Anyways, fantastic show if you’re in the market for some great entertainment. Completely character driven and very rated R.

On a side note, I truly believe that HBO is what Hollywood should be. On to The Wire.

I mostly run on the street and the Vibrams afford me a little more protection than running barefoot, while still maintaining the mechanics of barefoot running. By that I mean landing on your mid or forefoot rather than a heel strike. When you land on your heel, it sends a shock up your shins, through your knees and hamstring, all the way up to your back. That’s why running shoes are highly cushioned, to help absorb that initial shock. Landing on you mid/forefoot, however, takes advantage of the body’s natural shock absorbing system. You see, humans are born to run. We don’t need high tech gear to do so. Next time you are barefoot, try running around your yard or house a bit. Take particular notice of how you naturally run. Do you land on your heel or the ball of your foot?

So how was my first run? It was very good, considering it was 94 degrees out. Here are the particulars: I ran 2 miles on some quiet back roads, consciously trying to break the habit of the heel strike. That’s not so hard to do when there’s zero padding for your heel and it hurts like hell to land on it. The balls of my feet started heating up pretty good about three quarters of the way through the run, possibly due to the obscenely hot weather, but more likely because they’re relatively tender compared to my battle hardened heels. I assume they’ll toughen up over time. By the way, these shoes are a bitch to put on at first. It took me five minutes to get just one foot situated the day I bought them. I’m at about thirty seconds per foot now. One thing that I noticed during (and felt after) the run is that I used an entirely different set of muscles. My calves, and believe it or not, my abs were very sore, but that good kind of sore. I felt nothing in my knees or my hamstrings. The other thing I noticed is how light I felt. More agile even. My stride was a bit shorter, but not as much as I thought it would be.

All in all, I was extremely happy with my first run. It’s still too soon for me seriously recommend these to anybody (although I really want to). I’ll need a good month to a year of running before I can put my official seal of approval on them, but they’re definitely off in the right direction.

I think the term “every cliché in the book” has become a bit of a cliché in and of itself, but if there were such a book, these guys found it, read it, reread it, and then plagiarized it. All of it. Every cliché in the book, as it were.

Just one more thing and then I’ll shut up. I’ve noticed that every natural disaster movie that’s released tries to out do its predecessor in terms of death toll. Twister (96) and Dante’s Peak (97) both wipe out various sized towns. Volcano (97) wipes out a major city. Deep Impact (98) and Armageddon (98) wipe out half the planet. The Day After Tomorrow (04) wipes out most of the planet. 2012 (09) …… I can’t say what happens, it would spoil the movie. Let’s just say, to beat it, the next natural disaster movie is going to have to wipe out the entire planet, repopulate it, then wipe it out again. I can’t wait.

The ideas that Eagleman puts forth in each of his forty essays are not to be taken too seriously, but are indeed, meant to stimulate a more pliable way of pondering the mysteries of life after death. It’s an approach that, for some, offers a bit more intellectual freedom than that of atheism (no God, no afterlife) and theism (one God, one afterlife). But don’t get too caught up with the topic of the hereafter. The vignettes presented in this little thought experiment are really more of a study of life than of death, albeit, cleverly disguised in varying incarnations of the great beyond.

One of the things that drew me to this book was Eagleman’s use of a term he invented called Possibilianism.

According to his definition, possibilianism rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional theism and the certainty of atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground.

He pretty much summed up my own personal philosophies on the subject of death and spirituality. And, although I don’t plan on running out and joining the church of possibilianism anytime soon, it is a refreshing alternative to the awkward and uncomfortable term of agnostic that people like me are so often labeled.

The possibilian perspective is distinguished from agnosticism in that it consists of an active exploration of novel possibilities and an emphasis on holding multiple hypotheses at once when no data is available to privilege one position over the others.

If you’re like me and love reading interesting perspectives on all kinds of interesting topics, I would put this little book on your reading list. It’s a short read and can be easily finished in one sitting. You’ll most likely enjoy it, but even if you don’t, just throw it on your coffee table — it’ll be sure to spark some interesting conversations.

Then watch this video on how the LHC actually works. Pretty cool stuff.

