I'll admit it: I only managed to catch one episode of Firefly during its brief 11-episode run. It was a pretty good episode ("War Stories"), but I found the mix of spaghetti western and science fiction a little off-putting.

But with the Serenity movie coming out, I figured maybe I should give it a chance. So I rented the first three discs from Netflix (because you can only get three at a time) and Karen and I started watching the backstory.

About three quarters of the way through the two-hour pilot, Karen said "I haven't even finished watching the first one, and I'm mad they canceled it!" I'm kind of glad I didn't get into the series when it was on, because I would have been royally pissed when it was canceled. It was smart, it was funny, it was touching — all the things Fox hates, apparently.

Yesterday, when picking up a new router to replaced my dead one, I bought the series on DVD, and last night Karen and I watched the last six episodes that we hadn't seen. I'm glad we watched the whole thing before seeing the movie; the film would still have made sense, but some of the events wouldn't have had the emotional resonance they had after coming to know the characters and what they meant to each other.

What a great series. What a perfect cast. I now understand what would move its fans to take out full-page ads trying to save it. And I'm glad the movie came out, otherwise I might never have seen such a jewel. Or had the experience of seeing Adam Baldwin play a character I actually liked.

And the movie itself? Definitely worth seeing. But I won't describe why, as I don't think I could do so without spoilers.

About this time last year, my primary hard drive experienced a catastrophic failure. Now my secondary drive — the one with all my audio recordings on it — is making ugly clunking sounds whenever it's accessed. This does not bode well.

Fortunately, I've been backing up my entire system to an external hard drive, though not as often as I should — I think the last time I did one was a couple of weeks ago. As luck would have it, though, I was imaging a server before I left work this evening, and forgot to take the Ghost floppies out of my shirt pocket. I don't know if it'll get all the way through taking the image, though... the longer it goes, the more frequent the drive noises are... and the higher the "time remaining" field climbs.

I can live with losing two weeks' worth of stuff. At least the Consort and Falcon files are safe.

I've already mentioned that I didn't watch Firefly when it was on, and then discovered, to my chagrin, how good it actually was.

Now, with all the shows we watch on hiatus or in repeats (didn't the TV season used to start in the fall, and run until spring?), Karen suggested we rent Lost from Netflix, as we'd never watched it.

After watching the first disc in the series, I canceled the rest of them.

I'd been expecting something like Survivor, only drama instead of "reality". What it turned out to be was more like Survivor crossed with The Twilight Zone, The X-Files and perhaps a bit of Twin Peaks (without the cherry pie and backwards-talking midgets). We sat down Friday night to watch only the first half of the pilot, and ended up watching the whole disc because we got sucked in like the guy standing in front of the turbine. So when I saw the whole first season for $30 at CD Warehouse the next day, I snapped it up (hence my cancellation of the other discs on Netflix). By Sunday we'd made it through the next two discs (and I suspect we only managed to stop there because the last episode on the disc didn't end in a cliffhanger).

I also set up my PVR to record Season Two, but the first two episodes of the season had already aired. This brought me a small measure of distress until Karen reminded me that there was more than one way to watch television. After having watched the entire run of Christopher Eccleston's Doctor Who incarnation, I'm embarrassed to have forgotten that.

And speaking of whom, we also watched Eccleston in the Revengers Tragedy. Jacobean drama with its Early Modern English intact, delivered in Scouse accents, in a semi-post-Apocalyptic setting... interesting, to say the least. And every once in a while, they'd throw in a bit of modern dialogue just to keep things amusing:

Ambitioso: Slave, cam'st thou to delude us?
Officer: Delude you, my Lords?
Supervacuo: Villain, whose is this corse now?
Officer: Why your brother and the Duke's son.
Supervacuo: Plagues!
Ambitioso: Confusions!
Supervacuo: Darkness!
Ambitioso: Devils!
Supervacuo: Our younger brother.
Ambitioso: There's no advantage in the killing of a younger brother!
Supervacuo: (to Officer) Villain, I'll kill thee!
Officer: Fuck off, you cheap pair of bastards.

Okay, not entirely faithful to the original, but still pretty enjoyable.

One of my favorite Far Side cartoons is "Raymond's last day as the band's sound technician". It turns out that the "suck button" does, in fact, actually exist.

Remember when hard drives were called "Winchester drives"? Yeah, I know you don't. But I used to.

I was reminded of the name because some reporter did a story on this new thing called "blogging", and of course someone posted it to Fark, where naturally the reporter's being made the target of vicious ridicule. ("This just in: The sky is blue!") And then somebody predicted that some day, copies (or "clones") of IBM's Personal Computer might eventually include the larger Winchester drives...

Man, I was ecstatic when I was finally able to afford a Winchester drive. And when I saw the name again today, it was a really weird feeling to know it used to be something I yearned for — perhaps even obsessed over, as if it were some dread ring forged in the fires of a volcano in a dark land — and until I saw the name again, I didn't even realize I'd forgotten it. Yeah, I know, you don't care. But it makes me wonder what other facts and memories are trapped in the dark recesses of my brain?

Who knows? I might even remember something about the 1980s and not even realize it.