Here’s last year’s television list for comparison.

What stays

• 30 Rock - Like I said last year.This is one of the few televisions shows that Ange and I watch together.
  
• Californication — Every time I watch this show I get the urge to become a crazy writer. They make it look so fun.
  
• Entourage - Last year I stated that Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold was the only character people watched Entourage for. I still stand by that. He’s the only character who’s had any sort of growth.
• Robot Chicken — I haven’t seen this show for a while now. I wonder if they’re still making it.
  
• South Park — One of life’s guilty pleasures.
• Supernatural - The last season ended on such a high note that I worry how well this last season will pan out.
• The Daily Show - Since ABC2 started screening it at 7:15pm every weeknight I haven’t had to download this show. It’s what The 7PM Project is attempting to be. Irreverent, but still relevant. Love it.
• The Simpsons — All but rusted on now.  I can’t not watch it. Though the last couple of seasons have been getting better, they’re still no season six.
  
• True Blood - There’s only one episode to go in the third season.
• Weeds - I don’t know why this wasn’t on earlier lists. I’ve only been watching it for the past five years or so.

Added in the off-season

• Doctor Who - I was never a fan of Doctor Who, but I started watching the new Matt Smith season on a lark and was completely hooked by the end of the first episode. The upcoming season has an episode written by Neil Gaiman. Can’t wait!
• The Big Bang Theory - This should have been on last year’s list. I churned through the first two series in about two weeks. It has it’s detractors, but I like it.
• Community - Easily one of the best shows on TV.

What’s new

• Blue Bloods — I might wait until the off-season and watch the first season of this show in one hit. I’m not dying to watch it and waiting frees up my download cap for other more useful things.
• Nikita - I caught an episode of the original Nikita TV series years back and didn’t mind it. I do like my action-y/spy stories.
• Undercovers - I’ve just about reached my limit of TV shows launched by JJ Abrams. If I don’t get into this one I’m swearing off his stuff for good.
• The Event — This could end up being another FlashForward. The marketing campaign has just been awful.
• No Ordinary Family — This could be terrible or it could be good. I’ll give it three or four episodes.
• Walking Dead — A TV adaptation of a zombie comics. How could I not be interested in it?

What goes

• Dollhouse - What a let down that second season ending was.
• FlashForward - A moderately interesting thriller only noticeable because it actually answered questions (*cough* Lost *cough*). Started to sag towards the end, but it’s cancelled now.
• V - After building up my hopes, the first episode was a total let down.

I don’t use the site that much these days — which in itself is a good argument for deletion -  so I probably don’t know all the various menus and/or settings that may solve my problems with Facebook. Having said that let’s push on.

The biggest problem I have with Facebook isn’t with their Content Ownership rules (if they exist); nor is it with their ever shifting Privacy Policy (even though one major change reset all my carefully chosen privacy settings). My biggest problem with Facebook is the lack of control.

While you’re free to “create” a lot of things on Facebook (content, photo albums, goddamn Farmville accounts and connections to corporate entities), it’s near impossible to take something back.

Installed applications aren’t required to delete information trawled from your account once you uninstall them, which I can chalk up to the tomfoolery of third party developers; more tellingly photos that are deleted by a user aren’t actually removed from the site.  Yes, all just references to them are removed but the images themselves still exist deep within the fetid bowels of the Facebook network. If you have the  direct URL you’ve got access to the image.

Just to reiterate, it’s not a privacy thing. I’m not deleting my account because my details were leaked or used for nefarious shenanigans. I’m happy to have reasonably identifiable information out there on the internet, but only if I have control over how and when it’s used.

I have no faith that Facebook will ever give me that control. That’s why, in two days from now , I’ll be deleting my account.

While I may need prescription glasses to see, funnily enough I have perfect hindsight. I know exactly what I did wrong:

• Had only the barest idea of the plot,
• Had no idea who the characters were…
• …or their drivers,
• And didn’t write nearly regularly enough.

