DVDxR/blog

Comedy Central has confirmed their order for 26 new episodes!

Full story over at TV Week

A thought occurred to me the other day.  Who really, in their job, needs a word processor?  Most of my users just use it to make documents and shove them on a file share to be forgotten.  These docs almost always contain information that, really, would be better stored in either an online document system or via email.  Think of it this way: You wake up in an alternate universe.  This universe is just like ours except for one tiny difference: The word processor, for whatever reason, was never invented.  Instead, for formal documents they use a….typewriter.  Really.  Or a typesetter for big stuff.  Anyway, you go to work and look at your alternate universe desk.  Now ask yourself, would that desk contain a typewriter?

I’ll bet your answer would be no (nostalgia “old school!” answers don’t count).  More than likely you would use email or use an online knowledge base or document system.  What got me thinking about this was Google Wave and the thought of integrating everything into a hybrid, web based communication system.   Foget document types, concentrate more on document content.  You enter it, drop it into an search indexed public or private folder. Want to email it, click email and email headers appear.  Sending it internal, it just links to the document in the folder instead of generating 5000000000 copies of it, since you, of course, hit reply-to-all.

OK, ramble over

As mentioned earlier, My Name is Earl was canceled by NBC and the producers were shopping it to Fox.  TV Series Finale is reporting that Fox has now passed on picking up the sitcom for its 5th season.

Reaper was cut by CW and now the its producers are trying to get the series picked up as a first run syndicated show.  Head over to ReaperDMV for the full story and info on how you can help save the show.

Just a reminder, there are some cool shows starting up soon, or continuing.

• Mental - New Fox show about a mental ward. Think ER, but for crazy people.  Starts Tuesday, May 26th on Fox
• Wipeout - Starts on ABC Wed, May 27th
• Pushing Daisies - The final episodes get burned off starting Saturday, May 30th on ABC.
  
• Ice Road Truckers - Always a cool show in the summer (get it? I’m a riot).  Starts Sunday, May 31 on Discovey
• Dexter - Showtime is re-running the entire series leading up to the new season.  Starts Sunday, May 31 on Showtime
• Burn Notice - 3rd season starts Thursday, June 4th on USA!  Don’t forget to follow Jeffrey Donovan (Michael Westen) on twitter @Jeffrey_Donovan
• The Listener - The Canadian import mind-reading drama starts Thursday, June 4th on NBC
• Royal Pains - The new USA drama starts on Thursday, June 4th
• Weeds - New Season Starts Monday, June 8th on Showtime.
• Nurse Jackie - The new Showtime show staring Soprano’s Edie Falco starts Monday, June 8th.  I’m looking forward to this one.
• Raising the Bar - The TNT legal drama kicks off its second season on Monday, June 8th.
• The Closer - The Closer opens its new season on Monday, June 8th on TNT
• Kings - NBC starts burning off the remaining episodes starting Saturday, June 13th.
• True Blood - The second season starts up Sunday, June 14th.
• Torchwood - For those of you in the UK (or, um, P2P users) the awesome Doctor Who spinoff starts its 5-episode 2009 run on Monday, June 15th on BBC 3
  
• Top Gear - Again, just for our UK viewers (yea, right), Top Gear returns Sunday, June 21st on BBC 2
  
• Eureka - SciFi’s Eureka returns on Friday, June 15th on SciFi
• Leverage - The very cool “Ocean’s 11″ like TV show returns to TNT on Wed, July 15th
• Hawthorne - Thursday,  July 16th on TNT
• Saving Grace - Thursday,  July 16th on TNT
• Eli Stone - The Final four episodes air starting on Monday, June 20th on ABC
• Merlin - The British import starts its US run on NBC on Tuesday, June 21st
• The Cleaner - The  A&E drama pickes back up on Thursday, June 23rd
• The Philanthropist - The new NBC drama about a billionaire playboy who uses his money as a weapon in his pursuit of good starts Wed, June 24th

More updates coming later today.

Did I miss something? Drop it in the comments or twitter me @DVDxR

In the WTF department comes news that Twitter (the company) wants to integrate Twitter (the service) into an unscripted reality/game  show.

From the article: “The show would harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format.”

WTF?  A Twitter game show where you stalk celebs?

From Mashable and Yahoo/AP via @chrispirillo via @KimSherrell via @mashable (whew!)

It’s that time of year again.  Is your favorite among the slaughtered? A few of mine are.  Here is a list of scripted shows that got the ax this year:

NBC (the slaughterhouse for TV shows this year)

• My Own Worst Enemy
• Knight Rider (Really, who though this would actually work!?)
• My Name is Earl (May jump networks, stay tuned)
• Life
• Lipstick Jungle
• ER
• Kings
• Crusoe
• Deal or no Deal (not a scripted show, but a noteworthy cancellation)
• Medium (Technically canceled on NBC, but it’s moving over to Fridays on CBS for season 6)

Fox

• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Damn cliffhangers!!!)
• King of the Hill (Fox still has a few unaired episodes to burn through though)
• Do Not Disturb
• Sit Up and Shut Up (Such an awful show to have such a talented cast).
• Prison Break

ABC

• According to Jim (This was still on?)
• Samantha Who?
• Life on Mars (Interesting ending, but overall not near as good as its UK counterpart)
• Boston Legal
• Cupid (Remake a canceled show from the 90’s, great idea!)
• Dirty Sexy Money
• In Motherhood
• Eli Stone
• Pushing Daisies
• The Unusuals

CBS

• Eleventh Hour (Another one I liked)
• Harper’s Island
• Swingtown (If a show about swingers can’t pull in ratings….)
• The Unit
• Without a Trace
• The Ex List
• Worst Week

CW

• Reaper (Sounds like the studio is shopping this one around for a new home) Save Reaper Info
• Everyone Hates Chris (apparently so..)
• Privileged
• The Game

Almost forgot the two SciFi shows we lost this year….

