B5 Compressed

07.01.2004

The 5 seasons of Babylon 5 are comprised of 110 episodes, 22 per season. After commercials, each episode is roughly 45 minutes long. For the run of the series, that makes the whole thing last about 82 hours.

Over the past 7 weeks, since my little beach vacation, I've managed to watch all 110 episodes.

I've been wanting to watch the entire series for a while. I had never seen the 5th season, and I was completely wrapped up in the first 4 seasons when they originally aired starting in '94. Watching the episodes again, I'm amazed at how much went on. Wars, conspiracies, more wars, friendships built and destroyed. It had a little bit of everything.

Babylon 5 was envisioned as story that would take place over 5 years, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. Although most of that story was squeezed into the first 4 years (rumors of cancellation made the writer fit everything in), the entire series still holds up. My favorite part of the series are the little seeds planted that fortell what will happen. It may happen in the next episode, it may be 50 episodes away, but it's cool to see it finally come to fruition.

I doubt there will ever be another series to try and take on the scope of what Babylon 5 did, but it would be cool for somebody to try.

The Babylon 5 movies are coming out in August, expanding the Babylon 5 universe. I had missed most of these, too, so it's going to be fun getting one last glimpse into what seems to be my favorite series.

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Carts & Paypal

06.30.2004

A couple of weeks ago I finished up the new shopping cart addition to the Bioventures website. Along the way there have been little bugs, but nothing major (just an added address field here, a credit card validator there). They're even getting orders from it! 8 orders so far, which is about 5 more than I had expected. Biotechs are usually pretty slow during the summer since most of their customers are researchers at schools, so that in conjunction with it being a new cart had me a little skeptical. But it looks like things are moving along!

One thing I've been wanting to do is to integrate my cart better with Paypal. Paypal is better for a lot of small businesses, because it saves the business the money of getting an SSL certificate and all the accounts needed to transact a credit card, while Paypal has enough features and and has been around long enough that most people feel safe using them. While trying to integrate some of their features, I came across the PayPal Developer Network, which is just chock-full of hints and help to get your site running smoothly when integrating with Paypal. After searching the message boards, I found answers to the problems I was having along with a couple more answers I didn't know I needed yet.

I guess I've just been a little cart-crazy of late.

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Some More Links

06.29.2004

I've got so much going on without having much to say, I thought I would share a couple of things I've seen recently:

• Ever wonder if some of the fees added on to your phone bill are what they sound like?
• The first Do-Not-Call case is going to court.
• A cruise ship got reposessed right before a 19-day cruise. Makes me remember all the fun I had on my little cruise.

  
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  My Mommy's Moving

  06.23.2004

  After months of being on the market, it looks like Mom is about to sale her house. Offers and counter-offers have been made, and now a tentative closing date of 7/2 has been set. After that, Mom will go off an become an official resident of Tennessee, where she and Terry have been living in an RV park 90% of the time.
  
  It strikes me as weird, even though it shouldn't, that Mom's about to move. I didn't move out until 5½ years ago, and then the house I bought was only 3 miles away. It was in a different county so it felt further away. It was a long distance call so it felt further away. Still, it was only 3 miles. A few years ago she and Terry started staying at the RV park because it was easier for Terry to get to work while he was on call. They were now 120 miles away, but their house was still only 3 miles away.
  
  Now it's sinking in that 3 miles away isn't going to be there any more. I'll have to learn to make the 120 mile trip (and I'm notoriously bad about not taking trips to see family). But 120 miles isn't really that far. I commonly drive to Nashville and Florence for dinner, so going a little further to see Mom shouldn't be such a big deal.
  
  Gonna miss that 3 mile trek, though.

  
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  Some Links

  06.21.2004

  The Daily Planet is an Austrailian brother than went public last year. It seems that they're about to get out of the brother business to avoid some police investigations into their stockholders.
  
  There's a new 70 megapixel 360° webcam out from a company in Switzerland. ~$7700, webserver included.
  
  Ever wonderif there's any merit to all the ads that will make body parts bigger (and more). Well here's the facts from Popular Science.

  
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