They refused to play it on any US TV network, but of course there are other ways to see such things. Since the new Series of Doctor Who started on March 26th in the UK, we’ve been watching it together as a family every Saturday night, exactly one week after it aired in the UK. (OK, usually a week plus a few hours to be exact.)

Both Brandy and I had watched the show when we were younger. And Amy was hooked with the very first episode of this new series. It is after all designed to be one of those shows that is aimed at kids first, but with lots of stuff thrown in for the adults so they can watch and like it too. For the last 13 weeks, it has been one of the few constant things that we know EVERY week we sit down and do together. It has been a lot of fun. We watched the last episode of the new series last weekend.

I was worried about this return of the Doctor. It might have been like the Doctor Who TV movie from 1996. Passible. A few good things about it. But missing a lot of the flavor that was appealing about the show in the earlier years. Basically they tried to Americanize it a bit, and in the process just made it not quite right. But no, they did it right. This new one updates the old series in some good ways, but retains all the right stuff that made the show fun to begin with. Yes, I could nitpick about certain things here and there. But almost without exception I had FUN watching the episodes and enjoyed them. So it succeeded.

There have now been 173 Doctor Who stories made for television (of different lengths both in time and episodes.) That is spread between 9 doctors and over a 42 year timespan. Wow. Even taking into account no new TV stories from 1990 to 1995 and again from 1997 to 2004, that is a long time for a TV show. It of course beats that lame old Star Trek thing. :-)

Anyway, the BBC sucks, and has only released a small portion of those 173 stories on DVD so far. (Unfortunately, of the 173 stories, 27 do not exist intact any longer since the BBC destroyed a bunch of “worthless old stuff” in the late sixties and early 70s. Damn them!) Anyway, BBC has only released a small portion, and some of those are only available as European region DVDs. Of the ones available in the US region without a region free DVD player, Netflix has 28 available. 28 out of 173 total (or out of 146 that actually fully exist) is pretty deficient, but hey, it is something.

(The Netflix search I linked to has 33 rather than 28 because it also includes a few disks with bits and pieces of the “lost” stories, and also the 1960s movies with Peter Cushing which everybody agrees don’t count.)

So we are continuing the Saturday Doctor Who thing with Netflix. I filled up an extra personality in Netflix with all the Doctor Who they had and put it in order by when the stories aired. (Then the Cushing movies and stuff after everything else). And so off we go, starting with Story #6 “The Aztecs” with the First Doctor which originally aired as four 25 minute episodes from 23 May 1964 to 13 Jun 1964.

I am guessing Amy won’t be quite as enthralled by these old episodes. Especially from the first and second Doctor when they were in black and white. And the special effects were of course MUCH WORSE. Just plain bad in most cases! And also the pacing was quite a bit different than the fast paced 45 minute episodes of the new series. So she may well fall asleep. We’ll see! They just have a handful of first and second Doctor episodes though, so in a few weeks we’ll be in color again.

And that should see us through until Christmas time when the first episode with the 10th doctor will be airing in the UK. I am a bit wary, as it is a “Christmas Special” and the producers have said there will be reindeer and everything. That just does not seem like Doctor Who to me, and they better not screw it up! Especially since it will be the first full episode for a new Doctor! (He got a few seconds in the last episode of this series.)

Anyway, it has been fun revisiting my childhood (well, my late pre-teen and early teen years) by watching this for the last 13 weeks. And having Brandy and especially Amy into it as well has been great.

Looking forward to the 10th Doctor in a few months! In the mean time though, bring on the old black and white episodes from the 60s!

I am working from home today because Amy was sick. I was just on a conference call and while on it was walking around the pool. Look down, and what do I see… hundreds and hundreds of tadpoles again!!!

On the one hand, I guess we really do have to get better at checking the chlorine level more often (and perhaps we need a new cholorinator), but on the other hand, maybe I can make up for my earlier mass murder of the frogs with the hose!

