Unusually for me, I don't have any specific plans to leave town until late May, when I'll be going to WisCon. Afterward, a few days in Chicago, then off to Swarthmore for my college reunion the first weekend of June.

After that, things get hazy. I'll be in the Northeast the first week of August; at some point after that, I'd like to spend a couple weeks in Boston; I have a wedding to attend in New York near the end of August; and I'm tentatively planning to go to WorldCon in Melbourne the first weekend of September.

I was thinking of taking some time off work this summer, just to recharge; possibly as much as a couple of months. (After I sell the condo, which can't happen 'til June.) So I might just spend August out East, even though it's not really the ideal time of year to be there (but maybe there'll still be fireflies? I'm not sure).

I was thinking I could head from there directly to Australia, and then home, but now that I think of it, I guess Australia is closer to CA than to NY, so I guess it would make sense to stop at home before continuing on.

Also would like to visit friends and family in the Seattle area and the LA area at some point. Well, and the East Bay Area, but that doesn't really count as leaving home. (But maybe it should; I might be more likely to make it over thataway if I treated it as Travel.)

I also finally paid my remaining property taxes. I got a supplementary property tax bill the other day that said it was overdue (and charged me a penalty); I was tempted to call them and complain that I'd never received the first notice—but then I came across the first notice, opened and waiting to be paid, in a stack of papers. So I received it (at least two months ago), opened it, set it aside, and completely forgot about it, and I have nobody to blame but myself. Ah, well, at least the penalty wasn't too awful.

Anyway, so I paid that, and while I was at it I also paid the second half of the main property-tax bills (not overdue 'til April 10, but if I hadn't done it today, then I probably would've let it slide 'til sometime in May, and the penalties on those would've been much higher).

I also bought light bulbs to replace the burned-out ones in the kitchen, and I finally got batteries for my father's calculator (about which more another time).

And I made a couple of phone calls I've been putting off. The cleaning-service people said the extra invoice they sent me was a mistake; the company I bought memory from last year said (as I'd expected) that it's been way too long so I can't return it. (But it's a relief to finally have made the phone call anyway.) Anyone need two 2GB RAM chips for a unibody MacBook Pro? And I tried to call my HOA to find out their address—the check I sent them in February came back as "no longer at this address" a couple days ago—but I just got their answering machine.

This evening, I read several submissions, and then we had an editorial meeting and made decisions on a bunch of stories, and then I sent about sixty rejections.

Have also been setting things up for our new First Reader.

Soon, I will try to get some overdue editing done.

So it's been a nicely productive day. (In a very grownup kind of way. When did so much of my life become focused on house-related activities?) Sadly, there is still much to do.

Off to do some of it.

They raise money via a LiveJournal-based fundraising auction. Which ends tonight! I'm sorry not to have mentioned it sooner.

Kate N provided instructions a while back on how to browse auctions and how to bid on an auction (even if you don't have an LJ account), as well as other how-tos.

There are many cool things being auctioned. I want to point particularly to the items from the WisCon guests of honor:

Mary Anne is offering to critique your book, provide handmade curry powder and cookbook, or have a private lunch with you at WisCon. (Those are three separate items.)

Nnedi is offering two copies of The Shadow Speaker with author doodles. (Two separate items; top two bidders each get one.)

There are a bunch of other things and services in the auction: February list, March list. Books; handmade jewelry and clothing; food items; a custom website built for you; an original musical composition based on your prompt; DVDs; magazine subscriptions; art (including commissioned art of your choice); poetry; manga; custom-written fanfic; bunches of other stuff. Go check it out!

(Speaking of people who've had much worse weeks than I have.)

It sounds like there's nothing to be done to get this decision reversed. So this is just a note to express sympathy, and to mention (in case any of y'all have useful leads) that she's looking for housing options in the UK. For more info, read her entry.

For background, see also her entries from a couple years ago on why she splits her time between the US and the UK and what she misses about each place when she's in the other place.

Cheryl and Kevin, sympathies to both of you. I hope you manage to find a way to get things to work out. And of course let us all know if it turns out there's anything we can do.

For example, there was hot-tubbing.

And today I got to see a fun talk: Raya Yarbrough, the singer for the haunting main-title theme of BSG, interviewed Bear McCreary, the composer of most of the BSG music. The focus was on McCreary, but both of them were interesting and entertaining. And they performed some music; in particular, they performed that main theme, and wow, Yarbrough sounds even better in person than on the show.

