pool. Unless you have a different, similarly shaped card, which I had, the only possible use for those spammy fidelity cards you get at various medical or shopping facilities. But that's like a general rule when going on holiday: always have a standard shaped card to leave in the electric current slot in the hotel.

To summarize: if they bought a little more Internet bandwidth, paid for satellite TV and upgraded the TVs in the room, made some sort of window that you can open without letting everyone in and, above all, didn't think to rip you off at every opportunity, the hotel would have been great! Instead, it felt like a below average overpriced tourist trap.

We also had an unexpected surprise from them. You see, in order to book a room there, you authorize them to take half of the staying sum from your account. For all practical purposes you pay that sum. You then go to the hotel and pay the rest of the sum. Then, they take the sum you authorized them to take when making the reservation, then the rest of the sum, then they "unblock" the authorized sum when you leave the hotel. That means you pay 1.5 times the actual sum until the original half is returned to you. We left on Sunday, and we were kind of... disconcerted... when we noticed a negative balance on our purely debit card. So take that into account (sorry for the pun).

Getting back. A few hundred meters below The Cliff there is the yooBulgaria resort. One could probably go over the Net, find this hotel and choose it, just like we did with The Cliff, to spend their holidays. We went there. It looked nice, but the entire hotel was surrounded by abandoned buildings, victims of the economic crisis in times of great investment in the tourism business in Bulgaria. Seriously, it looked like the hotel was the lucky building that survived a full aerial bombardment of the entire zone. I am talking about empty concrete scaffolds with graffiti on them. Horror movies and parkour videos could be made there.

The town of Obzor was actually a village till 1984. Then it was promoted and then the Communist era ended and the tourism took hold. As a result it is a combination of greedy tourist corporations, small family owned businesses and a tourism oriented management.

We searched the Internet on the best restaurants there and we found: "Starata Kushta", recommended by three different sites that had the same text in them. We couldn't find this restaurant and so we went to recommendation number two: the Tania restaurant. It is a nice little thing, but rather expensive. The guy recommended the pizza there; he probably never went to Romania. Their pizza is mediocre at best. Try the fish things, but do not, under any circumstances, ask for sauces. They are horrible. Then we tried our luck with what was there (and this is my recommendation for anyone visiting Obzor: try your luck, eventually you will find something you will like) and found Morska Perla, or the Sea Pearl. There was this deliciously looking waitress there. We were, of course, served by the old ugly one that didn't know English. The fish was OK, the prices reasonable, but they had this apricot brandy that was really something. We also tried Dionisi, right next to Tania. The pizza in Tania was about 14 leva and rather small. The one at Dionisi was the same size and 4.5 leva. Unfortunately you paid for what you got: pizza from supermarket dough and some cheap stuff sprinkled over. The spaghetti were floating in oil.

The last restaurant I want to mention was almost great: it's called Rai (Heaven) and it is also located around Tania, about 500 meters from it. They have this Rai Calamari dish that has 500 grams and costs 27 leva. I thought it sounded OK, but I really expected some piece of fried cephalopod and instead got a squid filled with a mix of onions, oyster and small shrimp and served with four jumbo shrimps. So, even if the menu didn't advertise it (bad for them) the dish was actually a seafood plateau, something I had been searching for unsuccessfully in Obzor and went up to Balchik to have at Regina Maria (did I mention the hotel and the restaurant are great? They have sushi!)

The only problem with Obzor restaurants and bars is that they don't have dark beer. None of them! I also asked for lemonade and none of them had any! It's water with lemon and something sweet, for crying out loud... I drank a lot of Grozdova Rakia (grape brandy), a Bulgarian speciality, and Kamenitsa, their beer.

That's about it. We visited close by Nesebar, which is nice, but filled with tourists. There was a cool restaurant there, called Hemingway. Not in any way connected to the writer, but good food. We never got to Burgas and we only passed through Varna a few times. Bottom line: Obzor is a nice see side town, but I wouldn't want to be housed in that cacophony of noises, music and smells. The Cliff was a good option, remote as it was, although the sounds from Obzor occasionally made their way there, as well, but it had its flaws.

When I first created my blog (oh, almost seven years ago), spam was something that automated software was posting, mindless comments that I can't imagine would inspire anyone to do anything. Cialis, Viagra, cheap fake Rolexes (as opposed to the expensive ones, I guess), pleasing my woman in bed, lasting longer; how could anyone imagine that, wanting all of these, I searched on the net, tried all the options, then still needed more? How much pleasing does my wife need anyway?(I'll have to look into that). Back then, I didn't even have a method to see all the comments for the blog and/or to delete the spam. Or any way to report it. I had to go to each post and remove them manually, even if they were identical texts and any tool could have noticed they were complete clones and, therefore, spam. Anyway CAPTCHAs were and are being used to stop these evil machines from polluting blog posts, yet sometimes they were not enough.

This was the first step in the blog spam evolution: if machines are stopping the spam machines, let's use humans. Getting so low that you need to have to write spam on people's blogs in order to win some money is something I thankfully never experienced or even understood and I hope I never will, but this is what I suppose happened. Some guy was randomly exploring the web, finding blogs that had enough visitors, then writing spammy comments in the hope that the blog master is not active enough to delete them as they are written. I hope I was active enough and, for those annoyed by post spam, I apologize. So, it didn't work too well for spammers on Siderite's blog.

Another mutation and the spam comments were now aimed at soothing my ego. "Thank you!","This info was great!","I am so glad that I read this post.". I felt wonderful the first few seconds before getting a comment email and opening it to see it riddled with links that had no connection to the content of the post. I felt so cheated that I created a javascript code to recognize any comment with the links I found and replace it with words acclaiming my work against spam. Now, THAT soothed my ego a little longer, thank you very much.

One of the feature of Blogger is that someone posts with a URL, their username appears as that link and goes to the person's "blog". So here I was, reading this comment that contained nothing bad, no links, but seemed a little too general. I mean, I know I am great and that my blog is wonderful, but how did other people find that out? I even replied to one or two such comments. My confusion was soon dispelled when going to see who wrote generic posts of praise for me and my blog. Cialis and Viagra were long gone. Instead, I had freemium software packages, trojan scams and fake antivirus packages. I deleted comments like that, even if, for a split second, I had the feeling that the text of the comment was OK and worth preserving. Oh, well.