Amy and I spent a few minutes saving tadpoles and putting them into that same tank I was using last time. Then it started pouring rain, so we stopped.

I think Brandy is going to buy us a new tank on her way home from work, with lots more room for more tadpoles.

Uh, and then she’s going to pour chlorine in the pool and kill all the ones Amy and I don’t manage to get into the tank.

I was going to suggest just leaving the pool de-chlorined until all the tadpoles turn into frogs, but I don’t think she would like that idea. Especially since that cycle would probably just continue forever, cause there would always be new tadpoles.

Anyway, updates as they are warented on the new generations of tadpoles!

(I suppose we could also chase away the mating frogs when we see them, but they are there by the pool all night every night doing their thing. And they ain’t quiet about it either! Once the screen is up next month, the frogs won’t be able to get to the pool…)

I haven’t been posting all to regularly on random things I see and have thoughts on, because I have been too busy. Most of my posts have been “What is happening with me” updates lately. Which may be more or less interesting depending on your perspective.

Anyway, here are a few short thoughts on a few things.

* Brandy hasn’t posted lately. Wonder what is up with her.

* Al is absolutely right on Kerry’s irrelevance at this point. And the democrats in general are still just damaging thermselves more and more rather than putting up any actual viable alternative thoughts. I’m obviously no W fan, but the Dems are not providing any alternative I can warm to.

* Rebecca is about to have a Gideon. She “got my hair and nails done so Gideon’s first impression of his mother won’t be too grubby”. Yup. That’ll work. Anyway, very exciting.

* Tivo makes me mad. They have so badly mismanaged what they have. Over the last year they have basically stood still with their product. What innovations they have made seem to me either as distractions (looking at your pictures on your TV) or just done badly and late (TivoToGo), and meanwhile not doing many things that would improve the platform. And on the business side they have let important deals slip though their fingers. DirecTV is clowly pushing them out in favor of their own product. (And has not released the new feaures that Tivo HAS added to their stand alone system, so it makes the comparison even worse.) They had a deal with Comcast almost done but then said no… A year ago while there were cheaper alternatives out there, none was BETTER than an actual Tivo. Especially the DirecTV combo unit. But Tivo has stood still. Now the others are catching up and nipping at Tivo’s heels. Factoring in price concerns, in terms of VALUE (as opposed to actual quality not considering price) some are probably already ahead. In a year, unless Tivo does something dramatic, they will no longer be the best. I love my Tivo. But only as long as they are the best thing out there. As soon as there is a better option (not just value, but actually BEST) I’ll switch. It will make me sad though.

* Star Trek: Enterprise cancelled. Oh well. Haven’t had time to watch anyway.

* Johnny Carson: Makes me sad. I used to watch all the time. And I’d forgotton a lot of it. But one time a few years ago I was on a bus ride. Can’t remember why or where. But they were playing Best of Carson stuff on the TVs in the bus. And I couldn’t stop laughing. I put the Carson DVD sets on my Q at Netflix.

* Atlas 3B: Another rocket launched last night. A classified NRO payload. Presumably a spy satellite. I set my alarm to go off 40 minutes before (at 2 AM), but I didn’t realize I was hitting the snooze button every 10 minutes until 40 minutes after the liftoff. I slept through it. This sucks, cause you can see the launches pretty well right from my back porch, and the night ones especially are really nice to watch. You can’t see the actual pad of course, but you can see them a few seconds later once they are in the air. Since I have been full time in Florida (since 1 Jul 2004) there have been 8 launches (Messenger on 3 Aug 2004, NRO on 31 Aug 2004, GPS 2R-13 on 6 Nov 2004, Swift on 20 Nov 2004, AMC 16 on 17 Dec 2004, Delta 4 Demo on 21 Dec 2004, Deep Impact on 12 Jan 2005 and NRO on 3 Feb 2005). Of those I have seen 4 I think. Messenger, Swift, Delta 4 Demo and Deep Impact. I am told by folks here that you stop even noticing. I still notice and get annoyed when I miss one. I like watching them.

