Oh how we have missed you …

This is the episode of love, confessions, betrayal, murder, attempted murder, regret and homecomings… throw in some kick ass space fighting scenes… and OMG, this is easily the best episode of the series …

Spoilers after the jump “JUMP!”

The episode begins two day previous to where we were when Adama jumped in his Raptor to wait for his reason for living.

The Hybrid, as it turns out, is jumping around because of Natalie being killed, it has disrupted her, agitated her, and well she kind of pissed… so jump .. jump .. jump around …

During the jumps (yes, during the jumps – in between disappearing and reappearing) Roslin has visions, and in her visions we see Elosha again …

Once the jump completes, the hybrid prattles on about filters, and the sublime elevation of victors and someone else, but since no one would shut up and listen to her, I couldn’t make it out.

New Jump, and a new vision for Roslin … back to Elosha . I liked Elosha, because she kept Roslin true to her path, and it seems that she is back in vision form to do the same again. She takes Roslin through the empty halls of a deserted Galactica to show her on her Death bed. Roslin looks like craaaapp.. One wonders if the Galactica is empty because they are currently in orbit of Earth, and every one has gone down to the surface..

Back to the base star … this episode made me a little motion sick. The Hybrid now goes on about “the six who went among the makers is no more… end of line.” This is where we discover that she is jumping due to the fact that she is peeved about the humans whacking Natalie .. too bad she can’t sense that it was actually Athena who did it …

Baltar thinks the Hybrid is his long lost kindergarten pupil, and tries to coax something coherent from much like a creepy pedophile might try and coax you into his white van.. The effect are similar .. the Hybrid jumps the ship again ..

Roslin is back with Elosha and is now joined by the cast of mourners by her death bed. Today mourners include, Starbuck, Apollo, Adama, and Doc Coddel. Starbuck seems pretty broken up over her dying, especially given the fact that Roslin tried to kill her just a few episodes ago… hmmm.. if we are too assume this is the future, maybe something happens to make them bond.

Maybe they jump into the boxing ring back on Galactica

Well, probably not, but something must happen to bring them together.

Meanwhile, Elosha is pretty much laying all the horrible things that have happened to the human race at Roslin’s feet.. or at least the breakdown of the fleets morality. I would agree with that, I mean it is kind of hard to argue with a dead woman in your vision…

Back in the real world, Helo and the Eight are planning the mission, since they have realized that the Hybrid is heading to the resurrection hub. It’s now that Eight decides to act very inappropriately and creeps Helo out, by giving him an “Athena special” message… Helo is a little curious how she knows how to do that since Athena learned that skill after she got back to Galactica…

Well, are you ready for this … this particular eight went all Jennifer Jason Leigh from [ Single White Female ] and decided to download all of Athena’s memories and “become the same as her”… So much for Athena being unique, and does that mean that it is not really cheating if Helo gets a little action before the mission … I mean a guy has to cut the tension somehow. Eight acknowledges that is creepy and wrong, but doesn’t want things to be strange… hmmm. too late.

Helo bolts off to the raptor for a little heart to heart with the president, and Roslin let’s him in on her master plan of betrayal where she will screw the Cylons out of talking to DeAnna.. Obviously Helo is not cool with that, and we are all left thinking that since they are on a cylon base star can she really just start making all the rules… hmm.. I don’t think so.

Now we head over to the resurrection hub, where Cavil has just brought DeAnna back … Here is where you can insert a quippy Amazon “UnBoxed” joke…. Cavil fills her in on all the civil war fun that she has missed out on, and then lets her know that, oh yeah, it’s all your fault.

The ones (Cavil), four’s (Doral), and the fives (Simon), are going against the two2 (Leobon’s), Sixes, and Eights…

Then comes one of my favorite lines …

Cavil: “She is my pet eight, and an eight can be a formidable ally
DeAnna: “Until they see something shiny”

Awesome, but it surprised me that Eight didn’t react to it at all…

Back on the rebel base star the human pilots and the cylon pilots are having some trust issues with the plan. Apparently the cylon ships will tug the vipers in so they are not detected then cut them loose and let them tear up the resurrection hub … The human pilots are concerned about the trusting the cylons and the cylons are pissed that no ones trusts them … sheesh, wipe out one civilization and no one ever believes you again…

Back at the hybrid goo station, Roslin and Baltar prove that they should NEVER work with autistic children, and apparently not with hybrids either. They both try to get the hybrid to tell them about the opera house, but instead they find out that DeAnna is back in the flesh. Then the hybrid jumps ..

