busywaiting

I wonder what the timesheet code for "waiting for my mailer to haul down a few dozen megs from Texas and process it" is.

Lotr III: the quickening

Two independant reports that I feature in RotK.

Observations on "24"

I've got two episodes left to watch in Season 2 of this rather good show. The following occurred to me along the way:

• they were way too slow to lock onto the idea of cellphone tracking in the first season
• Jack should have named his daughter Trouble, to avoid future surprises
• Fully expecting Trouble to phone Tony at CTU at some point and have Tony say, "Look, Trouble, would you ever just FUCK OFF and stop calling us?"
• They didn't expect to get a second season. Or, they didn't put as much effort into the second season script. The twists in the second season are a lot less smooth than the first, and Trouble's side story is just distraction instead of being an integral part of the plot like it was in season one.
• After they'd accidentally overtortured Jack in season 2, all I could think of was, "huh, he knows the drill here. he was in Flatliners".
• Reminding me that Jack's powers of regeneration put Wolverine to shame.
• Season 2, as mentioned, with the looser plot has to make WAY more use of "guy turns up just in time", "guy stays alive just barely long enough", etc. in order to resolve plot difficulties
• In general, I don't really notice the Real Time nature of the show, since I guess I'm used to the stock Hollywood "car leaves scene"-"car arrives 300 miles away in next shot" and also since they tend to cut away from the boring location-change action.

I'm told season 2 ends with a huge cliffhanger; with two episodes left I can pretty much figure out what it is. Rather a shame, since they left the end of season 1 complete, and cliffhanging an end-of-season show like this seems incongrouous - there's supposed to be a 1-year gap between season 1 and season 2, but if you cliffhang at the end of season 2, does season 3 roll straight into the next 24-hour period?

"24" redux

Ok, so the cliffhanger wasn't the one I thought it was. In fact, I think it's more of an attempt to graft a similar ending to the first season onto the second, and do so poorly, rather than a cliffhanger.

One more point of observation about the world depicted in 24 is that the CTU IT department is probably not a good place to work in, ever.