Hehe...

I've been ignoring the whole Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week thing that's been going on in the US because...well, duh!, that's what you do to stupid, annoying people. Paying attention only encourages them by giving them the false impression that they are relevant [1]. However, when Bitch PhD wrote this article on SuicideGirls [site generally NSFW], I just had to link to it :)

[1] Unless, of course, they do more than just annoy and do actually become relevant to your life.

Phenomena of/Article on Microblogging

Jason Pontin has a good article in the November/December 2007 issue of the MIT Technology Review on the phenomena of microblogging.

I'm not much of a microblogger myself, at least in the strictest sense of the word, because I don't use Twitter or Jaiku or any of those specialist services. I do, however, update my "status" on Facebook every now and then. And by "every now and then" I mean whenever anything interesting happens in my life. I find it very hard -- and, in many ways -- pointless to be constantly updating some web service with what I am doing, feeling, or thinking at that time. People have better things to do with their lives than knowing, for example, that I am now at the market buying eggs. Or, of course, "watchin' the game, havin' a bud"...which, naturally, begs the question "what are you doing?"...which, in turn, happens to be Twitter's tagline.

My criteria for updating my status, then, is anything going on in my life that can lead to an interesting comment or discussion. Or, if not that, at least something that is funny, interesting, or unusual. Basically, anything that is not mundane, boring, or (blatantly) unoriginal. Unless, of course, that mundane, boring, or unoriginal thing that I'm doing is something I really want to share with my friends and family. In which case, that thing -- in my opinion, at least -- isn't mundane, boring, or unoriginal after all. You get my drift, right?

Start Aside: Blogging (Not of the Micro Kind)

In many ways, I apply the same logic to my blog. Though I do add one more criterion to what I blog about: I blog about things that I don't want to bookmark or don't want to remember to tell people in the future. This post is a case in point. I read a good article on the web that I found interesting. I thought other people would find it interesting too.

In the past, when this happened, my default action would have been to bookmark the site if the article was really interesting (otherwise bookmark volumes get out of hand really quickly), save a copy of the article on my computer (should I want to read it later), and compose an e-mail to friends and family members (who'd be interested in this) in which I'd include a link to the article and my comments. Nowadays, though, I just blog about the article instead. This provides automatic bookmarking (since the article is linked-to from my post), categorization (through tagging), and archival/storage (that too, online). It also makes it easier for my friends and family members since they don't get extra e-mails from me, they can read the article and my comments whenever they want to, and they can comment on my comments as well. Additionally, the group of people that I offer my comments to has also been expanded considerably. Yes, it's fun all around :)

End Aside: Back to Microblogging

That said, there are a lot people out there who love the mundane, the boring, and (really) the unoriginal...which maybe I should now abbreviate to MBO! Which brings me back to Pontin's article:
Sending microblogs broadcasts, "I am here!" Reading microblogs satisfies the craving of many people to know the smallest details of the lives of people in whom they are interested. Already, new-media intellectuals have coined a term to describe the new social behavior they say microblogging encourages: they talk of "presence," a shorthand for the idea that by using such tools, we can enjoy an "always on" virtual omnipresence.

Though what I should really be pointing you to is his conclusion:
I quickly realized that decrying the banality of microblogs missed their very point. As Evan Williams puts it, "It's understandable that you should look at someone's twitter that you don't know and wonder why it should be interesting." But the only people who might be interested in my microblogs--apart from 15 obsessive Pontin followers on Twitter--were precisely those who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality: my family and close friends. For my part, I found that the ease with which I could communicate with those I love encouraged a blithe chattiness that particularly alarmed my aged parents. They hadn't heard so much from me in years.

Which, of course, comes with the caveat:
On the other hand, I strongly disliked the radical self-exposure of Twitter. I wasn't sure it was good for my intimates to know so much about my smallest thoughts or movements, or healthy for me to tell them. A little secretiveness is a necessary lubricant in our social relations.

More from the Harry Potter World

J.K. Rowling, who is on her US book tour these days, revealed quite a bit about the Harry Potter world when she spoke at Carnegie Hall in New York earlier today. Some of the things she revealed were that:

  • Dumbledore was gay (which, naturally, is getting the most press)
  • Neville marries Hannah Abbott (who goes on to be the landlady of the Leaky Cauldron)
  • Draco doesn't owe Harry a life debt

There will be more once we get additional details on what exactly she said at the session. The Leaky Cauldron will upload the full transcript once they have it ready. It'll be best to head straight there.

