24, the Fifth Day, at the 17th Hour

SPOILER WARNING: READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!

This episode turns the President into a complete villain. And he’s using his power to get Jack. They are really in trouble now.

• I still think to have the President be the biggest villain doesn’t make any sense at all. I mean, starting in this episode he throws away that anxious, weak face and suddenly becomes assertive and strong. Like I said last time, what a good actor he was the whole time. It would be more believable if he wasn’t such a wuss before.
• Since Logan is revealed as the villain, the Vice President Gardner suddenly loses his evil,scheming face too. That change is so obvious as if to remind viewers that “Hey! I’m not the bad guy! It’s my boss!”
• I thought Evelyn would have the evidence with her when they went to meet Henderson. How does that work? Now that I think about it, how come Henderson didn’t ask to see and verify the evidence before letting go the little girl? He really had the upperhand at that point.
• I didn’t think it was wise for Jack and Wayne to leave Evelyn alone, wounded staying in the hotel with her daughter. I would think at least Wayne should’ve stayed behind. Oh well, it can’t be helped that the little girl called 911 when her mom fainted. Henderson found them and I think they are going to die.
• That poor bank manager dude. When I saw that Jack was going to have the guy open the bank by force, I knew this guy is dead. This is like a golden rule in 24: if you happened to be an innocent civilian and you happened to have the misfortune to be enlisted by Jack for help, you are more than likely to get killed. As soon as Jack got the evidence, the bad guys conveniently arrived and the poor guy was killed during their escape.
• On the other hand, Jack was shrewd to get the LAPD to battle Henderson’s men. It was also kind of cruel because they were pretty much being used as human shields.
• The DHS people are a bunch of dumb asses. They actually thought Audrey wouldn’t know her car was bugged? Come on. It’s even more ludicrous that they put the transponder at such an easy-to-find location.
• I really hate that dude, that DHS lady Karen’s henchman. He has “Hello I’m a bureaucrat and I’m an ass” written all over his face.

I did get to see the preview of next week’s episode. They are in a world of trouble. Audrey is being followed by the DHS/CTU agents. It seems that Jack is going to be ambushed at the airport when he meets up with Audrey. (I wonder what the DHS agents’ faces would look like when Secretary Heller shows up.) Chloe gets set up by the paranoia chick and the bureaucrat bastard and it looks like she’ll be arrested. I really hope that bastard would go down in flame before this season ends. Let’s see what will happen next week.

Apple’s Boot Camp

Today Apple announces a public beta of this Boot Camp bootloader that allows Windows XP to dual boot on a Intel based Mac. Besides the bootloader, it also comes with Windows drivers for the Mac hardware. Boot Camp will be part of OSX 10.5 when it comes out. The release of Boot Camp pretty much makes the effort of the 3rd parties to run XP on Intel Macs moot. This is a good thing because you get a nice bootloader to choose which OS you want to use and you get official Windows drivers from Apple. This makes buying a Mac more attractive for Windows users. If and when I can afford a new laptop, I would seriously consider a Mac.

As I look through the forums on many tech sites a lot of people seem to love the comment Apple makes on the Boot Camp page:

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

This is just silly and give me a friggin’ break. Of course Windows on a “Mac” is just like Windows on a PC, because there isn’t a whole lot of different between “Mac” hardware and PC hardware. Stop making it as if Macs are totally different than PCs, especially after Apple switched to the Intel platform. Running Windows on *any* platform will give you the same exact troubles and annoyances. I can run Linux on PC hardware or like some hackers do, slap x86 OSX on PC hardware and I would be just as “safe” as using a Mac. (I never have problems with worms and viruses in Windows, so I don’t know what’s the big deal. Not needing to waste resources on anti-virus/anti-spyware/firewall programs is a plus though.)

Another silly comment I read is “Muwahaha! Dell must be pretty upset now!” Come on now, upset about what? Dell doesn’t give a damn until Apple drops the price of their hardwares to Dell’s range, and/or large enterprises start buying Macs in bulk. To think that being able to dual boot XP on a Mac is going to greatly effect Dell is simply being ignorant and silly.

