Cop shows, five-sided buildings,
While browsing through iTunes yesterday, I stumbled upon a free download of the pilot episode of NBC's new cop drama Southland. If features a respectable cast, but the character-driven plot struggled to to find coherency in its debut. Further, the main character, rookie Ben Sherman (played by Benjamin McKenzie) is dull and never really took the fore. As such, there wasn't any opportunity to relate to Ben or his mysterious past. He does little and little information is given about him. It feels like he an out of place transfer from Lost who has little relevance until his flashbacks. As for the episode itself, the strong performances by rest of the cast carried it. The writing didn't seem like anything special, nothing to distinguish itself from a tried-and-again genre, but it made for something to occupy 45 minutes of my afternoon. It made no compromises of realism, despite cliched subplots, and felt authentic. I don't really see myself going out of my way to catch it (premieres tomorrow, April 9), but I probably won't change the channel when it comes on.
Things are winding down right about now here in the DC land. I have a meeting with the department head on Friday to talk about how my rotation is going/went followed by an informal tour of the Pentagon. My last time in the Pentagon was brief, focused, and didn't present opportunity to look around, so it could certainly be cool. I'll just need to be extra careful not to bring my phone with me that day.
My next planned review is of the Wii game Madworld, but that will be some time away as I'd like to log some significant hours with it first. I'll be working on one for Wario Land: Shake It as well, though it's anyone's guess which will get done first.
I did a little bit of tinkering to Zephyr II today. I was having some issues with the audio panel and I wanted to play around some with my video drivers to see if some of my isolated issues could get resolved (like enabling DirectX 10 Far Cry 2 resulting in a 90% performance drop and Left 4 Dead crashing when multi-core rendering is enabled). So far so good. In addition to a new personal best on the Half Life 2: Lost Coast stress test (1920x1200, all settings maxed: 242 frames per second or "fps", up from 110 or so), I can now play Far Cry 2 with DX10 while staying between 80-100 fps. Sweet. Oh so very sweet indeed. I'll wait until later in the week to try some other games/tests (like Crysis, though I don't expect much improvement there).
Things are winding down right about now here in the DC land. I have a meeting with the department head on Friday to talk about how my rotation is going/went followed by an informal tour of the Pentagon. My last time in the Pentagon was brief, focused, and didn't present opportunity to look around, so it could certainly be cool. I'll just need to be extra careful not to bring my phone with me that day.
My next planned review is of the Wii game Madworld, but that will be some time away as I'd like to log some significant hours with it first. I'll be working on one for Wario Land: Shake It as well, though it's anyone's guess which will get done first.
I did a little bit of tinkering to Zephyr II today. I was having some issues with the audio panel and I wanted to play around some with my video drivers to see if some of my isolated issues could get resolved (like enabling DirectX 10 Far Cry 2 resulting in a 90% performance drop and Left 4 Dead crashing when multi-core rendering is enabled). So far so good. In addition to a new personal best on the Half Life 2: Lost Coast stress test (1920x1200, all settings maxed: 242 frames per second or "fps", up from 110 or so), I can now play Far Cry 2 with DX10 while staying between 80-100 fps. Sweet. Oh so very sweet indeed. I'll wait until later in the week to try some other games/tests (like Crysis, though I don't expect much improvement there).