R8 Install Pushed Back

Well, folks -- the R8 install has been
pushed back again. There's a concern with QA (quality assurance) testing, and
we'd rather wait a week than put something flawed out.

So. That's
where we are with all that. Stephanie said she'd post about it in further detail
over in her blog, but she is out in California, three hours behind me.
Check her out
this evening for more details, but otherwise ... everything's fine.

'Lost' Season 3 Premiere: The Others Have It Together

So 'Lost' kicked off its third season last night -- and man, I had no idea I could hold my breath for a whole hour! I thought the show was great in predictably unpredictable 'Lost' fashion: It offered some answers but asked apeloads of questions, and the rabbit hole just got deeper and deeper.

The folks at EW and 'Lost': the Tailsection have excellent recaps of last night's episode up. And if I dare say so, ours isn't too shabby either. No sense in my reinventing the wheel here.

Theories and Predictions

The real fun with 'Lost' is in the armchair commentary the day after. This must be what winter is like for football fans -- talking shop around the digital watercooler with friends and strangers.

So here's some stuff that I've compiled from a peek around the Web. If any of you have theories of your own -- or better yet, your own blog entries about 'Lost,' please drop a link in my comments. I'd love to get some discussion rolling here.

What the Web says:

1) The Others are much older than they look and have discovered a "Fountain of Youth."

2) There's a little dissent between Juliet and Ben, and Juliet's a bad cook.

3) We may have missed a big hint.

4) Some folks think that the Others expected our heroes on the island.

What I say:

1) The Others have a connection to the outside world. They were totally surprised to see the plane breaking up over the island and managed to compile a dossier (within two months!) that detailed Jack's life down to career and marriage issues.

No doubt they know about Jack's daddy issues, and I would not be surprised if those sick suckers stole Jack's father's corpse out of the casket in the cave back in Season 1. One thing is certain: They didn't learn all that stuff about Jack from his Myspace page. Back in the world, the Others' folks are meticulous.

2) Connection to the outside world = potential for escape. While I doubt our intrepid antiheroes will be consuming any in-flight meals anytime soon, you best believe they're going to have the possibility dangled before them.

3) The Others are not 100 percent cool with being on the island either. Petula Clark's 'Downtown' (a loathsome tune if there ever was one) coupled with Juliet's tears in the mirror during the opening moment hints that maybe she's not too stoked on island life. She's certainly no fan of Ben, AKA Henry Gale, who left her to drown when Jack turned on the waterworks.

If any of the Others are going to turn, it's gonna be her, although she's not to be trusted. Anyone who lies and plays trust games -- like her little game with Jack and the food -- and then demands to be trusted is a broken soul capable of monstrous evil.

4) The fact that the Others are obsessive psychological scientists reinforces 'Lost's' central conflict: science vs. faith. I bet we'll see a titanic inner struggle as the rational Jack find himself drawn to the Others' science, while his emotions keep him with his friends. He may be the first to find the good in the Others' way of life.

5) There is a pattern to the Others' lies. They do not lie 100 percent of the time, but they sure don't tell the truth all the time either. If we can figure out why they lie, we're a long way to figuring out what they're hiding.

6) Man, was the music during Sawyer's escape a 'Planet of the Apes' reference or what?

Total Crap:

Every TV show's got it ...

Have you noticed that everyone on the island has a knockout switch located above their neck? Striking someone in the back of the head, on the temple or jaw is equivalent to pressing ctrl-alt-delete on your computer. It kinda reboots them. I'm not the first guy to notice this, either.

Seriously, knocking someone unconscious like they do EVERY DAY on 'Lost' is way harder than it looks. My best friend's little brother learned that the hard way after we conducted a few "experiments" on him one unsupervised afternoon in the early '80s.

Also: I did NOT appreciate that Wrangler commercial that showed the hawk attacking the buglike Wrangler. It looked so much like 'Lost' that I watched the whole damn thing with bated breath. That's 30 seconds of my life I'll never get back ...

Again, if you have a 'Lost' blog, a blog post or your own theory, leave it in my comments or send a mail to me at : journalseditor@aol.com ...

R8 ReInstall

Journals R8 re-installs tomorrow morning,
which means the usual 4-6 AM EST outage. It seems the edit/add entry button
bugs have been fixed, so
you really shouldn't notice many changes at all, especially if you were
monkeying around with Journals in Beta over the last week or so.

As always,
Stephanie at BamBam! has more.

And
-- if you notice any problems, please let me know via mail or in the comments
here.

Thanks
again ...

We've Resolved the Intermittent Alerts Problems

Some of you have reported
issues with your Alerts over the past few days --
both "Comment Added" and "New Entry Added." I finally got to the bottom of it,
and the problem should be fixed
now.