Supreme Court Gives Gore's Nobel to Bush :)

Sometimes there's nothing funnier than political satire. Andy Borowitz writes in the Huffington Post:

Supreme Court Gives Gore's Nobel to Bush

Just days after former Vice President Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on global warming, the United States Supreme Court handed Mr. Gore a stunning reversal, stripping him of his Nobel and awarding it to President George W. Bush instead. [Source]

Star Trek XI: First Look

I am, of course, following the upcoming Star Trek movie (referred to as Star Trek XI since its final, official title hasn't been released yet). It's a prequel about Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the Enterprise bridge crew as they make their way through Starfleet Academy. As a result, they've had to re-cast all of the principal characters. They finalized that just recently and /Film (pronounced slash-film) recently posted a photo-shopped first-look of the crew on their site. The crew looks good so far. Here's hoping the movie is a good one, too.

The Sci-Fi Genre's Rise in Popularity

The New Humanist Magazine, in its latest issue, has published an excellent article that talks about the rise in popularity of the science fiction genre in television:
No one who likes television could in all conscience have missed Heroes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Angel, Battlestar Galactica, Lost or even, if you’re feeling patriotic, Dr. Who. Supernatural and extraterrestrial television has stopped being only for people who like to dress up with pointy ears, ideally at a convention with like-eared friends, and become the mainstream.

Natalie Haynes argues that sci-fi is becoming increasingly popular these days because programmes set in the real world are becoming increasingly limited in scope and because the nerds (like Joss Whedon) are becoming more powerful. She also talks about why science fiction fans are so loyal.

Anyway, it's a great article and I highly recommend you read it.

Making Time for TV

I love watching television. Whether it's the news, documentaries, movies, cartoons, music videos, my favourite television shows, or, well, anything else that's on. Unfortunately, because of my MBA commitments (especially evening classes), I don't get the time to watch as much television as I would like.

Enter LifeHacker's 'Six Ways to Catch Your Favourite TV Shows'. And though not all of the methods described in that article work in Australia -- like streaming episodes directly from US television networks' own websites -- the rest do and that's better than nothing.

If you're in Australia, meanwhile, you can download entire episodes of ABC shows from the ABC website. Or, if you like 'Rove', 'Australian Idol', or 'Supernatural', you can view or download those shows from the Channel Ten website.

Enjoy :)

Tales of a WordPress Trojan

A couple of nights ago, as I was browsing the web, I got a pop-up message from Zone Alarm Anti-virus telling me that it had found and quarantined the Trojan-Clicker.JS.Agent.h trojan in my Firefox cache.

Now the problem with the Firefox cache is that the files in there aren't indexed by URL name so I had no idea which site I'd gotten that trojan from. The only two sites that were open in my browser at that time were Google Reader and this here blog of mine. This blog, by the way, is installed on my own website which, in turn, is hosted on a shared web hosting server in the US. A server that is expertly managed by my web host's very competent systems administrators. My website, therefore, is very secure. My blog is also secure since my version of WordPress is almost always up-to-date. This, then, was strange since neither of those sites should really have had a trojan or virus or anything else malicious on them.

Since Google Reader was the less likely trojan-hosting candidate, I thought I'd check my blogs's HTML page source to see if I could figure out what was going on. However, when I tried to check it through Firefox, the page came up "missing". That was not a good sign. This meant that it was indeed my blog that contained the trojan since it was this page's local copy (in the cache) that Zone Alarm had quarantined. To double check, I navigated away from and then came back my blog's home page. Immediately, Zone Alarm popped-up another quarantine notice. Yep, the trojan was in my blog [1].

Bugger.

Time For Some Research

I then went to the web to learn all I could about the trojan which, strangely enough, wasn't much at all. This trojan was (and still is) rather new to the 'net and, therefore, has been minimally catalogued in all the online virus databases. It was, however, mentioned on a few message boards. Unfortunately, the relevant posting on Zone Alarm's message board was incredibly useless while the message boards that really seemed to be discussing it actively were all in Russian. Google Translate helped a bit with that but, ultimately, I couldn't learn anything from those pages either.