Roslin heads back to vision land to find Elosha and we get to see a touching scene of Adama reading to the dying Roslin. It really was great. I know a lot of people get all bent out of shape with the reading scenes, but I really like sensitive Adama

Baltar decides to go a preachin’ and finds himself a centurion to convert. Not sure what he plans to do once the centurion praised the one true god, but I have a feeling he was thinking personal security guard…

All the jumping around is draining Roslin, and Helo wants to make sure that Roslin is going to be honest with the Cylons. This is why we love Helo, because he won’t sacrifice his morality for his survival. He believes in the eights now, but of course Roslin ONCE AGAIN proves she has lost all sense of right and wrong and is in no way shape or form to ever be trusted.

FINALLY we get to the hub, at this point I feel like the kid in the back of the car … “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

The attack begins, and Pet eight on the hub seems to think that they are shooting the re-imagined Star Wars and says to Cavil “It’s the rebel base ship” I was thinking they should have had a probe droid from Empire Strikes Back float across the room chirping “Rebel’s in the system”.

Cavil realizes that if the hub is destroyed they will all be dead permanently to which DeAnna says “Permanent Death? Then that makes this all the more meaningful…” and then snaps his neck and throws him across the room … while still sitting naked in a tub of goo… have I ever been more attracted to a woman in my entire life???

No.. I have not.

Back to Baltar who apparently has decided he is a Mormon and needs to convert anyone or anything he sees, and seems to be making some head way … or at least head tilting … the centurions seems genuinely interested and is looking like he may accept a copy of the re-imagined book of Mormon starring Gaius Baltar.

Back to the battle, which is where we all want to be anyway … and Pike is wigging out, he decides he is heading home. I have to wonder if jumping away during the battle would be considered desertion … but it doesn’t really matter since last episode we saw him floating around dead… He gets shot, and with his last moment jumps his ship … Goodbye Pike .. we miss you already, be we can always chat with you online over at the [ Galactica Watercooler ].

Just when we think that Baltar will be getting himself a shiny new balcubine, an explosion rocks the ship and blows apart his new centurion friend and give Baltar a nice new hole in his gut… looks serious too ..

With the base stars moving into range we get some really cool base star on bas estar action, and Baltar gets carried in to the bridge for Roslin to fix him up … Wow, President, Dying Leader, Spiritual visionary, prophet… and now field nurse. Of course, she is not very good at it…

In the pain of the situation, and probably thinking he might die, Baltar decides to hit on, and try to convert Roslin … Maybe he wants to go out with a bang? (sorry bad joke)

Roslin appears to be getting into the one god thing.. until Baltar goes ahead and confesses that he was in fact responsible for all of humanity being wiped out… hmm. Roslin thinks, “instead of saving, and maybe screwing you, I am going to go ahead and take the bandage off and let you bleed out.” Finally a presidental decision I get behind.

Don’t get me wrong, I love James Callis, great actor … but Baltar needs to die. I think it would be cool to kill him here, and have Roslin get a head Baltar…

At this point, Eight gets a lesson in why you NEVER trust a human as Helo, very apologetically, lets her know that they are going to screw the cylons and keep DeAnna to themselves… Again, I have to ask, do you not realize that you are on THEIR ship … who says you get to make any rules… ugh .

DeAnna runs to Giaus and looks genuinely worried.. Roslin orders Helo to keep everyone out , no matter what … He looks at her, like yeah, ok. you know that they have centurions here right?

DeAnna does a major head job on Roslin and convinces her that she is one of the final five, but then says PSYCH!!! LOL great great scene. She then goes ahead and again shows us why she is just a big plate of awesome with awesomesauce on the side. She tells Roslin that she won’t say anything until they are back at the fleet. DeAnna is all ghetto, and she don’t trust nobody.

They jump back to the waiting arms of Adama and his little raptor, and Roslin FINALLY says I love you …

Adama is SOOOO getting laid in the next episode, which thankfully will be next week.

Carl Icahn demands Yahoo sell for $49.5 billion. Intel Anti-Trust woes spread as FTC takes a look. S. Korea already on the case. This was bound to happen eventually. CC free wireless Internet plan doomed to fail? I wonder. Creeping featurism to hit Gmail? Perhaps. My airplane anecdote tells of giant cloud. Comcast looking to deliver 100 Mbps sooner than later. I’m predicting metered service. Lame survey describes the obvious.

Click to listen:

I would like to say that I can post some spoilers from tonight’s episode, but nothing new was on SciFi that hasn’t already been posted about..

SciFi once again changed the rules on us, and without notice.  They used to give us the whole episode at 9AM PDT.. then they started doing the whole episode every hour on the hour, then they changed it to only show the first ten minutes… which was incredibily cruel.. NOW… now we only get 2 minutes… that’s right 2 minutes…

What we see in the 2 minutes, after the jump…

The base star keeps jumping around, seemingly randomly, but I think it has some meaning to it.. During the jump (yes , while they are in hyperspace) Roslin is having vision  of the dead lady in the picture above.. Yes I know it’s Elosha.

I think Elosha is back to remind Roslin where her path is and to try and get her back on it, first step is for Elosha to show her what appears to be her final minutes of life on an empty Galactica (maybe in orbit of earth?).