Here's a quick summary of what
happened:

Information can only travel to and from AOL Journals' back-end
machines from certain computers with specifed IP addresses. This is an essential
security feature. The Journals team recently added new machines on
their end, and had not yet added the new machines' IP addresses to the 'okay to
talk to' list for Alerts. This was not causing a dramatic problem for all users
-- like a system outage -- but was making it so that some users were not able to
see alerts reliably.

We should be good now. If you see any other problems by this
evening, please let me know. And thanks again for keeping us posted.

Journals Now Less Slow

Hey folks ... you reported slowness in the Journals product last night, and we got on it. As I understand it, there was a server problem at the banner ad end, and that has been fixed.

Everything was fine this morning, and now some of you are reporting some more slowness issues. I'm talking to the ad people some more, and they're looking into it. Again.

While I have your attention:

A few of you have emailed me, asking who exactly the hell is Stephanie Bergman, Product Manager? Well, I'd tell you -- but Stephanie is great at talking about herself, and I'd hate to rob her of the pleasure. (She knows I like her as a person, and can take my trash talk.)

So check out her bio post ... AOL Journals community, meet Stephanie Bergman.

Journals is Sloooooow In Case You Hadn't Noticed

Hi all ... Journals is moving at an absolutely glacial pace at the moment, in case you hadn't caught that already. It seems that one of our advertising partners is having a server error that is dragging everything down to a molasses crawl.

They're aware of the problem and working on it as fast as they can. Until then, sit tight and breathe easily, everything's gonna be okay.

Take this opportunity to get some fresh air, I say. I'll let y'all know everything I can just as soon as I know something else myself.

Take care ...

Ejected From the House of Boing Boing

Jesse "The Devil" Hughes, BoingBoing contributors Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Cory Doctorow, and Xeni Jardin

BoingBoing is more than just a blog. It's a mecca, a shining golden temple in the sky for pseudo-hipster geeks like me ... its blend of tech activism, great digital art and high internet weirdness is more than a little addictive to web content creators and consumers worldwide. Maybe addictive isn't the right term. Shrews aren't exactly addicted to eating, are they?

Apparently I'm enough of a BoingBoing fan and Web geek that the site has wound its delicate digital tentacles around the folds of my brain and crept into my subconscious. Here's the dream I had the other night -- what do you make of it?

*****

All of BoingBoing's contributors lived in a crumbling wooden house on a cliff overlooking the San Francisco Bay. The house was shaped exactly like the Hall of Justice from the Superfriends cartoon, but showed signs of serious termite damage on the front porch.

I walked up the gravel path in front of the house and knocked on the sagging screen door, but nobody answered. I called out a few times, but nobody answered -- so I gingerly let myself in. The interior of the house was decorated with all manner of spectacular original paintings by Shag, Coop and Robert Williams. The overwhelming decorative theme was a homey retro- futurism -- a stylistic mashup of Kubrick's interiors in '2001' and the Jungle Room at Graceland.

I tiptoed up a set of iridescent orange shag carpeted stairs to the second floor. On the wall at the first landing there was sky-blue cloth hanging on a hook next to a large glass porthole covered with thick condensation. Water dripped from the edge of the porthole, but boiled into mist before hitting the carpet. A small placard next to the porthole said simply "Tomorrow Evening."

 I could hear muffled voices from further up the stairs and tiptoed up to investigate. Cory Doctorow sat in the middle of the room, reclining in a large easy chair. He was fast asleep with his laptop open, resting on his gently moving chest.

 Cory had a shiny, robust handlebar moustache just like Jesse "The Devil" Hughes, singer/guitarist for the Eagles of Death Metal. Although I couldn't see them through the walls, I knew that 1) Mark Frauenfelder and David Pescovitz were up there as well, and 2) they also had Hughes-style moustaches.

I could hear a sizzling hum from a back room. "Cool!" David shouted. "Mark, you've really done it. Using old Kleenex, a USB port and Starbucks coffee grounds, you've invented a device that reverses global warming AND cracks DRM codes! Let me try!"

With that, Cory jerked awake. "Who the hell are you?" he asked. "And how did you get in here?" I stuttered and stumbled. Coolest house in the world or not, I hadn't been invited.

"Err, ah, Xeni's little brother is an old friend of mine, and I just thought ..." It's true, though. My friend Carl's older sister is Xeni Jardin. That held as much water with Cory as it does with anyone else I've told: zero.

He aimed a small laser pointer at me and pressed a button. Suddenly I found myself out in the oyster-shell parking lot, completely intact except totally barefoot. With a giant inhaling *pop* sound the house closed in on itself and vanished completely. I crept carefully across a field of broken oyster shells to the nearest intersection, raising a hand to hail a cab and preparing myself for a very long wait.

*****

Do you have any idea what this means? Let me know in the comments ...