All I ended up learning from the web was that this is a JavaScript trojan (hence the JS in the middle of its name) that either opens up a pop-up ad, places a cookie in your browser's cache, creates a connection to a couple of sites on the 'net, and/or re-directs your browser to a particular page. I wasn't sure which of these this trojan did because it never got the chance to run on my computer. I also learnt that this trojan was, for all intents and purposes, pretty harmless. The virus databases listed its threat level as low and, really, if no one had even bothered to document it in any detail on the 'net, how bad could it be?

Still, a trojan is a trojan. So I set about trying to fix the problem myself.

Do-It-Yourself

The first thing I then did was some more research. I started by checking the WordPress site for security documentation. I learnt quite a bit from there. I then went and did all the things they suggested you do to 'harden' your WordPress installation. These were things I hadn't done earlier and that was probably how the trojan had gotten into my blog in the first place.

Next, I went and downloaded (through FTP) all the files from my blog installation to my local hard drive. All the files (mostly PHP files) got downloaded just fine but one of them immediately got quarantined by Zone Alarm. "A-ha", I thought, "that must be the file that contains the trojan. I must look at this file." Unfortunately, Zone Alarm wouldn't let me (duh!).

Fortunately, this was a file that I could look at from inside WordPress' administrator's interface. Unfortunately, again, most of what was in that file was gibberish. It contained a few JavaScript functions that were weirdly named (a seemingly-random string of numbers instead of a descriptive name) and some code within those. Now, since I didn't want to mess with WordPress' code, I though I'd compare this file's code with the corresponding code from Nadia's blog installation (which, according to Zone Alarm, was trojan free). Nadia's version of this file was, indeed different from mine. As I tried to tweak the code in my version of the file, however (i.e. change my file's code to make it look like Nadia's), I must have mistyped something because the next time I tried to view the blogs they had both crashed. That is, every time I tried to load them, I got a 500 Internal Server Error error.

Bugger.

It All Falls In To Place

Fortunately, our blogs eventually came back online (did I mention that my web host's SysAdmins were really good?) and, this time, I wasn't getting any trojan pop-up messages from Zone Alarm when I visited them. However, the next day, the trojan quarantine messages were back. Oh, and now they were coming from both blogs. It was then that it occurred to me: "Dammit! The reason my code editing didn't work the first time was because I was trying to make my trojan-ridden code look like another kind of trojan-ridden code!" That is, I wasn't actually removing the trojan from my blog, I was merely changing it to look like the trojan on Nadia's blog. What I should have done was compare my version of the file to a perfectly clean version of the same file.

To get a clean version of that file, I went back to the WordPress site but couldn't find it there. I figured I'd have to go into the actual PHP source code (maintained by WordPress' developers) to do that...but that wasn't something I really wanted to get into. Then I realized that I did have easy access to a clean version of that file: I could simply install another copy of WordPress on my own website. Since this would be a new install, all of its files would be perfectly clean and trojan-free. I could then compare my file to that installation's version of that file. So I went ahead and did just that. And guess what? All of the JavaScript code in my file was trojan code. That is, the original version of the file didn't contain any JavaScript code at all [2].

Removing that was easy and now, finally, our blogs are completely trojan-free. If all now goes well, and with the help of a much more secure WordPress installation, our blogs will stay trojan-free from now on as well. Here's hoping.

Footnotes

[1] While my web host's SysAdmins are responsible for maintaining the web server itself, they aren't responsible for the stuff you install on your site. That is, the fact that my blog had a trojan in it, wasn't their fault. It wasn't entirely my fault, either. Nor was it really the fault of the people who made WordPress. It was basically the fault of the hackers who had found a way to exploit a vulnerability in WordPress that let them attach this trojan to it. That's usually how it happens anyway.

[2] Which, in retrospect, is obvious since it was a PHP file that really shouldn't have had any JavaScript in it anyway.

Empire State Building Lit Green for Eid

New York's Empire State Building (ESB) was lit up in green from 12-14 October to mark the Islamic festival of Eid. This Eid (there are two of them in each Islamic calendar year) is called Eid-ul-Fitr and it marks the end of the fasting month of Ramzan (pronounced Ramadan in Arabic). Check out the AFP article about it, the Fox News article about it, and, until the page is updated next, the ESB's tower Lighting Schedule that mentions it as well.