24, the Fifth Day, at the 16th Hour

I won't even bother with the spoiler warning. I'm 3 days late because I missed the show and had to watch a taped one later. There are only a couple of things that I wanted to comment on:

• If Audrey was going to sell out Buchanan to help Jack, she should at least let him know in some way before he left. I feel kind of bad to see him go like that.
• The bombshell at the end didn't make sense at all. They are telling me President Logan is behind all these? Isn't the President such a good actor this whole time! If he's the mastermind, then what's up with the whole mess with Walt Cummings? They should be working together right? In that case I'm sure Logan wouldn't need to be convinced to let the Russian rebels take the nerve gas. I'm not sure I'm buying it. They need a lot explaining about why Logan is the mastermind.
• Is that mean the Vice President isn't a bad guy? Or he and Logan are just pot and the kettle?

I didn't catch the preview of next week's episode so I have no clue what's going to happen. I expect a full explaination of this "Charles Logan the most evil President in US history" thing. If they don't explain this well this is going to be one of the worst plot twists of the show.

My Fantasy Baseball Draft

This is what my team will look like to start the season:

C:    Joe Mauer - Keeper
1B:   David Ortiz - Keeper
2B:   Felipe López
3B:   Troy Glaus
SS:   Michael Young - Keeper
OF:   Adam Dunn
OF:   Carl Crawford - Keeper
OF:   Pat Burrell
Util: Richie Sexson
Util: Ryan Freel
BN:   JD Drew
BN:   Mike Piazza

SP:   Carlos Zambrano - Keeper
SP:   John Patterson
SP:   Josh Beckett
SP:   Danny Haren
SP:   Freddy Garcia
SP:   Zack Duke
SP:   Paul Byrd
SP:   Ervin Santana

RP:   Chad Cordero
RP:   Derrick Turnbow
RP:   Trevor Hoffman
RP:   Bobby Jenks
RP:   Francisco Liriano

Our league only has 8 teams and we get 5 keepers to carry over from last season. The biggest bats such as Manny or Bonds are keepers of other teams, so I didn’t have a lot to choose from. Overall I think I did well with my offense but my starting rotation is suspect. I spent lots of time stacking up on big sticks and closers I missed quite a few big time starters who weren’t keepers, such as Smoltz or Pedro or Harden. I’m also a little worried about my closers. Is Turnbow going to be good in his sophomore year? Bobby Jenks is even more worrisome as I just found out he won’t be closing games to begin the season because he’s been having control issues throughout this spring. I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up a couple sleepers during the season to improve my pitching staff.

Btw, don’t ask me why I picked Francisco Liriano. That was a mistake as I don’t believe he’ll move into the starting rotation this season…

Hello Outlook, Goodbye Thunderbird

I have been a long time user of Mozilla Thunderbird, the open source email client, on Windows. I am mostly a webmail user and I only use a desktop email client to check emails from my ISP and a couple of other POP3-only accounts. At the beginning I decided to stay away from Outlook/Outlook Express because of the non-stop patching cycle due to worms and its inability to filter spam effectively. I have tried a few other clients and I ended up sticking with Thunderbird because it’s relatively safe from worms (one still needs to be careful with attachments though) and its Bayesian spam filter is pretty good. It’s not perfect, but I thought it was simple and good enough, until lately that is. Few days ago I decided to switch to Outlook 2003, leaving Thunderbird as backup.

The first and biggest reason for my switch: the lack of an integrated calendar. I have wanted a calendar integrated into the email client for a long time. I have looked around and I haven’t found anything remotely comparable to Outlook. Before someone suggests Evolution and Kontact, no they don’t count. I do use Linux but only for its development tools. Not to mention Evolution is dog slow and using Kontact isn’t that great under Gnome. (To be fair, if I have to choose one of the two it would be Kontact.) Then last week Mozilla.org released Lightning 0.1, a Thunderbird extension that would add calendar function to Thunderbird to make it just like Outlook. I have heard about Lightning being in development for quite a while. Somehow it took them very long to release a 0.1 and I was eager to give it a spin.

