Numb3rs

Alrighty then. This show has a unique spin in that math is the device that the writers use to drive the plot. I guess it's a good time to mention that I'm a total geek and watching these shows definitely scratches some kind of repressed nerd need.

Now Charlie Epps definitely is an interesting character, but I like most of the characters in this show. It's all well written, and a few of the episodes have awesome stories. Several of the episodes have nerdy tendencies that really can feed your inner geek, but at the same time, the best episodes are really excellent drama that you don't have to be an egghead to watch.

The interplay between the characters is excellent, so much so that the few minor changes to the cast are in my opinion easier to overlook than on just about any other show. The cast are all excellent actors, and they have been playing their characters long enough to really get into them and give them a depth missing in some of the other cop drama shows out there imho.

Charlie's interaction with his brother, his father and his girlfriend are all so much more normal than many of the other shows on the air, that it really seems more convincing than some other shows. Aloof, emotionally repressed geniuses, or dark, emotionally troubled people make up so many of the characters we see than when a couple of brothers have friction for the sole reason of sibling rivalry, it's refreshing and hits close to home.

I've always liked science and math, and to see their application being used to solve crimes is awesome. I particularly like when game theory is used to solve a riddle or figure out a clue. Most of the math I honestly just don't follow, but occasionally I'll hear something I do know, and it seems to me that the rest of the math must be on the level.

Final words, Navi Rawat is an awesome actress, and when Numb3rs is finally over, the only silver lining to that otherwise gray cloud is that she will be able to star in more movies, at least I hope so. BTW, here's a little Amita fan service.

Fark.com

If you don't know what Fark.com is, for shame. Simply put, it's a news site unlike any other. It has all the news you want and some that you probably don't, but what legitimate media outlet isn't crammed full of stuff you didn't want to know.

Fark is much like your CNN's much cooler younger brother who you started to be friends with after you figured out what a tool CNN was in the first place. I mean, sure if Vanilla Ice is on the radio sure you're going to listen to it, but not if there is any music on another station, or if there is any other station available at all, or if you can pickup up static, or if you happen to have a nail gun you can pierce your ear drums with. I mean sure, if the last people on Earth happened to be you and Grace Jones, Tori Spelling and Mariah Carey and it was up to you to repopulate the planet, and you had three bags, sure you'd take those bags and asphyxiate yourself with them, I mean who wouldn't? What does that have to do with Fark you may ask. Well, when you're stuck with CNN, Fox News and Headline News, and all of a sudden Jessica Alba walks up, you take the three bags and while listening to the static on the radio proceed to asphyxiate the other three and recreate the human race with some dignity and class. You get what I'm laying down here, right? Oh yeah!

Chess Variants

I'm not going to go into this subject very heavily, as there is just so much there, but I'm going to list some of them and also some chess based games.

Some variants add a piece or two to the board, some replace a piece with another. Some games alter the board a bit, and some alter it a lot. Some games are hardly recognizable as chess at all, and some just add a bit of flavor to an old standard. I want to give an example of each type, then go into my favorites.

Chaturanga is perhaps the oldest form of chess. It mostly resembles the modern game where the only differences are the queen moves one space diagonally and the bishop has been replaced with an elephant that normally moves two spaces diagonally, hopping the intermediate square like a knight. Other than that, the game is pretty much the chess that we know.

Omega Chess is a newer chess variant where the board has been enlarged to 10x10 with the addition of one square extra diagonally out from each corner. There have also been 2 new pieces added to the game, the champion and the wizard. The wizard functions like a uber-knight which jumps three spaces out and then one over or one diagonally and the champion can move one or two spaces horizontally or vertically, or can jump one space diagonally.

Elephant Chess, or Chinese Chess is one of my favorite variants, and I actually have this board at home. Some of the board differences is that the play is on the intersections of the lines, there is a river in the middle that some pieces can't cross and there is a castle on both sides of the river that the king and his guards can't leave. The elephant returns in this game and the only difference from chaturanga is that it can't cross the river. The cannon is also neat. That piece moves like a rook, but has to jump an intermediate piece to take a piece, which can make it hard to take a piece easily, but can also result in a check from a distance in complete safety. There is also a Korean version of this game, Changgi, that is very similar, but with no river.