If you want to brush up on your Quantum Mechanics and dive into the world of Superstring Theory, check out Brian Greene’s book called “The Elegant Universe“. It’s a fun book and a fairly easy read, that is until you reach about page 3 when all subatomic hell breaks loose. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but coming from someone who previously had about 17 seconds worth of exposure to Quantum Mechanics, I probably wouldn’t recommend this as an intro to physics. I do think, however, if you have even a little familiarity with Particle Theory and the like, you will really enjoy this book. It truly is mind blowing. And after you do read it, come back here and please explain to me what the hell a Calibu-Yau is in English. My head hurts just thinking about it…

But it’s not enough just to be a niche. Flixter.com is a social networking site devoted to movies. The problem with that site is that its design and content attract a younger crowd. It’s sort of like a Myspace for movie lovers. Case in point, Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift averaged 4 stars. — Seriously?

Goodreads is a little more neutral, like Facebook rather than Myspace. And the simple fact that it’s a website devoted to the love of books, helps it attract a much more sophisticated crowd. My only criticism would be with regard to the website’s design and usability. Though it’s not awful, it’s definitely not great. They need to make it a little more intuitive to navigate around the site. The website could also use a Web 2.0 face lift; it looks very 1999ish.

Other than that, I think it’s a really fun site with a ton potential. It was launched in January of 2007, so it’s still young in Internet years. The user reviews (though not quite as good as Amazon’s user reviews) are extremely helpful, and I have to imagine they will become even more helpful over the years. If you’re a bookworm like me, go check it out. I’m going to try shelfari.com as well. Shelfari is another social networking site for book lovers, and is bit more established than Goodreads. Shelfari also seems to have all of the Web 2.0 features that I mentioned were lacking in Goodreads. But I can’t be sure until I try it out for myself.

Speaking of books, I just finished Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. It was fan-freaking-tastic. I would highly recommend it.

The Victorian Internet — This book was fantastic. My daughter bought it for me at a library book sale for 50 cents. The Victorian Internet chronicles the rise of the telegraph, as well as the astounding effects it had on the world. The most fascinating aspect of the book, to me anyway, was the comparison of the telegraph to the modern day Internet. The cultures surrounding these two technologies were/are eerily similar, each having their own bevy of underground elites. Remember the heyday of IRC? Yeah, like that. This is a must read for any geek.

The Alchemist — First, let me say that I knew nothing about this book, except that it seems to be on every self-help bloggers “favorite books” list. Eventually, after reading about it for the hundredth, I bought the book. I’m really glad I did. The Alchemist is an inspirational (and motivational) book about a young shepherd boy named Santiago and his journey to fulfill his personal legend (aka: his dreams.) And that’s the exact message the story is trying to convey, always follow your dreams! Excellent book if your looking for a good story and a little motivational pick-me-up.

The Dip — Ahh, The Dip. Here we have a well thought out collection of common sense. Yes, common sense. There probably isn’t much in this book that you don’t already know, but it’s good to have a refresher course every now and then. Seth Godin tells us that whatever we do in life, be the best at it. And anything that we can’t be the best at, quit. That’s kind of a crappy summary of the book — Seth actually does give good advice on how and why to live by the aforementioned guidelines. It’s a quick read, less than 100 pages, and could easily be read in one or two sittings. Or in my case, a week. It’s definitely not the best self-improvement book I’ve ever read, but for the money and time invested, it was well worth it.

Well, I just had a great customer service experience and I want to give credit where credit is due. Last week I ordered a book from Amazon.com called Getting Things Done by David Allen. The book arrived, I went home, cracked open a beer, sat on my brand new lazy boy, and slowly opened the book — savoring that new book smell. Oddly enough, the book jumped right into the thick of things. No table of contents, no preface, nuttin. I was three pages into it when it dawned on me that I might be missing some pages. Sure enough, pages one through fourteen were no where to be seen. I was a little bummed, but I know that these things can happen from time to time. The first thing I did was to see if anyone had had similar problems with this particular title, and they had.

So I did the next obvious thing, I contacted Amazon. Or more precisely, they contacted me. While I was on their site searching for contact information, I came across a “Call Me” button. Being the spontaneous adventurer that I am, I clicked it. It then prompted me for my phone number and options for when I would like them to call me back; right now, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 15 minutes. I really wasn’t doing anything at the time, due to lack of reading material, so I clicked right now. Almost the same instant I clicked the button, my phone started to ring. “No Way!” was all that came to mind. So I answered it. It was a recording telling me they were connecting me to Amazon. A few seconds later I was talking to an Amazon customer support representative. Since I was logged into my account when I clicked the “Call Me” button, he had all of my information already up on his screen. He politely asked me a security question to verify that I was who I said I was, and then went on to ask me how he could help me this evening. I went on to tell him my sad story. He apologized to me and assured me that he would send out a replacement immediately. All I had to do was print up the prepaid mailing label that he emailed to me and send my defective copy back to them free of charge.

