The Technorati site tracks blog posts about television now. Pretty cool that it has become a category/topic in its own right in the blogosphere.

Anyone else planning on watching this new Heroes TV series? It sounds pretty good!

Hey, anyone ever hear of this new series coming to the Sci Fi channel called The Dresden Files. It is about a guy named Dresden who is a modern day wizard (literally, apparently) living in Chicago. He occasionally helps out the Chicago PD with the odd case. The very odd case. As in werewolves, demons - that sort of thing. The literary agent who discovered Mr. Butcher is the same one who discovered Laurel K. Hamilton, the authoress of the highly successful "Anita Blake - vampire executioner" series. Apparently, Butcher is a real success story himself. His first book's first run completely sold out in 3 days: it was 15,000 copies. That is not bad start. That is a hundred copies per day, per state, for 3 days - when nobody has even heard of the book yet. There is a placeholder for Jim Butcher on 43 People, which he has yet to claim but at least one fan has announced themselves on. I skimmed the first part of the first chapter of one of his books over at Jim Butcher.com His bio in Wikipedia sounds pretty interesting. Any other potential future fans of the show out there besides me? Anyone here read any of his books?

I did a respectable number of reviews this afternoon, finally. Kind of a nice end to a pretty decent - though busy - week. I have barely had any time to watch TV this past week. I was very busy. I think I was doing a good job with what I was working on but it was not without a sizable effort. Anyway, as a treat to myself, I did not fall into the trap of working overly late Friday night. It helped that I was not stuck on solving a big, difficult problem when time came to leave. Instead, I left and stopped for a steak dinner on the way home. It was really delicious. The place I ate was a kind of new one in town, I think. The first time I spotted it was a few months ago. It looks very conservative on the outside. Inside there are lots of video screens, some of which are airing a loud rock video with pretty good dance music, and some are silently showing sports or whatever. It is a pretty good combination. I liked it. It is within walking distance of my house so I will probably stroll over there on a weekend sometime. I actually consciously did not buy a salad when I was ordering. Normally, I would have one with steak. However, with all the warnings about avoiding raw spinach - and the revelations that lettuce has been contaminated even more times than it in the past few years, I was not too into putting my health out there. That aside, the meal was a real treat and I enjoyed it.

There is a really beautiful cafe in my town. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I bought my cat a few extra varieties of cat foods this morning. In addition to regular fare, I bought her a few little tins of the gourmet stuff. They were mostly seafood, which she seems to like better lately, and even had some garden greens mixed in with them. She did eat a little bit of them right away. But not a lot. Hopefully, tonight I will find she has eaten a lot more.

I updated last night to iTunes 7 and I really like its new features. You get a 3D virtual carousel of all your CDs, album art and all. It can download the images of the album art you are missing, if you want it too. It asks for permission to turn that setting on, so do not freak out. At last, you can see the status of what is downloading at a glance. And, you can see the details of the downloads on a Downloads status page. Additional buttons have been added to make existing features more convenient to access too. Of course, what has gotten a lot of buzz is the ability to purchase games for the 5th generation iPod, and full length movies as well. All in all, Apple continues to rule the online music experience venue.

My cat woke me up a little after 4 a.m. with her yowling. She had been making noise a lot of the evening and night. Yesterday morning she seemed to really like the Science Diet hairball formula dry food I put out for her. But in the evening she seemed to ignore it. I am going to run out in a little while for some canned food. She seems like she has lost some weight this week. I don't care what she eats, so long as she eats at this point. Mom mentioned cats sometimes get a craving for sardines so I might look for those when I run out for milk and cat food this morning. Well, I wanted to run some backups and some experiments before I went off to work this morning and I needed milk anyway. I hope she lets me sleep tonight. Hope I figure out what she wants too. I gave her a little hair ball medicine a couple times this week, just in case that is what is ailing her.

My cat decided to yowl at me periodically all night long. Just enough to keep me from getting much sleep Before I went to bed, I had given her fresh water and food before she went to bed. Not sure what is wrong but I hope she does not do it again tonight.

This afternoon I created a new blog about movies and movie-watching entitled John On Movies. There are a lot of useful informational resources and a couple that link to the obvious shopping sites (iTunes, Unbox) and rental (Netflix) sites. The latter are just as a convenience, not to drive people to buy there. Those sites have movie reviews on them - that is the reason I included them. These days the line between movie watching and TV watching is getting blurred. Anyone with a computer and a TV set can watch their DVD movies on either one. They can download TV shows and watch them on their Apple Mac or Wintel PC. Television has become more and more of an abstraction for the past year or so. It used to be a delivery mechanism for broadcast-over-the-airwaves shows (and commercials). Then came made-for-TV-movies. Then came cable. Then came satellite. Then came VCRs. Then came DVDs. Then came movies-on-demand. Then came Google Video, iTunes TV and Movie downloads, and so on. We are in the middle of an entertainment revolution where the medium is now - just a medium. Anyway, this weekend I figured it was time to start a new weblog. Let me know if you like.