Lets start with the the dreadful dialog.  Most of the start of the episode was bloated with characters giving lengthly exposition that ruined the tone of the show and crippled the ability to create personalities for its characters.  In the beginning I assumed it was that they wanted to make sure that people who didn’t see the pilot wouldn’t be lost on what the pattern was, and who was on the team, but it didn’t stop after the first segment.  Was this episode written by out of work radio serial writers?  It is not like on Mad Men dialog is:

Don Draper

“Well honey, I am off to work.  At the Sterling Cooper Ad agency.  Where I am creative director.”

Betty Draper

“Ok.  I am going to go ride my horse as I search for a life outside my suburban prison and see if I can create a self outside your shadow.  Please don’t violate my trust again by having another affair.”

Also there seems to be no suspense in the mysteries on this show.  I can’t quiet put my finger on exactly what it is, so I guess it must be a combination of factors.  First, the show is directed like an episode of Bones.  It sets no mood at all.  There is no difference from a scene meant to be funny and one meant to be suspenseful.  Also, answers seem to come too easily to them.  Just google some old doctor’s name that Walter remembers, look through some files, Bob’s you uncle and we are done.  And finally the show hasn’t learned the lessons of shows like X-Files (which is odd since it is a direct descendant of it), Lost, and Heroes.  Keep it mysterious, don’t show the audience too much.  Let us learn with the main characters.  Let us feel their frustration and enjoy their discovery.  When we see the others, bad guys, puppet masters of the universe or whatever, keep it short and have them talk in generalities.  And when they do reveal something the main characters don’t know, let it be something important that the audience can be desperate for the good guys to know.  Hitchcock once said about suspense that if you just had a bomb go off that is a surprise, but instead you show the bomb the detectives are looking for and the audience knows it will go off, but don’t have it go off.  All that time they are searching and the bomb isn’t going off is killing the audience.  That is suspense.  There is no ominous bomb yet in Fringe.  I don’t have any feeling of real stakes.

But I do know that the writers of the show have seen a lot of SciFi before since episode two seemed like a mashup of some old favorites.  Some examples (I probably could have found more but couldn’t bring myself to rewatch it):

• Olivia’s having baby dream sequence = Aliens
• Guy needs to kill X people every Y years to harvest organs to survive = X-Files classic “Squeeze”
• Make a defibrillator out of live electrical wires = MI:III (another JJ Abrams joint)
• The Pattern sounds a lot like every plot point ever from Alias

A final word about the science in the show.  The basis of all scifi is to create a universe in which the characters live and set the rules for it.  Once set, and you get the audience to buy into the universe you have to stick to the rules you created.  This is what makes it seem real to the audience, from magic in Lord of the Rings, to the Force, to space travel in Star Trek.  This show sets down the rules as they talk in the lab and then violates it one scene later.  Tonight we are supposed to buy into that you can see the last image in the octave nerve from a dieing person because of the drug injected, etc.  Later we see an image of the bridge the girl looked at a good 15-30 minutes before she died.  Really?

Some other random thoughts:

• More dull exposition in what the Massive Dynamics does speech.   Talk about giving too much information.
• The “Pattern” sounds cheesy every time they say it.  The more serious the tone, the worse it sounds.
• The 3D text in the location transitions got old at record speed
• Pacey is still Pacey not matter how many times I hear he has a 190 IQ.  And they mention it almost every time they talk about him.  And that drop in that he has a mysterious, hush hush, medical background didn’t make me care at all.
• Why is the cow still there? Comic relief?  I thought JJ Abrams was in charge of this, not Joss Whedon.

Thank you Time Warner for deciding to upgrade my cable boxe’s firmware at 9:30pm on a Tuesday. It is not like many people watch TV at that time. It took the cable box about 15-20 minutes for the flash and reboot to occur. If this happened on a Sunday night during The Wire I think I would go postal.

I can’t tell what the firmware change did, and cable companies are loath publish these details.  I do know it didn’t make Video on Demand any faster.  Starting HBO on demand still takes 30 seconds to a minute.

1. Move into a house in an old nieghborhood that has at the door mail delivery.
2. Hire a low cost resource to check the mail for me. (You know what I mean.)
3. Get married and have the wife check the mail.
4. Go Kramer and refuse to get any mail.