I’ve mentioned it before on the site, but actually starting to write is one of the hardest things for me to. Once I get going though it’s pretty hard to get me to stop.

So the plan for now is to write and write and write. I don’t know what I’ll write, but I need to keep the fires burning. That means throwing up a framework around my creative writing. I need to lock down my weekly output and what and where I need to improve. Hopefully with  year’s practice I can come back to Script Frenzy and finish the damn thing.

Write the interesting stuff first.

I did warn you of it’s simplicity.

See, my current method of scriptwriting involves plotting out a number of beats in my head, then writing down everything that happens in the lead up to each beat. In theory the beats become a rewards system. A long slog through mundane, leading conversations is rewarded with a few pages of white hot action! Of course, in reality what happens is that the promise of tearing into a juicey story beat things just isn’t enough to keep me from boring the shit out of myself and losing  interest in writing.

I guess I just wanted to keep a sense of linear story progression. Without the bridges the story just becomes a series of vaguely connected story beats. Basically the script for Napoleon Dynamite.

With only 1 week to go until the end of Script Frenzy, I’m going to focus solely on those  story beats I’ve got riding around in my head.

Oh and for those of you still keeping score. I wrote two more pages this week. Bringing the grand total to 10 pages.

It’s not that I don’t want to write. I love writing. I like building tiny universes and populating them with semi-interesting people.

This is very similar to what happened with NaNoWriMo, except it happened far earlier. I was all set to write my amazing-but barely-thought-out screenplay,  but then that devious black box of distraction just had to rear it controller-shaped head and insist I pay it some attention. And who was I to argue?

It’s a tad cliché, but coming home after a big day at work, there’s nothing better than sending a few digital hollow-points down the old telephone line. I’m just not in the right mindset for creating a stellar piece of writing at the moment.

That fact that I’m even a day late with the regular update is proof enough.

Thanks to the Easter bomb wiping out 4 days, it hasn’t been the most productive week. According to the Script Frenzy site I should be sitting on around 23 pages of glorious storytelling. But the unfortunate reality is  I’ve only just passed page number eight.

I still don’t have any idea of what the story beats will be (which could leave me with a  story that turns in on itself some some literary oroborus) do I have a few thoughts on what’s driving the motivation for travelling to other worlds.

I’ve been writing the story in a linear fashion, but I may switch this up in week two. Maybe I’ll try writing down interesting ideas and fleshing them out over multiple pages. Essentially writing from the middle out to see if this improves my page count. The story may not be all that coherent, but that’s for the editing phase to fix up.

To add value to you, my eight regular readers, I’ll be posting a weekly roundup with my progress and notes about the storyline and where it’s headed.

Of course, being me I’ve left everything to the last minute and only done a meagre amount of planning.  The one thing I did put some effort into was the “elevator pitch” I used over on the Script Frenzy forums:

A solider, tasked with mapping Parallel Earths, searches his own Earth for the girl he’s destined to spend the rest of his life with.

Sound interesting?

Cannot wait for this.

But, it seems they’re still using PageRank, or a variation of it. The only way that Google knows a site exists is if you link to it enough times.

Cover to Return of Bruce Wayne #3 via DCU Blog.

The original plan was to, at the end of the month, write a blog post about one experience or event that happened in the past 30 odd days. I thought it was an interesting idea, but when one of the things I want to focus on in 2010 is improving my writing (both in volume and quality), then once a month just isn’t going to cut it. In my notes I’ve only managed to scrounge up 9 events anyway, so I’d already failed before I began.

Getting back to the New Years Resolutions, it seemed like last year I’d just thought up a bunch of things to pass the time without putting any thought into the why. Why was I doing each resolution? What would I get out of them?

I guess this was the other problem I had with ‘the grand plan’.

Then there’s the infamous Things To Do Before I Die list. Realistically is should be a list of things I can only do at certain points in my life. Like punching an octogenarian in the solar plexus without feeling shame. I think I might retire it, or at least take it down from this website.