It is a 0.1 release indeed because it is very raw. The release notes says there are quite a few data-loss bugs and numerous other issues to be resolved. It obvious that it has a long way to go before it becomes usable. When one considers how long it took them to release 0.1, chances are Lightning won’t be usable for at least a couple of more years. I have waited a long time and I’m not willing to wait another year or two. I’m not accusing the Lightning team being lazy or anything. I simply think they don’t have enough developers to make the project go as fast as they would like.

Thunderbird, on the other hand, seems to suffer from the same problem. Its pace of development is quite a bit slower compared to Firefox. One can call it my pet peeve, but there’s this one bug in 1.5 that drives me absolutely crazy. I have a number of email accounts set up in Thunderbird and I check a couple of them more often than others. Whenever I launch Thunderbird as soon as the window shows up I would click on the down arrow on the Get Mail icon to pull up the list of accounts. What is happening here is that if I click on it too soon, Thunderbird would crash. To get around this problem, after the program window shows up I need to wait for a few seconds, may be click on other menu items or something, before I can click the Get Mail icon and not having it crash. One can ask why I couldn’t wait for few more seconds, and my answer is I think it’s silly that after I launched a program I have to “artificially” wait a bit more before I can use it. Sometimes I am really in a hurry or I simply forget, and it would crash and burn and I have to start over again. It drives me absolutely crazy and I don’t feel like putting up with it anymore.

So hello Outlook 2003.

Outlook’s calendar works quite well and it looks polished. I’m pretty happy with it. Unfortunately the application itself is not without problems. First of all, shortly after I installed Outlook I started to appreciate the way Thunderbird’s menu and preference panels are set up. Simply put, Outlook’s menu and preference panels are difficult to navigate. May be it’s unfamiliarity but I keep feeling like I have to get through hoops to find that preference I would like to change. Thunderbird is simpler and easier to navigate in this regard. To be fair, Thunderbird doesn’t have calendar, task list, and etc, so it *should* be simpler. But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel lost navigating through Outlook’s menus and preferences. Until I can get used to it, I think the way it’s set up is clumsy and not very efficient.

The second problem is the default character encoding when displaying emails. I have set Windows to a non-English regional setting, but I have set Office’s default language to English through the Office Language Settings tool. I also have set the default language to English in Outlook’s preference. But for whatever stupid reason it still chooses to display some of my emails with wrong character encoding. Yes I can change it through the menu, but it’s for that particular email only and there doesn’t seem to be an option to make it the default. This is very annoying. I noticed it happens when the email header does not specify a character encoding. Shouldn’t Outlook have a default encoding option when the email message does not specify one? I really would like to know. As one can see from the picture, the font used is next to unreadable and having me to change it for every single email is a PITA. May be I’m missing something somewhere, it would be great if someone can enlighten me on this.

The feature that I miss the most from Thunderbird is the built-in Bayesian spam filter. It works quite well and I don’t have to upgrade the filter every month as Outlook requires. Outlook has some 3rd party plugins for this, but a lot of them aren’t free and the free ones aren’t very good. The one I tried causes Outlook’s memory usage to almost double. The good thing is my POP3 accounts don’t get a lot of spam, so it’s not a big issue. On the other hand, I sure as hell don’t miss the relatively long startup time. Outlook starts up a lot faster than Thunderbird and the difference is even bigger when compared to Evolution on Linux. One of the best things about Office is that its applications start up very quickly even on low-end machines. That’s why I can never get used to OpenOffice.org, it has some nice features, but it is just too slow.

At the end, by switching to Outlook, I get the very nice calendar feature I have wanted while giving up the simplicity and superiority as an email client in Thunderbird. If and when Lightning becomes as useful as (or at least pretty close) to Outlook, I may switch back to Thunderbird. But first, they better fix that damn bug which causes it to crash when clicking on the Get Mail icon.

