Okay, I’m spending too much time on this, but… after reading the comments on my post last night and thinking about it more, here’s how I think they should have ended the episode:

Sayid, while interrogating/torturing the Guy Who May or May Not be an Other, finds out something equally ambiguous and creepy from him—something that makes Sayid pause, sit back, uncertain of what to do next. Meanwhile, Jack and Locke are in the middle of their confrontation, just as it played out before, and while Locke is in his haste trying to enter the number, the timer reaches zero… and cut to black.

That’s right, a cliffhanger ending. I’d be fine with that, I think it would much better than the cop-out hieroglyphics. It would have been a stronger ending. Keep all of Sayid’s flashback, that’s fine, just end on zero and forget the goofy speech with Charlie on the beach.

They totally need to hire me as a writer.

Yeah, this is getting somewhat regular: recording some thoughts about the latest episode of Lost. I suppose some of these might be spoiler-y, though, so I’ll put it behind the clickthru. (RSS readers: well, uh, you don’t get that luxury, so watch out: there might be spoilers.)

• Sawyer and the tree frog: Hello, you’re in a jungle where tree frogs are a dime a dozen… does the word "futile" come to mind?
• Seems to me we should be seeing some castaways start getting sick. All the signs point to it in the timeline thus far: Rousseau revealed that her shipmates got sick after two months on the island, the "other" from tonight’s episode indicated his wife became sick after a little over three months, and in the show’s timeline, they’re 50-odd days on the island. So whatever this contagion is they’ve been building up to… soon? Maybe a season finale kind of thing?
• Of course, that may be coming up sooner rather than later… one of the items I read about the next upcoming episode dealt with Aaron (Claire’s baby) getting sick from a mysterious illness.
• What a cop-out on the timer running out! Sure, the time ran out, but it didn’t really run out of time… there was still a good five or more seconds as the various symbols slowly flipping into place like a slot machine… I’m sure somebody will have a screenshot of those symbols online within 24 hours, and then mass speculation as to what they mean will begin. I still say it was a cop-out.
• Though Jack-vs-Locke-vs-The Timer? That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
• That last little bit, between Sayid and Charlie: think Sayid knows it was Charlie who was complicit with Sawyer last week? I kept expecting him to say something to that effect…

This was an amusing read, and devilishly detailed: The Lost Ultimate Theory. I won’t guess as to the accuracy of it—quite a bit seems too science fantasy for my taste—but I will say that if the producers are ever looking for new writers for the show, they should contact this guy.

Nothing grand to report, but somehow we managed to fill up the weekend.

Friday night after work we had dinner at the excellent La Rosa, over on the west side. Afterward, we meandered around Wal-Mart and Shopko looking for gifts for birthday parties are kids were invited to. Exciting, right? When we got home and put the kids to bed, I cleaned bottles for the batch of pumpkin ale I had in the pantry.

Saturday, we made Valentines cookies (heart-shaped sugar cookies, of course). Later on, my daugher went to one of the afore-mentioned birthday parties, and soon after some old friends that we hadn’t seen in five or so years came over. These were friends from the homebrew club we had back in the day, but they moved to Eugene and we just fell out of touch. But, they moved back to Bend recently, and we’re reconnecting.

These are friends that are really into beer and homebrewing, so needless to say I drank entirely too much Saturday night and we had a great time. No ill effects, though, except for a minor headache when I woke up this morning. Good thing, too! I feel like I dodged a bullet.

Sunday (today) the kids frosted the Valentines cookies and I bottled up the pumpkin ale. The rest of the day was fairly mellow; we relaxed, and went to my parents’ house for dinner.

And I have to mention the gorgeous un-February-like weather. Sunny, mid-50s, fantastic. It probably won’t last, but that’s okay, it is still winter, technically.

I’ve been informally keeping track of the books that appear on Lost, so of course I caught tonight’s little Easter egg. Anyone else catch the title of the book Locke was shaking through when Sawyer found him in the hatch? The text on the cover read "Owl Creek Bridge", and a quick sweep on Wikipedia reveals:

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is a short story by Ambrose Bierce originally written in 1886…. [It] is the story of a man who is sentenced to death by hanging at the Owl Creek Bridge of the title.

You can go to the page to read the spoilers about it, I won’t reveal them here. What’s interesting is, I remember seeing this on an old episode of The Twilight Zone!

I don’t know if it’s supposed to fit into the show’s mythology, or the writers just liked the book enough to put it in there and mess with people’s heads. I suppose that could go either way…

Last week I met with a local businessman who was interested in finding a local PHP expert/consultant for a project that he’s expanding. He already has a long-distance PHP guy doing work for him, but also wanted someone local. This got me to thinking; aside from myself and a few isolated individuals, and Alpine, who are the PHP people for Central Oregon? Are there any PHP-specific shops or consultants who are available for this kind of thing? If not, why not? And how would anyone find out about them?

My next thought, invariably, was We need a local PHP user group for exactly this kind of thing. A local organization where any and all of the PHP programmers/users can get together, and perhaps build a directory of services and maybe even host events.

Would this be of interest to anyone? I’m actually pretty ignorant about the user group thing (it’s probably been close to a decade since I’ve been anywhere near a user group type of function), so I may not actually know of which I speak. For instance, is there already a Central Oregon PHP user group that I’m totally unaware of?

I’d be interested in getting involved one way or another. What says the community-at-large?

It’s amazing what they’re publishing in For Dummies books these days… I almost wish I had made this up:

Pit Bulls for Dummies

This just makes me laugh. The fact that it’s for real just makes this that much more irrationally funny to me…

In case you were wondering why I suddenly dropped off the radar, it’s because Thursday I came home from work feeling achy and tired and running an elevated temperature of 100 degrees or so. Went to bed, skipping dinner, slept more-or-less through the night, and got up Friday feeling better—not perfect, but well enough to try going to work. I’d still been slightly elevated when I awoke—99 degrees or so—but that subsided.

Still, felt mostly under the weather Friday, even when it came to the "mandatory" work meeting that was held at, of all places, McMenamins—with free beer. Feeling a bit out of it meant only nursing a single (free! damn it) beer for the better part of an hour.

Friday night I went to bed early (for me), avoiding the computer. Saturday was kind of a "recovery" day (how I approached it, anyway… got a lot of reading done) and we had some friends from out of town visiting, who we met at the Deschutes Brewery for dinner. We were visiting until about 10:30, and I was tired enough to head to bed without hitting the computer. (Tell the truth, it’s kind of liberating to not feel like having to plunk down in front of it and catch up on all the news and blogs and email.)

Today I had to replace the (same) computer’s power supply… perhaps it’s an omen of some kind?

I thought this sounded interesting considering how popular poker is these days (you know who you are): PHP Editors is holding a PHP programming contest for a Texas Holdem game. I might try it out. It wouldn’t be anything like most commercial poker sites out there, but it would be an interesting programming project.

…Not unlike being back in school, writing a program for whatever computer course I’d be in. Those were the days; they were still teaching Pascal at the time. I remember writing a Hangman game (it mostly sucked), and an algorithm for storing shuffling a deck of cards (which might have been a precursor for a poker program).

Of course, handling and "shuffling" a deck of cards that only exists in a computer program is trivial. You simply need to have a structure representing the cards, and draw them randomly. (And a method for keeping track of what’s been drawn.) Each subsequent "shuffle" is simply a different random number set selecting the cards.