Do you think it's a good idea to friend all the journals you read, just to give the readers an idea of who's reading their journals? Would you prefer that people who are reading your journal friend you, or at least post something to your journal indicating they are reading it? Actually, I have seen a fair amount of concern in several journals over whether or not to lock posts. I have never locked any of my posts, and don't have any plans to do so in the immediate future. OTOH, I don't post anything really personal, or that needs some level of privacy.


Friday's episode of BG was ok. I guess I'll keep watching, but I think that John Colicos will be the One True Baltar for me. The SciFi channel was showing some of the classic BG episodes on Friday morning, including the two-part episode The Living Legend featuring (the great) Lloyd Bridges. In this episode, Baltar had enough firepower to destroy the Galactica and the rest of the fleet. However, he was unable to do so, because unbeknownst to him, the Pegasus, another battlestar under command of Cain (Bridges) had survived.

I found it somewhat odd that Baltar did not know of the Pegasus' existence, because certainly other centurion leaders knew about it. However, in a previous episode (Lost Planet of the Gods), Baltar claimed that the Cylon empire was in chaos, and that the Galactica should return to Caprica (presumably under his control) to mount a surprise attack against the Cylons. It was actually a ruse to trap the Galactica so that the Cylons could finish it off, and Adama didn't buy it (lucky for him). But there was some truth to what Baltar was saying in that throughout almost the entire first season, the Cylons do not appear to have a coordinated plan to even find the Galactica, let alone capture or destroy her. Instead, they seem to operate rather autonomously of one another, and in some cases jockey for power rather than combine forces.

In the new series, we don't know much about the Cylons yet. We know some of them are designed to look like humans. The fact that there may be some Cylons aboard the Galactica and/or the fleet masquerading as humans could very well incite distrust and panic among the humans, who seem to have their fair share of such issues already. I think it will be interesting if this concept is explored more fully; perhaps we'll see the crew really pull together. (BTW, in Galactica 1980, there were a couple of episodes where Cylons appeared in human form. However, the series was cancelled before that idea could be further developed.)


I'm starting to think my getting a network s/w development position isn't going to happen again. I'm considering changing my focus somewhat to try to get a web crawling job. I don't know as much about web crawling as the people who did that at AV, but I know a little about it, and can hopefully learn more from the papers and open-source implementations that are online. Perhaps I can also apply some TCP performance ideas to web crawling; certainly, there are lots of angry webmasters who feel crawlers are abusing their sites. OTOH, there are angry webmasters who complain when their site drops out of its (highly ranked) position, possibly out of the results altogether, just because the site couldn't be reached during a crawl.