During the cut scenes for the show we see Baltar in pain, base stars exploding, and Centurions be blown up…

Despite SciFi skeeeviness, I am still excited about tonight’s episode, and will get a review posted as soon as it is over..

Amazon.com has been inaccessible to many U.S. visitors since at least 10:30 a.m. PDT on Friday.

“Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” was the message that appeared when Amazon customers across the country attempted to log on.

Rumors are flying as to what happened…

Did MediaDefender decide that Amazon was providing copyrighted material and DDoS the site, like they did Rev3 just a week ago?

Is Amazon stocking the online shelves with fresh 3G iPhones?

Has Twitter taken over amazon?  Did the little birds that hold up the whale on twitter fly over and drop the whale on Amazon ?

Or is this just a site redesign gone bad?  Whatever it is, it will me an economic downturn for Amazon, as even alittle downtime for that site means losses of large scale.  Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average.

At least some Amazon sites outside the United States appear to be working such as China, the UK, France, and Germany.

The site’s front page has remained available using Amazon’s secure Web site address–https://www.amazon.com–but links on that page aren’t working.

The social networking side of the net has really be exploding lately.  Web Apps like [ Twitter ], [ Facebook ], [ Pownce ], and even [ Digg ] have created an almost viral desire for people to stay connected on a real time basis.

When blogging began to be used on a personal level, it was a great way to find out what was happening in people’s lives on a daily / weekly basis and we saw a whole new medium of socal contact being born.  Enter Twitter and now, instead of a daily mass of blog to read, you were able to get 140 character updates from people sent to your computer, or your phone… Life was good, albiet a little distracting.

Twitter, however, has now become more known for being unavailable, then it is for being a revolutionary way of communicating.  While I think it is a little unfair, they are bringing that onto themselves since they can’t seem to keep the site up and running for more then a few hours at a time.

Enter [ Plurk ].  Yeah, I didn’t misspell that.  Plurk is the newest addition to the “micro-blogging” world, and it is something else.  The time line takes a little getting used to, but I think that was you do get used to it, it is much better for maintaining conversations, which is something always bothered me about twitter.  I will get responses on twitter to something I said hours, even days, ago and have no idea what they are talking about.  Whereas plurk keeps everything in a nice little box connected to your original statement.

Plurk is obviously a “Work in progress”, but is definitely enjoyable being a part of a new and fresh community, so I am happy to help them work out the bugs.

Plurk will have to start providing some external apps to allow you to break free from the browser, but I know that will be coming.  They also need to provide a way to stop being updated on certain topics..  For instance, I am “friends” with Leo Laporte, meaning that I get his plurks, and he gets mine (along with several thousand other people ) and every time he says ANYTHING he get about 200 responses.  Personally I am not interested in reading all the fan boy responses, so I would like the option of shutting that off .

All-in-all… plurk is very addicting, and I like the Karma aspect of it, makes plurking almost like a game where you earn points, and then get cooler stuff from the site.

I think that Plurk will need to pay close attention to the mistakes that Twitter has made, and correct them before they are made, since the overall feel of the plurking community is that they are shifting from Twitter to Plurk, and with heavy users like Leo Laporte, and the c|net crew making use of plurk, it has already starting to show sign of hiccuping…

So, come join me in the Social Networking world :

You can plurk me at [ Plurk ]

You can follow me on Twitter : [ Twitter ]

You can Pownce me at [ Pownce ]

We rarely cover Microsoft garbage, becuse who really cares.  However, I couldn’t pass up the recent comments that Steve Ballmer made concerning print media.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has now gone out on the limb of stupidity and made outlandish predictions in a recent discussion with Washington Post editors, the biggest of which, by far, is his proclamation that he thinks there’ll be “no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network.”

He clarified that that means there “will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”

First off, I rememeber these predictions back in 1999.  They were stupid then and they are stupid now.  No matter how prolific the internet gets, it has already be proven that people prefer to read the physical media.  This is not going to change in the foreseeable future.

Microsoft, and Ballmer in particular, are known for their wacky predicitons that generally fall flat.. remember when Ballmer said that the iPhone would fail … or even better when Gates said that the spam problem would be solved by 2006…

How about you all focus your attention on fixing Vista… that’d be great..

Australian resellers began receiving mysterious packages from Apple on Friday with a warning across the top that breaching the boxes ahead of June 10th would be a violation of their non-disclosure agreements with the company.

June 10th in Australia is actually around the same time of Apple chief executive Steve Jobs’s June 9th WWDC keynote in the US. The boxes likely contain a single demonstration 3G iPhone to be displayed by the resellers immediately following the company’s announcements.

Earlier this year, reports began appearing on Apple rumor sites in Australia that said local resellers had started to receive guidance from the Cupertino-based company regarding a local 3G iPhone launch during the final week of June.