Note: There are no pictures this week.

TV is light entertainment. Great TV provides light entertainment very well. The really great TV shows never last very long. An example was “The Flash”. It was one of the best shows ever. Visually, it had an intriguing juxtaposition of the latest in technology superimposed over an Art Deco background. It was a perfect genre piece (male hero, not always sure of himself; female scientist, good looking and brainy; really bad villains; a few hero side-kicks and hangers-on). The show was pure shtick, and they played it straight. There was a nice sense of self-depreciation and humor (like when the Flash did his mother’s dishes really fast so he could leave his mother’s house in good graces and go save the world). As good as it was, it didn’t last long.

Neither did Vegas. This show was really great TV. It had an authentic feel of post-war 50’s Vegas. It had bad bad guys and good good guys. Visually, they got every detail right — from the cars, to the desk lamps, to the fire extinguishers, and everything in between. When they made allusions to historical events, they got them right. Sadly, it looks like Vegas is cancelled. Bummer.

Fortunately, there are a couple of decent TV shows still on:

• Blue Bloods: Totally predictable schmaltz, done right.
• Good Wife: Whatever happens, you won’t see it coming and it will be slightly outrageous.
• The Mentalist: a nice off-beat take on cop shows. We haven’t seen any of these episoeds this year. 10 PM is too late for us.

Danita and I had a nice week eating out. We ate every breakfast out until Wednesday, when Danita had to go back to work. We ate every dinner out, including a SOCA party coming up tonight. Yesterday being our anniversary, we went a little upscale to the Candle Light Inn. We did their early dinner special. I had potato-leak soup, truffled meatloaf, and chocolate-peanut butter mouse for desert. It doesn’t get much better than that. The nicest thing about going to restaurants (besides Danita not having to cook and me not having to do dishes) is  that we can disagree on what we like to eat, and both eat something we like a lot.

I’ve gotten a couple of rides in, but not many. It’s been cool and rainy. They are forecasting snow for this evening. I’ve been looking at the possibility of riding the Blue Ridge Highway from Asheville, NC to home. That’s about 500 miles of very tough mountain riding. It turns out the riding is the easy part. Getting myself to Asheville, and finding places to stay that don’t cost $300/night with a 2-night minimum are not as easy. Also, I would have to reserve all the rooms ahead of time. Whatever schedule I decide on, it would be rain or shine riding. I’m not sold on this yet, but I haven’t given up either.

I spent most of today on computer stuff for CASA. They have laptops with detailed information about juveniles. Maryland has really tough juvenile privacy laws. Their laptop data needs to be encrypted. But they don’t have any significant IT support. I wanted to use Microsoft’s Encrypted File System, with everybody sharing one key. This way everybody in CASA could automatically share the encrypted files, but if they lost a laptop, the bad guys wouldn’t be able to get to the sensitive information. I spent hours searching and finding that this wasn’t possible. Microsoft designed the system so everybody has their own individual key, and that’s that. I finally got disgusted reading and just make it work, exactly like I wanted it to. That felt satisfying.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.