With the head writer and creative genius, Alan Sorkin, leaving The West Wing this season, it’s no longer the same show it used to be. Instead, it seems no more than a ghost of its former self, as John Wells (the producer and writer who’s stepped into Sorkin’s shoes) attempts to take over.

Whether Wells made a conscious decision to change how the characters are portrayed (and their dialogue) or whether his scripting is just his own unconscious attitudes about how he sees things seeping through, it seems quite obvious to me that everything that made The West Wing great is now missing. (Wells also contributes, or did contribute, to ER, which I really like, so I’m not putting him down by saying any of this – merely that his writing style was the wrong choice for The West Wing.)

Under Sorkin, the characters had a kind of frantic energy. The dialogue was fast, witty, and each character played off of the other much as do musical instruments in a concert. While many episodes had melodramatic scenes, there was always the sense that, as the characters went through their trauma, an ironic commentary on their situation remained. Nobody actually sank into a despair that sapped the viewer of intellectual enjoyment of what was going on. Rather than just having our heartstrings tugged, we also got some good cerebral enjoyment out of everything.

In the new season, while characters still walk quickly down hallways, there are moments of dialogue filled with pregnant , and uncomfortably unfulfilled, pauses, waiting for that immediate comeback of somebody else that I’ve come to expect. There was far too much focus on Bartlett’s home life and his despair. He seems to have lost his self-confidence and that aspect of him that makes him a leader and a scholar. At first I could forgive this because of the circumstances of his missing daughter – but when it continued, I realised it was more an overall writing change than it was a way of addressing the specific plot development. I simply don’t like Sheen’s character anymore – or even, really, that of anybody else.

I don’t find myself grinning in appreciating of things said, or anticipating confrontations between characters because I want to see what they’ll say. I’m no longer involved in the story and characters, instead I’m simply watching a kind of “going through the motions” soap opera unfold in front of me. Everybody seems to be shown dreading events and having a kind of “hangdog” expression, rather than energetically rising to each challenge and beating it back. It’s now a kind of mutual “woe is me” gathering, making it impossible to ever share in a sense of victory, either through actual problem solving or pure personal conviction. It’s simply no longer any fun.

One problem may be that Wells is trying too hard to keep things as they were. He’s just not up to the task. If he took it and changed it so that it fit his writing style completely, then it would be better. It wouldn’t be the same show (of course) but at least it wouldn’t fail by trying to be the same show and not succeeding. With ER, there mainly is just a lot of melodrama – but it’s good melodrama and it doesn’t only showcase negative emotions. If we have to lose the biting wit of Sorkin, it should at least be replaced by the full range of things of which Wells is capable – not just an unsucessful attempt to emulate it.

I’ll probably still keep watching it a little while longer, but I doubt that I’ll ever like it again as much as I did – which is a shame. I don’t know what political in-fighting caused Sorkin to leave the show. But, whatever it was, I don’t think it will be winning another Emmy – and I think that the studio executives shot themselves in the foot (assuming that they were the ones to cause Sorkin’s departure) by allowing it to happen.

To continue on from my last entry, I tried just about every workaround I could think of to get those multiple secure sites running off of my single NIC/IP interface to Cogeco to no avail. (I say “about” because there was still one pretty remote possibility left – but it was far from certain, it would have taken more time to research and experiment with, and I wanted to get my client sorted out as quickly as possible.)

So – I purchased and installed a switch. Currently I’m grabbing two different IPs, one for each site, and I’ve just now finished setting up automated scripts to properly handle what happens should either of those IP addresses ever change on me.

I’m waiting for Glen to drop off a dual-port NIC. This will let me reverse the “quick hack” I had to do with the equipment I had to support this (it works, it’s just not ideal) as well as adding a 3rd incoming IP address to the lineup – to be used for all of those sites being hosted that do not provide secure links.

(If the title of this entry doesn’t make any sense, or even if you only find it a little bit funny, it’s because it’s a networking in-joke. Trust me, it’s funnier than you think.)

I never started off wanting to be an ISP.

However, as time goes on I’ve ended up hosting multiple Web sites on my single server. I’ve recently run into a real problem with hosting two different sites, each of which offer secure encryption. For technical reasons, which I won’t go into, you can normally only have one secure site per network card and/or Internet address (IP).

There is a standard workaround for this, but it’s not perfect and it introduces problems that aren’t acceptable to everybody. (It means having each site at a different non-standard address, and many companies with firewalls will block these by default.)

I’m still working on a better solution. It will all come down to me either spending some money on more equipment to sit on the floor under my desk, or doing something fiendishly clever with various bits of my server’s operating system that a more sane person wouldn’t even think about.

Currently, I’m going with the free(ly) insane approach. I still have a couple more avenues to pursue. After that, if nothing pans out, I guess I’ll have to go with the crowd and take out my wallet.

By default, the blog software that I’m using (Movable Type) has you enter a name, email address, and an optional URL for some Web site whenever you comment on an article. If you’ve entered both an email address and a Web site, then when you click on the name of the commenter, it will take you to the site rather than send them an email. (If you leave the site blank, it will send them an email.) The thinking here is that if they bother to fill in a URL, it means that it’s a personal site, on which can be found their email address anyway.

