No, Kevin Federline did not make the cover of GQ. Yet. Take a look at him in these photos from Us magazine. He really looks different, doesn't he? He looks like he could host a talk show now. Before, he seemed like I guy they would just have on as a guest on a talk show. Somehow he seems like he has more of a future now.

It has been a while since I saw someone in Hollywood get this much bad news in the course of a couple of months. For Michelle Rodriguez, the latter half of spring brought her the following drama: * arrested in Hawaii for drinking-and-driving * sentenced to 5 days jail time in Hawaii (she opted not to do community service) * served a day in jail in Los Angeles for violating terms of parole for drinking-and-driving there several years earlier * still has to perform 30 days community service * her character was killed off in Lost I think that I got that list right. This is from news stories I heard over the past month or two, so I might have criss-crossed some of the details. The death of her character allegedly had nothing to do with her drinking, arrest, and subsequent detections. The other stuff was of course due to her drinking and driving. Hopefully, she has learned her lesson. Do not drink, or else do not drive. I was kind of let down to hear about other entertainment legends that have had some reoccurring problems with alcohol as they got up in years. 1. Zsa-Zsa Gabor (watched her all the time on Green Acres as a kid) 2. Jan-Michael Vincent (great actor) 3. Glenn Miller The list goes on. The sad thing is, they could probably go into a room in just about any part of the country and tell the true story of their life. People would just eat it up. The have probably done all kinds of exciting things and certainly many interesting ones. But instead, they kind of crash and burn. Anyway, I hope Mme. Rodriguez makes a decision not to follow in their footsteps.

I just spotted it on the list of Sci-Fi shows and it sounded interesting. I read the plot and I liked the story idea. Has anyone watched it? Did you like it?

People seem to love Veronica Mars. It seems like it was one of the best TV series on this season. I really like it a lot. I noticed tonight that it is number 3 on the charts of favorite TV shows here at TV.com right now. That is not #3 out of shows airing right now. That is #3 out of all TV shows ever. That is a pretty seriously high ranking! There are some pretty major classic shows on the list. "I Love Lucy" is #78. It ran from 1951-1957. Anyway, that is how highly TV watchers rate Miss Bell and friends. Not just near the top of a list of current shows, but near the top of all shows in TV history. The merging of the WB and UPN networks - a surprise to everyone - has made the competition for prime time TV slots in the 2006 Fall season twice as intense as ever. Anybody heard if Veronica Mars will be returning for a new season or not?

Hey, if you haven't updated your QuickTime on your Mac yet this week - if you have a Mac - you might want to go ahead and do it. If you do not have your Mac programmed to check for updates every day, just go to the Apple icon menu and execute the Software Update... command. Pretty easy... Note that your computer will require you to restart after performing this update. So do not do it if you are in the middle of something and cannot close all your applications and documents first.

It is way too hot today! Temps rose to 97, which is more typical of June or July than May, at least where I live. On a different subject, I had a pleasant shock at the cash register this evening when I was paying for my groceries. I used my customer savings card at my local supermarket, and that took over fifty five dollars off my grocery bill. It was well over a quarter of the total regular prices. Have you ever heard of such a thing? It seems crazy to have such a disparate two-tier pricing system, where you get such a huge discount just for flashing your card.

Well, someone here pointed out the cool wonder that is the british hit TV series "HEX" and it sounded really great.

It is a supernatural thriller movie set at a british college or bording school, I believe.  There are some ghosts, witches, and vampires.  Scary people, scared people.

I cannot seem to get it here yet on DVD.  Dang blasted DVD region codes!  If they actually made one that could be played in the US I would rent or buy it. Kind of hard to do that when it is impossible, though!

Anyway, this sounded like one of those BBC series that is not to be missed.

And a couple nights ago, I was watching TV and a commercial came on advertising the series.  The bad news is, it is not airing on broadcast network TV.  The good news is, that it will be airing on US cable TV.  BBC has a cable TV station here.

I might actually sign up for cable for a while so I can see this series.  There are a couple other cable-only shows I would like to see. They mostly will wind up coming to network TV.  This one, though - I have a hunch it will not.  Perhaps it will come to PBS when I am 60.  Likely by the time it does air, my tastes will have changed

Anyway, I guess I am going to think about it.

One thing I kept expecting to happen in the Alias series, was for Marshall to go back in time and get trapped there -  in the time of Rembalde.  And then have to live out the rest of his natural life in that civilized - yet hardly advanced - period.

My logic was, the technology  Rembalde invented/discovered - was mostly things Marshall was already familiar with. 

Rembalde was aslo very familiar with so many obscure details of things during the period of Sydney's stint as a secret agent.

