Economy Size Geek

Ok so I might as well admit that I watch a hell of a lot of television and movies. I like watching them what can I say. One ways that I end up find interesting television is by surfing horizontally in the grid with my ReplayTV looking for shows I’ve never heard of. (I’m a big fan of mid season replacements that don’t make it - Life on a stick for example)

That takes a lot of time, and if I stop then I end up with the same shows I always watch - which normally isn’t a big deal but now that summer is here and everyone is showing reruns out the ying-yang - that doesn’t work so well for me.

A long long time ago I wrote a program in Python to help me with this task. Basically it would look at the TV listings for me and keep track of show titles that appear. When a show title shows up that it had never seen before it would send out an email.

So for example when Spike started running CSI - it didn’t care because CSI is a known show (It’s been on CBS forever) but when Trio ran “The Truth About Gay Animals” it alerted me. It’s a bit of a shotgun approach - but it help filter down all the billions of repeats they like to show. (Yes I’m talking about you BBC-America)

It wasn’t great but it helped. Eventually it had some problems I didn’t feel like fixing so I just turned it off and let it gather dust.

Then about a week ago I came across this article. Basically it shows a neat little tool in Python that makes it easy for you to generate RSS feeds from the command line.

The light bulb went off - I have a program that needs to send out info - it’s already in Python - maybe I could graft this RSS stuff into the program and make it useful again.

Well folks that’s exactly what I did. I also found a major bug in the system that was preventing it from seeing shows that were on (kind of major since that is the only thing it is supposed to do).

So I setup some channels to monitor and put the feeds up for your pleasure. The system looks about 7 days ahead. It’s going to be noisy in the begining because it is building up it’s database of shows.

There are two ways you can use the feeds - you can just subscribe to the Master Feed. That is all the channels in on single feed. Or subscribe to a given channel ( I recommend this option)

Hopefully this will work and be useful - just an FYI - if it doesn’t and it isn’t I’ll be putting it back in it’s litle crate.

Oh and I almost forgot - you can go to here to see the feeds. I made the page work so that if you click on the subscribe link from bloglines you can actually select all the channels you want at one time.

Ok - so actually I wrote this a few hours ago. I had been testing my feeds in a little RSS agregator I downloaded and everything worked great. Unfortunately when I viewed it in Bloglines the HTML in the description was completely escaped meaning instead of nice HTML you got lots of greater than and less than signs.

Apparently I didn’t read the fine print in the RSS library I’m using because it does mention that it doesn’t support HTML. I didn’t realize this because the desktop ap just figures it out - but since Bloglines doesn’t I’m back to sorting this out.

One small rant

Which leads me to a small rant about Python. I really like the language. It’s very clear and flows easily. It doesn’t have a lot of bad early design decisions to overcome (Yes I do mean PHP) which makes it nice to drop in to. There’s just one problem with Python - no one uses it. Obviously I don’t mean no one - because people do use it. But every time I try to do something in Python and I need a library my choices are always incredibly limited. In this case there appears to be one and only on RSS generator for 1.0. Fortunatly someone else made a RSS 2.0 generator (it’s on version 0.1.1) which doesn’t do exactly what I want but I can fix that.

SMRT-TV: Haiku About Lost

Look I’m a huge fan of the show. I’m not sure I feel about them but this one is my favorite:

Jack’s a huge asshole
Someone punch him in the mouth
Who’s the doctor now?

“Robot Chicken” (2005)

Ok I don’t have a review for this on specifically. Mostly that if you haven’t heard of Robot Chicken - then let me fill you in. If you have heard of it but aren’t watching it - then shame on you.

Basically it’s a 15 minute show on Cartoon Network where they do stop motion animation with action figures. They do terribly inappropriate things with said action figures.

One of my favorites was “Enter the Fat One” where they used the N’Sync action figures to have Joey Fatone avenge the death of the rest of his band. With the help of Mister Miagi(sp? Pat Morieta) .

Bottom Line: Get watching - it’s 15 minutes of TV you won’t regret.

The Venture Brothers

If you liked Johnny Quest as a kid, this cartoon is for you. It is basically a satire of the Johnny Quest format. Only with a lot more off humor. For example in last nights episode Brock (the bodguard) was able to kill a pirate by tricking another pirate to do a body cavity search on him. He clenched his butt cheecks and threw the examining pirate into the other pirate. If this sounds over the top, it is. But I think that is a large part of the charm of the show. Plus Brock is voiced by Chris McCulloch( Putty on Sienfeld, The Tick).

If you want your cartoon both adult and retro - this is the one for you.

“Life on a Stick” (2005)

Ok so last night I watched life on a stick for the first time. Once I got over the fact that the main character looks like a young Bruce McCulloch from the Kids in the Hall I could concentrate.

It was surreal and in some way predictable. Examples of oddities - the mom in the show is a stylist and the husband sells beauty supplies. The main plot point of the episode was that the main girl (Lilly) just wants to fool around and the main boy (Laz) wants an actual relationship.

The manager of the hot dog stand is a guy named Mr. Hutt (Probably a reference to both where they work and Star Wars) He’s a bastard. He yells. He told them - “The farmer doesn’t have to listen to the chicken - get to work” He calls Lilly - “He female”. He’s brash, loud and obnoxious. I have friend who must have gone to the same school of management.

The crowning achievement is Rick. This is the doofus of the show. He achieves an almost Jeff (of Coupling) status for his ability to non-sequiter into something very odd and funny. (Though he hasn’t starting yelling gusset).

This show will probably get cancelled so watch it while you can and enjoy it for what it is - a throw away American sitcom.

Alien Apocalypse (2005) (TV)

Ok this was on the SciFi channel over the weekend. What can I say:

The special effects where terrible
Everyone had terrible wigs except the “hot” slave girl
The plot was simplistic
The acting stilted
The aliens predictable.

You might ask why I would even watch such utter crap? Two words - Bruce Campbell. Since I saw Evil Dead 2 in 6th grade I’ve been a huge fan. I even got his autograph when I was 13 at a Fangoria weekend of horrors convention. I will watch pretty much anything if he is in it. Unfortunately, this movie put that statement to the full test.