Category: Uncategorized

And now, finally, (funny to say finally after only 3 days), on to Harry Potter. My memory is that I struggled a little to find this book interesting. This time around I can’t put it down. I am drawn in by all the scene setting and background exposition stuff. It’s fun to notice all the little references you wouldn’t have known about before. Hagrid borrows the motorbike he flies on from ‘young Sirius Black’.

On the challenge generally, I’m finding it tough. I enjoy the reading when I get down to it but “pottering around” (‘scuse the pun) takes up far more time than I realised. I got up at 11:15 today (I was reading til 3) and didn’t start reading until about 20 minutes ago. I read for a few minutes and then remembered I needed to blog. I was hoping to get 2 hours in before 3 and then go to the shop. I’m not worried about not making the target for today, but I do worry that I won’t be ahead as much as I’d like. It feels like Harry Potter is an easier read but my average pages/hour stubbornly stays below 50. Which means 3-4hours a day.

Well I could, but most often don’t. But the page count targets help me keep focussed.

OK, so how’s it going to work? Well I have 23 days (I started yesterday) to read 4,032 pages. Which means I need to read 176 pages a day. I tend to average 60pages an hour on the Harry Potter books. So that’s 3 hours a day. Which sounds a lot but don’t forget I have two weekends where I can probably get a lot more done and be ahead of the game. Also, I have been reading in my lunch hour. So I really only need to manage a couple of hours on a work night. Which requires some focus – no sitting down thinking I’ll watch 5 minutes of TV and looking at my watch an hour and a half later – but is doable.

There is at least one evening I won’t be able to do much reading – Thursday 12th July – that’s the day the Order of the Phoenix movie comes out. I should be in the middle of that book by then. I’ve calculated I’d need to average 225 pages a day to finish it before then so I may not manage that. But we’ll see.

I’m committing myself to updating the blog once a day with a few thoughts on the reading so far. This should take no more than 20 minutes and should give some summary statistics – current book, page, culmulative count so far, lag/lead on target.

I’ll do my inaugural ‘thoughts’ post in a moment based on yesterday’s reading, but I’ll just note that I only managed 96 pages yesterday and I forwent my lunchtime reading for the creation of a natty little spreadsheet that helps me track my progress. Basically I enter the page number of the current book and it shows where I am versus where I need to be. I need to be careful not to get distracted by stuff like that. I have books 3 & 4 as ebooks and I found myself thinking that I could adapt an open source conversion program to make a Linux ebook viewer. Or I could not waste reading time and read them in Windows!

But in terms of on-going series – hourly or half-hourly regular fictional programs, I think most hit my 3 or combination of the same. What do I mean by these three terms:

Sitcom: Primary purpose is to amuse, to make jokes. Value is obvious – everyone likes to laugh.

Procedural: Cop/lawyer/doctor/forensic shows are the obvious, but not only, examples. Problem(s) and/or Mystery(s) is defined, explained and resolved. Value is in the sense of closure.

Soap: On-going story lines using, and hopefully developing, the same characters. Value is that investment with story and characters is greater and so pay-offs can be bigger. Sense of attachment to characters, caring about their problems and triumphs, is greater IF characters are developed.

Soaps divide into real (or traditional) soaps and pseudo- soaps. The former tend to be plot-driven and the “churn” rate for both storylines and characters is so high that it tends to be unrealistic. A character that lasts any length of time in a real soap will have been through any number of relationships, breakups and dramatic life-events. So much that you hardly recognise who they are. Pseudo-soaps tend to have less episodes than real ones – they’re not on year round and have only one episode per week when they are. They can still be plot-driven but have the space to be character-driven because the “churn” is slower.

Seems to me that in the old days there was a strict divide between Sitcom and Procedural, and Soap. The former two had to reset at the end of every episode, which allowed for out of context, out of order viewing (popular with schedulers). However now most shows are mixtures. Desperate Housewives is basically a sitcom-ish, plot-driven pseudo-soap. Bones is procedural with on-going elements and character development.

It’s tempting to think our favourite shows aren’t so easily categorisable but I think they are. Buffy, for example, started out as a procedural – find and kill/stop the monster of the week – it grew into more plot-driven soap – season long story “arcs” – and always kept developing the characters. Of course there was always a strong strand of humour, and outright sitcom episodes in some cases.

I don’t know how profound all this is. Like many before me I’ve probably just created a classification system and squeezed everything I can think of into it, without really explaining anything.

Which is only 1 but should’ve been 2. MythTV crashed again – which is becoming annoying. Fixing the underlying problem might not be possible until I get my broadband connection but the crashes are identifiable so I’ve set up a scheduled job that checks for them and reboots if necessary. Not elegant but should stop me losing recordings.

Still considering how to make the blog more readable. Would probably mean sticking to one topic which I’m slightly loathed to do. Being brief would be better though.