What to do with this blog then?

I should always be updating it. Whether it’s a link dump, image or a 500 word micro-epic about the joys of CSS3 (and there are many joys to behold). Doesn’t matter as long as the site is  kept pumping.

The comic reviews were always popular, so my site statistics say,but I just couldn’t keep churning them out. Not when I wasn’t putting anything back out there for review myself. It just didn’t seem right. Why should I publicly criticise other people’s hard work  when I wasn’t willing to bare my own work to the world?

I really don’t like the look of the site and I think thats one reason I’ve stayed away. The design was dated back when it launched and just looks eye-bleedingly horrible now. I’m going to redesign the site with an aim of making it infinitely easier to read. I’ve been immersed in the User Experience field for the last 2 years, so there’s no excuse for why this site still looks and behaves like it does.

I know I keep making promises that I don’t return to for weeks at a time, but this is really important to me. Having said that you probably won’t hear back about the redesign for a few weeks, but rest assured that I’ll keep updating this site regardless.

Seen in a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory*. $395 from DC Direct.

*Starring every late model Generation Xer’s preteen crush Danica McKellar.

I set seven resolutions for 2009 and forgot half of them just a few weeks later.

1. Learn how to make bread. Be able to make sour­dough and whole­meal high tin loaf.

Pass.

Call it laziness or fear of the unknown or that I work best under pressure, but I didn’t attempt to make bread until just a few days before the year ended.

I’d been told that making bread without using a machine to knead the dough would be extremely difficult, but I had no problems with that or any part of the process. In a nutshell throw flour, sugar and salt into a bowl, then  add a cup of beaten eggs, lukewarm water and yeast. Follow that up with two session of kneading sessions alternating with two rest sessions. Bung it in the oven for 30 minutes and you’ve got one crusty white bread loaf. Too easy.

2. Go on a mush­room pick­ing tour.

Fail.

I remembered I had this down as a resolution about two days after mushrooming season finished. Whoops.

3. Con­vince the Ital­ian com­mu­nity to let me get involved in mak­ing sausages.

Pass.

I was all psyched up to make sausages this year, but then my contacts decided they’d much rather go on a holiday.

To make up for that I took a sausage making class through CAE back in October, so I at least had something of sausage making experience.

4. Sub­mit fic­tion to at least two short story competitions.

Fail.

Another resolution I completely forgot about.

I did attempt NaNoWriMo in November and managed to write just over 19,000 words. So this year wasn’t a complete bust in terms of my writing.

5. Fin­ish a 100 page script for Script Frenzy in April.

Fail.

I started Script Frenzy. I finished Script Frenzy.

Did I write 100 page? No.

6. Par­tic­i­pate in Dry July.

Fail.

Another resolution I completely forgot about. (Are you sensing a theme yet?)

7. Loose 10 kilograms.

Fail.

I became a full member of my work gym at the start of 2009. I had my first program written up for me in mid-Jan with new iterations every 6–8 weeks.

From 14th Jan to 21st Dec I went from 93.3kg to 90.8kg and my body fat percentage dropped from 26.6% to 25.5%. So I only ended up losing 2.5kg in weight. BUT, I lost centimetres off my legs as bi-weekly sessions on the spin cycle began to tighten up my leg and hip muscles. On top of that I’m lifting over twice the weight was  was when I first started there. Moving to the “big boy” free weights was probably the highlight of my gym year.

In Conclusion

Two Passes, five Fails.

It’s become very clear that New Year Resolutions and I do not mix well. So there will be no resolutions this year. They’re too easy to make and too easy to break.

I have a better idea for 2010. One that I’m really excited about and has the benefit of not needing year long management like New Year goddamn Resolutions. But I’ll save that for another post.

Despite the setback of not having a functioning vegetable garden I was able to meet the Pasta Primavera challenge, as the photo above will attest.

