So this morning I got up and donned what must have passed for a Halloween costume. After a good smothering of thickly caked face paint makeup purchased at Wal Mart the night before, I looked at myself in the mirror, and decided I resembled something from TOS. I couldn't decide on exactly what, but definitely the spirit of TOS.

And yes, a talk with someone today at work confirmed my worst fear: Those stupid black bars with text at the bottom of the screen originate from the network feed, so there is no way to get rid of them. Fortunately, it appears most of the channels don't have that annoying bug. Unfortunately, it just so happens it occurs on two channels which sometimes carry shows I like. I think lodging a complaint would be a good idea. Maybe I'll go to that "chat site" their little messages were promoting and give them my two cents.

Tonight, I worked on putting my other bookshelf together (actually designated as a storage spot for overflow dvds) and tried listening to some of the audio-only music feeds, which thankfully seem to feature wider playlists than your local ClearChannel affiliate. When I noticed that it was after 1900, I turned on UPN while I worked -- just in time to miss the teaser, AND that annoying theme song.

Although the plot was somewhat predictable, I rather liked tonight's episode. It just seemed a good mix of character development, species development, and a good bit of action. So it would appear that the Andorians might turn out to be a major player in these early days. Look forward to seeing more of them.

One thing I don't think I like is that the show seems to be on a trend to instantly use the "unreliable" transporter technology to bail the crew out whenever a crisis occurs, with somebody saying the obligatory "but we might not materialize in one piece" line, and then going ahead with it anyway. Sloppy writing. It would seem we now have transporters as as substitute for technobabble. Blah.

After that, I watched, not 1... not 2... but 3 hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on FX. Normally, they "only" strip 2 episodes each weeknight, but I guess today is a Halloween special, so Buffy has been running all afternoon and into the evening, and I just caught the tail end of it. If this sort of thing happens very often, it could become very dangerous to my sanctimonious non couch potato ethic (hah!).

Although FX doesn't have continuously annoying black bars, the image did seem to choke during parts of the show. Frame rate would drop, things would get pixelized, and the sound would momentarily cut out occassionally. If I had to guess, I'd say their poor little pipe was struggling with having sufficient bandwidth to keep the bits coming. Hope it doesn't turn out to be a continuing problem. I even tried calling the AT&T support line once when it got really bad, but after waiting on hold for 3 minutes, the picture seemed to have cleared up, and I hung up.

On the way home from work tonight, I bought a bag of candy just in case any trick or treaters happened to show up. Throughout the course of the evening, there was just one knock at the door, which turned out to be 2 little kids with expected costumes and bags. I guess I'm going to have some leftover candy to eat. :)

My brain utterly saturated by the Scooby Gang, I completed my second bookshelf, placed the remaining dvds on the top shelf, and put my speaker on top of it. Very nice. The place is really shaping up. Next, I'll need to assemble the mini-desk I bought last Sunday, get Dagobah a hard drive, and get my second terminal set up. That will likely happen this weekend.

[Bitscape gets distracted trying to track down a very odd and critical Content Collective bug which was reported by Yanthor.]

Very odd. Something odd was happening with the content solutions headline table, but it seems to have magically fixed itself. Perplexed, I am. Tired, I am. Time for much needed sleep.