And here I am, prompted to write this post by the latest wave of mutant spam: comments that are related to the content of the post! They seem very legit, at the limit of being vague. The links from the user name go to a site, but it is not necessarily a spam site. Today, for example, it was a completely free utility to help you play Scrabble. I don't know that it was a Trojan or was filled with ads; it could have been legit, an attempt by some Scrabble enthusiast to make himself known by attaching his web site to the Blogger comments. I always add the link of this blog to my comments elsewhere. I deleted it, anyway, but sometimes I find comments that are so far on the edge of legitimacy, that I don't have the certitude I need to delete them. So, I am pretty convinced that there are still spammy comments on the blog, but so well crafted that I failed to properly detect them.

This also means another thing, that sometimes there are false positives. I apologize to real people who found their comments removed. Try to leave more meaningful messages next time. And yes, it all boils down to that, doesn't it? If you have nothing to say, don't say it! It doesn't help anyone. And I already know the blog is great, tell me in what way it is so wonderful to you. Do tell :)

This is the point I've reached in my war against spam. It is still ongoing and far from over. I wonder when comments that will discuss real philosophical issues will appear, from people that were paid to have meaningful conversations on blogs and link to some site or another. I also wonder when, as people who can actually carry a conversation are expensive, I will find myself have a meaningful conversation with a spam bot.

I have been called a hipster many a times and that is because I don't really like mainstream things and, instead, choose to see beauty and purpose somewhere else. I'm not really a hipster, though, since the trends I am following are not the latest and I have no sense of fashion. But enough about me. Let's talk about software and it's latest incarnation: mobile and HTML5/javascript and how I despise the hype around something that is, let's put it simply, a combination of lazy programming and market forces. No real innovation, no quality, no soul. A Hollywood of software, if you will.

People, I've seen this before and so have you. There was a time when computing was done on devices that had single digit megahertz chips at their core. Applications and games thrived. Programmers would always complain about the lack of resources and there was a time when 64KB of memory was thought enough for most computing purposes. It was that time that spawned the algorithmic generation, the guys that usually ask you what a graph is or how to manually do a bubble sort on paper when they hire you to work on web sites. You needed to make your software slim and efficient to work on those devices. Then the processor power, memory and drive capacity just exploded. Each step of the way, applications and games thrived. The problem was... they were the same as before, only larger. Wolfenstein became Doom became Quake became Counter Strike became Call of Duty and beyond, the resolution, the realism, the environment ever evolving, but the game staying the same: get some guns and kill something. But still, it was OK, we like things bigger, we want more pixels. It doesn't matter that the Windows operating system grows exponentially to use the increasing space and processing power, yet we use it in about the same way as before. It doesn't matter that the single player games just look better and have the same or even less complexity than the games ten years before. It's a status quo we can live with.

But then browsers came along. Suddenly, there is a whole new market: online apps. One server to bind them all. And we again lament the lack of resources, as we use slow javascript and try the ever annoying Java applets and somehow we settle on Flash. It can be used on any operating system, almost any browser, let's make games with it and place them online. The only reason we do not make entire web sites in Flash remaining SEO. And we lament the lack of programming tools for something that was originally created only for online animation for commercial ads, but we can live with it. All the games we played so joyfully on 80386 processor machines we can now play in a browser, in Flash, on machines that are 100 times faster. No problem there.

Then the smartphones and tablets arrived, with their new operating systems, their weird resolutions and their direct dislike of Flash. Suddenly Flash is no good anymore: it is not open enough, not fast enough, not compatible enough. Instead, let's switch to HTML5 and Javascript, the backbone of the Web. Let's use those. Sure, now we need a faster Javascript, so we think on it a little and Kaboom! Javascript is suddenly 8 times faster. We need new HTML concepts and ideas and Kapow! the HTML standard suddenly changes after years of wallowing between panels and committees. Nothing can stand in the way of change now, we even have portable devices that are faster than the computers we used 10 years ago.

And so we get to today, when my Athlon II 2500+ computer is too slow to play flash games without overheating, because they are made with frameworks designed to output HTML and Javascript. And that is why I can't even move the mouse in browser based HTML5 and Javascript games, even if what the page I am on only wants to do is let me play Angry Birds, a game that would have worked fine, with almost the same level of graphics and certainly the same level of intelligence and entertainment, on a 33Mhz computer from 20 years ago.

I could live with all that, though. I could buy another computer, after all it is a wonder this one even works anymore, but it bothers me so much that I have games and films and software that have been working on this machine for so long and they are mostly better than what I can find today. It bothers me to buy a smartphone or a tablet only to see my rights to use it restricted and conditioned from the people that make them. It bothers me to have lived 20 years with computers, only to have more pixels at the end. I can even imagine my LCD coffin, being put into the ground, with people crying over the touching (really, you can touch them!) floating images from it, while some people would discuss the number of pixels the coffin has. He lived a good life, he got pixels.

Ultima Underworld was and continues to be an inspiration as to how and why to make video games. I've played this as a kid, on a 386 PC computer, and was blown away. It featured simulated 3D with angles that were not straight and rooms of different heights. You could jump, use weapons in multiple ways (like jabbing or cutting with swords), there was discoverable magic, NPCs, interaction that went as far as having to learn a new language or play an instrument, numerous puzzles and an amazing story.

But that is not what made it great. You see, I am telling everyone I know that this was one of the games that defined my childhood and today I've read the Wikipedia article for the game and remembered all the history related to it and I realized that I needed to blog about it, too. What made this game great was that there was no need to make the game as good. Released in 1992, it only had to compete with Wolfenstein 3D which was released a few months after, anyway. At the time Civilisation and Dune II, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II were also amazing games, but none in the genre of Ultima Underworld. They could have worked less, released sooner and gained more money. But that's not what they did, they did something to be proud of and that is why the game was great.