I figured, the only way Francisco Rembalde could have known all of these things - if he had first lived in Sydney's time, and then later, hundreds of years earlier, in the Italy of the past.

Marshall also looks kind of Italian.  So that too, seemed to sort of fit.

The show did not shy away from fantastic technology, bordering on metaphysics.  So a time travel accident would have been not such a big deal, given everything else going on.

Funny isn't it, how that seems to make so much sense
 - yet simply was not the case?

It hardly suprises me they spent more than they made during the recent quarter.

After all, they are engineering the new TiVo series 3 model that will be coming out late this year.  All the bells and whistles it has, and support for all the latest technology - is not something that can whip up in just one or two quarters with just a few engineers.

They have also rolled out new service after new service since the start of the year.  So far, none of these services are extra-cost ones. They just keep adding more free servies, strengthening their position in the marketplace.

The bright news at present is that they have over four million subscribers. They have really grown their customer/client base in the last year.

When they roll out their new system, my guess is there will be a consumer buying spree as pent-up consumer demand for HDTV TiVos finally gets satisfied.

TiVo has completely revolutionized TV watching over the past five years.

They came in at just the right time, right when super-sized hard drives became available.

As the ability to move information faster appeared, they were able to take advantage of that.  When Java appeared on Linux, which they use, they adopted Java as well.  When Yahoo was looking for partners to bring their services to things beyond just plain computers, TiVo was able to join forces with them as well.

They also recently introduced the dual-tuner TiVo series 2 model.  It can record 2 TV shows at once.

I have been trying out a new web browser all evening long.  In fact, I will have to shut it down in a few minutes, so that I do not wind up trying it out all night long!

The browser is called Flock.

Flock is an open source program.  That means:  any programmer can get the source code to it, look it over to make sure he thinks it is sound, fix any problems he sees and inform the authors, and even try his hand at adding an enhancement or two.

What most people will like about it is that it is free.  Not only that, Flock is based on the state-of-the-art Firefox web browser.  Firefox is the fastest-growing web browser - in terms of both features and popularity - in the world.

What I like about it are a bunch of things:

1. WYSIWYG word processor for submitting entries in blogs for Blogger/Blogspot, Friendster, etc.
2. fancy "photobar" feature for browsing your own photos on Flickr (or Photobucket), or those of your contacts on that system.
3. ability to view newsfeeds at the click of a button, without needing to subscribe first (just as convenient as Safari on this point now)
4. ability to mark certain sites as news sites or Flock favorites - and have them show up on a special toolbar; the bar will let you click on their button in the toolbar to visit the site, and once there the button becomes a drop down with a summary of all the news items on the site (empowered by the newsfeeds for it, I suspect)
5. comes with latest Java and Javascript
6. same powerful HTML/XHTML/SVG/CSS/XSLT/MathML powered rendering engine as Firefox, giving it support for the most W3 standards of any popular web program
7. fast, it really seems really, really fast
8. virtually compatible with Firefox extensions/themes though developers for these do have to make a tiny change in each one to make it willing to be run in Flock
9. ability to tag bookmark entries with keywords, to make it easier to search for them (kind of a Web 2.0 thing that is very in vogue right now)
10. ability to save your bookmarks to the web so you can access them from all of your computers that you run flock on (default:  store bookmarks locally)

I have probably left a few things off, but you get the idea.  It is one powerful program for accessing the web.

The software is still somewhere between alpha (internal testing only) and beta (public testing) stage, according to its developers.  All I can say is, I have been running it about five hours and it has not crashed yet on me.

The program was still a little brittle last year, I read. But since the beginning of this year it has apparently been pretty solid.  The new photobar feature I mentioned was just added within the past couple of weeks, I think.

One thing that made me hang back this long from trying it was concern that it might mess up my Firefox settings.  Not so, says the FAQ I read today.  It turns out that Firefox settings and Flock settings are stored completely seperately from each other.

Do you fancy yourself an "early adopter" type for gadgets, create lots of bookmarks, use more than one computer, have a weblog (besides the one here), or like to look at or upload digital photos to the web?

If so, you might find it worthwhile to at least go over to the Flock site and have a look.  I am not sure what their schedule is for releasing Flock 1.0.  However, from the way it "feels" tonight, I think it is likely that it will be released before Microsoft Vista (E.T.A. January 2007) and quite possibly before IE 7.

Flock has a jump on things because it uses the same code as Firefox for the tough things that usually make it hard to create a web browser.  As much as possible, the Flock team is just trying to layer a lot of fancy features on top of Firefox.  The goal seems to be to keep updating itself with the new Firefox changes as they come out.

Flock is based on Firefox 1.5.  The new version of Firefox, by the way, is expected out later this year (2006).  The new version will be designated Firefox 2.0.