Shogi is the Japanese equivalent of chess and it is really different. Played on 9x9 board, the pieces have unique promotions and the pieces look identical on both sides, with only the way it's pointing indicating which player it belongs to. It also has a unique rule where you can drop a captured piece onto the board as your turn, which is kinda like a zombie rule for chess. The pieces are hard to discern for western eyes as they are marked by Kanji, but they pretty much represent similar pieces in western chess.

3-D Chess has many variants itself. There's the famous Star Trek chess that Kirk always seems to beat Spock at, but there are many other types too. Raumschach is a neat looking 3-D chess game on a 5x5x5 board with the addition of a unicorn piece. While Star Trek chess looks cool, I'm thinking that Raumschach might be more fun, but I've not played either.

There are also mini games. Petty chess, quick chess, speed chess and Elena chess are all played on a 5x6 board where the only difference is the initial setup of the pieces. There are also huge versions of some of these games. Taikyoku Shogi has 209 different types of pieces played on a 36x36 board. There are 402 pieces each and 1296 squares.

Four player chess is interesting. Most boards are set up in a cross fashion with the four armies meeting out on a common field. Having to wait three turns to make your next turn has to be annoying when you are trying to strategize. I would think it's more of a defensive game than some of the other variants. Some of the four player games give you control of an opponents army when you capture their king.

Finally I wanted to mention Stratego. Probably the best chess-like game out there, it is also an example of a chess-like board with similar strategy, but not really any of the pieces or vastly different rules. I've seen some of these games that are really just strange, and most of them I wouldn't play, but Stratego is alright.

The Xanth Series

Xanth, what can I say about this series. Let me start with the Author. I think that I've read more Piers Anthony books than any other author. I really like the way that he writes and several of his series are just great. Also, he is a prolific writer who has a good handle on how long a story should be. His stories neither drag or fly by; they are a good length for light reading.

Now, I just picked up a new to me Xanth book within the last month and read it, and to be honest I was thinking that I really wouldn't like it too much, being too juvenile for my tastes anymore, but I was pleasantly surprised. I guess I really go for that nostalgia feeling, and since Ogre, Ogre was the first book that I ever bought for myself as a kid of about ten years, reading this stuff sure fills that nostalgia fix pretty well.

The world of Xanth, which is almost the exact shape of Florida, is a magical world where strange punny things happen. Over the years Anthony has expanded the territory of the series to include a dream world in the gourd (read Ogre, Ogre) and Ptero and it's derivatives. Regardless, the whole world in which these stories reside seems to evolve over time, and in every book, a new facet of Xanth is opened up for discovery.

Xanth has two main properties. First it's magical and second it's humorous. Not all aspects are funny, but most things the characters run across in Xanth are mostly pun. It's actually really fun to read about the absurdity of the land and it's creatures and their unique interactions can be really entertaining.

I'll probably keep picking Anthony books up as long as he keeps writing them, and for a lighthearted read, Xanth books will probably always be at the top of that list.

Masters of the Universe

Is it about the figures? Maybe. Is it the comics? Probably not. Is it about the cartoon? Somewhat. What MOTU is really about for me now is the nostalgia factor. I think that He-man was the first cartoon I can remember watching where I had a toy that was based on it. I do remember watching Tranzor Z earlier, but I never had any of the toys.

I remember as a kid having several of these toys, and my brother had a few himself. I don't know what actually happened to my MOTU figures, and will probably never know, but I do remember playing with these as a kid, and even having Castle Grayskull. That was awesome. For some reason, my parents only bought me good guys and my brother and friends had all the bad guys. I can even remember being really jealous of my friend Doug's MOTU collection, but hey I was a kid, what do you expect. I think it's kinda the suck that I never had any of the bad guys to fight against, cause the bad guys were where it's at.

Which brings me up to one of my theories. Villains are always more fun than the good guys. I don't know why this is, but I heard an interview from a Marvel writer once discussing the problems with villains. His main point was for every hero, there needed to be a slew of villains or the plots would get boring. Would Batman have been Batman if the Joker was the only villain? What about the Penguin, the Riddler, the Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, the Phantasm, Ra's al Gul, Poison Ivy, Two-Face, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Clayface, Manbat and a host of others. His point was that behind every successful hero, there stood a ton of supporting villains. I think I read something like at one time Marvel had copyrighted something like 20,000 characters, but that less than 500 of them were superheroes. I think the number was around 96% of copyrighted characters were villains. So if there were so many of them, to be memorable, they had to be great, not good. That's why villains like Bizzaro, the Joker, Sinestro, Venom, Metallo, Magneto and Kingpin just to name a few were so cool, they had to be.

