Day: September 2, 2003

Why Buffy Kicked Ass

Reason has finally gotten around to adding to its web site Virginia Postrel’s excellent article that appeared in the print edition, Why Buffy Kicked Ass.

Buffy assumes and enacts the consensus moral understanding of contemporary American culture, the moral understanding that the wise men ignored or forgot. This understanding depends on no particular religious tradition. ItÂ’s informed not by revelation but by experience. It is inclusive and humane, without denying distinctions or the tough facts of life. There are lots of jokes in Buffy — humor itself is a moral imperative — but no psychobabble and no excuses. Here are some of the showÂ’s precepts, a sample of what Americans believe:

. . .

Evil must be fought — sometimes literally, with lives and weapons. Most evildoers are beyond redemption. They are certainly beyond persuasion. War is stupid and wasteful and cruel and necessary. “People die,” says Buffy. “You lead them into battle, theyÂ’re going to die. It doesnÂ’t matter how ready you are or how smart you are. War is about death. Needless, stupid death.” The next day, she goes to war. And good people die.

. . .

We donÂ’t get to choose our reality. LifeÂ’s not fair. ThereÂ’s no point in whining. “I hate this,” Buffy tells her small band before their final battle. “I hate being here. I hate that you have to be here. I hate that thereÂ’s evil and that I was chosen to fight it….I know a lot of you wish that I hadnÂ’t been either. This isnÂ’t about wishes. This is about choices.”

Yes, yes, a million times yes.

I Wanna Be a Rock Star

My six-year-old daughter has this often-amusing (and occasionally not-so-amusing) habit of latching on to stray phrases she hears on television or the radio and then fixating on them almost obssessively.

For example, as part of a homework assignment we worked on this weekend, she had to describe what she wanted to be when she grew up. She settled on being a teacher because she wanted to help children.

She was pretty adamant about that until today when she insisted that being a rock star was actually superior to being a teacher. Why a rock star? Because, repeating something she had to have heard in an interview with some vapid entertainer, in order to be a rock star “you have to feel it in your heart.”

Of course, she informs us, she still plans on being a teacher on the days she’s not out being a rock star. I guess it’s all about balance.

I Finally Hit the Half Million Mark

Okay, web site traffic in August was phenomenal, and I finally got over that half million monthly page view level I’ve been trying to conquer for a couple years now. Last month I served up 502,211 page views (compared to 372,582 in August 2002 — a 35 percent increase).

In my wildest dreams when I started my web sites 7 years ago, I never imagined I’d be using more than 6 gigabytes per month in bandwidth and close to 6 million page views a year all in my spare time (I used to be a 1.4meg floppy weakling who would get silicone thrown in his face . . . )

Now if I could just find a few spare moments to catch up on all of my web sites. Oy.

Dead Router

I had all sorts of plans for working on the web site(s) this weekend until my cable connection seemed to implode. No matter what I did I couldn’t get a connection to the Internet — unfortunately it took ole dunderhead me a couple days to consider that the Linksys router I’m using might be the problem.

Not sure what happened to it, but it is totally screwed up. I’ve reset it, tried upgrading the firmware, cycled the power. If I plug my cable modem directly into my laptop, my laptop grabs a nice normal looking IP address like xxx.xxx.xx.xx. Plug the same cable into the WAN connection on the back of the router, and roll the dice to see what number comes up. Often I get something that looks like yyy.xyz.alf.gbc — like they put a frigging random number generator in there.

Gee, no wonder I couldn’t get an Internet connection this weekend.

But as I tell my wife, look not on this as the death of a beloved router, but rather as a chance to upgrade to 54g!!!

Feed Demon

Like I said before, new RSS aggregators are coming fast and furious. Shortly after writing about BlogExpress I ran across a mention of Feed Demon. Finally, an RSS aggregator for Windows that will spit out multi-feed category views.

Feed Demon lets the user set up a category, say animal rights, and can then give a simple one page display of all new stories from just the feeds in that category. Excellent — I think I’ve found a winner here.

Feed Demon is currently in beta, and so far there’s no information on pricing, but just the ability to show a combined category page will have me shelling out whatever it takes to buy.