(Side note: I had no idea until now that the lyrics to that main theme are the Gayatri mantra. I'm guessing there must have been discussion of cultural appropriation at the time, but I don't recall seeing such discussion. And I don't have the energy to try to discuss it right now, but I felt like it would be bad form to avoid mentioning it now that I know about it.)

(Other side note: I also had no idea that the song "Lords of Kobol" was in Sinhalese. Follow above link for more info.)

Sadly, didn't remember until too late that McCreary also wrote music for Sarah Connor Chronicles; I would've asked him about it, but I had to run off to a meeting.

This evening, I was delighted by a writeup of Star Wars as an Icelandic saga. Very nicely done. (I suspect it's even better if you know more about Icelandic sagas than I do, which wouldn't be hard.)

Earlier in the week, I labeled a bunch of photos, and wrote a bunch of stuff for the blog about my father. (I'll post a link to that blog sometime soon, along with more info.) These were among the activities that led me to neglect all sorts of other important tasks that I should've been doing, many of them time-sensitive, but it was good anyway. Among other things, setting out to write those blog entries led indirectly to my reading through a bunch of email from college (both stuff Peter sent me and other stuff), which was mostly good, though also sometimes sad.

(And I found some email that I wrote that I was appalled by; one exchange in particular in which I was being self-righteous about having done some stuff with a local forum system that I now consider outright wrong, but that at the time I apparently felt was completely justified. And I had no memory at all of that episode until I found those emails. Made me want to write apologies to the computer center staff.)

(Oh, and related to all that: I tried to find software that would read MacWrite files, version 5 or earlier (before MacWrite II and MacWrite Pro). I have a couple of leads, but nothing so far has quite panned out. I really should have translated all these files to RTF or plain text years ago, before I stopped using a Mac that could run the old translation software. I'm looking into Sheepshaver, old-Mac emulation software, but it looks like it may take a fair bit of work to get it up and running.)

Got in a couple of sessions of DDR this week; still not as often as I ought, but an improvement over only playing every couple of weeks.

Another thing that pleased me tonight: Flame, a lovely fluid web-based swirly painting program written in the nifty Processing graphics language. (Requires Java.)

Also, a friend sent me a poem that made me laugh, and another friend sent me part of an erotica story. So, y'know, I really have no room to complain.

Side note: Earlier, I was thinking about whether to watch a movie tonight to cheer myself up, so I looked at what I have out from Netflix:

• Hancock (which I gather is pretty dark for an action-comedy)
• Reds (which may not be all that dark, but does involve a revolution, and is very long)
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut
• No Country for Old Men

Yep, I sure do know how to pick those light-hearted fun charming movies.

So instead I think I'll go read some submissions. Tomorrow, it is to be hoped, is another day.

Oh! Nope, can't go read submissions yet; haven't yet sent in Hugo nominations. Which are due in just under 24 hours, and I haven't even started to think about what to nominate. So I guess I'd better work on that.

Did feel a bit better Tuesday than Monday, and a bit better Wednesday than Tuesday. Got some stuff done at work, though not the most important stuff.

There have been a lot of sudden changes of plan these past couple weeks. I'm always a little change-resistant, but have been coping even less well with change than usual lately.

At some point, I watched The Pink Panther (the first movie), which despite a few fun lines was not my cup of tea. Also watched the final episode of season one of White Collar, which I'll post about sooner or later—it wasn't nearly as good as the pilot, but was better than most of the other episodes this season.

And then yesterday evening I found out about the recent sudden death of a colleague who I liked but didn't know well. But I can't find a way to write about this that doesn't make it sound like it's all about me, when obviously his friends and family are having a much worse week than I am. So I'm not going into any detail, but it also feels weird to not mention it at all. (And it felt even weirder when I tried to pull this paragraph out into an entry of its own.) Suffice it to say I was shocked and saddened at the news.

But Mori didn't, as far as I can tell, do any research to back up this idea. So for the past couple decades (I've seen this especially in the past five years or so), people have been taking it for granted that the uncanny valley is real, and using it to describe a variety of phenomena, without having any actual evidence for it other than gut feeling that it sounds plausible.

A recent Popular Mechanics article, "The Truth About Robots and the Uncanny Valley," discusses some attempts to actually measure the u.v. instead of just theorizing about it.