So in MOTU, there were a lot of toys, and there were a lot of good villains in with it. Trap-Jaw, Faker, Beastman, and later some of the She-Ra villains were very cool. There were so many of them that some of them really had to stand out. Some of them just were so good, and no where near as pathetic as some of the heroes.

Just recently there has been a new line of figures released, obviously to tie into the nostalgia market, and some of the additions like Adora and the Green Goddess are really nice. I enjoyed these as a kid, and have a collection of them still now as an adult, so I guess I fill my nerd quotient for the day right there. However, there is one huge marketing faux pas from the original characters that I would like to sum up in the next question. Why was there never a Faker Battlecat?

Rick Steve's Europe

Maybe this is just a follow-up to the post I wrote about History Detectives the other day, but PBS is doing such a great job that I didn't want to leave this gem of a show untouched.

I only started watching Create about a year ago or so, and although the quality of the programming is great, some of it is not my style. I can only watch so many cooking and craft shows before I just want to turn it off, but some of the travel shows really caught my attention. Rick Steve's Europe is at the top of that list by far in my book.

Rick travels around Europe and writes guidebooks and shoots travel shows. I hope this comes out as the compliment I mean it to be, but watching his show is almost like taking a thirty minutes vacation itself.

Rick travels all over the continent to various countries, all of which he makes sound so interesting and like a place I would want to go. He does things like hire local guides to make his stay more enjoyable and goes to little out of the way places, away from the massive throngs of tourists while still managing to hit all the famous sites.

So far I think some of my favorite shows were ones about Bavaria, Prague and Iran. Yes, he even traveled to Iran for his show, and it was a very interesting country. In Prague, just about everything looked fun, especially the art nouveau museum and the music. Bavaria looked like a place to spend a good time in, and I'm sure I'd enjoy all the food and music there too.

Steve points out many of the conveniences of traveling in Europe, one of which is trains. It seems to me that there is a train to just about anywhere you want to go in Europe, and kinda makes me sad it isn't that way here in America.

History's Detectives

I'm a big fan of PBS. I've written a couple articles already on it, and the more I see, the more I'm impressed. Since the big DTV switch, at least here in my area, PBS has three stations, PBS, PBS Kids and Create. I'm probably going to write about a really good show on Create soon, but for right now I'm going to focus on what is my new favorite regular PBS show. History Detectives.

The seventh season of History Detectives started a few weeks ago, and I have to say, at this point, I'm hooked. I started watching this show right about the time that I got my first DTV converter box as before that WTVS didn't come in all that well, and I didn't watch it as much as I do now. That was back at the end of season five, and I caught it when I could during season six and now if I miss a episode, I go to http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/ and go to their video archive and watch it later.

Wes Cowan, Elyse Luray, Gwen Wright and Tukufu Zuberi are the four regular detectives, but during season seven, Eduardo Pagan served as a guest detective too. These four or five will investigate an object with unknown or questionable origins and find it's place in American history. Sometimes the investigation even leads to a discovery with great import, practically rewriting accepted American History.

My favorite detectives are Tukufu Zuberi and Elyse Luray. All of the detectives are really knowledgeable and likable, but Tukufu and Elyse are still my favorite to watch. If you are into more high-brow entertainment, I'd try this show out.

Craigslist

I've posted about garage sales in the past, and to me, the logical online extension of that is Craigslist. I love to wheel and deal, and CL is an awesome way to do it.

One of the keys I've learned about selling is it's all about connecting to a person with a need. That old saying about being able to sell refrigerators to Eskimos is stupid. All that you have to do to sell something is fill that persons need or want. What CL does is allow you to connect to that person.

I've sold maybe around $12,000 worth of items on CL so far, with most of that being sold in 2007, and what I've noticed has been similar in most of the cases. I have something that someone wants, and when the price is right, I have them lined up to get them. It's easy to sell someone something they want, because instead of selling, you are just helping them buy.

You need to know your product. You need to know your target audience, or at least have a way to get to them. You need to take a picture, write a description and then post it on CL and see what happens. Selling on CL is just that simple.

