The Ups And Downs Of My Day

Vicki told me a story over dinner - at The Keg - that I couldn't help but think would fit perfectly into a section of my Agile book. I was even writing the new material in my head at the table after she finished answering a bunch of my questions about it, and could hardly wait to get home and write it up.

When I got here, I went downstairs to check something else on my PC only to discover that it wouldn't boot up. The light around the ON switch comes on - proving that it's drawing power - but there's no other signs of life. Now I've got to take it into the place I bought it for a service call, which wasn't how I was hoping to spend my Saturday morning!

At one point during the initial investigation into the problem, I panicked a little, thinking that since I've been writing the book on that PC perhaps I'd end up losing some recent additions if this turned out to be a catastrophic problem with the PC. But then I checked Vicki's PC, where I periodically save copies of the work-in-progress, and discovered that the latest backup there seems to contain the last 'chapter' that I wrote! Whew! That's at least one less thing to worry about. The last full backup of my PC was done just before we left for San Francisco, meaning that I shouldn't have actually lost anything else - worst case! - except for the cataloguing of a few dozen comics and some recently-received e-mails. Everything else would be current as of the previous backup.

Tammy's here for a visit - I knew that we shouldn't have given her that car!!!!! (kidding) - and so the three of us watched a trio of Lost Season 3 episodes: "Left Behind," "One Of Us" and "Catch-22." With seven more episodes to go, it's building up steam quite nicely. Even watching them in quicker succession now, I still haven't really detected any lull over the course of S3, whereas you certainly can feel some letup at times in S2. The Nikki & Paolo episode, "Expose," which seemed just OK the first time, was more enjoyable two nights ago when we played the commentary track for it. Among the interesting insights provided by the writers of "Expose" during the voice-over was the fact that they decided to do that storyline in answer to the fans who complained about the "no name extras" that make up the rest of the castaways. Ironically, after "Expose" was broadcast, the Lost creators heard complaints about it to the tune of, "Why did you waste a whole episode on them? We want to see more of the main characters!" Beyond that being a "you can never please people" story, it was also presented as an indication that, in the writers' minds at least, each of the people on the island have fascinating backstories behind them, regardless of whether we get to learn about them or not. It was also an opportunity for them to briefly bring back old favourites of theirs, like Arnst, Boone and Shannon.

And that, in a nutshell, was my day (after work, at least)!