When I first installed and configured Movable Type, I removed this feature because I didn’t like the fact that clicking on the name of the commenter did different things depending on how they’d filled out their comment form. I’ve since reconsidered that and put it back in. While both the name and email address are mandatory fields, it will now be their Web site that’s linked to (not their email) if you click on their name. (If, for whatever reason, somebody wanted to send an email to a commenter, and the commenter’s site did not include an email address, I could always retrieve what they’d entered via Movable Type’s administration panel.)

I’ve reconsidered for two reasons. First, I think a lot of people wouldn’t mind advertising their own site – but really couldn’t care if they got personal email or not. Secondly, I could think of no non-intrusive way of keeping screen elements minimal and consistent. (At first, I imagined something like “Jason Bassford *”, where clicking on the name would send them email, and clicking on the asterisk would take you to their site – but that’s not very obvious, and a lack of it doing something obvious is, to my mind, even less acceptable than it being inconsistent. Alternatively, actually spelling out “Jason Bassford / Site” seems somewhat redundant if you know how things work, not to mention that it takes up more space than I like.) Besides which, once somebody understands the relationship between entering a URL and what the link assigned to their name does, it makes sense.

I did try to clarify things a bit by having the input box on the comment screen labelled “Personal Web Site” rather than just “URL” – which isn’t really all that informative if you think about it.

I have have several pet peeves when it comes to peoples’ misuse of the English language. There’s no excuse but sheer laziness. Worse, it seems to be pervasive in our society rather than just isolated cases. Here, in no particular order, are some of my grievances.

(Disclaimer: Any mistakes in grammar that you might spot in this post are unintentional, and more the result of my fingers having typed independently of my mental control, than they are of any ignorance on my part. At least, that’s my story.)

“I could care less.”

Well, if you could care less, then obviously you already care at least a little bit and there’s some room for a little more apathy. The correct phrase should be, “I couldn’t care less.”

“The victim was taken to hospital.”

Has nobody ever heard of an article before? Now, obviously, this one is a little bit of a grey area, but only a little bit. The mangling of this sentence hasn’t gone on quite long enough yet that “hospital” can be forgiven for its lack of an article. We say “in jail”, “taken to task”, and “go home” – rather than “in a jail”, “taken to a task”, “go to my home”, but that seems to be okay, at least in those cases. (Whether it started off that way or not, or actually is technically at this point, I don’t know. “Home”, for example, is, in this case, a kind of state of being rather than an actual object, so it doesn’t appear to need an article. As for “taken to task” or “taken to a task” neither one of them really makes any sense anyway if you think about it.)

But “hospital” hasn’t got to that point yet. I don’t recall anybody ever leaving out the article when I was growing up. It just seems as if people have become lazy in recent times. It would be far more correct to say “The victim was taken to a hospital,” or “The victim is recovering in the hospital.” (Obviously, you would use “the” if the name of the hospital had already been mentioned.)

“1000’s of cars for sale!”

Really? Just who is “1000” anyway that they own so many cars?

“I can always get a lite meal at my favourite nite club.”

While I’m always quick to correct any “could care less” comment, I never fail to shudder in horror (although I may not say anything) when I come across examples of “nite” or “lite” on signs, letters, or other forms of written media. I can almost forgive all of the rest I’ve mentioned just because it’s “easy” to overlook those mistakes. This one, however, has no excuse at all. Anybody more intelligent than a 3 year old knows right away that these are nothing more than bastardized versions of English. It might be okay if their use was considered to be cute – but that’s almost never the case. (Cute would be, as I joked with a friend of mine from University, naming a potential restaurant of hers “Kate’s Korner”.) People know that these words are wrong, yet they use them anyway. Except in those few circumstances where it is done to be cute (and that meaning clearly comes across) the only thing you can say about the people who write / compose this type of thing (or allow it to go un-edited) is that they are simply being stupid.

I’m sure I can think of some other examples. No doubt I’ll post about them in future entries as they occur to me.

I recently went to the local grocery store and bought a black forest cake. This is pretty unusual since I almost always bake my own desserts. However, I know that there’s a fair bit of effort involved in putting together one of these.

The one I bought, though, wasn’t what I’d call traditional. For one thing, it had vanilla icing rather than chocolate. In the end, it didn’t taste much like what I remember having in the past. Plus, it wasn’t the most “classy” of cakes, so it had that artificial taste to it, unlike the more expensive ones (or those I bake myself) that taste “real”. (Not, mind you, that this is going to stop me from eating the rest of it.)

But I’m still left with my quest unresolved. I know that Tim Hortons has a more traditional version of this, but – come on – it’s Tim Hortons. How can it really be any less artificial?

So, it looks like I’ll just have to take matters into my own hands and bake a proper one myself.

Effectively, I’ve now spent the better part of an entire week just trying to code a Web site so that it’s HTML 4.01 standards compliant and works/looks the same in both IE and Mozilla. (Plus won’t fail to work if the person browsing the site has javascript disabled.) Even though I’ve learned how to do everything I need to specification, IE doesn’t care. It’s irrational.