At the bottom of this post I will place a YouTube video of gameplay. The synthesised sounds (no recorded sounds were used in the game) and music as well as the graphics will probably make you cringe now, but at the time, it was state of the art. Just hearing that music fills me with strong emotion that I can hardly realize from where it comes, but it is deep. Ultima Underworld has left its mark on me, but not only. Look at the litany of games their authors attributed influence to Stygian Abyss: BioShock, Gears of War, Elder Scrolls, Deus Ex, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, Tomb Raider, Morrowind, World of Warcraft.

Amazingly enough, there was only a sequel to the game, Ultima Underworld II. The publishers refused to sponsor a third franchise and the developers ultimately decided to create a "spiritual successor", which was Arx Fatalis, also a great game. Younger people might only know Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which has nothing to do with Might and Magic except financially, and is actually Arx Fatalis II. You can see even there that storyline and gameplay have suffered when a big corporate game company took the reigns, despite the high budget graphics and sounds.

I have voluntarily removed myself from the gaming scene. I've refused to upgrade my computer to a state where it can play any modern game and the only things I play are web games to pass the time between tasks at work. I am certain that even now there are exceptional people creating exceptional games that push the frontiers of technology, but more than that, the frontiers of imagination. I've heard of some of them: The Witcher, for example, a game made after a successful fantasy book series that features free play and allowing the character to be as bad, good or rotten as he wants, while the game shapes itself after his decisions. Look out for games like these. Even if you don't realize it, they will open your mind and your heart and will influence you to be better than you would otherwise be. They are not only games, but teachers. Love them!

There is a sentence hidden there inside the Ultima Underworld wiki page: the game is non-linear and allows for emergent gameplay. In other words, it let's you guide the story, change the game play, play multiple times with different outcomes. Embrace choice, it will only get better.

[youtube:TpuTbxkaZ94]

I have been interested in the asteroids in the Solar system lately and, while perusing the vast amount of data that is now on the Internet on the subject, I've stumbled upon a video of the number of asteroids humans have discovered in the last 30 years (1980-2010). It is a simple bird's eye view of the Solar system, with the planets and the small objects we knew at the time to exist, together with a highlighted view of the objects we were seeing from the Earth at any given moment.

You should watch the video full screen and a large resolution, as the objects are pretty dim. If you only see the highlighted object, you should increase your video brightness or gamma settings. Enjoy!



The video is from Scott Manley's YouTube page, and there are more interesting asteroid videos there as well. I urge you to see them. The ones I enjoyed best I will include below.

Density Of Asteroids in the Orbital Plane of the Solar System

Asteroids In Resonance With Jupiter

Asteroid Belt - Edge On View

"Oh, no! Siderite's blog has been hacked", you will think immediately. People who know me know how I feel about having children, and that is: I don't feel anything. I seem to lack that inner feeling that makes people procreate for no good reason. And while I am at the subject, I do not deny the existence of this feeling in the world and I don't believe most people are like described below, at least I hope so, but it just hit me that so many times, people have said something and meant another. I will elaborate. Stay assured, my blog was not hacked yet.

You know those dreams we have when we are young? We will get rich and famous, we will find true love, we will be the best at what we do, we can do anything if we want, we can quit anytime (but we don't want to), we will always have time to lose weight and go to the gym, etc. We actually believe those things will happen for most of our youth and early adulthood and some of us actually do something about it, while the most just expect it will happen if they wait long enough.

Well, after a while, reality hits home and we understand that we actually cannot do all of those things, maybe none of them and that our life will not get any better than it is on its own. Some people, at this moment in life, start thinking about children. This way they can delay losing hope by passing it on to their children. That's why many parents are disappointed with their offspring, not because they actually thought their children were special, but because they forced themselves to believe it. In the end, they spawn other normal people, just like them.

You may feel that I am too much of an asshole saying these things, even more than usual, but I don't think so. You see, the assholes are people who spontaneously start advising you to have children, like they already have or plan to. When they say that, they are saying "For a moment now, I thought you might be better than me and I felt a little threatened. Have some children, please, so I can feel better about myself". Have you ever heard the one about children "fulfilling you"? Do I look half full to you? My life does have meaning and I am quite happy with it. I don't need children, therefore I am not having any. If I look unhappy, it may be because I still have hopes for myself and I still believe I can do better. I get disappointed in myself because I expect a little more from me.

I had to write this post because the only times I actually considered having children for more than one second was when I was depressed for not doing something as well as I wanted or when not having time to fulfil ALL of my dreams. I just realised that. There was never a content, happy time in my life when the thought ever crossed my mind.

Now I know that alphish or hormonal males and females do naturally feel the need to have children. I understand the overall need for our species to procreate (although, not right now, when we are too many to fart without a human nose having to smell it). I also don't begrudge or disrespect people having children (as long as they keep them out of my face). However, think long and hard before you tell someone to have children. What is actually the reason you are saying that? Aren't you a bit of an asshole, even if it were any of your business?

I have been reviewing my blog posts for the last few months and I noticed a troubling trend: a lot more social commentary and hobby related stuff than actual tech work. Check out this statistic of posts in the last three months:

• TV and Movie: 5
• Books: 6
• Personal or hobby: 6
• Social commentary: 1
• Tech: 8

8 is marginally more than 6, but split them between misc and programming and you get 18 misc for 10 programming (with some overlapping). And consider that two of the tech posts were attempts to fix something that did not work so well.

What does this mean? Do I not learn new stuff at work? Am I not interested in tech work anymore? Am I working too much and not having time to blog? Well, it is a bit of all. I am interested in tech work, but right now I am fighting to adapt to the new job. I am learning new stuff, but that is mostly office related than new frontiers of programming. And I am a bit tired as well.

I have been thinking of cool tech stuff to share with you at least in this post, but I could find none. I am reading a lot of blogs with new information about stuff ranging from Windows 8, .Net 5, the future of C# and Visual Studio to videos of Vesta, things that verge on proving the dark matter model is wrong and amazing BIOS rootkits, but that is not what I am doing.