I want to bring up one thing here though, pricing. I've learned invaluable lessons regarding pricing my items for sale on CL or in a garage sale from doing business on CL. It's about worth or value. How much is something worth? Only what someone is willing to pay for it. That's a beautiful thing. If the most I can get for an item is $5, guess what, I'm going to sell it for $5. It doesn't matter how much money I paid to get that item, even if I only bought it to resell it, the fact of the matter is I can only get what people are willing to pay. This has led me into another truth about business.

You make your money when you buy. Occasionally I buy out garage sales and add them to my own, taking some of the greater objects to sell on CL in the mean time. Normally what ends up happening is that I sell the couple large items right away for the price I paid for the whole garage sale or more. By the time my next garage sale comes along, I'm already selling stuff I didn't pay anything for. Then it doesn't matter to me what I sell the stuff for, I will still be operating at 100% profit, and that's good for any business.

You make your money when you buy. If I buy an item for $80 hoping to sell it for $100, that might be a good idea. However, I'm more likely to pass that up or try to ask for less. I'd rather buy something for $20 and sell it for $40. That's the same profit, but the margin is 300% higher and the money I've tied up in it is 25% of the other item. For the same $80 dollars, I could buy 4 $20 items and hopefully sell them for $40 each, netting me $80. If you thought the $20 dollar profit in both examples was the same, it's not. That $20 was 75% cheaper to produce. This should be business 101, not the junk they teach in school.

Oh well, guess I'm off to discover what else I can sell on CL.

I'm back! At least I think so.

Hi. I'm sitting here and thinking, hey, I kinda miss blogging, so I'm determined to get back into the swing of things. But there have been some good things that have happened during my hiatus, so I'm going to tell you about them.

I've always wanted to write. It's one of my few truly creative outlets. So this year I wanted to finish some of my writing projects and get a handle on writing, and I've done just that. I've finished four short stories (Conscious, Perchance To, Garamond... and Wilted) and I'm working on one right now (The Pact - Working Title) and I have the whole story in my mind, so I should be done soon. I've also started three other new projects, though we'll have to see what comes of them, and I've added maybe twenty new original ideas to my notebook for keeping ideas until I use them. Considering that I still have a life and don't get too much time to devote to writing, I think that I've had a pretty productive summer.

There's also been at least one disappointment for my writing. I was going to write for the first time in the superhero genre, and here's the extremely brief treatment for the idea I was going to write. Note, I wrote this about three years ago, but I was going to actually start threshing out a story, well I don't want to get ahead of myself. The next paragraph is copied right out of my notebook, word for word.

Villain treatment where you really get to know a comic-booky villain. They plot and plan and execute, when the hero shows up, busts him up then bails. Everything is from the villain's perspective, and the hero is an anticlimactic agent.

Here, I thought I had a unique perspective on creating a funny superhero story, and then I watched Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. This thing had Neal Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion in it and was written by Joss Whedon! I can't compete with that. As I was working through the details of my story, I had this idea of a hero who is a total tool and really trying to get the reader to identify with the villain, rooting for him to win. The similarities of the story I was thinking of and Dr. Horrible were, well let's just say if I didn't change a lot, I'd look like a plagiarist. It's easier to mark the differences. In my story, there were more than one superhero ruining my guys plans and the girlfriend was more of a henchman character. If I didn't practically idolize Joss Whedon's ability to create and think Neal Patrick Harris was so cool, I'd be kinda ticked. BTW, my working title was "The Hero is a Jerk".

This summer, I've also expanded my online bookstore quite a bit. On 9/29/09, I officially hit the 1000 books in my store mark. This might not seem like a huge accomplishment, but I'm geeked. I'm starting to develop plans for my bookstore, and would really like to bump it up a bit more soon. I'm planning to have about 1100 books mid-October, and maybe around 1250 by the time I put it in vacation mode on 12-1. I hate post offices in December, so I take a month vacation from my bookstore ever year, and this year I think I'm going to extend it until 1-15-10.

One of the last things I've done is scan the pages I've got done for my children's book. I still have about 6 pages to go, and then I'm going to talk to my cousin Sarah about helping me illustrate it when she moves to Michigan later this month.

Still, with all I've done over this summer, I've really kinda missed this, so I'm going to try to blog on a consistent basis again. What I'm thinking is that I'm going to try to get to this blog every Friday, and then if I can, I'll add Monday and if I'm feeling really up to it, I'll throw in a Wednesday too. Hopefully more to come soon.