SciFi

• Battlestar Galactica
• Stargate: Atlantis

So there it is. T:TSCC really hurt but wasn’t a great surprise. On the upside, my other favorite bubble shows, Chuck and Dollhouse, make the cut this year and will be back.  NBC ended up cutting 25 shows this year, in part to make way for Leno at 10pm/9pm central.  Can’t wait to see how that works out….

To keep up on the latest news for your favorite shows, check out these awesome sites:

http://pifeedback.com/ - Forums for The Programming Insider has all the overnight ratings info your heart could desire.
http://tvbythenumbers.com/ - Just what it says, ratings info and stats based predictions.  Also a great source of TV news.
http://tvseriesfinale.com/ - Again, just what it says. Great source for cancellation info and general TV show news.
http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/ - Nikki has all the best insider gossip.  Great resource in upfront season!
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/ - Another great TV insider source.

Hoping to get back to this very soon after the last year off.  It’s a long story, and I’ll be posting about it soon.

The one thing that twitterers fear is a fatal influx of spammers as the popularity of the service grows.  Right now it’s a fairly clean service, and the ability to easily block users makes it a challenge for spammers to get a foothold.  This doesn’t mean that some are not trying.  So to address this a new website has popped up, the Twitter Black List.  The service uses a formula that calculates the follow/follower ratio for a user and grades them as:

1:5 = twittercaster, 1:2 = notable, 1:1 socially healthy, 2:1 newbie or social climber, 5:1 twitter spammer.

Another tool, Twitter Twerp Scan uses similar logic to scan your followers and make suggestions on who to block.

Unfortunately going by this ratio alone you are going to catch a lot of legit users.  Lets not forget Scobleizers’ advice that it’s not who follows you, it’s who you follow.   Heck, going by this criteria I’m amost a spammer.  The problem with the Blacklist is that it seems to lable people as “… known spammers and other morons on Twitter…” without any reguard to the content they post. Sure, some of the posts are mundane, but I would not lable someone like flyaxe as a spammer.  The guy follows several thousand people sure, but a spammer?  I have a hard time with the concept that a person should get the ban hammer just because they follow a lot of people.  This is how some people choose to use twitter, it doesn’t harm the people they follow, and if they are not spamming you, who cares?  If we are going to scrutinize based on a follow/follower ratio, wouldn’t it make more sense to go the other way and take a harder look at people who are followed by way more people than they follow?

While I agree that a blacklist of twitter-spammers is a good thing, probably approaching necessary, some logic other than just an arbitrary ratio of followers needs to be used to determine who is a spammer and who is just trying to get the most out of twitter.  A more indepth analysis of tweets is needed, and without some other info (such as Blocked stats for users) it probably can’t be automated.   The only tell-tale way to tag a spammer would be to look at links in tweets, but how to do you sort out the spammers from the Scobleizers or mashables?

I’m not going to lie about it: I’ve always been an IE guy. I switched from Netscape back when IE 4 came out and never really looked back. Sure, I’ve tried others but never really saw enough to make me want to switch. When IE 7 was released with tabs (finally!) I thought I’d never stray.

Then came Vista. Again, I’m not going to lie: IE 7 under Vista blows. The crashes are annoying enough (at least twice a day) but the pauses! The pauses are driving me insane! It’ll just sit there, spinning it’s wheels for no apparent reason for up to a minute at a time. I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been patient. I started using Vista at home when it was RTM back in November of 2006 (several months before it’s early 2007 public debut.) I suffered through the nVidia driver blues and the bizarre software incompatibilities. I even put up with the UAC. Well, for about two days but hey, that’s a long time! I’ve even resigned myself to work around the file copy issues until they can fix them (robocopy to the rescue!) I tried every fix out there for the IE issues, but even with a clean install on a 4-core opteron (2x dual core) workstation with 3 gigs of RAM and a kick ass video card, it still took coffee breaks on nearly every page load, new tab, or refresh. Did my damn browser join a union?!

It’s been over a year now, and still IE 7 freezes up and, well, I’ve had it. On a lark I installed Safari and I have to say, I really like it. To understand why, we have to go back to the release of IE 4. Before IE 4 I used Netscape, and before that Mosaic. Back then Netscape made what I believe was a fatal move: they started to bloat their browser into what would become Netscape Communicator. It wasn’t a web browser anymore. It was a news reader, an email client, a webpage editor, it sliced, it diced, and it did it all rather poorly. At the same time, IE was, for the most part, going the other way and staying focused on being a web browser. That was the reason I moved to IE then and it is the reason I’m moving to Safari now. Safari doesn’t try to be what it’s not. It’s a browser, plain, simple, and fast. Most important it does what IE 7 can’t: it performs well under Vista.

So Microsoft has not only managed to drive me crazy with what is quickly turning into Windows ME 2.0, they have driven me into the arms of another browser. Microsoft should count themselves lucky that I can’t (legally) go out and install OS X on any old PC, or it’s quite possible IE wouldn’t be the only MS technology I’d be breaking up with right now…

Cranky Geek John C. Dvorak has [finally] joined Twitter.  Is this a sign of the end times or another sign of Twitter’s growing popularity?

You can follow him at http://twitter.com//therealdvorak