Posted inThank You Sir May I Have Another

Fairly Missing

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

A new year is starting. Most of the Web sites and news organizations are putting out lists for best of, worst of, and lost. In truth, the list of TV stars we lost in 2012 was a lot like saying goodbye to my childhood. Dick Clark, Mike Wallace, Larry Hagman, Jack Klugman (The Odd Couple, and Quincy), Ron Palillo (Horshack), Sherman Hemsley (The Jeffersons), the list goes on and on. If you grew up as a child watching television in the early 70s, you saw all of these people, even if it was in black and white re-runs. Heck, we even lost Stormin Normin!

 A few weeks ago, there was a list of television shows which met their end in 2012. Some where planned, like House, others were kind of shocking. I was quite saddened to see that “Fairly Legal” didn’t avoid the hatchet man. I actually liked that show. The addition of the dude to make the firm “Bitch, Bitch, and Jackass” added the spice the show really needed. They had spent a long time finding a base for the characters and I thought they were finally going to run with it the following season.

 One thing which shocked me was the lack of information about Torchwood. It seems most of the UK fans really hated Miracle Day, but I liked it. Perhaps 2013 will turn things around for fans of some shows.

 Probably the thing I miss most now that I watched the anniversary special is the original Sci-fi channel. Maybe, just maybe, someone with a lot of money and brains will launch a new Sci-fi channel. They will call it Sci-fi-Classic or Gold-Fi. It will be true to its roots. It will bring back all of those classic things we loved about the Sci-fi channel before it became just another TV station running reality shows and fake wrestling. Wouldn’t you like to see a station like that? One that brings back all of the golden series and movies which gave birth to the genre and runs them in order, from the beginning, perhaps in marathons like USA does with NCIS?

 Just think of the abandoned shows they have to fill the air with. Star Trek, TNG, Voyager, The Twilight Zone, Babylon 5, Farscape, Firefly, Planet of the Apes. The list goes on and on. There are already small stations doing the same thing with old TV shows like The Wild Wild West, Hogan’s Heroes, etc. Why can’t we have a Sci-fi-Classic and get away from the train wreck SyFy is becoming now?

 What are you missing in the world of TV entertainment?

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.