So let me summarize the technical state of my work so far:

• Scrum - my workplace uses Scrum as a development practice and invests a lot in maintaining the quality of its implementation. I've learned a lot about the advantages, but also the disadvantages of the practice (there is nothing as annoying as an Outlook alert that you need to do the daily scrum meeting when you are concentrated on a task)
• Visual Basic - as the original application that was bought by my employing company 5 years ago was written in Visual Basic, large portions of it are still VB. That only proves my point that refactoring code should be a priority, not a nice to have option. I wonder how many developing hours, research hours and hair roots could have been saved if the company would have invested in moving the application to a readable and canonical code form. I also wonder if the guy that invented Visual Basic is now burning in hell, as so many devs with whom I've talked about VB seem to want.
• Visual Basic - it just deserves two bullet points, for the bullet reason only at least. Also, try converting C# generic and lambda expression code to Visual Basic. Hilarious!
• Computing power - I am now working on a laptop that has a Quad Core I7 processor, 8Gb of RAM and a Solid State Drive. And I still want it 10 times faster. It seems to me that computing power is only keeping up with the size of the software projects and the complexity of the tools used to develop them, so that the total compile time for a project remains constant. Also, if for some reason the company issues you with a computer powerful enough to break the constant, they also need to enforce drive encryption as to compensate.
• Continuous Integration and Unit Testing - it gives one a good feeling of comfort to know that after "it works on my machine", the source control server can compile, test and run the software successfully (while you are working at something else, no less).
• Software Patterns - there are people who can think and visualize software patterns. They can architect any piece of code and make it really neat. However, it now seems to me that an over-architected software is just as hard to read and follow as a non-architected one. Fortunately for me, my colleagues are more the smart "let's make it work" type

That is about it. No magical silver bullet practices, no amazing software, no technological edge code, just plain software shop work.

I guess it is finally official: I am now a corporate employee. While the previous company I worked with was nice in terms of the people there and the technology used, I got bored. I blame myself for getting depressed when assigned disconnected UI tasks and when singled out socially. It shouldn't have mattered. Surely I could have worked on overcoming adversity and improving my development methods, no matter how boring the task at hand.

However, bored I did get and when a big corporate company approached me with a job offer, I was intrigued. This is a long story, though, because I passed their phone screening, their 6 hour long technical interview and got the approval of the top brass yet in another interview, all some time at the end of March. This coincided with my birthday so I thought it was like a present to myself: an opportunity to learn new things, work in an environment I was scared of, but which was different and exciting, not the mention better payroll, although that didn't matter that much.

So, why am I writing this blog entry now, at the end of July? Because I only got hired two days ago. Budgetary strategy, corporate decisional speed and pure bad luck (I hope) pushed the employment date for four stressful and uncertain months. And I am not even fully employed, I am a contractor with an intermediary for the time being.

I can't tell you yet how things truly are in the new company. People are certainly more professional and yet relaxed, not at all like the stick-in-the-ass image I had (well, most of them). Frankly, these people are more geek and less social monkey than some of the juniors at my last job, which is great. On the other hand, until I start actual work (which will take another two weeks of gruelling meetings and annoying bureaucracy) I will not know how (and if) this company gets anything done.

Certainly, a quad-core laptop with 8Gb of RAM and SSD harddrive will decrease developing time (I used to watch movies and read books while compiling projects at the old job). They also seem very communicative (to the point of never stopping from talking about a project), which is something I am less used to and I welcome gladly. They encourage and help with personal development and good development techniques, like TDD and a commitment to Scrum. And if you don't know something, people are not sneering, but offering to help. So far, I can't complain (and you know me, I am so good at it).

I will be working on an ASP.Net CRM project, something evolving from an older VB ASP.Net 1.0 thing to a C# ASP.Net MVC monster. Hopefully, this will reignite my passion for development, rather than reassert my disgust with web work. So you will see Javascript and ASP.Net posts again soon and not so much WPF. Too bad, I really liked that particular technology.

So, wish me luck!

It's time for the list of TV series that are wasting my precious time. I only do this so you don't have to. I know, I know, you are so grateful, but that's me: a beacon of hope, goodness and humility.

Let me start with the shows that I've already talked about before:

• Doctor Who has entered a darker era, with the arrival of The Silence, a race that has you forget about them the moment you don't see them anymore and that have lived on the Earth since forever and of The Flesh, a programmable biological material that can take any shape. Initially used as a way to build cheap avatars, it will become much more when infused with the memories and personalities of its users.
• Torchwood has started again, season 4 now. The show was the more cliché of the Doctor Who spin-offs so it was bought by the American TV channel Starz. It now features big U.S. actors like Bill Pulman, Mekhi Phifer and Lauren Ambrose. It is still weird enough to enjoy, but the first two episodes were not very bright.
• The Sarah Jane Adventures. It started for a while, time in which I noticed that the main character, played by Elisabeth Sladen, was a bit off, she was starting to look her age and a bit tired or confused. Later on I've learnt of her death to cancer. She was not in her fifties, I had guessed, but 65 years old. I do not know what the fate of the series is.
• Eureka just started again, the second half of the fourth season. I haven't had the chance to watch any of the episodes, but it can't have changed much.
• House MD got even stranger and harder to watch than before, but at least that annoying self righteous bitch was replaced by Thirteen again. As for the script, medically all characters are brain dead.
• Criminal Minds has ended its sixth season and we're waiting for the seventh. It lost some of its oomf, but at least it still has potential. Suspect Behaviour, the spin-off, was rightfully cancelled.
• Dexter hasn't started yet, but the hints and teasers are promising. Dex would return to his murderous roots and leave behind all that suburban emotional dad crap. Or will he?
• Big Love has ended with its fifth season. While I did enjoy the first four, I still could not force myself to watch the fifth season, not one episode of it. I believe I will leave it to braver men than I to comment on its ending.
• Fringe is undying. A lot of experimentation (pun not intended) with the show, including a partially animated episode. Still watchable at the end of a tiring day, but nothing else worth mentioning.
• True Blood's fourth season has started in force, with panther people, witches, shapeshifters, an amnesic Eric, a Bill that is king of Louisiana and a Tara that is bisexual. It has lost a major part of its charm though and I am only watching it to see what else they invent.
• Still waiting for Californication's sixth season. While it too lost a big chunk of its initial charm, it is still interesting in a lot of ways.
• V was cancelled by ABC and fans are petitioning Warner Bros to continue it. I feel it was a failure and it needs no renewal. If you consider that it is I who is suggesting cancelling a sci-fi show, then you should know that there are serious reasons for it.
• Men of a Certain Age second half of the second season has started and it's still great. Who would have thought that a lot of the police, fantasy and science fiction series would become family dramas while a show that has started as a drama would be interesting and educational, as well as fun?
• Weeds' seventh season has started rather well. Hot Nancy is pardoned from jail because someone has killed Esteban and the state wants nothing to do with her, while her family returns from Denmark when they find out she is out. Transactions with grenades for Afghan kush and the usual craziness come next, but I think they dialed down a notch all the stupidity and the onslaught of pointless American culture. Just a notch.
• The Good Wife is still a nice show, combining personal issues with court cases in a pleasant and intelligent way.
• The Walking Dead has not had its second season start yet. I have high hopes, despite the rather boring first season.
• Haven's second season has just started. I haven't seen any of it, though, which talks about my elevated interest about the show. It's a more localized and less sciency Fringe, so it falls into the same tired brain category.
• Royal Pains has ended its second season and just started the third. I have no idea what is going on with it as I stopped watching it and not even the wife seems to want to.
• Lost Girl, a sort of Canadian Sookie with more violent tendencies, has not started its second season yet.
• Nikita latest season has not started either.
• A Game of Thrones. Oh, this needed a section of its own. Short story: the first book of the series was turned into a 10 episode season. Why only ten? Make them at least 13, as it is customary. With only ten episodes a lot of the book was left out and when I say this, I don't mean the facts, but the interaction and relationships between characters. I know, you are thinking: Who is this guy? Where is Siderite? If he talks more about the relationships of characters in TV series I'm gonna switch blogs! The only comparison I can give that would give justice to the important part of the book that is missing from the series is Dune. There was a Lynch version of Dune, which had almost nothing to do with the book and there was a mini series version that followed the book line by line. I liked the Lynch version better. The feeling that you get reading the book you can't get from this series, which is, otherwise, very nice and well done.
• Better With You was cancelled, thank you!
• Falling Skies. I would call it a response to The Walking Dead. Earth has been attacked by aliens, defeated utterly, and the last remnants of humanity are fighting a resistance war. But practically there are a bunch of guys with a lot of attitude, trying to survive while being attacked by zombies aliens. I like it, but it is presenting the same idealistic people that fight "the good fight" while having ample opportunities to demonstrate how that is better than being evil and stupid. No real character development, no complex situations, only the good, the bad, and the stupid in between. Get it together, people!
• Endgame was boring, stupid and had nothing to do with chess at all. It felt more like that ridiculous show about a guy that gets tomorrow's paper every day and then tries to change the headlines. I refuse to watch it when I have real chess videos around.
• Southpark is going to a rough patch I think. The last episode ended in a very ambiguous way, with Stan's parents deciding to leave Southpark and Stan itself feeling distanced from his friends by the debilitating disease "being a cynical asshole". I still don't know what is going on.
• Season four of Breaking Bad just started. Haven't started watching it, yet.

Still here? Hellllooo... lloooo... looooo... looooo? Time for the new TV shows:

• King - Canadian show about a gloriously sexy woman that... solves police cases. She is actually a cop. Her name is King. The action was mellow enough, the episodes plot boring, even a tall red-head with beautiful legs could not make me watch it. It is the average cop TV show with a lead character, only slightly shifted towards women.
• The Killing has received great reviews, but unfortunately I could not find the time to watch it.
• Mortal Kombat Legacy. Remember about a year ago there was a trailer for a new Mortal Kombat movie, when Sub Zero was used by a cop to find Scorpion? It all looked realistic and reinvented and modern. That didn't go well. Instead they changed the theme a little and brought it as a web series. Is there any word that sounds more stupid than webisode? Well, they used those to present the characters. Some were good, some were bad, but overall I think it deserves a shot. Nothing fancy, mind you.
• The Nine Lives of Chloe King and Teen Wolf are two idiotically tweeny series that try to capitalize on Twilight and the such. I've watched the pilot episodes groaning at each good looking gelled hair idiot teen that turns into a cat/wolf while bad people are after them. Vomit inducing.
• Alphas is the new X-men series. Different powers, less cool, different professor, no X-es in his name, different bad guys. The pilot was not especially bad, considering you have Mutant-X as a reference, but nothing special either.
• Switched at Birth had an intriguing synopsis: two baby girls are mixed up at birth and they find out about it only 16 years later. The interaction between the two families should have presented an interesting experiment of nature vs. nurture. The pilot was not bad, but it was too family oriented for me to enjoy. Also, I think I am becoming slightly allergic to bouts of teenage angst. I understand most teenagers are dumb and selfserving, but they are not all clichés!
• Suits is the male equivalent of courtroom series. If The Good Wife is trying to attract more female audience by using a woman as the lead and presenting her in the midst of family issues, Suits shows cool bachelors finding all kinds of technical solutions to problems. I mean the boys are studs, one of them is a rookie that can remember anything he reads or sees, while the other is a cocky flashy lawyer that takes the noob under his wing. There are even technical discussions about race cars! It is not without flaw, but it produces an easy going feeling that I enjoy in my series.
• Camelot. This was recommended by a friend, one that usually has good tastes in TV and movie matters. Well, he was wrong. This is the King Arthur version of Hercules. The only people that die are those who make it harder for the screenwriters to continue the story, Merlin is the guy from Flashforward, with magic issues instead of alcohol, the same irritating frown and self righteousness and with no hair. Arthur is an infant that played in Harry Potter and Twilight. The only good parts here are the women: Eva Green as Morgan, Tamsin Egerton as Guinevere (after a lot of rumours she was going to play in Game of Thrones) and Claire Forlani as queen Igraine. Claire, could you play some sexy and open minded person next role? Your beauty is wasted on stuck up obnoxious do gooders!
• Wilfred is a new show stolen by the Americans from Australia. The story is that one guy sees the neighbour dog as a human being dressed in a dog suit, talking with Aussie accent and smoking bong all day. The dog teaches the wimpy human how to live. The show is both intriguing and annoying. I did watch it until now, but I am having conflicting feelings about it. I am curious about what will happen next and have no problem starting to watch an episode, but I always regret it afterwards. It's a kind of guilty pleasure, I suppose.