It couldn’t have gone any better. The whole experience took less time than it did to write this blog entry. Anyways, that’s my story. I’ve always loved doing business with Amazon, and this is just one of the many reasons why.

Zen Habits is a motivational and, I think, inspirational website dedicated to abolishing bad habits and creating good habits. I think what I like most about this site, is the fact that the author, Leo, is just a regular person like you or me. He writes about the different techniques and philosophies he uses to improve various aspects of his life. Specifically, he writes about productivity, organization, finance, family, simplicity, happiness, and health. His two main philosophies seem to be GTD (get things done) and simplification. I’ve always been a big believer in the latter approach toward life, hence the reason why I think I’m so drawn to his website.

If improving your life is subject that interests you, and it should be, then I would highly, highly recommend checking out Zen Habits. It’s extremely well written and I always leave the site with a renewed sense of confidence.

Since my blogroll is comprised mostly of tech sites, it’s sometimes hard to weed out all the other non-tech blogs that I like to read. Here is a list of some other sites that are also dedicated to improving your life in one way or another.

43 Folders
Lifehack
Lifehacker
Pick The Brain
Get Rich Slowly
Dumb Little Man

I’m happy to see that all of the above websites also made it onto Leo’s blogroll. Of course, Leo has quite a few more self-improvement sites in his list than I do in mine. I’ll have to take a closer look at what he’s reading. If they’re even half as good as Zen Habits, then they would be worth a look.

It’s completely free and it takes only a few minutes to get a new video on your site. I signed up, created a video, and embedded it into my site in under 5 minutes. Sorry for the bad quality. I used the built-in mic and camera on my MacBook. But imagine the possibilities.

Not only can I annoy people with my writing, but now someone has made it easy for me to annoy people with my face too. Thanks bubbleguru! Their slogan should be “We are Web 2.0s version of blinking text”.

All kidding aside though, this looks like pretty cool technology. You might see me pop in from time to time. Prepare yourself.

Twitter is sort of a cross between a blog and an away message. Unlike a blog, you can only post 140 characters at a time. You have the ability to post entries, or tweets as they are so affectionately called, via the web, a cell phone (sms), an IM client, or from a variety of desktop applications. Twitter asks the very simple question, “What are you doing?”. All you have to do is answer that question. It’s strange, I know. It’s even more strange that people are doing it. Not a few people mind you, but thousands. People use it to keep tabs on their friends. Organizations may use it to keep interested parties up to date. Some people even use Twitter to campaign for the Presidency.

I know, still a little strange. In fact, be sure to bookmark this page, because you’re probably going to dismiss Twitter pretty quickly. I know I did. It’s the natural Twitter cycle — a couple of weeks will pass and every time you hear the word twitter your ears will perk up. You’ll start hearing about it more and more, until finally, curiosity gets the best of you. You’ll sign up, you’ll post your first tweet, and you’ll be hooked. It’s usually around a 2 to 4 week process. At that time make sure to come back here for a list of some pretty handy Twitter resources.

Ah good, you’re back.

Let’s start with twittervision. This site pretty much sums up the Twitter experience. It grabs tweets from the public Twitter timeline and places them on Google maps in real-time. It’s addicting all by itself.

Remember those desktop apps I referred to up above? They allow you to post tweets and receive updates right on your desktop. You can choose to receive updates from the public timeline or limit it to people in your friends list. There are a few different applications to choose from, depending on what operating system you are running. Let me make it easy for you:

Twitter Desktop Applications

• Twitterific - for Mac users
• Twitteroo - for Windows users.
• gTwitter - for Linux users.

Recommended reading:

I really enjoyed the Twitter write-up over at Kottke.org. Check it out if you get a chance. While you’re it, another good article to read is Hacking Twitter for Fun and Profit. Good stuff there.

Some extra tidbits:

The founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, was also the co-founder of Blogger.com and more recently Odeo.com. Blogger.com was eventually acquired by Google and Odeo.com has since been put up for sale. From what I understand, Evan’s company Obvious Corp wants to focus all it’s time and energy on Twitter. That’s good for you Twitterholics.

