Fans of the South Park television show have threatened to boycott Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible 3 movie, according to the Washington Post, says a recent article in People magazine. They don't want to watch MI 3 unless they can watch the South Park episode that was pulled by the network before it was aired. If that is the case, it might be the first time that airing a TV cartoon show was aired as a marketing vehicle for a live action movie. Seems like much silliness but it will be interesting to see if they can patch things up and make everybody happy again. Keeping one group of people from being entertained by something another group does not want to see themselves. That has certainly been an overplayed motif the last two quarters. I can see how people's patience has been stretched to the breaking point with this tactic. Seems like all parties should just take it to heart that entertainment is optional and people should be able to watch it, or ignore it, as their own personal choice. Considering how none of the 3 religions that come to mind believe in the same God, you would think they would have learned a little tolerance by now. At least for what other people want to do in between listening to the 3 contradict each other. Maybe that is the real MI 3 we have all been waiting to see.

I just read the news that Richard Fleischer has died. He produced some of my favorite movies. I am sure they are movies that almost everybody has seen and enjoyed.

• 20,00 Leagues Under The Sea
• Mr Majestyk
• Conan the Destroyer
• Red Sonja
• The New Centurions
• Doctor Doolittle
• Fantastic Voyage

Most of these movies I saw on television, not at the theater. It seems appropriate to give him his due here.

Got a nice free upgrade this week from TiVo. Now, your delete commands happen without a cumbersome confirmation dialog. To prevent accidental loss of shows, they have a deleted shows folder that functions kind of like a Trash can on the Macintosh. Another nice thing they say they have done is improved recommendations. I cannot say for sure, but it does seem a little smarter than it was before. The last few months have brought more innovation and novel new features than the previous year and a half. TiVo's creativity is certainly on full boil this quarter. I was a little disappointed to see the subscription prices go up so high. Anyone know if that is just for people who get new units - or does that apply to people who have old units that they paid for as well?

If you can read DTD (document type definitions) the XHTML spec used by TV.com at the moment appears to be here. If you can't, or don't want to be bothered, here are some examples of really simple XHTML things that are really handy. Examples: The bold, underline, and italic tags are easy to remember. Creating lists, is done like this:

• tiger
• snake
• wolverine
• drake

Here is how you do a quotation:

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

- John F. Kennedy And here is how you can preserve white space in something you type. This is a silly example but you get the idea. Without the pre (short for preformatted) tag, all the leading and trailing and intermediate white space would be squeezed down into single spaces.

  X   X    X---+    X      +    X---+   X  X  

And if you want old-fashioned computer text like on a teletype that is how you do that. Well, that's all I know for sure works right now. The OL and DL/DT/DD, and TABLE/TR/TH/TD tags do not seem to work, unfortunately. Anyway, do a View Source command in your browser to see how these formatting tricks are done. Just look for one of the sentences in this posting. Once you find that, you can see what tags were used to create the different looks here.

Hey, this is so cool. I noticed a discussion in one of the Forums here that the TV.com Forums were switching over to use XHTML instead of HTML. I did not realize using either one was an option. I just tried it though, and it works. I already know HTML and most of XHTML by heart. So I think I will start shifting over from using bbcode to XHTML this week. If anyone wants to learn XHTML, go look at the W3's markup specs page. If you have a question about it, hit me up.

I haven't been able to post anything since this weekend. To forums or my blog. At the advice of my Puppets Who Kill sensei, I mentioned it to a certain TV.com person, and she fixed it within minutes. Thanks "e" !!

Well, if the Netflix turnaround goes as smoothy as usual, I will be watching Canadian TV show Puppets Who Kill while I have dinner Friday night. I received an email from Netflix a couple hours ago that they received the DVDs I mailed back yesterday. Presumably, it will arrive in the mail Friday morning.

I found the documentation for how to do fancy looking format for this site tonight. 8)

Both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis were repeats this week. Kind of a drag. I especially look forward to watching those two when I see them in my TiVo "Now Playing" list. Unfortunately, I had seen both these episodes before, so I stopped watching them when I was sure. Later in the day, that got me to thinking what this summer will be like. I like to watch something on the tube while I am eating a meal. Not much new stuff going to be network TV a couple months from now. Great shows are ending this year too. I guess I will be watching DVDs while I eat my dinner before long. Sigh....

I am so psyched. I have at last made Level 5.