One of the things the article makes clear is that it's hard to even define exactly what the u.v. is supposed to be. But there've been some experiments that attempt to pin things down, and they've had inconclusive results. For example:

Proposing a wide-reaching theory is one thing, but applying any sort of academic rigor to vague notions of familiarity, repulsion and even humanity has shattered the theory into countless smaller ones. "It turns out that there may be more than one uncanny valley," [Karl MacDorman, director of the Android Science Center at Indiana University] says. "It's not the overall degree of human likeness that makes [a robot or animated character] uncanny. It's more a matter of a mismatch."

MacDorman did a study in which the results seemed to suggest that men were more subject to a u.v.-like effect than women. But MacDorman's experiments seem to have involved images on a screen. Other people seem to suggest that the u.v. doesn't exist at all in in-person interaction:

"In my experience, people get used to the robots very quickly," [roboticist David] Hanson says. "As in, within minutes."

[...]

According to all of the roboticists and computer scientists we interviewed, the uncanny is in short supply during face-to-face contact with robots. [...Despite some comments about a couple of creepy robots on YouTube,] [i]n person, no one rejected the robots. No one screamed and threw chairs at them, or smiled politely and slipped out to report lingering feelings of abject horror. [...] A previously skeptical journalist wound up smiling and cuddling with the ominous little CB2.

There are a bunch of reader comments at the end of the article, several of which say, essentially, "But you're measuring the wrong thing! The u.v. is when a robot looks 100% human, but behaves oddly!" Which just underscores the point that there are a bunch of different ideas about what the u.v. is.

And few of those ideas have actually been scientifically tested. It's always seemed to me to be a kind of Aristotelian approach (only insofar as it involves creating theories without experimental data): Mori came up with the idea of the u.v., it became a popular idea, and now most people take it for granted, without anyone having really tested it.

So it seems to me that the burden of proof that it exists should be on the people who claim that it exists. If it's real and measurable, then let's define and measure it.

I'm not saying it's not real. But it seems to me that the evidence we have for it mostly consists of people saying "Wow, [robot x] sure is creepy." And there are a lot of things that we find creepy that aren't even remotely human-looking.

So until we have (a) a clear and agreed-upon definition for the u.v., and (b) studies confirming its existence, I'm inclined to believe that there are a lot of factors that can contribute to someone finding a given robot creepy, and a lot of individual variability in responses to robots.

By now, you've probably come across the excuses offered by Republican state Sen. Roy Ashburn, outed following his DUI arrest after reportedly leaving a gay bar in Sacramento last week, for his history of voting against gay-rights legislation. The gist is that his voting record merely reflects the wishes of his constituents, and that he thought he could separate his personal life from his political career[....]

(Btw, I've seen articles that claim Ashburn is married, but he's actually divorced.)

The article goes on to provide, and discuss, the full quote from Ashburn about his reasons for his votes. There's some good discussion in that piece, and it talks about some aspects of the situation that I'm not going to address here (like the issue of whether his constituents would've voted for him in the first place if they'd known about his orientation, and the question of whether legislators should precisely follow public opinion or whether they should lead).

But the thing I haven't yet seen anyone discuss in any detail is this:

In February of 2009, Ashburn "was one of six Republican legislators who crossed party lines and voted to pass the state budget." Some of his constituents were so unhappy about this that they launched a recall attempt, on the grounds that "the senator voted for a budget with tax increases after signing a pledge not to raise taxes in 2006" (quotes in this paragraph are from linked-to article). Ashburn's response: "I will always respect the people's right to elect or unelect me."

In the end, the recall attempt failed to get the necessary signatures to make the ballot. But my point is: do that vote and that statement sound like the actions or words of a man who is unswervingly dedicated to voting exactly as he believes his constituents want him to vote, never wavering into taking a stand for what he personally believes in?

Y'know, if a gay guy wants to do his best to prevent gay-rights laws from passing, he can do that. But the idea that he did it because it's what his constituents wanted, and that he was selflessly denying his own beliefs in favor of theirs, doesn't seem to me to hold water.

(Of course, it may be that the majority his constituents really did want him to vote in favor of the state budget last year, in which case I withdraw my complaint here. But it doesn't sound to me like it was a real popular move.)

It was the middle of a not-terribly-cold day. I was under three blankets. This should not have been a problem.

