On del.icio.us

After hearing about del.icio.us for a while, I decided to get an account, and it's pretty cool. Now I can easily access links to my online bills / accounts and technical papers that I check from time to time. I've also been trying to bookmark things I think are worth reading; it's for cases where I don't feel like writing a blog post about an article or posting it on NewsDog, but I still think others may want to take a look. There are RSS feeds on all the pages, although the only one I imagine anyone else would want to track is the last one. Anyway, good stuff.

ForecastFox and Berkeley library proxy

Here's something that about 0 of you care about. I use the ForecastFox extension in Firefox to show the upcoming weather, and I also use the UC Berkeley library proxy to access certain web sites from outside school. Unfortunately, the proxy configuration script lists AccuWeather, the site ForecastFox uses, as one that needs to go through the proxy, thereby necessitating a login to the proxy server every time I want the weather forecast to show up. To fix this, I changed the script to not access AccuWeather through the proxy server; here is the altered script. Just use that link as your proxy configuration URL instead of the standard one, and you should be set.

Obligatory Stella Review

I just watched the first episode of the new Stella show on Comedy Central, and given that my blog is called Raking Leaves (Quicktime link), I figured I should comment. To put it briefly, it's funny, and still weird in that Stella way, but it just didn't have the impact that I was hoping for. Stella's lunacy just doesn't work as well over 22 minutes as it does in 2 minute sketches. And, I agree with this Dana Stevens review that this stuff might be too weird to get big ratings. But, don't get me wrong; the episode had really funny moments, and I'm definitely going to watch whenever I can. And, I know from experience that Stella gets funnier after a few viewings, so maybe I'll take another look at the first episode sometime soon.

The Wire Season 3

I just finished watching it, in spite of my current massive workload. I'd say that in the end, it didn't quite match Season 2, mostly because it was a bit too sprawling. To really appreciate Season 3, you need to remember Season 1 and some of Season 2 in a fair amount of detail. The amount of mental effort required to try to track all the plot connections detracts from the impact of the episodes. I imagine that upon a second viewing of all three seasons things would connect in a deeper way, but that's 37 hours of television, which is beyond even an addict like myself. Also, I didn't find the running theme of politics in the third season to be quite as compelling as the inside look at union workers from the second season. Nevertheless, Season 3 is definitely worth watching if you've seen and liked the first two.

Cable Choice

I heard this interview with Tim Winter, director of the Parents Television Council, yesterday on the radio. From the things I had previously heard and read about the PTC, I assumed this guy would be some sort of nut, but he was actually fairly well-spoken and reasonable. I was pleased to hear that his group wants to deal with objectionable content on cable by allowing consumers to only pay for the channels they want. This solution would also solve my problem of wanting HBO, but not wanting to pay $50 for the other 200 channels on digital cable that I'll never watch. Anyway, even though some of what he said was BS, he seemed thoughtful, which was a pleasant surprise.