Shirking Responsibility

Oh well, I guess I can stay in this Friday night. Two new shows that may possibly force themselves into my weekly TV routine. Well, that and I haven’t got a single other thing to do.

Firefly was cool; definitely something I’ll watch again. The ending especially had me laughing. You gotta love Joss Whedon. Apart from those times you’re hating his guts, of course.

I am in the middle of watching John Doe right now, and if the fact that I am multi-tasking here with my blog is any indication, I’m not entirely pleased with the show.

It seems like an interesting enough premise. Shows and movies about amnesiacs have always appealed to me, but annoying actors can ruin anything. What’s with these people. Does everything feel so rushed because it’s the pilot and they are trying to throw in something for everyone? They have got to slow things down just a tad.

Would someone please smack the lead character across the head when he goes into another one of those fact fits?

Without shame, I will reveal to you something about myself.

I am a hopeless software addict.

Yes, I realize that most frequent web users do at times indulge in this same vice, but few do it with as much gusto as I. The first thing I do when I sit down at a computer, be it my own or a public terminal, is check out the new releases at File Flash and at BetaNews. If I see nothing of interest there, I might swing over by VersionTracker or Source Forge.

Just yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting File Flash and seeing a new release of Trillian listed. It seemed at first to be just a minor point release, which I assumed was just meant to patch some security exploit that had been found a week or two ago. When I visited the Trillian site, though, I learned that along with the update to the free version of the chat program, Trillian Pro 1.0 had also been released.

I’ve been using Trillian for quite a while now and find it to be vastly superior to the native chat clients offered by AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! Aside from the obvious benefit of needing only 1 client to simultaneously connect to AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! (it also has IRC support, but it pales in comparison to a dedicated client like mIRC), there is also the wealth of options, preferences and settings strewn throughout the program. I realize that some people are annoyed when faced with too many options, but I prefer having total control over every aspect of my software. Also, there are no evil advertisements to soil every square inch of the program.

Trillian wasn’t perfect, though. There were a few annoyances, some bugs and the default skin/interface was really not very good. But Trillian Pro solves most of these problems. The default skin/interface looks very nice and is a lot more efficient than the previous one. And most importantly, it now has a plugin system! So far Cerulean Studios has released some plugins which seem to serve as examples of what can be done. I especially like the RSS plugin, despite it being somewhat simple. Maybe with this plugin system Trillian will finally gain Jabber support.

Before I finish, I should mention that Trillian Pro is not freeware. It sells for $25. I think I would have paid for it, but luckily I didn’t need to. The developers are offering it for free to people who donated a few bucks to them in the past.

And no, I am not in any way affiliated with Cerulean Studios. I’m just an enthusiastic user that likes to point out good software to anyone who will listen. d:

I am currently in the middle of watching a few episodes of the TV series 24 on FX. They’re having a 24 hour marathon to mirror the 24 hour episodes in the series.

Something puzzles me about the computer monitors that everyone uses on the show. They all seem to make a buzzing sound as they load pictures and data. This got me thinking and I realized that this is a very common effect in many shows and movies that I can remember.

The sound itself changes depending on the show or the type of computer. Often, it sounds very much like a flatbed scanner, although maybe a bit more shrill.

What is the purpose of this sound? Do computers not seem high tech enough on screen if they aren’t making all sorts of noise? Most people watching tv or movies nowadays are likely to know that computers don’t make all these sounds when loading images on screen.

I know I’d be pretty upset if my monitor made that much noise.