This is only the third religious festival that is honoured by the ESB, the other two being Christmas and Hanukkah. This green lighting (sorry, had to make that pun!) is now going to be an annual event.

MBA Blog Spin-Off?

I am seriously considering starting a new blog. One about my MBA journey through the University of Melbourne's Melbourne Business School (MBS). It'll cover my life during the program, the courses I'm taking, stuff about the university/school/program, my job hunt, and basically anything else that is relevant to me, the MBA, the tech industry, and Australia. I've already documented part of my MBA journey in my MBA Journal but that only presents a high-level overview of events. I want to get into the nitty-gritty details and, basically, tell more of the story.

The good thing is, should I do the spin-off, I know that I'll be able to sustain the new blog. I've started to blog reasonably regularly now and it's getting easier to maintain this pace. In fact, I have reached the "I should blog about that" stage thanks to which, whenever something interesting happens to me these days, I start to think about how I'm going to write about it in my blog!

Also, this here blog doesn't have a proper focus. Yes, it's about anything and everything that I find interesting in my life and in the world, but having a stronger focus would let me explore my subject more deeply and be more insightful about what I write. I will, of course, continue to maintain this blog in parallel.

Finally, while there are lots of MBA student blogs out there, only one other MBS student, my classmate Birgit (with Birgit in Adventureland), currently maintains a blog of her own. And even that is a more general blog about her adventures through life and around the world that it is about her MBA journey. As for our professors, only two maintain blogs: Chris Lloyd with Fishing in the Bay ("Statistical musings from an Antipodean perspective") and Joshua Gans with CoRE Economics ("Commentary on economics, strategy and more").

Meanwhile, B-Schools from around the world are embracing the power of blogging. Here's a random selection:

My blog will be a drop in the ocean compared to all of those, of course, but at least it'll be a start.

Incidentally, I was all set to convince MBS to start their own series of blogs -- authored by students, professors, and the admissions, alumni, and marketing departments -- a few months ago. I'd even written a project proposal for it. Unfortunately, I then got an internship so I never followed through with it. If all goes well -- that is, if I maintain a good blog over the course of this term -- I might propose the idea to them again at the end of this term. Let's see.

Meanwhile, let me start by thinking up a good name for my new blog. Hmmm...

Two Things: Excellent Typography, About Introverts

This is my sixth post today. I'm on a roll, eh? Two completely unrelated articles this time, for which I apologize. It's just that I don't want to write two separate posts for them when, really, I just want to write three lines for each.

First, do you want to see stunning examples of typography on the web? Look no further than I Love Typography's '15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography'. I mean, like, wow.

Second, Brian Kim wrote a really good article earlier this week called 'Top 5 Things Every Extrovert Should Know About Introverts'. Being generally introverted myself, I really appreciate the fact that he's written this and think that it's something everyone (extrovert and introvert likewise) should read.

The Latest on My Tablet PC Obsession

If you've been reading this blog for a while now (that would be just you, Nadia!), then you'll know that I am rather obsessed with convertible tablet PCs. That is, I really, really, really want one. Why? Because convertible tablet PCs are everything that I want in a laptop computer at this point in time. That is, a keyboard that I can type on, a touch screen that I can write on, and a small and light form factor that I can easily carry around. The latest ones are also fast, powerful, and full-featured (ports, accessories, etc.). The only things missing in them -- a large display and a configuration suitable for gaming -- are better left to desktops anyway. I figured, therefore, that it was time for another tablet PC update. Why? Because Fujitsu and HP both recently released their latest tablet PC offerings: the T2010 and the 2710p respectively. And from all the reviews about them on the web, they're both excellent machines.

So here's my hypothetical issue (it's rather pathetic to have one, I know, but hey, if I can't fantasize about all this here, then where can I fantasize?). If I had the money to buy a tablet PC right now (let's say I won the lottery or something...God: hint, hint), which one would I get? I'm down to the following four choices:

  1. Lenovo ThinkPad X61t

  2. Fujitsu LifeBook T4220

  3. Fujitsu LifeBook T2010

  4. HP Compaq 2710p


And they're all really good. The problem is that, while they're all really good, they're all extra-specially good in different ways.

