TiVo has released a list of the Top 100 season passes, based on 20,000 anonymous samplings. The few shows that we have season passes for are bolded.
Rank : Title
1 : The Apprentice 2 : CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 3 : Desperate Housewives 4 : Lost 5 : Survivor: Vanuatu, Islands of Fire 6 : Joey 7 : ER 8 : The West Wing 9 : CSI: Miami 10 : The Sopranos 11 : Will & Grace 12 : CSI: NY 13 : Law & Order 14 : Oprah Winfrey 15 : Las Vegas 16 : Six Feet Under 17 : Nip/Tuck 18 : Scrubs 19 : Law & Order: Special Victims Unit 20 : 24 21 : Without a Trace 22 : Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 23 : Everybody Loves Raymond 24 : American Idol 25 : Enterprise 26 : Saturday Night Live 27 : Law & Order: Criminal Intent 28 : The Simpsons 29 : Monk 30 : Alias 31 : Cold Case 32 : Smallville 33 : The Bachelor 34 : Sex and the City 35 : NYPD Blue 36 : The Daily Show With Jon Stewart 37 : Rescue Me 38 : Chappelle’s Show 39 : Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 40 : Boston Legal 41 : Friends 42 : Joan of Arcadia 43 : LAX 44 : South Park 45 : Third Watch 46 : Stargate Atlantis 47 : Medical Investigation 48 : Gilmore Girls 48 : The O.C. 50 : American Chopper 51 : Dr. Phil 52 : That ’70s Show 53 : The Real World 54 : Stargate SG-1 55 : The Amazing Race 5 56 : Entourage 57 : Father of the Pride 58 : Crossing Jordan 59 : Two and a Half Men 60 : Last Comic Standing: The Search for the 60 : Curb Your Enthusiasm 62 : JAG 63 : Deadwood 64 : Charmed 65 : Arrested Development 66 : Judging Amy 67 : North Shore 68 : 60 Minutes 69 : The King of Queens 70 : American Dreams 71 : The Shield 72 : NCIS 73 : Newlyweds 74 : The Wire 75 : Fear Factor 76 : Everwood 77 : Mythbusters 78 : The Dead Zone 79 : Wife Swap 80 : Da Ali G Show 80 : Big Brother 5 82 : Days of Our Lives 83 : Jack & Bobby 84 : Hawaii 85 : Seinfeld 86 : Family Guy 87 : The 4400 88 : The Ellen DeGeneres Show 89 : Blue Collar TV 90 : Reno 911! 90 : Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy 92 : America’s Next Top Model 93 : Malcolm in the Middle 94 : 7th Heaven 95 : Navy NCIS 96 : General Hospital 97 : Airline 97 : dr. vegas 99 : The Casino 100 : Dead Like Me
I voted for John Kerry.
The death of my father-in-law on Saturday has filled my mind with numerous thoughts. This is not the first time I have lost someone in my family, but it is the first “parent” I’ve lost. No matter how well prepared you think you maybe for the death of aging loved one, you never are really ready. Death isn’t like saying goodbye and driving away, or hanging up the phone. Death is final and most of us during our lives don’t have to many events that are well and truly final.
As Michele and I have talked over the past few days, trying to put words to the emotions we are each having, we have both come to realize that this is not an intellectual process. Death is a powerful emotional process, one that we are ill-equipped to handle. Michele has explained to me her model for how we humans deal with stimulus that has an emotional component. As children we experience emotions for the first time, and over time repeated emotions create places of recognition within ourselves. How we were able to react to fear, anger, loss, hope, joy, love, et cetera as children greatly effects how we are able to react to those same emotions as adults. For example: if as a child you were never allowed to express your anger appropriately, it is likely that you can’t express it appropriately as an adult either.
By the time most of us are emotional adults we have experienced most of life’s major emotions. Except perhaps for death. Even if we experience death as a child our cognitive ability isn’t able to process it completely. Your first lost loved one as an adult puts you in a unique situation of having a powerful emotional stimulus with no place of recognition to handle it.
I believe that this accounts for the surreal quality everything takes on in the days following the death of a loved one. We have felt anger or happiness many, many times in our lives. The combination of our consciousness, spirit or soul, intellect, and emotional self know how to handle everyday stimulus. Death is a stimulus that we aren’t prepared for, and one that most of us (hopefully) don’t get to practice for, either.
Michele and I each are dealing with her dad’s death in our own ways. Life is suddenly fragile and tenuous where before it seemed solid. Mundane daily tasks are no longer important or meaningful. Clear thought and introspection are faint memories. Death forces us to deal with life for a time without all the filters and illusions we normally use to get through the day. Death is like a violent storm that cleanses the air and leaves the air clear and devoid of distortion. In some ways the living we do immediately following a death is a truer form of living because the higher abstractions are stripped away, leaving us bare and exposed.
We will move forward from this event. Slowly our filters and illusions will return to the fore, our abstractions about how life really is will comfort us once again. But our understanding of the deeper, underlying truth of life will be a bit stronger. In moments of solitude and quiet we maybe able to strip away our carefully constructed artifice and touch the world with our true selves.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “dan.jpg” }} 1921 - 2004 Son, Husband, Father (left to right) Thomas McAvoy, (Sharon) Michele McAvoy Nichols, Daniel McAvoy ((Michele, age 2))Michele’s Goodbye to her Dad
Thursday morning Michele woke up and immediately told me that she had a sense of dread, of foreboding. Given the lingering effects of our move to KC, apprehension over the upcoming election November 2, and fourth and final dental visit for her abscessed tooth, neither of us thought to much about it.
