davextreme: November 2005

Watched the super special no sharks involved live debate episode of The West Wing last night. Many people get one very big thing wrong about that show: it’s no more about politics than Star Trek is about science. Or, at least, it didn’t used to be. Last night clearly had a few “ripped from the headlines” lines in it, but the show, when it’s good, was never good because it was poignant, it was good because it was a good show. Politics was always just the setting. Lots of wonks don’t get that, and think that if an episode’s about Josh trying to get the Senate to do something, that it’s about the something, and not about Josh.

I’m not sure that the John Wells-era West Wing knows that, either, but last night they did a pretty good job. They showed the differences between the two characters, though the real point of this episode was just one thing, and that was to show what would happen if political debates would be like if they were actual open debates with no time limits. In this respect I think they did a pretty cool thing, kind of like the “CSI effect” but for debates. Television has a strong ability to shape expectations. Get audiences used to fancy forensics, and they’ll show up to real courtrooms as jurors expecting digital reconstructions of crime scenes. Get audiences thinking that political debates will be real debates, and real voters might actually want to hear real responses from politicians. So I guess in this case, even if the show is swerving too close to being about politics rather than just letting it be the ink with which the show is painted, West Wing was at least interesting in its wonkiness.

CTRL-Tab

A-ha! I’ve been trying to figure out the keyboard command in Firefox to switch between tabs for ages now. The answer is CTRL-Tab. Of course, this means my poor brain will have to learn to switch between that and the Safari command of CMD-SHIFT-[ and -].

Imported comments:

FYI: in case you find yourself stuck on a Windows machine, Ctrl-Tab will switch between subwindows/panes within most Windows applications.

Google on Tabbed Browsing

Usability study on tabs. A close box on every tab is better.

Online Scheduling - Yahoo! TV

Yahoo! adds buttons to its TV listings that let you set your TiVo.

03 November 2005

Flight Patterns

Very neat illustrations and movies of flight paths over the US.

01 November 2005

Star Wars: Episodes I-VI - The greatest postmodern art film ever. By Aidan Wasley

Neat Slate article on the series as a whole.

TiVo: Overlap Protection

TiVo finally adds some logic into their recording to account for overlapping shows.