There is something to say about future projects, like Once Upon a Time which sounds promising, but I haven't really researched the future plans of TV networks yet.

Until the next time, have fun!

As I was noting a few posts earlier, I recently watched the entire Star Trek Deep Space 9 series. This part of the franchise showed a lot of the Klingons as well as their choice of beverages: Bloodwine and Raktajino. The former is a strong alcoholic beverage which I will not get into, and the latter is a strong and spicy coffee that grew on the crew of the space station. As I knew that the Klingon culture spawned an entire real life current, including a complete language, I was curious if they also replicated (pun not intended :) ) their recipes. And I found that, indeed, there was at least one Raktajino recipe on the net: Klingon Raktajino Klah Version.

I was not satisfied, though. You see, Klingons are supposed to be mighty warriors. Why would they throw a bit of sweet chocolate, some cocoa and a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg into their drinks if it's not going to be effective in battle? So I started researching the different active ingredients in the recipe, as well as other possible sources for a stronger effect. Here is my research on it, the result and the effects on myself (as any mad scientist knows, you first experiment on helpless victims or yourself. I was fresh out of victims that day).

Let's first examine the main stuff: coffee. There are other energizing beverages in the world, like tea, or mate tea, or even stuff like Burn or Red Bull. I will not touch the chemical energizer drinks in this post because I couldn't possibly replicate one out of simple ingredients (or could I? Note to self: make a one hundred times stronger energizer drink than Red Bull. Get more helpless victims.). Something I've recently (to my shame) found out is that when people researched coffee, tea and mate they called the main active ingredient for each by the substance they started with: caffeine, theine and mateine. Later on, it was proven to be the exact same substance. So there would be no point of mixing these together, since they have the same effect.

However, there are other ingredients in the beverages described above, like catechins, which are found in white and green tea, mostly. Also, found in cocoa, so there might be something there for the Raktajino, after all. The effect of flavanols on health is mixed, but it is clear that it has a health benefit for heart conditions as well as an apparent anti-aging effect when combined with regular exercise. Nothing Klingons like more, by the way.

Ok, which of these contains the biggest concentration of flavanols: cocoa or white tea? It is irrelevant, as this is actually a class of substances and the flavanols in each (and in wine, btw) are different. So, let's mix them up for starters.

What other active ingredients does cocoa have, except the flavanols? Well, it seems it contains something called Theobromine. It can appear naturally in the body as a result of metabolising caffeine, btw, so it seems like a good choice for the acceleration or augmentation of the effect of coffee. Also, it has a slight aphrodisiac effect :)

So, we got a mix of cocoa and white tea, something that is good for the heart, slows ageing and also should accelerate the absorption of coffee. But the recipe also had Cinnamon in it. So let's see what it contains. Well, it is called Cinnamaldehyde which sports effects like antimicrobial and anticancer. But what cinnamon does most is increase the blood flow, so also the metabolism, so the absorption of all the substances in our magic mix.

Of, if we have already a substance that increases blood flow and metabolism, why not use one that is really hot: Capsaicin? Yes, you read that right, it's the active ingredient in chilli peppers and the thing that tricks the heat sensors in our body to react to lower temperatures, giving us the sensation of heat. It also increases blood circulation and regulates sugar levels.

The net recipe also showed a use of nutmeg. I suspect that is mostly for the aroma, as large quantities of nutmeg are toxic, even if it also has a deliriant effect. Also, the "recreational" properties of nutmeg can take about four hours to take effect, so we don't actually need the stuff.

Ok. We have the ingredients we need to add to our coffee: cinnamon, cocoa, white or green tea and chilly powder. I used 2 spoon of cinnamon, 2 of cocoa, enough green tea for 2 litres of strong tea and one tablespoon of chilly powder. Then I've added it in my coffee. I also drank it with hot water only. The best results were with coffee, some sugar to add to the burn, and a bit of milk to take the edge off the tongue.

The effects: I am not a big drinker of coffee, but ever since I've moved to this job where they had a coffee machine, I would drink one cup a day. Sometimes four. Anyway, after a while it didn't seem to have any effect, other than a deficiency of calcium (that's another story, just remember to add calcium and vitamin D to your diet if you are a coffee drinker). So, the day I used a small portion of my spice in my coffee, not only did it taste great! but it also gave me a jittery active state that I hadn't felt since the first days of drinking coffee, a state that lasted for... 6 hours straight!

So, to wrap it up, I can't give you a recipe for my version of Raktajino, as I am experimenting with various quantities, but mix a lot of cocoa and cinnamon with your coffee, then add some concentrated green tea and as much chilly powder as your stomach can stand: Raktajino, Siderite version!. (I used strong text there because it is so strong of a coffee, see?)

Do let me know if you drink it and tell me what effect it had on you. The excitement of the research may be responsible for the jittery effect, after all, although I doubt it.

Well, I have been kind of absent from the blog lately and that is for several reasons. One is that I have been waiting for some news that would determine my direction as a professional developer. The other is that I have re-acquired a passion for chess. So, between work at the office, watching chess videos, playing chess with my PDA and watching all seven seasons of Star Trek Deep Space 9, I haven't had much time for blogging.

Also, when you think about it, the last period of my programming life has been in some sort of a limbo: switched from ASP.Net to WPF, then to ASP.Net again (while being promised it would be temporary), then back to WPF (but in a mere executive position). Meanwhile, Microsoft didn't do much to help me, and thus saw their profits plummet. Well, maybe it was a coincidence, but what if it wasn't?

I am complaining about Microsoft because I was so sold into the whole WPF/Silverlight concept, while I was totally getting fed up with web work. Yet WPF is slow, with no clear development pathway when using it, while Silverlight is essentially something else, supported by only a few platforms, and I haven't even gotten around to use it yet. And now the Internet Explorer 9/Windows 8 duo come in force placing Javascript and HTML5 in the forefront again. Check out this cool ArsTechnica blog post about Microsoft's (re)new(ed) direction.