24, the Fifth Day, at the 15th Hour

SPOILER ALERT as usual. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Oh boy isn’t it nice to be proved wrong. Last time I said I believed Audrey Raines really is the one who sold the schematics to Collette. It turned out I was wrong (not surprising) and it’s more complicated than it looks. On the other hand, with how the things are going, I wonder how they will drag this story through for another 9 episodes.

• Last time I was wondering who the hell were those guys that attacked Wayne Palmer, it turned out it was Henderson’s henchmen. How the hell did he get those guys pass the checkpoints? If they had been hiding there before martial law was declared, then how did Henderson know Wayne would definitely pass through that road?
• It was Audrey’s turn to get the Burke’s Special. But it turned out she was set up by Henderson, who told Collette to use Audrey if she got into trouble. Sneaky bastard.
• The new girl that replaced Edgar is downright weird. At first I thought she is a victim of that perverted DHS bureaucratic jerk. (I forgot his name, but he has “I’m a jerk” written all over his face.) I thought Chloe was pretty cool for standing up to that dude. But then the new girl was horrified just because Buchanon patted her on the shoulder when complimenting her for her good insight. It seems that she has some kind of paranoia problem and that DHS dude, although he’s still a jerk, may not be a pervert after all. Again, Chloe’s facial expression after finding out what the girl is really like is priceless.
• Btw, the new girl said she went to CalTech. How come she doesn’t look like a nerd at all? That is SO unconvincing! ;-)
• Where the hell did Wayne Palmer get that big-ass automatic rifle with green LED and all that?? I thought he was unarmed when he escaped from his car? That green LED looks kind of fake. It reminds me of the Alien movies, or FPS like Quake or Doom.
• That was a close call at the natural gas plant. As usual they were barely able to stop it when the clock was ticking down to the final seconds.
• Jack, once again didn’t seem to remember he is not immortal, went after Bierko when the plant was exploding left and right. They were making it somewhat a cliffhanger at the end but everyone knows Jack is going to be fine. There are 9 more hours left and the show needs him to be alive. ;-)
• Now the questions. With the canisters gone and Bierko pretty much captured (or dead), the only guy left is Henderson. What the heck is he scheming? What did Wayne Palmer find out from his brother’s computer? There seems to be a lot of people involved inside the administration. The First Lady’s aide also seems to know something too. In order to “drag” this on for 9 more episodes Henderson must be planning something big. With the foreign terrorists gone, are we dealing with domestic terrorists now, or there’s another group? Can’t wait for next week.

Bronson’s Out, Wily Mo’s In

The Sox has traded Bronson Arroyo to Cincinnati Reds for Wily Mo Pena. I know the Sox is having a surplus of starting pitchers after Wells rescinded his trade request but I didn’t expect they would trade Arroyo. If one thinks about it though, Arroyo is actually a good candidate in a trade. He along with Papelbon are the odd-men out when the rotation has Schilling, Beckett, Clement, Wakefield, and Wells. Arroyo and Papelbon would be in the bullpen as the long men when the season begins, but how many long men do you need? The team probably wants to keep Papelbon in the majors instead of AAA thus Arroyo becomes expendable. His contract is also relatively cheap when compared to guys like Clement or Wells, making him more attractive to other teams. Performance wise, he significant drop in K rate last year and his inability to get lefties out probably gave the team an alarm that they decided to sell high.

The reason I didn’t expect it is Arroyo is that when he signed the 3-year contract earlier this year, it was reported that he went against his agent’s advice and took a hometown discount to stay with the Sox. Obviously he didn’t get a no-trade clause from the team, Arroyo only hoped that the team would appreciate his “goodwill” and would not take the advantage and trade him. I guess he (and I) forgets that this management never gets emotional when it comes to conducting its business.