The Powerhouses

The Fujitsu T4220, for example, is the only one that has an on-board optical drive. It's also (by far) the most powerful of the bunch. However, it's also the most expensive. The Lenovo X61t, meanwhile, has the best keyboard (though the others are really good too), the longest battery life, the fastest hard drive, a really good processor, and the best extras. However, it has the the dimmest screen, no on-board optial drive, and, for the time being at least, is going through production problems. These two are also the heaviest of the bunch (though both are less than 2kg each).

The Lightweights

Meanwhile, both the Fujitsu T2010 and HP 2710p are incredibly light (about 1.5kg each), have excellent screens, good battery life, and aren't all that expensive. However, neither has an on-board optical drive (which means you have have to buy, and then carry one, with you separately) and both have low-power (i.e. slightly less powerful) processors. The 2710p also has the slowest hard drive. On the other hand, it's the only one with a wide screen. It's also the cheapest of the lost, and, apparently, has the best "tablet PC experience" of the lot as well.

Confused? Hong Kong Phooey made a really nice comparison table that shows each tablet's strengths and weaknesses graphically. That might help. The discussion below that posting is quite good too.

More Data, Mr. Spock!

Want to know craploads more? Check out the following video reviews on GottaBeMobile.com:

Or the following text reviews listed on Tablet PC Review (except for the last two that haven't been added to the listing there yet):

Analysis, Mr. Data?

So what does this all mean? Which would I finally choose? Well, when you compare the four, the first (and most obvious) grouping splits the bunch into features and raw, number-crunching performance (X61t & T4220) versus display quality and overall tablet PC experience (T2010 & 2710p). I generally prefer performance over everything else since I want to be able to edit audio & video and run processor- & RAM-intensive programs like Dreamweaver and Paint Shop Pro on my laptop. This would be true even if I did end up buying a desktop on which I could play high-end computer games etc. And, really, I don't mind the extra half-kilo of weight. That eliminates the two lightweights and narrows my choice down to the two powerhouses: the X61t and the T4220.

Next, if push came to shove, I'd probably pick the Fujitsu over the Lenovo. Why? Because, even though the Fujitsu is the most expensive of the lot, it does have the most features. If I get the SXGA screen (i.e. the higher resolution one) and up the hard drive to 7,200RPM (i.e. the fastest one; if possible), for example, I undo most of the Lenovo's advantages. I won't get the Lenovo's excellent battery life in the standard configuration, yes, but I will get the most versatility thanks to the Fujitsu's modular bay drive that can hold an extra battery, the optical drive, or, to reduce weight, nothing. And I like versatility.

Oh, and I get a few bonuses with it too: the control key is the bottom-left-most key on the keyboard (a big plus in my book), there's a touch pad instead of a track point stick, and the docking bay includes an HDMI port (which makes for better viewing on large, external monitors). Fujitsu is also supposed to have the best service and support.

So there. I've decided then. I am hypothetically going to get the Fujitsu LifeBook T4220P (the P is the more powerful of the two models) as my next laptop. Now I just need the money for it. Which basically means that I won't be able to actually get this till next year (assuming, of course, that I have a job by then). Oh, and Dell will have have come out with its tablet PC by then too. That should really shake the industry up and, as a result, I will get to make one more posting about my little obsession here. Yippee! :) Till next time...

Muslim Punk Rock?! Awesome!

Rolling Stone ran an interesting article a few days ago called Allah, Amps and Anarchy. It's about the first-even Muslim punk-rock tour in America and it makes a really interesting read. Here's a snippet:
There are more than a million Muslims living in the U.S., and the youngest generation is still struggling to find its place in America. "Shit changed for all of us Muslim people after 9/11," says Khan. "The best way for me to deal with it was music." The Kominas are one of the more established groups, having toured and released records. Their songs mix punk speed and attitude with Middle Eastern sounds. Their lyrics, often confrontational, are also deeply personal. In "Par Desi," Usmani, who spent part of his childhood in Pakistan, describes getting beaten up by punk skinheads in America: "In Lahore it's raining water/In Boston it rains boots."