I had a rough, several hundred word post in my head on my adventures in vegetable outsourcing, how I made my own pasta from scratch and only discovered the chosen Primavera recipe a day before I was due to cook it.

But this photo says it all really. I did it.

There’s even a Blue Beanie Day Photo Pool for those who enjoy taking photos of themselves.

Bugs and failure

The propagation tray was a dead end. Only about a third of the trays sprouted and the few that did were snipped of their delicate leaves before I moved them to the garden. Once in the garden it took about two days before I noticed that the zucchini was being slowly annihilated every night. The next night I went out to inspect the garden and saw a family of earwigs tag-teaming the plants. Not having any spray or bugdust handy I picked them off one-by-one and flicked them over the fence. Before I could stock up on repellents the garden was attacked again and the  garden was left looking like a barren wasteland.

Sorry, Try Again

I wasn’t looking forward to replanting the entire garden from scratch. I eschewed the propagation tray and just dropped the seeds into the garden to see what would happen. The plants only took around half as long to sprout this time, which was great!

The garden is looking really healthy now. The earwigs and other insects moved on once the original plants had died, so everything there has been able to grow in peace. (I still haven’t bought anything to protect the garden.)

Watermelon and eggplant are coming along well and the potted tomato plant is firing off a lot of flowers.

Today I added Stephan’s iceburg lettuce, a small pot of chives I’d grown from a packet bought at Coles and a small cherry tomato plant from one of my coworkers (Who apparently can’t get rid of the damn things quick enough).  Provided we don’t have any more scorching days for the next week or so they should settle nicely.

Home stretch

With only one week to go I won’t be finishing Project Primavera with any of my own vegetables (or fruit if you’re being picky).  Luckily Abbotsford Convent is holding a Farmer’s Market next Saturday the 28th. The same day the project is coming to a head.

The plan is to wake up crazy-early that morning, head to Abbotsford for supplies, cook the sauce and then head to Mike’s house with a steaming Tupperware container and maybe even some beer. It won’t be a dish grown by me, but it’ll still be my primavera.

After just one day of blue skies and sunlight the watermelon finally sprouted. Eggplant followed a couple of days later and now I even have some oregano and basil shoots showing.

Saturday was the big day. I raked out the excess pea straw from the garden and knocked down the few clumps of manure to smooth things out. Wetting the soil down proved to be a bit of a problem. I dumped around 20 litres of water into the garden n preparation for the seedlings, but it only managed to soak down around 3cm or so. I ended up digging holes for the seedlings with a trowel, then pouring another 10 litres of water into them just to prevent the roots from drying out.

Something else I didn’t do with last year’s garden was properly space out the plants. The garden is now a uniform 5x3 grid.  Five zucchini plants run along the entire right hand side, three eggplants sit in the front left quadrant and three watermelon plants are up the back.

The zucchini placement is an experiment. I still don’t know how much sun is too much when it comes to them, so each plant gets a different level of sunlight depending on placement. The one up the very back stops getting sunlight around 2pm each day, the rest follow as the sun dips below the fence line. The eggplant thrived up the front of the garden in full sun last time so there was no question about where they’d be. The watermelon died off fairly quickly once the summer heat started blazing, so I’m hoping that keeping them shaded for half the day will keep them alive long enough to get some fruit this year.

I should note that the garden still smells terrible. Three weeks on and it smells like a petting zoo. My Dad says: “The worse it smells the more plants love it.”  If that’s true then this garden will be amazing once it’s fully grown.

Two weeks after setting it up, my propagation tray isn’t doing as well as I’d hoped. In fact the only thing that’s growing is the zucchini plants. Every other section is still barren dirt.

The crappy weather we’ve been having certainly hasn’t helped. With the first two weeks of October being composed of alternating rain, hail, thunder and lightning. So much for it being the middle of Spring.

I was hoping to plant them all out this weekend just gone, but I’ll give them a few more days. The local weather service is suggesting we’re in for good weather, so maybe, just maybe the seedlings might see fit to make an appearance. Fingers crossed.