I tried various approaches. Finally around 1:30 I got up and did what I should've done from the start: put my feet in hot water for a little bit to warm them up. (Thanks to Cat F for suggesting this years ago.) Then put on socks and slippers and went back to bed, and fell asleep.

Woke up a little after 4 p.m., feeling much better.

Spent the rest of the evening on administrative stuff, email, etc. Tried playing DDR for a bit, but it was one of those days when I feel certain that I'm stepping on the right arrows at the right times but the game says I'm not; it got too frustrating after a while, so I stopped.

And now here it is quarter past eleven at night, and I sort of feel like I've gotten all my morning stuff out of the way and can settle down to start my day.

Time to read some subs, maybe do tax stuff, get to work on my to-do list. Hoping I won't be too awake to fall asleep at a reasonable hour tonight and get back to a vaguely reasonable schedule tomorrow.

(Note: This is not in reaction to any particular recent emails; don't worry, I'm not complaining about anything any of y'all have sent me. Just general musings accumulated over the past several months.)

Say I'm writing a note to someone to thank them for something they said about brachiosaur habitats in a blog entry. Here are some possible subject lines I could use:

1. [blank—nothing on subject line]
2. hello
3. IMPORTANT
4. Your blog
5. funny stuff
6. Backiosars [or other one-word misspelling]
7. Entry re "Brachiosaur habitat"
8. thanks
9. Thank you for the brachiosaur entry!

There are also lots of other possibilities, of course.

But my point is that half of those subject lines don't give any hint as to the content of the email, and most of them don't give any hint as to the tone or the emotional content. Only the last one gives any real sense of what the message says.

Half of those subject lines look like spam to me. If I received an email from a stranger with one of those spamlike subject lines, I might well delete it unread. If it's from a friend, I would probably read it, but I would be uncertain what it was about.

(I also talked about spamlike subject lines in email a couple of years ago in my entry on contacting strangers about old web pages.)

And even the nonspamlike ones are mostly not ideal. A couple of them suggest to me that the emails are likely to be neutral or even negative in tone. (For example, if I see a lowercase "thanks" with no punctuation, depending on my mood, I might worry that it's sarcastic. An exclamation mark can go a long way toward conveying tone; seeing the subject line "Hi!" generally makes me happy, while seeing the subject line "hi" is more likely to make me nervous.)

A related kind of thing can happen in responses. If I send you a note with subject line "My theory about brachiosaurs and the modern world" in which I espouse a pet theory that I'm worried you may be dismissive of, and you write back with the standard response subject line "Re: My theory about brachiosaurs and the modern world," I may be kind of nervous about the content of your response.

Or, say my note had the subject line "Do you like me?" and your response has the subject line "Re: Do you like me?" Nerve-wracking.

In such cases, it might be kinder to the recipient to change the subject line of the response to say something like "Great theory about brachiosaurs!" or "Yes, I like you!"

I think I picked up this idea from my friend L, who used to often change the subject line of responses entirely—I would send her a nervous/hesitant note, and she would respond with a subject line like "That all sounds great" or "No problem" that would make it immediately obvious what the tone and gist of her response was.

I confess that I found that a little bit offputting at first, because it didn't obey the traditional "Re" rule of email response subject lines and made it harder to track mail threads. But it was a huge relief to not have to stress about what might be in the email. Of course, it might've been less of a relief if the subject and content hadn't been cheerful and friendly—a subject line like "I'm mad at you and here's why" may make me more nervous rather than less. But at least the (gist of the) content wouldn't be a surprise.

An aside re the differing user interfaces of different mail software:

Unfortunately, changing subject lines over the course of a conversation means losing Gmail threading. Gmail considers all messages with the same subject line (modulo an initial "Re") to be part of the same "conversation," and those with a different subject line to be a different conversation. This is one of the things that bugs me most about Gmail, but nobody asked me to make design decisions about Gmail. Anyway, I imagine that a lot of Gmail users will be annoyed by my suggestion to change subject lines, and if I used Gmail I probably would be too.

Gmail also displays the first few words of the message content (plenty of other mailers do various versions of this too), which often takes the mystery out of the subject line; that can be a good thing or a bad thing, but again at least it means the content isn't so much of a surprise. But my mailer displays only subject lines, not content, until I explicitly open the message.

Anyway, I apologize to Gmail users for my recommendations about subject lines. But for me, it's worth losing threading to have more accurate information about content.