And there you have it. Now go give it a try. You can look me up at twitter.com/skyecade. Just in case you want to know what I had for breakfast,… or what movie I’m watching,… or what pants I decided to wear,… or what project I’m working on,…or what I’m thinking about at any given moment, etc…

The JenniCam has since gone dark, but not before firmly cementing itself into Internet lore. There is a new phenomenon sweeping through the net now. This phenomenon is called justin.tv. Who’s, Justin? Justin is a guy who strapped a video camera to his head 11 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes ago, and has not shut it off since. It streams live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He claims he will wear it until the day he dies. That would be interesting to see. :0

I watch it on and off while I’m at my computer and I have to tell you, it’s pretty cool (in a weird sort of way) and surprisingly addictive. I reminds me of the Truman Show with Jim Carey where anyone could turn on their televisions at any given time and see what Truman was doing, even if he was just sleeping. In fact, Justin is sleeping right now. It’s soooo wierd! Don’t worry, he’s not lazy — he’s just on west coast time.

This week’s Website of the Week choice is musicovery.com. Like Last.fm and Pandora, musicovery is a music discovery site which helps to match listeners with music that they might be interested in based on their musical tastes.

The first thing you see when you go to the site is a control panel of sorts on the left hand side of website. From here you can choose what you want to listen to, and there are multiple ways of doing this. The first set of options include LoFi and HiFi. To listen to HiFi you need a paid subscription. I don’t have a paid subscription, so LoFi it is. The next set of options include Hit, non Hit, and Discovery. You can choose any combination of the these three options, but at least one must be checked. Hit and non Hit are pretty obvious as to what they are, the Discovery option isn’t so clear though. I assume it grabs independent or otherwise lesser known artists and adds them to the play list. I can’t find any documentation to confirm this though, so I could be wrong.

Up next is an interactive time line. If you leave it as is, it will simply tell you the era in which the song being played originates from. For a little more control, you can use the time line to narrow down your music discovery session to a specific decade, or even year.

Below the time line is the matrix. There are four points on the matrix: calm, energetic, dark, and positive. By clicking on the matrix, you are telling musicovery what kind of mood you want the music to reflect. Experimenting with this is half the fun of musicovery. Once you click a spot on the matrix, a variety of songs will appear to the right. These songs are all color coded by genre, but all share the same characteristics of the matrix, i.e. calm, energetic, dark, positive. So, if you clicked somewhere in between energetic and positive, all the songs that are displayed will have these specific traits in common, whether they be reggae, blues, funk or disco.

What if you want to listen to something energetic, but you’re only interested in one specific musical genre such as rock? No problem. Below the matrix are color coded buttons which list specific genres. When you click on one of these buttons, a mini-matrix is displayed for that particular genre. This mini-matrix works the same way as the main matrix, but only the results of that specific musical genre will be displayed. You may have noticed that the songs displayed to the right of the control panel are now all of one color, in this case dark blue. Dark blue represents the musical genre rock. Pretty cool, huh? They do seem to be missing some popular genres though, but we’ll chalk that up to them being new. All in all this is a very fun website to play around with.

Another great feature is the ease in which musicovery lets you purchase the songs you are currently listening too. Each song has an iTunes and Amazon link associated with it that will take you directly to that product for an easy check out. Actually, it’s probably not a great feature for impulse buyers, but for everyone else it’s great.

I could write more, but I don’t think I’d do the site any justice. It’s one of those things that you just have to try out for yourself, but if you love music, you’ll most likely love musicovery.

http://musicovery.com

I had never heard of this musical before. Most likely because I generally don’t like musicals, never mind musicals that are performed by high school students. I really didn’t know what to expect. We arrived at the high school around one o’clock, went in, bought our tickets, and sat down. I want to mention that this was one of the nicest high school auditoriums I had ever been in. It had true stadium seating with tons of leg room. Lots of leg room is nice for someone who is 6′ 2″. And of course, the stadium seating is nice for the person who has to sit behind someone who is 6′ 2″. The acoustics and lighting were decent as well.

The actors, consisting of freshmans, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, were fantastic. They were confident, funny,… just fantastic. The music was so much fun too. You couldn’t help but tap your feet. And the voices that came out of these kids — American Idol quality. True, I may be a little more forgiving than Simon Cowell, but they were amazing just the same.