* State of the Union: I Tivoed it. Have not watched it yet. I may comment on it here. I may not. We’ll see if I am inspired.

* Work: Work has been going well. I’ve been having a lot of fun lately. It has been busy, but good busy. We were really stressing on a few things the last few weeks, but looks like everything is going to come together in good ways. Good. Also, there has been some turnover. Some people leaving, some new people arriving. It should be a good refresh. Lots of fresh new faces. There may be more info before too long on that. But nothing yet.

* Apple: That Mini is really cool. With the price I really want one. With a few added features, not the bottom of the line, but still… it is nice. They released ne powerbooks this week too. Which is of course what I REALLY want… I don’t want to go back to using a desktop. They are so confining! But laptops are of course a lot more for the same level of performance. And these aren’t the much awaited G5s, which may be awhile yet. BUt still. Anyway, new laptop isn’t in the works right now. But maybe a mini could be done by summer once we get all the basic settling in and getting situated done. Dunno. We will see. I’m a little annoyed though. Early 2004 when I was briefly “without job” before coming down there I needed cash flow, so I sold a bunch of stock and mutual funds and such. Some of that sale was all but one share of what I owned of Apple stock. It wasn’t a huge amount to begin with, but it was something. Given the run up in Apple, the gains in the last year would not be enough to get a PowerBook, but it would be plenty to buy a Mini! Oh well! That one share is doing awesome though!

* Iraqi Election: Seems like a complete success so far. And yes, I’ve read some of the things (Juan Cole for instance) that point out all the negatives. But on balance, this is very good and very exciting. We have a long way to go yet, but at the moment things are looking positive. If W actually manages to pull this all off against the odds and we end up with a good result when we look back at Iraq several years from now, I’ll give him full credit.

* Howard Dean: They really don’t want to win in 2008, do they?

* Garmin: They finally got an automotive deal! Garmin GPS (dealer installed option) on Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep. Woo! I wish they had gotten more, but this will do. I like Garmin’s interface and feature sets more than all the built in systems I have gotten a chance to play with (not many). Just so long as they don’t dumb it down for the car.

* Superbowl: I plan to Tivo it and fast forward through the game (couldn’t care less) and watch the commercials.

OK. That’s it. I’ve just been adding these quick notes off and on between other things as I think of them all morning. I’m done now.

Yesterday morning at work I noticed that one of my coworkers had a LED Binary Clock. We got to talking, and I mentioned how bogus it was that it wastn’t actually purely binary, and still represented digits from our normal 24/60/60 system. I joked that I would whip up a web version that did it right. I didn’t actually intend to. But over lunch I needed a break, so I did. Most of it was done in 20 minutes over lunch. (I was slow since I hadn’t done this kind of thing in years.) I ended up refining it slightly more during another short break I had in the afternoon, then once I got home I started cleaning it up for posting here, made new images, etc. Anyway… my new binary clock is now ready!

Abulsme True Binary Time

A number of places sell items like the ThinkGeek LED Binary Clock.  These proport to show the time in binary and thus be all geeky and cool.  But they fake it.  They just take the normal standard time in HH:MM:SS format and show each of the six digits as a binary number… This is simply NOT geeky enough.  True geeks will want a clock like what I present here.

This is a true binary time clock where the time is represented by one binary fraction representing the portion of the day that has passed. The first bit is half days, the second is quarter days, then eighths, etc. as well as their on and off graphics. The clock shows the local time from your computer and reflects the time zone you have set, so it is only as accurate as your own computer’s clock. The last bit flips once every 1/65536th of a day, otherwise known as approximately every 1.3184 seconds.  This is truely a binary clock.  Not like those wannabes that use 24/60/60.

Hmmm… Now I just need to get someone to make an actual physical one of these so I can have one on my desk or hanging on my wall!