There are just so many things that IE does terribly – either not following the standards, or exhibiting strange little quirks that throw everything off. I’ve now tried a handful of different design strategies. All of which might have worked just fine as an alternative, but all of which, in the final analysis, proved to be incapable of being displayed properly by IE.

I even got to the point where I ended up throwing in some non-standards compliant code, just for IE’s sake:

“overflow: auto; overflow-x: hidden”

(It’s the second bit that’s invalid in any browser but IE, so only IE pays attention to it.)

Just because, for whatever messed up reason, IE insisted on displaying horizontal scrollbars even though the content fit inside the boxes just fine. Worse, when resizing the browser window the scrollbars disappeared! But – they’d always be there when it was displayed initially. Talk about strange – and frustrating. (It was while I was Googling around for the “disappearing scrollbar” solution that I came across the IE’s proprietary overflow-y tag. What? They realise that they haven’t implemented “auto” properly so they have to throw in some band-aid fixes?)

Here’s another example:

“top: 10; bottom: 10”

You’d think that any decent browser would figure out that the top margin should be 10, the bottom margin 10. Mozilla handles this beautifully. IE, on the other hand, starts with a top margin of 10 – then proceeds to completely ignore the bottom margin.

Which led to me to having to define different sections of the screen with different “priorities” (using z-index in case you care), so that when one box is scrolled up on top of another it disappears behind it. No problem. Except that my drop down boxes (form selects) completely ignore such layering and don’t disappear behind anything at all. So far, there seems to be no workaround. Other than to remove IE. (If only I could snap my fingers and do that, making everybody in the world use Mozilla, life would be so much simpler.)

Every time I solve one batch of problems, I run into another insane bit of (mis)behaviour. I may try looking into making parts of my code conditional. If Mozilla, display this simple and correct page, if IE, do something entirely different, making use of all sorts of stupid and non-standard code. It’s called browser sniffing – the only problem is I’m not sure how to apply it to the actual code itself, nor is such sniffing entirely reliable or “kosher” in its own right. It sure sounds like a no-win situation to me.

Not entirely, just with respect to a new Linux management tool, called Nterprise Linux Services 1.0, that their putting out.

Apparently, Novell’s decided that Ximian’s Red Carpet (which Novell acquired last month when they bought that company) can do a better job than their own older tool.

This is hardly a ringing endorsement of your own product and, even if if is technically the better answer, I can’t help but wonder what kind of message the move will put out to the community in general. To me, it sounds sort of like them shooting themselves in the foot. Which is too bad, since Directory Services can use all of the help it can get against the technically inferior, but market-wise leader, mess that makes up Microsoft’s Active Directory. Granted knocking ZENworks doesn’t directly knock Directory Services, but I can’t really see how it can help it either…

I just read an announcement that another movie in the series is in the works. Normally, I’d find this depressing – since the quality of each movie only decreased as the series went on – but the new one is being directed by Christopher Nolan, who directed Memento. Also, the lead role goes to Christian Bale of American Psycho and Laurel Canyon. So it could easily get rid of some of the tarnish from the dumbed-down, “kiddified” productions of the latter entries.

The article I read, says that it’s supposed to show the early career of vigilante. Which means it would be set before the original Michael Keaton movie, before the “Bat signal”, and before the police or public ever had any confirmation that he existed.

I taped the new show Nip/Tuck the other night and thought it was actually pretty good. But, just before we were about to watch it, Michelle asked me if I’d taped an hour and a half rather than just an hour. The answer was no. I didn’t realise that it ran an unusual length of time. I looked back to the TV guide again and, sure enough, absolutely no mention of this was made anywhere – either in the listings or in the review of the show.

I still don’t know how she knew that it ran longer than normal. If it wasn’t in the TV guide, she must have heard it from someone or somewhere.

As we approached the point where the tape was going to stop, one of the doctors had left the practice. Michelle said that now we wouldn’t know what was going to happen. I told her that of course he’d return to the practice – after all, that’s what the series is about. So, I don’t expect any surprises there. The only things that really got left unresolved were what ended up happening to the pedophilic gangster, and whether or not the doctor’s son got his circumcision. However, I’m sure that those resolutions aren’t very unpredictable either – the answers being, in order, he went away at the end of the show, and no, he worked through his confidence issues.

While the show is enjoyable, and well produced, it certainly didn’t offer any surprising twists or exploration of new material. More like a kind of high class soap opera – entertaining, but far from intellectually engaging. Unlike Six Feet Under (to which it’s been compared), which is enjoyable, well produced, excellently acted, and thought provoking. Nip/Tuck has the trapping, but is short on substance.

But, back to the thing about not letting people know how long it is. Since it’s on relatively late, I’m sure that at least a few people elected to go to bed and tape it. It makes me wonder how many other people lost the last 3rd of the episode, and whether or not the network (or the TV guide) is going to apologise for this blunder and/or rebroadcast it.