i have to say that i kind of adored the premiere of "pepper dennis." and when i say adored, i mean "am hitting my head against the wall for admitting in any sort of public forum that i actually like this show because it's really pretty terrible." i just thought it was sort of good in that fun, over-the-top-cheesy way, where even the people starring in and creating the show know it's terribly cheesy and insanely unrealistic, but since you all can admit this freely to each other, and they have fun with it, you can all share a big hearty laugh and drink a bottle of wine while it's on. or that was just me. whatever.

anyway! that rebecca romijn sure is pretty, isn't she. i'd even consider adding her to my who-i'd-do-if-i-were-a-lesbian list. which currently consists of eliza dushku circa buffy.

UPDATE: what's even weirder is seeing the creepy dude who played goodwin on lost play pepper dennis's cringe-inducingly bad stereotype of a newsroom boss. he chews gum like an over-excited cow and speaks in what he must imagine is a chicago accent (the show is set in the lovely windy city). he's awful, frankly, whereas he was pretty good on lost. the mind boggles.

I only caught the last 60 seconds of it or so, but Jon Stewart just cordially demolished John McCain over the issue of his association with Jerry Falwell. Ouch. McCain did a decent job parrying, but was obviously stunned and trapped. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the guy.

UPDATE: Video's up.

It's working. The text messaging stuff I've been working on for the last six weeks is finally all working. The payoff is forthcoming. Right now, it's time to show off — and, more importantly, load test. Until the end of Wednesday, April 5, you can add comments to this post via SMS. Neat, huh?

Just text the number 202-299-7949. Seriously, please give it a shot. It'd be a big help to me. If your message doesn't show up within a couple of minutes, leave a comment to that effect. And don't worry, your phone number's last four digits will be scrubbed.

Here's the setup. There's an unlimited-SMS SIM in my cracked-screen Nokia 3100. From there text messages travel over my recently-acquired FutureDial cable and are picked up by Gammu's smsd daemon. That dumps them into a directory. A Python script uses the coincidentally-named Gamin to detect the arrival of the new files (because Gamin's Perl interface refuses to compile for me, even using CPAN). It then dispatches the content of the messages to an appropriate Perl script. That script packages the data up and sends it to a simple PHP script on this server, which unpacks the data and prepends it to a text file. A tiny bit of PHP in this post includes that text file, and some CSS formats it.

There! Some of the most tightly-packed technical gibberish I've ever written. The acronym density should give you some idea of just how much time I've put into this project, and how much knowledge I've had to pick up along the way. It took me a fucking lot of work to get this operating properly. I'm exhausted and ecstatic that it's finally working. When this system is hooked up to something useful, it should be pretty cool.

From a post on Slashdot:

If you think the whole Mac/PC beef is religious in nature, try the Tivo/anything else one.

Ain't that the truth.

Go to an online TiVo forum and ask about feeding your TiVo listings from XMLTV rather than subscribing. Bask in the hostility.

Here's a hint: google for "oztivo", "tivocanada", and "service emulator". Learn perl. Then lament the fact that you'd be sued and lynched if you ever told anyone how you did it.

(This is all hypothetical, of course.)

Verrry interesting. Hypothetically, I mean.