Changing subject lines to accurately reflect content can also be useful on mailing lists; for example, a message thread with subject line "Congratulations to Aloysius!" may get ignored by some members of the list, so if someone responds to that thread with a note about a change of date and time for an important meeting, information may not reach its intended recipients. Changing the subject line to "Important change of meeting time!" may get more attention.

(Conversely, if a posting to a mailing list is on-topic for the thread, then it may be a good idea to just leave the subject line alone; threading in a fifteen-person extended conversation is more of a big deal, imo, than threading in a two-person two-message exchange.)

Which reminds me that it's also a good idea to provide urgency info in subject lines. I tend to use the phrase "Time-sensitive" in subject lines to indicate that a decision or comment has to be made relatively soon, or by a particular date; or "Urgent" to indicate that time is very short and/or the topic is very important.

Anyway. I'm still not very good at this; my usual impulse is to use a neutral-tone subject line that states the general topic of the email. But I'm trying to train myself to more often use subject lines that more accurately reflect the content and tone of messages.

Then late last night, just as I was heading for bed (about an hour after starting to feel really tired), I discovered that I had somehow lost track of what week it was, and had failed to do some extremely time-sensitive magazine stuff. . . . I wrote up what happened as part of a draft of this entry, but decided not to post it here yet; too tired to be able to tell whether I really want to post about it. Suffice it to say the situation was entirely my fault, and needed to be fixed immediately.

Is there a word or phrase for a situation where the ground situation is really bad but everything else goes about as well as it possibly could? Where one really bad thing happens, and then for the rest of the scenario the person is as lucky as they could plausibly have been? I've certainly said "I got really lucky, under the circumstances" or similar phrases at various times, but it seems like there ought to be a term for this kind of thing.

Anyway. Got everything done, after an hour and a half or so, but I was still tense and stressed about it. Went to bed, didn't have any trouble falling asleep, but kept waking up. No idea how much sleep I ended up getting, but clearly not nearly enough.

Started preparing to go in to work for a meeting, kind of stumbled on my way to the bathroom, realized that I was not safe to drive. Called in, postponed the meeting 'til later in week.

Tried sending a work-related email. Mistyped a three-letter word. Went back to fix it, mistyped it again.

So I'm taking the day off work. Too tired/sleepy, too stressed.

On today's agenda: sleep. Try to relax.

I had intended to spend some of this weekend fixing some problems with, and posting to, the blog I put together a while back where family members can post memories of him, which I haven't posted to in two years (and which was offline due to technical problems for a long time), but haven't managed to do that, and have too much else to do to get to it tonight.

Also considered making this the day I would finally publicly post the memorial video my brother made in 2005 (as I think Jay said a while back I could do if I wanted to), but there are various obstacles to doing that that I still haven't decided what to do about, so that's not gonna happen either.

The weekend hasn't been as rough as I'd feared. I've been pretty tense/stressed the past couple weeks, as I think has generally been true this time of year the past few years; have been coping even less well than usual with change, with conflict, with personal interaction in general, with minor obstacles and roadblocks, etc. And there's been an unusual quantity of such lately, I think.

(For example: earlier this week, I bought a toilet to replace the guest-bathroom one that broke. Breht started to install it for me, and then noticed that the weird plastic shelf that runs along the bathroom wall meant that a standard-height toilet won't fit in that guest bathroom. I called the place where I'd bought it (they'd been very nice earlier) and asked them if they did exchanges (figuring they probably didn't, but that it couldn't hurt to ask); they quizzed me about all sorts of things about the toilet and the bathroom. I finally asked again if they did exchanges, and they said, "Well, not if it's been opened," in a tone that suggested I was an idiot for asking. They could perhaps have told me that the first time I asked instead of going through all that other stuff. Anyway, I decided to put any further bathroom-related decisionmaking on hold 'til after this weekend; that was the right choice, because dealing with that stuff makes me tense, but it's meant another Unresolved Thing lurking in the background all week.)

So I had kind of intended to spend the weekend rewatching favorite Gilmore Girls episodes and otherwise avoiding any contact with reality or anything that would cause difficulty or stress.