The musical itself is a mash-up of classic Dr. Seuss stories and characters, woven together to create a heartwarming and genuinely enjoyable experience. Okay, stop laughing at me, I know this is a bit out of character for me to be praising a musical starring characters like the Cat in the Hat and Horton the Elephant, but that just goes to show what a positive impact this play and its cast membershad on me. I stress cast members, because I honestly don’t know what my take would be on this musical if it were in the hands of another cast. Like I said, they were fantastic.

Great job guys!

The website isn’t the most pleasing website to look at, but don’t let that deter you from trying it out. It’s well worth a look.

There’s tagging, tracking reports, logs, all sorts of goodies.

If there were such an operating system that could make me switch, however, it would most likely be OS X Tiger. I’ve been using OS X on a daily basis now for about five months and have loved every minute of it. This is a new frontier for me. I have no substantial experience with any of the other Apple operating systems, so I can’t form a valid opinion of them. Just OS X Tiger.

Here are some of my thoughts on OS X in comparison to Windows and Linux:

First of all, OS X is really just a pretty version of Unix, so we know right away that it’s far more secure than Windows. Having a background in Linux/Unix really helped me with the transition to OS X. In fact, the first time I booted up my Mac I was surprised at how much it looked like Kubuntu, menus and all.

Boot up and shutdown times are ridiculously quick. Noticeably faster than Windows and quite a bit faster than Ubuntu. Coming out of sleep mode is almost instantaneous too.

Installing programs couldn’t be easier. Drag the new program to the Applications folder and voila, it’s installed. Uninstalling couldn’t be easier either. Drag the program to the trash bin and voila, it’s uninstalled. No orphaned DLL files or abandoned registry entries to clutter up your system.

No viruses. The typical argument here is that it’s because the writers of such malicious programs don’t create viruses for Macs, because no one uses Macs. That’s partially true. It is possible to write a virus (or other malware) for OS X — and as the operating system becomes more popular you can bet we’ll see more of them. The simple fact is, however, it’s much harder to write this kind of software for a Unix based OS. One reason for this is because 99% of Windows users are going about their daily business logged onto their computers as administrator, also called a root. Ask any Linux user if he or she surfs the net as root and they’ll most likely laugh at you. OS X, for all intents and purposes, is Linux.

It’s very intuitive to use, but first, you have to clear your mind of all Windows. Only then will yo be able to accept the OS X interface. For example, the whole corners thing is genius. When I move my mouse to the top left corner (or whichever corner you choose), all my open applications are tiled in front of me. It’s like alt-tab times 100. It’s little things like that that make OS X shine.

OS X is a very powerful development platform which comes preloaded with languages such as Python, Perl, PHP, and Ruby, while still remaining incredibly user friendly to the computer novice.

Spotlight! By far the best search utility in any operating system. So good that Microsoft is putting a Spotlight clone in Vista.

Plenty of software applications. From what I used to hear about Macs, the main problem was that no one made software for them. Like I said, I don’t know anything about the older versions of Apple’s OS, so this may be true. I can tell you that with OS X, there is definitely no shortage of software. Because OS X is Unix based, you can essentially run any Linux program you want on it. For example, I don’t use Microsoft Office anymore, even on Windows. I use OpenOffice which is a free, cross-platform office suite. I don’t use Dreamweaver anymore. I use NVU, which is a free, cross-platform HTML editor. Software that is cross-platform is especially nice because no matter what OS you are using, your workspace remains familiar.

OS X is geared more towards the user. In the world of Web 2.0, content is king. In the world of content creation, OS X is king. It’s hard for anyone to argue the fact that the Mac reigns supreme in the area of photo manipulation and audio / video production. With bundled apps like Garage Band, Photo Booth, iTunes, and iMovie, the average user can easily produce rich content, ripe for a new dynamic web.

These are just some of the examples of why I love OS X, and it’s only been 5 months. So if you are a Windows user and you haven’t looked at an Apple in a while, I recommend that you take another look, you may be surprised.

Or you can wait a bit. Apple and Microsoft both have new operating systems due out shortly, OS X Leopard and Windows Vista respectively. 2007 could turn out to be an interesting year.

Installation is a breeze. When you sign up with Tracksy (or Google for that matter), they will generate a little javascript snippet that you place in the html of your website. It’s literally cut, paste, done. I’m currently running both on all my sites.