Djembe, Geek T-Shirts

Other than this awesome djembe from Toca Percission (pronounced jem-bay, by the way) that Nadia got me for my birthday:

Djembe_small


She got me a few t-shirts too. I selected these three from ThinkGeek:

Pi By Numbers



There's no place like 127.0.0.1



No Comment



We also really wanted this one, but it was out of stock:

Come to the Dark Side



And now, thanks to Download Squad, I really want this one as well:

Balki Bartokomous T-Shirt



(*sigh*) Some day.

Tech Stuff: Screen Savers, TinyURL, UC Berkeley, Careers

A lot of people have written about a lot of good/fun tech stuff over the last few weeks. Here are some of the things I found interesting:

The excellent Smashing Magazine did a good roundup of the best screen savers available online. And, in case you missed it, they recently did a good roundup of desktop wallpapers (my favourite wallpaper site for the last few years has been Vlad Studio, by the way) and, some time ago, an extensive roundup of over 40 books for professional design and development. Pretty awesome.

Scott Rosenberg wrote about the Terror of TinyURL. I'm someone who rarely, if ever, clicks on a URL that he can't see in the browser's status bar so I know where he's coming from. And while I do understand the need for TinyURL, it does scare me.

CNET reports that UC Berkeley has now started posting entire course lectures online on YouTube (at http://youtube.com/ucberkeley). And while the are the first to do so, they certainly won't be the last. This should be fun.

Finally, Marc Andreessen has been giving lots of excellent advice about career planning on his blog. He's written three installment (plus introduction) so far, and though he comes from a high-tech, Silicon Valley background, it makes a really great read for everyone:

Enjoy :)

Life in Lahore

In a comment to my post about monsoons in South Asia, Aman pointed me to Umer Farooq's two-part article on Lahore that also talks about what happens when it rains there (and does a much better job that I ever could). You can find that on the Read It Live website: Lahore, Lahore - Part II. If you've ever lived in Lahore for a decent amount of time (or simply know people from Lahore), this ought to strike a chord. Or at least resonate a bit.

Multiple, Complex Storylines = Good

One of the really cool [1] things about television shows these days is the complexity and sheer number of storylines that they're squeezing into them. What's even cooler is that we're able to follow each of those threads, for the most part, reasonably easily. Though recaps and other assists help us keep things straight. Of course, this is not to say that the A/B storyline concept is dead [2]. That is indeed alive and well, and will continue to be the dominant narrative form on television for the foreseeable future.

If that jargon has thrown any of you, here's a quick recap. A storyline is a narrative thread "experienced by different but specific characters or sets of characters that together form a plot element or subplot in the work of fiction" [Source: Wikipedia]. Basically, a storyline is a plot (if there's only one storyline) or a sub-plot (if there are more). You can also call them story threads.

Single-Plot Stories

Older television shows (and even movies) usually had just one storyline that ran, for the most part, linearly. There was usually only one major plot (e.g. Spock, Kirk, and McCoy get stranded in the 1930s after stepping through the portal called The Guardian of Forever) and, occasionally, a few minor sub-plots (e.g. Kirk, surprisingly, finds the time to fall in love with Keeler). And we were usually shown these in chronological order unless, of course, there were flashbacks.

This is generally (not always!) what makes older stuff a little harder (i.e. a little boring) to watch. Though an episode like Star Trek: The Original Series' The City on the Edge of Forever is far from boring!

Multiple-Plot Stories

Then came the concept of the A/B storyline [3]. In this, two (or more) story threads (i.e. narrative plots) are developed simultaneously. The A-storyline is the main plot of the episode. For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Once More With Feeling, the A-storyline is the one in which the team investigates the spontaneous singing and bursting-into-flames phenomenon and tackles Sweet, the demon who has been summoned to Sunnydale and has caused all this mayhem.

The B-storyline, meanwhile, is a sub-plot that usually does things like character development, moving forward a developing story arc (i.e. a plot spread over a number of episodes), or supporting the main plot in some way or the other. In Once More With Feeling there are two main B-storylines. One is Tara finding out that Willow is abusing her Wiccan powers (and using them on Tara) and the second is Giles realizing that it is time for him to leave Buffy on her own (and for him to go back to England). The former doesn't figure much into this particular episode but the latter almost gets Buffy killed. You could say there are two more B-storylines going on: the first addressing the Buffy-Spike relationship and the second exploring the Anya-Xander relationship in more depth. Those are a little less important though, so you could even call them C-storylines!