Since 1 through 3 are very unlikely and 4 is unrealistic I have always thought that the fateful day would come where I could make the death march to a mailbox to see if I got new super-saver coupons.  But then today I saw my possible salvation:  Remote Control Mail.

Well, that seems to be the solution a lot of my friends a thinking about. In the last 2 weeks 4 separate friends pushing 30 have talked to me about going to get their MBAs. All have good reasons, but the biggest is “What the hell am I doing? Everyday at work is the same crap and I am not going anywhere. Hey, college was fun. Screw it, I am going back.”

Hey, I am not immune, I have thought of it too. But I am even too lazy to take the GRE and apply to schools. What we are all looking for of course is real fulfillment. When we look around others seem to be finding it in their families. Some are finding it in their jobs, but we don’t. Some of the best advice I got when I was young was from my father’s friend, “Don’t confuse your life with your career.” But when you are spending 10 hours a day at work it can be a hard thing to find meaning outside of the office. I like what I do, but I know I need to spend more time on stuff outside work. My parents advice would be “get a hobby, get a girlfriend”. Good advice, get off our asses and go do something. You don’t need to change the world to be happy and all that.

Angst is a bitch, and really annoying coming from yuppies like my friends and I.

hype delay:  The time between the scheduled start of a sporting contest and the actual start of play that is filled with endless promotion for the game the viewer has already tuned in to watch.

• Drunk and Retired
• Redmonk Radio (another Cote production)
• This Week in Tech
• Filmspotting (highly recommended to film nuts)

And now I see iTunes has added This American Life as a podcast. That is another hour a week gone.

It marks the stop where the Barons pledge to force King John to sign the Magna Carta and to make war on him if he refused. Now their goal was not liberal democracy for all commoners, but it was a first and important step in limiting the power of a monarch and of government in general. The principal of habues corpus has been part of the foundation of our form of law since and today the President signed into law the removal of that right from non-citizens that are deemed enemies of the state. And there will be no way to challenge that designation. I won’t go on too much on this subject since much smarter people then I, with law and history backgrounds, have been writing about this subject for a few weeks. But it does sadden me that we have become so fearful we are willing to strip people of their freedoms and rights based only on suspicion and the say so of a government that has a track record of duplicity and incompetence. By the way, my mother who was so proud to show me part of her history that day would subject to this new law since she is not a citizen. But I do doubt the FBI is looking into a sixty year old Scottish school teacher. But she was raised in a quasi-socialist society.

PS: After we left the park we went and had beer at the smallest pub in Britain: The Nutshell. I also have been to the longest bar in Britain: The Horse Shoe.

As you can see they included the password I chose in plain text in the email. What kind of security is this? Why have me pick a secret password if you are going to beam it in plain text across the internet. I don’t want to pick on Adobe, because this isn’t the first time I have come across this. I see it all the time from web forum registrations and the like, but I expect better from large corporations such as Adobe. Did they just store the plain text long enough to send me the email, or are they storing the passwords in plain text in a database? If so, someone could hack into and read everyone’s password. So maybe with Breeze meeting application security isn’t that big of a deal you say. So someone is going to have a webmeeting as you, or on your dime. But the on-line Breeze service account info could also contain past meetings, trade secrets, payment info , etc.
The worst case of this I have seen was a few years ago when I signed up for American Express on-line payments. The web registration form had no password confirmation at the time and I had miss typed. Frustrated I called American Express to reset my password to something so I could login and change it. When I talked to the rep on the phone he was able to tell me what I had typed in and what my password was. American Express with all my financial information had stored my password entry in plain text. How do these lapses in security in registration process get past product management?
I am not looking for the over the top 20 step login process that places like ING have, but there are some basic things every web app big and small should be able to say it has:

• Passwords stored in encysted form
• User entered passwords must be confirmed and have some kind of minimum standard for length and content
• If registration confirmation is sent it should not contain the password or financial information
• Security question/response sections should avoid the classics like “Mother’s Maiden name” and need to support user entered questions
• Users should be able to request a password reset via the web and a link to the reset password screen with some key should be sent via email, not a new password
• For public registrations the email addresses should be confirmed with an email that contains the confirmation URL

These security measures aren’t difficult so why are we still having these problems in 2006?