Here is a list of some of tracky’s user generated reports and features that they offer:

• Exclusion Cookies
• Exclude Selective I.P. Addresses
• Invisible or Visible Counter
• Detailed, Real-Time Reports
• Recent Visitor List
• Traffic Reports
• Traffic Per URL
• Traffic Per Year
• Traffic Per Month
• Traffic Per Weekday
• Traffic Per Day
• Traffic Per Hour
• New vs. Returning
• Referrers
• Referring Sites
• Search Engines
• Search Engine Keywords
• Visitor Computers
• Browser
• Operating System
• Language
• Screen Size
• Screen Color Depth
• Internet Service Provider
• Connection Speed
• Visitor Locations
• Country
• Region
• City
• Visits
• Pages Viewed
• Visits Per Month

Not bad for a free service. Give it a try and if you don’t like it, it’s as simple as deleting the javascript from your website. It can’t get much easier than that.

I’ve never been a huge Superman fan. I have nothing against him personally, he seems like a nice enough guy. My brain just never really clicked with the concept of an all powerful super man, if you will. He’s like the swiss army knife of super heroes; laser eyes, freezo breath, super strength, gravity defying, x-ray vision, bullet proof, rocket proof, missile proof, umm, pretty much invincible. Where’s the fun in that?

But wait, I recall enjoying the original Superman movies with Christopher Reeves. In fact, I really enjoyed them. Then it dawned on me. It’s not Superman himself that everybody loves, it’s what he stands for; truth and justice. The fantasy that someone is watching over us no matter what. This is an important fantasy, especially in the world we live in today, and this movie did a great job in representing that fantasy. I’m getting a bit too philosophical though.

The bottom line is that Superman Returns did a great job stimulating multiple emotions and not just the ones that are typically associated with this sort of film. The cast was fantastic and the story grabs you right from the beginning and doesn’t let go until the closing credits. True, the movie could be slow at times, but slow doesn’t always translate into lack of intensity. I caught myself holding my breath quite a few times and not just during the action scenes. Louis and Superman had some unforgettable moments together.

I think you get the gist of this review. I would seriously recommend this movie to anyone, Superman fan or not. I think it’s that good.

The only two real contenders in Pixar’s line up are Finding Nemo and the original Toy story, and believe me when I say that I enjoyed Cars only half a hair more than the latter two. Cars was definitely the most visually appealing of them all, but what did it for me was the movie’s setting. It was very nostalgic and that was the clincher.

That’s all I’ll say though. I give Cars a 9.5 out of 10. Oh, and I highly recommend going to see this movie on a rainy Saturday night, with about 100 screaming children who are up way past their bedtimes, strung out on an endless supply Junior Mints. It really amplifies the experience.

By the way, check out this unbelievable tidbit from Rottentomatoes.com.

“The addition of reflections in practically every shot of the film added tremendous render time to the project. The average time to render a single frame of film for “CARS” was 17 hours. Even with a sophisticated network of 3000 computers, and state-of-the-art lightning fast processors that operate up to four times faster than they did on “The Incredibles,” it still took many days to render a single second of finished film.”

See what a great liar I am? The reality is I usually never admit to my mistakes and I bury the truth deep within the bowels of my soul, hoping that no one ever discovers my dark little secret. Alas, I made an error in judgment that I feel I need to address. Back in October I reviewed a movie called Serenity. I stick by my review for the most part. It’s my thoughts about the T.V. show Firefly that I wanted to amend.

As I said in my review, Firefly is the T.V. show leading up to the movie Serenity. I also mentioned that I watched it and hated it. However, I never really gave the show a fair shake. I only watched the first episode, which I read recently was never intended to be the first episode. Fox, in their infinite wisdom, decided to shuffle the order in which the series would be aired. After Serenity came out I decided to make good on my promise and give the show another chance. I am so glad I did. I rented all the discs from my local video store and watched the entire season in a week. I loved the show so much that I bought the DVD set and watched the entire season again. GEEK! I know, but it could possibly be one of the best sci-fi shows ever. As a matter of fact, I don’t think the term sci-fi best describes this show.

My initial reason for not liking the show was due to its western motif. I’m still not a huge fan of that per se, but the characters Joss Whedon created are so much greater than the environment they are in. The characters in Firefly are so entertaining and interesting (and completely original) that I quickly forgot what it was that turned me off about the show in the first place.

There, I’m glad I got that off my chest. Now I can sleep at night. I’m also half way through season 2 of BSG and I’m loving every second of it. For those of you have not yet seen it, I would highly recommend it. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m afraid I’ve already said too much.