Generally, though, shows produced after the turn of the century have lots of little subplots and storylines being developed in them all at the same time. That is, there aren't just two storylines, the A and the B, there are a few. Despite that fact, the phrase "A/B storyline" still generally works.

By the way, I chose Once More With Feeling to explain storylines specifically because each B-storyline literally gets its own song in that episode!

Craploads-of-Plots Stories

What's happening in television shows these days, though, is that there are many more storylines that just a handful. Lost is probably the first series to explicitly explore numerous storylines, character development arcs, and overall story arcs. This fact was initially daunting but, once you got used to it, all the storylines fit together and made sense. It was a little difficult, though, to start watching the series mid-season since you weren't quite sure what was going on. Also, Lost uses flashbacks to explain a lot of what is happening with its characters.

Heroes, which just started its second season in the US a few days ago, is the second major series to tackle this many storylines. In this they use both recaps and captions (that give you characters' names and locations) to help you figure out what's going on. That is particularly important for this series since, basically, it is narrated like a comic book.

The best thing about all this, then, is the fact that television shows are starting to become more compelling (narrative-wise, that is, since you have to have good writers on the show to be able to pull off that many simultaneous storylines and still make sense!); more in-depth with their stories (though, understandably they're a little slower with story development); and more prone to cult-like followings (since laypeople will find it hard to join mid-way...and once you're hooked, you're hooked). All of this, in my opinion at least, is a good thing.

Multiple, complex storylines = good.

Footnotes

[1] I have to stop using the words "cool", "awesome", "great", and "really".

[2] Or is it "A-B storyline"...I don't know.

[3] In television shows, that is. Plots and sub-plots have always existed in books.

Newly Discovered News Feeds

I've already written on this blog that I love Google Reader so you know that I'm into news feeds (lots of them!). What is really cool on the Internet these days, though, is the number and variety of sites and services that are starting to offer them.

There are, of course, the obvious ones:

That is, sites that feature dynamic, regularly updated content.

And then there are the less obvious ones. Much to my delight, the two that I've recently discovered are:

  • Facebook, which gives you an RSS feed of your friends' user statuses (so you can find out what they're up to without having to log in and you don't miss anyone's status update)
  • Flickr, which gives you a feed that contains the latest pictures uploaded by a particular user

Both are really useful and I'm glad they're there. Thanks, people!

Now if only sites like Ain't it Cool News, Airliners.net, and McSweeney's would start offering news feeds too. Some day.

I Miss the Monsoon

Since yesterday, Victoria (the province that Melbourne is in) has been buffeted by strong winds -- sometimes reaching gale force in localized areas. There hasn't been much damage, though the Bureau of Meteorology has issued a severe weather warning for "Localised Damaging Winds".

I walked home through that weather last night and, when I was about four streets away, it started raining. The rain itself wasn't hard but the wind was whipping it around quite a bit. Though I've been through heavier rains and thunderstorms in Melbourne, this was the first time I really felt the power of the elements -- which is a feeling that I really love. Of course, as Richard Adams says in his book 'Watership Down', the only reason we can say that is because we know we can protect ourselves from those very elements. If we couldn't, we probably wouldn't love, say, winter all that much (which, by the way, is my favourite season).

Anyway, as I hurried down the street while being pelted by rain, I realized just how much I miss the South Asian monsoons. I've been in Australia for the last two monsoon seasons -- which, in Pakistan, runs from end June to September -- and there's nothing quite like that on this continent. And though the weather here is sometimes more extreme, I do miss those rains (the thunder, those heavy showers) very much. It's not just the rains, though. It's the sights, the sounds, the smells, and ultimately, what the coming of the monsoon means for that part of the world. The monsoon heralds the coming of a new season, a new beginning, a new lease of life for that land...something that washes away the previous year and brings in the next. [I'm not going to try to be poetic about this. Many others have done a much better job that I can ever do!]

I think it was the smell of fresh rain on the ground that triggered my memories. That and the fact that I wasn't getting drenched like I would have been, had this been a monsoon rain. I wonder when I'll get to experience that next. Probably not next year. The year after that, maybe? Only if I'm lucky. Oh well.