With that said, I guess this is a good trade. While Pena does have his problems, being a strikeout machine and never walks (that’s even worse than Bellhorn), but he has a ton of power, bats right-handed, and is still only 24 years old. He can also play all 3 OF positions so that’s a plus. Whether he can handle Fenway’s RF is a big question mark. When the Reds came to Fenway last year, he looked lost playing RF. I hope it was only because he wasn’t familiar with the quirky RF at Fenway. Pena would be a good platoon mate with Nixon. And when Trot’s contract is up at the end of this season, the team can move Pena to play RF fulltime, if he can improve his plate discipline by then. As for Arroyo, it’s kind of sad to see him go, even though he did take a discount he got a 3-year contract that gives him more security than going arbitration every year. One thing I fear though, is that players probably would never give the Sox any kind of “discount” again. Since the team doesn’t really appreciate it there’s no reason for players to be nice. After all, this is a business, and nothing else.

24, the Fifth Day, at the 14th Hour

Your usual SPOILER WARNING here. Massive SPOILERS below. Read at your own risk.

There wasn’t much to comment, except for the bombshell at the end, because Jack was mostly following new leads:

• If CTU is indeed being absorbed into DHS, what’s going to happen next season?
• Alright, can someone tell me just how the hell Jack programmed a SD card to self-destruct when data is being uploaded? I mean, unless someone educates me this is possible with today’s technology, this simply doesn’t make sense and it’s a cheap ripoff from James Bond (or is it Mission Impossible?). May be I would believe it if the card would self-destruct when data is accessed without proper authentication, but *only* to self-destruct when data is being uploaded is a load of crap.
• So Jack not only pissed off the Chinese government, now he pissed off the German government as well. May be when all is said and done, Jack would’ve pissed off the entire world and would have to live in Antarctica or something.
• What’s up with Wayne Palmer? What did he find from David Palmer’s computer? More interestingly, how come he didn’t contact Jack but Aaron Pierce?
• Who the hell were those guys who attacked Wayne? They actually hided behind the roadblocks. Should I assume those masked men are government SWAT teams or something? If that’s the case, then Vice President Hal Gardner is extremely suspicious. Is he also behind the assassination of Palmer along with Walt Cummings? (That means Cummings didn’t cough up everything after all?)
• Now the bombshell at the end: Audrey Raines gave that Collette lady the schematics? What the hell is that all about? Is Audrey going to become another Nina Myers? From the preview of next week’s episode, Jack is interrogating Audrey and he goes into his well-known “berserk mode”. (He really believes in equality of men and women does he…?) That scene totally reminds me of Nina Myers, except that Audrey is playing innocent instead. May be that Collette chick framed her, but to be honest, I think that seems unlikely.
• Actually on second thought, during the preview it seems that Jack is chasing Bierko to that facility where he is going to release the nerve gas. That means Jack finds out what kind of schematics that is and that also means Audrey does spill the beans. Of course I assume that Collette chick was telling the truth that she doesn’t know the detail of the information she obtains.
• Similarity between Nina and Audrey: they both look very skinny. Is that this show’s stereotype of traitorous women?

Oh Shucks!

Geeez, so it was indeed 3rd time’s the charm. The Japanese team did get the last laugh after all. Damn it, should I root for Cuba now? I don’t like them very much either because they beat my Papi and the DR team. But it would be comical if Cuba won the championship, as the US government didn’t want them to participate in the tournament. Oh what should I do?

Third Time is the Charm…Again!?

Geez, the Japanese team needs to send Team USA a thank you note for their pathetic showing again Mexico. Team USA just lost to Mexico 2-1, and Japan advances to the semifinals because of the USA-Japan-Mexico 3-way tie and the ERA rule kicks in. Japan is going to get their 3rd chance for revenge against Korea. Let’s see if Korea can make it a hat trick. It would suck if Japan wins though, they would advance to final and kind of gets the last laugh.

Personally, I wanted the US team to win, but they are just spectacularly craptastic and didn’t get the job done. You guys suck.