But as it's turned out, the weekend itself mostly hasn't been bad (and I haven't watched any TV since the movie Friday night). There was an unfortunate moment when a particular song came up in iTunes [entry edited an hour later to remove description/discussion, 'cause it was making me stressed; suffice it to say the song in question is the one Judy Small song that I hate, and that it's relevant in a bad way], but I noticed which song it was and stopped it and moved on. Later, a John McCutcheon song about the Amish and forgiveness came on ("Forgive Us"), but I stopped that one before it even started—it's a really stunning song, but I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to it in the two years since I bought the album (after hearing him perform it live), and this weekend was definitely not the right time for it.

Anyway. Worked at home on Friday after several unexpected changes and issues came up Friday morning and I realized I wasn't dealing well with them. Friday evening, got enough food (from the closest Chinese place) to last me all weekend, and I've been holed up at home ever since.

Mostly reading submissions and such. Not entirely sure where the weekend has gone. Some email, some computer games. Finally played DDR again for the first time in a couple weeks yesterday; my plan to play 20 minutes a day has not been working out so well. Went through to-do list, moved 150+ past-due items to being due in the future. Spent too long assigning names to faces in iPhoto. Spent a while rearranging apps on my iPhone. Sent about 65 rejections over the past day or two (and my colleagues sent another 60 or so; we've now responded to everything submitted in the first seven days of the year). Did some other magazine administrative stuff. Ran a dishwasher load. That sort of thing. Also had brief phone calls with M and Kam.

Huh. Got all tense and stressed while writing this entry, much more so than has been true so far this weekend. Guess there's more going on in my head than I thought.

Dinner now, I think. And laundry. And Kam's going to stop by to provide hugs.

Then maybe DDR, then some overdue editing. Then taxes, and/or a bath. We'll see.

I guess the short version of all that is: I'm coping, more or less, but the degree to which I'm coping varies from day to day. I'm guessing things'll get easier/better in the next few days.

PS to family: Hope you're all holding up okay. I wasn't up to calling anyone, but hope to talk with you soon.

One of the main reasons I picked up the book in the first place was that I had seen a preview for the movie and it had looked like fun, and I wanted to read the book first. My issues with the book made me somewhat less interested in seeing the movie, but it stayed on my Netflix list, and it arrived in today's mail.

I had a kind of a difficult day (nothing awful, just a bunch of relatively small stuff, plus general difficulty coping), so instead of saving the movie for this coming Sunday, when I expect to need something fun and fluffy to distract me, I watched it tonight.

(And it had occurred to me that a movie about a kid who's lost a parent might not be ideal for Sunday anyway.)

And I really enjoyed it.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's pretty much what I wanted the book to be.

Which probably means that y'all who loved the book won't think much of the movie. And iIrc, the reviews of the movie from reviewers who hadn't read the book were middling-to-negative, so y'all who haven't read the book might not think much of it either. But the few of you who read the book but found it lacking might consider giving the movie a try.Spoilers follow, for both book and movie

(Thanks to KH for the link.)

Turns out she's playing one of the main characters in a new series called Parenthood (which is the second TV series to be based on the 1989 movie).

So I watched the pilot episode.

Overall impression: Nearly every scene with Lauren Graham is lovely. The rest of the episode is okay.

(As I remarked to Kam: I spent over a hundred hours last year watching Gilmore Girls, over the course of eight months. Spend an hour every couple of days with someone for that long, and you start to miss them when they go away, even if they're a fictional character. Really nice to see her again; she's definitely playing a different character, but I think there's a fair bit of Lorelai in this new part.)

At first I thought that the most prominent male character (of the quite large cast of characters, most of whom are related to each other one way or another) was played by Garret Dillahunt, who played Cromartie in Sarah Connor Chronicles. But I was wrong; instead, he's played by Peter Krause, who played Nate in Six Feet Under. I still maintain that they look kinda vaguely similar, if you aren't paying much attention and don't have a great memory for faces.

A few other assorted notes:

A little weird that the show is theoretically set in Berkeley; it doesn't look like any part of Berkeley I've seen. But most of my time in Berkeley has been either on Telegraph or on (or near) University, so it could well be truer to the city than it looks to me.

I wasn't totally thrilled with their handling of a certain neurological issue (trying to avoid spoilers here), but I may not be giving them enough credit there either.

One of the executive producers for the series is Jason Katims, who's also an executive producer of, and showrunner for, Friday Night Lights (which I still haven't seen, though I keep hearing good things about it).

Anyway. I probably won't keep watching, but I might stick around for another episode or two. And it's really nice to see Lauren Graham again.