Friday evening I was sitting at my desk working on the computer and she was sitting in the overstuffed chair watching television. At the edge of my vision I saw someone move from right to left between me and the television. I was very startled and looked up to see who it was. No one was there. Knowing that Michele can some times see people who have moved on I asked her if there was someone in the room with us. She saw someone in uniform standing behind me, but she didn’t recognize him.
Saturday morning about 8 we got an email her brother telling us that Dan, her father had been in an accident and was in the hospital. We call Lee and learned that Dan was in “serious” condition. We weren’t entirely sure what to do next. A few minutes later Lee called back and said that he had just learned their dad was on life-support, that the accident had caused severe brain damage. They were keeping him alive only until we could arrive.
We immediately left for Knoxville, a 750+ mile drive. Late in the afternoon we called Lee on our cell phone to update him on our progress towards the hospital. He had to tell us that Dan died about 12:30 eastern when his heart stopped. After talking to Lee on the phone for several minutes we made the decision to return to Kansas. Her father had for years said he didn’t want any service, and that his cremated ashes were to be spread at sea.
We arrived home about 12:30 Sunday morning and almost immediately collapsed into bed. This morning Michele called Dan’s widow (his second wife, and by no means a “step-mother”) and talked to her. Bobbie explained that the accident had happened on Thursday, originally we were told Wednesday. It seems that Michele’s premonition was about her father’s accident.
And now we know who it was we both sensed here Friday evening; it was Dan in his dress whites. Usually I am not one for seeing through the veil of this reality to the next one, but I did on Friday.
Today we are just hanging out close to home. Dinner tonight will be one of our favorites - Arroyz con Pollo. Tears have been shed, and will be again. Perhaps a nap later this afternoon. It is going to take time for the truth of Dan’s death to sink in completely.
Remember the Apple switch ads? These are in the same vein only better. Real people talking about their disenchantment with the Republican party in general, and George Bush in particular. These are real votes that the GOP counted on four years ago that they have lost through arrogance.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “kerryswitch.jpg” }}
[via Kottke]
My career turned twenty-one over the weekend. I started my first full-time, paying programming job on October 17, 1983. My career is now old enough to legally drink. Woohoo!
A lot has happened in the past twenty-one years. I’ve worked for state and federal government agencies, created frameworks for a wafer manufacturer, headed projects at a utility company, developed software for a pre-IPO that crashed and burned, and been self-employed. I’ve re-trained myself several times, moving from mainframe batch processing with JCL and VSAM, to client-server development with Powerbuilder and SQL Server, and then distributed application development using Forte (still the best development platform I’ve ever used), and now finally thin-client or web application development using Java, X/HTML, and JSPs.
My career has literally taken me across the country and back again as I’ve lived in Illinois, Washington (state), South Carolina, Illinois (again), and now Kansas. I’ve been fired, laid off, re-hired, promoted, passed over, ignored, and appreciated. I’ve experienced the ego rush of placing my resume on a job search board and getting over twenty responses from around the world in less than twenty-four hours. I’ve also experienced the fear and despondency that comes from no offers week and week after week while being unemployed. In all these years I’ve never had an office with a door. At best I’ve had a cubical all to myself, at worst I’ve shared a church-table with another programmer.
For much of my career I have pursued the next technology, the next title, the next level. I’ve never managed to reach a point of stability or satisfaction. Sure I have held satisfying positions and felt like my career was great at times. Those times have been short, however, and I’ve learned that basing my job satisfaction on elements of the work that were largely (if not totally) beyond my control is foolhardy. Now I am more focused on how to meet my emotional and personal needs outside of the current job. A job is only a job. Like spice adds flavor to a favorite dish, a job adds spice to the meat of your life. It took me a long time to realize that my life was not just my job.
I can only imagine where the next twenty-one years will take me.
WiFi is truly a wonderful thing. Michele has a faculty meeting this afternoon, and lacking anything productive to do, I tagged along. So here I sit in the minimalist “cafe” at the community college surfing the ’net for free on their WiFi network. No fuss, no muss, just set the Airport to connect automatically and I’ve got an IP address and full network access.
It’s hard to believe that I started my computer “lifetime” using acoustic couplers at 300 BAUD. If the past 30 years have taken us from punch cards and reel tape to flash memory and gigabit ethernet, what will the next 30 years bring us?
Most of us, I think, believe that one vote or one voice makes little impact in the world today. Certainly after the debacle of the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida you have to wonder if individuals have any power in the process of our republic. I know I did.
That is until yesterday.
I got a call from the candidate who’s campaign Michele and I joined back in July. I setup a small, rather humble, website for Bob, and filled it with his words and positions. It seems that while out walking door to door campaigning, Bob rang the bell of a young couple who reacted to his name. They had been to his website and read his positions. They told him that as a result of the information provided online they were going to vote for him on November 2nd.
Wow.
The idea that a website I created and hosted for this man is actually causing people to vote differently than they would have otherwise just blows me away. Sure the positions are Bob’s, but without my contribution it is unlikely he would have had a website at all. His district is heavily populated with voters other the other party, so every vote we can garner is critical. My “one voice” does have power. My “one vote” does make a difference.
At a time when so much of my life feels out of control and chaotic, hearing that I made a difference was just about the best news I could have gotten.
I Dare You.
Originally seen here.