All of this, plus the mysterious news I have been waiting for that I won't detail (don't want to jinx it :-S), but which could throw me back into the web world, plus the insanity with the mobile everything that has only one common point: web. Add to it the not too enthusiastic reaction of my blog readers when starting talking about WPF. So the world either wants web or I just have been spouting one stupid thing after another and blew my readers away.

All these shining signs pointing me towards web development also say that I should be relearning web dev with ASP.Net MVC, getting serious about Javascript, relearning HTML in its 5th incarnation and finally making some sense of CSS. Exciting and crazy at the same time. Am I getting too old for this shit or am I ready for the challenge? We'll just have to see, won't we?

Who needs time consuming trips to other countries when you can have it all here, on Siderite's blog, embedded in a blog post? Of course, if you would like the real deal (Hmpf!) don't hesitate to contact me. I can guarantee very good prices and the total trustworthiness of the people there. (Both Silverlight and Photosynth have been somewhat discontinued since the time I wrote this)

You can('t) access the same Photosynth by clicking on this link: Villa in Kyparissi, Greece on Photosynth.

Now, before you start thinking I've gone into tourism marketing, let me explain the technology, what is Photosynth and how to use it.

Photosynth is a Microsoft Research baby and one of the things that they should be terribly proud of, even if not many people have heard of it. I blame this on bad marketing and the stubbornness on using Silverlight only. If you are to read the Wikipedia article, the technology works in two steps. The first step is photo analysis with an algorithm similar to Scale-invariant feature transform for feature extraction. By analyzing subtle differences in the relationships between the features (angle, distance, etc.), the program identifies the 3D position of each feature, as well as the position and angle at which each photograph was taken. This process is known scientifically as Bundle adjustment. You can see it in action if you go to the villa and chose to see the point cloud. The second step is, obviously, navigating the data through the Photosynth viewer.

Now, how does one use it? Surprisingly simple. First take a bunch of photos that overlap themselves. You can use multiple cameras, multiple view angles and times of day, which of course does complicate matters, but the algorithm should be able to run smoothly. Then download the Photosynth software from their site (make sure you have an account there as well) and feed the photos to it. Wait a while (depending on how many photos and their quality) and you are done. I especially liked the option to find the place in the synth on Bing maps and select the angle of one picture in order for it to determine the real location of the objects in the photos. It will also use geographic information embedded in the pictures, if available.

There are, of course, problems. One of the major ones is that it is all done through the Photosynth site. You cannot save it on your HDD and explore it offline. Also, it is not possible to refine the synthing process manually. If your pictures are not good enough, that's it. You will notice, for example, that none of the images rotated to 90 degrees were joined to any others or that there is no correlation between the images of the house outside and those inside. One cannot remove or block pictures in the synth, either. Being all closely connected to the Silverlight viewer also reduces the visibility of the product to the outside world even if, let's face it, I have edited the Photosynth by adding highlights and geographic position and I have navigated it all in the Chrome browser, not Internet Explorer, so if you refuse to install Silverlight to see it, it's a personal problem.

I hope I have opened your eyes to this very nice and free technology and if you are interested in a vacation to the place, just leave me a message on the chat or in a comment. If you have read to this point, you also get a 10% discount, courtesy of yours truly :)

Now what else could I have been? I have been doing this damn job for at least 6 years, depending on what you call programming and what not, and even in the worst moments of depression and disappointment I still can't imagine myself doing anything else.

The point is that I have taken the 70-518 exam: Designing and Developing Windows Applications Using Microsoft .NET Framework 4 with 950 points of 1000. The same old story: pointless questions with some ridiculous answers and focus on technologies that nobody has really heard about like Microsoft Sync Framework or using DTOs or planning testing strategies (you only have to know how they are named, though).

Even worse, after getting almost all the questions and answers from the web in the form of a helpful .vce file, I started researching them on MSDN. I really wanted to know exactly what each question meant and why were those the correct answers. I really expected to find tons of documentation from Microsoft about all of this, but no! Not only did I not find what I was looking for most of the time, but when I did it was either obsolete information, meaning there were from 2007 or having specific message on the pages that the information is no longer valid, or formatted in a weird and unfriendly way that was not conducive to any type of training or learning.

Go ahead, try finding documentation on Microsoft Sync Framework, a Hands on Lab or anything that can be read from top to bottom and give you the ability to use that technology. Nada! There is no book for the MCPD exam, not even one that is going to be published in the future. Sure, I can download anything, install it, try it out, google for error messages and fix things up when they don't work, but I would have done that anyway!

I leave this whole experience behind with a vague sense of disappointment. I've learned a lot about WCF and I am going to read Julie Lerman's Entity Framework book now, but none of these four exams did really push me to learn anything new or (something that I feel I deserved from Microsoft) to find the best ways of doing things. It is all a jumbled, bureaucratic mess.

Ok, time for a summary of TV shows I have wasted my time with since I've written the last post. As usual, my opinion is king and everybody else's sucks... or so I think the usual disclaimer should have sounded. So, here it the dough:

• Doctor Who, Torchwood and even The Sarah Jane Adventures - these British shows are a bit ridiculous, but they are meant to be. I continue to watch them. Torchwood is the only one that goes towards the classic team of professionals battling the forces of evil or whatever, so it was bought by the American Starz channel. The other two are goofy and non violent, which is what I actually like about the Who concept.
• Eureka - nothing has changed, really. There were some stirrings in the storyline, where time travel has changed the future and only some of the people involved are aware of it. I think it's a courageous thing to do in a story, but also a pretty lame cop-out for previous script errors. It's all in the motivation, really.
• House MD - wife watches it, I mainly just fall asleep at it. It has become almost completely non medical and totally confusing. Did you catch the one minute romantic relationship between Cuddy and House? OMFG, OMFG!.. not
• Criminal Minds and Criminal Minds - Suspect Behavior - I like Thomas Gibson and I have always felt like he was the one "making" the Criminal Minds show. What better way to test that theory than make a Criminal Minds spin-off, while taking him almost off the original series episodes? The result is a slightly more boring Criminal Minds and a horrible, horrible Suspect Behavior. And the thing is, I like Forest Whitaker and Janeane Garofalo, so I can't for the life of me understand how a spin-off of a show I like starring these two can fail so miserably!
• Dexter - the show went in a rather boring direction for a while. I mean, you start with a serial killer and you make him a father of three that has a family, all the while trying to make it exciting. Yes, he was almost caught a thousand times and each time the solution was more and more outrageous. Towards the end of season 5 it seemed as Dexter was back on track killing people, but who knows that they will do to him in the sixth season? The latest Dexter book is about cannibals. Yumm!
• Big Love - this show started as interesting, mostly because it was about a culture I know nothing about: polygamist Mormons, and because it starred Bill Paxton. Towards the end, though, it became so repetitive, with all kinds of moronic twists to keep the viewer interested, that I never got the will to watch it end. The episodes of season 5, last of the series, are waiting for me to watch them.
• Fringe - Peter and Fauxlivia are having a baby! Yay! Once I stopped bitching about how lame the show is, how ridiculous the science and how bad the scripts are, I actually enjoyed it. The best show to end a hard day or to start a morning when nothing seems to work. It requires no brain power to watch. Actually, having brain power available makes it unwatchable.
• True Blood - I still enjoy the series, mostly because people are making an effort to act well and keep the script interesting. Also because I started liking it for the vampire/werewolf Louisiana atmosphere mixing the supernatural with the superstupid and the superredneckness and they are still going strong. (yeah, I make up words as I go along)
• Californication - the original smartness of the character spiced with a little sex turned into a lot of gratuitous sex and not too much smartness, but then it turned both sex and smartness up. (What a turn on!) I can't say if that is good or bad, but I've watched season 5 and I am looking forward to the sixth
• Secret Diary of a Call Girl - the show ended, but left avenues open for a continuation. Billie Piper playing a prostitute was a guilty pleasure in itself, but the show was actually very enjoyable. The last season was not nearly as good as the ones preceding so I guess it is a good thing the series ended when they did.
• Entourage - can one keep a show consistent for eight seasons? A lot of people have tried, not many actually succeeded. I enjoy Entourage still, but I feel that the original spunk and friendly youthful energy of the show has dwindled to nothing. Let's see what happens in the eighth and last season.
• Stargate Universe - used to the other two Stargate shows, I was expecting that the last episodes of Universe be ridiculous, self referential, "screw you, we are done" style, below average quality episodes. But no! They are actually going strong and some of the mid season script and acting is making me angry for the show's cancellation. Whoever heard of great episodes in mid season AND when the show is cancelled? Blasphemy!
• V - the second season (and probably last) ended up in a Mortal Kombat way: Shao Khan wins, muhahahahaha! It was a no brainer, really, and I won't feel bad whether it continues or not. The things that I found funny was to use some of the actors in the original series. (yes, indeed, there was another V series in 1983. And yes, I was old enough to watch it then and I did watch it and I don't really care if you don't watch anything created before 1990 :-P )
• Men Of A Certain Age - the show is still smart, funny and tasteful. I keep wondering why is it still on. I can't wait for the second half of the second season
• Weeds - I have to agree with the wife here: enough is enough. The show isn't even about marijuana anymore! And it gets more and more ridiculous by the episode.
• The Good Wife - another great Tony and Ridley Scott work, pun not really intended. Characters are consistent, complex, while the story keeps me interested. Just enough human relationships to make it real, but not too much to make it soapy.
• The Walking Dead - I was expecting a bit more from a zombie series. Apparently it is based on a comic book strip and someone told me it pretty much follows the story there. Well, it doesn't have to! [hint! hint!]
• Haven - the first season of this supernatural "loosely" based on a Stephen King short story ended in an unexpected twist (which was to be expected). Am I waiting impatiently for the second season? Not really.
• Rubicon - show was cancelled. I can't remember anything remotely interesting about it.
• Royal Pains - doctors. That about says it all. This particular brand still has three unwatched episodes waiting for when both me and the wife want to watch it. It doesn't seem likely to happen soon.
• Lost Girl - waiting for the second season. Does not require brain. Still sexy. Canadian.
• Nikita - inertia. That's the only reason I keep watching. I have big mass, you see.
• A Game of Thrones - oh yes! Finally something I want to talk about. Hasn't started yet, but I've read the books and they are great. A feudal fantasy world that is focused on the political machinations in the Seven Kingdoms, with a little magic thrown in to spice things up, but kept nicely in the background. I can hardly wait! It is set to start on the 17th of April
• No Ordinary Family - about a superhero family, I have not really followed the show and meanwhile it was cancelled. bye bye!
• Better with You - it started as a funny show to watch with the girls. It seemed as a humorous comparison of the different stages of marriage. But it became the usual background laughter at people's blatant stupidity thing and I am not enjoying it anymore.
• Shattered - interesting concept, bad execution. Cancelled.
• Falling Skies - a replacement for V? Aliens attack again and a resistance is formed. Set to start in June.
• The Cape - Batman's poor little brother is trying his luck in a city that looks more like Robocop's Detroit than Gotham. Show was lame and has been cancelled, too.
• Outcasts - oh, the humanity! A show with so much promise and so little in the way of proper execution. The premise is that humans fucked up the Earth and in a last ditch effort sent a few colony ships towards a distant planet they named Carpathia. I expected something akin to Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri (yes, old enough to have played that, too!), but in the end it became the quasi mystical "planetary alien entity" thing, mixed with really bad acting and inconsistent scripting. So it got cancelled. It was British, it was cheap, it has potential. They still screwed it up.
• Endgame - I am yet to find the time to watch the pilot of this show. Apparently, it is a Canadian show about a chess player that uses his skills to... you guessed it, solve crimes! If it is anything like Numb3rs, I'll watch the hell out of it. Something tells me it won't be quite like that, though.
• Southpark - still funny as hell and I continue watching it

There are the usual anime shows, too, but I won't list them. The blog entry has gotten long enough.