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As a Christmas present, we treated ourselves to the complete West Wing box set. We already owned three seasons on DVD, but the price gap between buying the set and buying the four seasons we were missing was slim enough and the packaging so enticing that we gave in, and have been working our way gradually through it ever since. Season Five remains, unfortunately, just as weak as I’d remembered. There was some decline in Season Four as Rob Lowe departed and Aaron Sorkin was aware of the impending end of his tenure, but Five was where that really sank in. Too many scenes lack the pace and the intensity of the show’s earlier days, and the writers seem to lack the insight into their characters that viewers expect by this stage. But that’s not what really lets it down for me. ...

This is one of those stories that really ought to be huge, but probably won’t make many waves in the US. The BBC’s Newsnight has been told by a former senior US government official: Tehran proposed ending support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and helping to stabilise Iraq following the US-led invasion. Offers, including making its nuclear programme more transparent, were conditional on the US ending hostility. But Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office rejected the plan, the official said. ...

I’m already beginning to think I should try and block out all mention of Neon Bible, the new Arcade Fire album, for the next couple of months as not only is it getting heavily hyped in the world of blogs, but it’s getting really well hyped. For an example, check out the (most likely “V for Vendetta” inspired) video embedded in this post at I Guess I’m Floating. Then head to the band’s site and check out the song “Black Mirror”. ...

There’s some irony in the fact that in the same week that the death of former US President Gerald Ford is leading to a slew of obituaries mentioning his pardoning of Richard Nixon, Saddam Hussein has been executed. You don’t have to draw any moral comparisons between the crimes of Hussein and Nixon to suggest that if most historians agree that Ford was correct to let Nixon off the hook for his crimes in order to begin a process of reconciliation within the US, then perhaps there’s a better way forward for Iraq than a rushed verdict and sentence on Saddam Hussein. Especially when that sentence looks set to lead to a significant increase in violence. ...

I’ve just released the first stable version of my XML_Feed_Parser library through PEAR. I’ve been working on the code for about 18 months now, it’s nearly a year since the first beta, and some time since I last had to make any significant changes, so it seemed like it was time to open it up to a wider audience. You can get it through the usual channels, either downloading it directly or using the PEAR installer, and PEAR provides a bug tracker should you find any problems or have ideas for enhancements. My time to implement enhancements will be very limited, so I’m also very interested in hearing from anyone who’d like to sign on as a developer to help keep the package moving forwards. ...

Another project I’d been working on launched without my noticing. After a month of delayed DNS transfers, the alliance for environmental sustainability site is live. It’s a pretty simple content management system/site, built on top of drupal, a system that designers (and my client) The Image Shoppe use for all their sites.

Chatting with Steve today I discovered that perhaps we had been a little less public about our plans for next summer than I had thought. As he was telling me about his latest blog entry on climate change I was telling him about our travel plans and realised he at least had not picked up on them. The plan has been formulating for some time. Our move to the UK means that Kari will be quitting her job and I’ll be looking for a break in some of my work. So it seemed a shame to not make the most of that freedom and do some travelling. So while our belongings are shipped eastwards we will be heading west, to San Francisco, then New Zealand, Sydney, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Beijing, Mongolia, Moscow and then on by train to London. ...

Yesterday we pushed the button and launched the new version of GOOD Magazine, a site I’ve been working on for the past couple of months along with the folks at Area17. It’s a relatively large Ruby on Rails system built on top of the ORGware system (refitted as an engine) and supported with a caching system built for Madame Figaro. Most of my work has been under the hood, but where I’ve touched the frontend I’ve tried to make use of microformats and other good practices. We’re providing a range of atom feeds (which will become easier to find over time as we make some refinements) but eventually I hope that we’ll have all listing pages using hAtom so that anything can be a feed. ...

For the past couple of months, any time spent writing here was time not spent working on the new version of the GOOD Magazine website. Today we pushed the button and took that new version live. I’ll probably write more about the experience on my other blog but suffice it to say that it’s been nice to have such interesting content to read while testing the site. We’re still working on a few bugs, so go easy on us, but if you’re reading this you’ll probably find the magazine worth a look. ...

In one way or another I’ve been waiting to see The Fountain for five years, ever since Darren Aronofsky’s last film, Requiem For A Dream left me wandering across London from Soho to King’s Cross in something of a daze and turning up at a party in a distinctly non-party mood. It’s been a long wait for his next offering, partly because of the (in hindsight fortuitous) withdrawal of Brad Pitt from the picture a few weeks before filming was due to start. Hugh Jackman’s performance leaves little doubt that the revised casting was a considerably better choice. ...