TiVo + Amazon Unbox

One last thing tonight: I'd been reading about the integration between TiVo and Amazon's Unbox service, where you can download a movie or TV show from Unbox and have it delivered to your TiVo. TiVo has sort of lost me as a user, as their HD DVR is way too expensive, and as bad as the Comcast/Motorola DVR software is, I can record HD and do pretty much everything I need to do. The TiVo has been relegated to backup recordings and occasionally streaming some music.

However, TiVo and Amazon are offering a $15 credit, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I signed up for it today--it was very easy, you just sign into Amazon, then type in your TiVo account info, and you're done--and scanned through for something to download. I didn't want to get a TV show, so I grabbed a rental of the recent Mike Judge movie Idiocracy. It cost about $4, which leaves me a good amount of credit to rent a few more movies or TV shows. The rental last a few days after download.

Now, after about an hour, it's only downloaded about 1/3rd of the movie (I've got an older wireless adapter), which means this isn't going to replace On Demand for instant gratification. On top of that, it's not in HD, so I'll probably never use it when I could use On Demand or Netflix.

But, for stuff that I'm not worried about being timely or high quality video, it'll be worth playing around with. Frankly, I doubt that this will take off. I just don't have much of a desire anymore to watch stuff in crappy TiVo quality. I've got a laptop that I can download movies/shows in high quality, or watch them online in high quality, and I can access them faster than the TiVo can get them from Amazon.

So, it's sorta cool technology, but I think it's a little bit of "too little/too late" from the TiVo camp. I don't think this will compete with Apple TV; I don't think this will compete with BitTorrent and a laptop; I don't think this will compete with On Demand. It doesn't win on price, quality, or convenience.

Well, at least I don't think it does, since I haven't had a chance to watch it, and it won't let me start watching it until it's fully downloaded.

My Small Impact on the World

I went to check out my Evite To Google Calendar script page at Userscripts, since I like to poke in every once in a while and see if anyone is actually using my script.  Last I had checked I had about 4 downloads.

Today: 64! 64 people have installed it. That's pretty cool. Granted, that's not a ton, but it's a lot more than before! I left a comment, since I'm hoping someone will follow up and let me know if anyone really finds it useful.

Tecmo Bowl! More Mii!

Today is a good day. Tecmo Bowl was released on the Wii Virtual Console. Seriously. It's awesome. Most of the player names were removed, but it's the same game as I played 1000 hours of as a kid. I'd forgotten how simple and addictive the game was. So awesome. So, so awesome.

Speaking of the Wii, thanks to a couple of cool tools called Mii Transfer and the Mii Editor, I was able to transfer my Mii character to my computer and output a couple of decent images. Hopefully, that'll let me eventually finish the overhaul of my main page that I'm working on. Maybe this weekend, if I get some time.

If I'm not playing Tecmo Bowl. Lawrence Taylor is a beast.

Busy Busy Busy

The last week has been extremely hectic. I'd thought I'd kind of caught up on life in general last weekend and early last week: getting a bunch of laundry done, paying bills, getting the brakes in my car fixed, grabbing some cheapish plane tickets out for my friend's bachelor party.

The looming proverbial monkey wrench, however, was my Tuesday visit to Cambridge for jury duty. I've been called once before, ended up sitting in a room in Fitchburg for a few hours before getting sent home. I was hoping that Tuesday would be similar--grab the T over to Kendall, hang out for a few hours, get sent home and have a quiet day.

All pretenses that I might have a quiet day were scuttled when, within an hour of being there, I was in a courtroom being asked if I was fit to serve on a double-murder trial that would last approximately a month (if you've been paying any attention to the news, you know which trial it is). I didn't get impaneled on that jury, but an hour later, I was in another courtroom, and sitting in the jury box for a trial expected to last a week long.

At first, I was a little annoyed, but I sort of realized that if I was all that upset, I was no better than all of the people I scoffed at as they repeated lame excuse after lame excuse to get out of sitting. Somehow their time is more valuable than mine. That's just generally douchebaggy.

So I don't mind sitting so much. The only tough part is that I'm working half-days so that I don't have to burn any vacation time (though that might change this week, since I'm getting run down). Mornings in Cambridge, back on the T, drive to Burlington for work. It makes for long, somewhat stressful days, but it also means I haven't had a whole lot of time to work on some of the projects I've wanted to.

I have started playing around with the layout of the blog a bit. If you notice, the right sidebar is reorg'd a little bit, with a little widget that lets you see my shared items from Google Reader. I've slowly started formulating the layout for the new and improved ryantoohil.com (I'm playing with CSS as a bit of an experiment). I also revamped my little basketball statistics tool with a nicer layout and look.

The MacBook Pro has come in handy recently, as I can sit comfortably, get inspired, and quickly whip something up, rather than having to overcome the inertia and walk into my somewhat cold office. It's also going to come in handy for jury duty, should I end up as an alternate, because I'll have a bunch of time to kill while my fellow jurors deliberate.

Hopefully, I'll have some more time in the next week or so to play around with some of my ideas (the home page, maybe another podcast, some posts here). The trial is expected to wrap up mid-week, so hopefully I've only got a couple more days of back and forth.

There's some fun news: Ben Folds is playing with the Pops orchestra on May 9th. Tickets go onsale tomorrow, which means I'm going to have find someone to buy me tickets since I'll be listening to testimony and not near a computer to get a couple of seats. Since I missed on The Arcade Fire (who are playing the next night at the Orpheum), I'd like to get a seat. I'll have to work my mojo tomorrow.

Linkbaiting is Annoying

I've been reading a lot of search engine stuff in my feed reader recently. I used to be deep into the search engine optimization knowledge, but at some point, I realized that it was, at some level, just scummy. Not the idea that you'd understand how engines work and do the little things to make your site rank appropriately. No, it was the other stuff, like link exchanges and link buying and the general dishonesty that comes along with that. When I go to a search engine, I want to actually find what I'm looking for, not have to dig through a bunch of crappy sites that think they deserve my traffic.

It got worse when AdSense came along, and it got even worse as Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and the other social networking-type sites got big. Now, not only were people gaming the engines, they were throwing up lame articles and gaming other systems to get both the search juice and the traffic. Their spammy site gets the best of both worlds, and the rest of us deal with more spam--just not of the email variety.

This week was a big to-do about one of these SEO/SMO guys who got banned from now-Yahoo! owned blog widget because he was posting how to hack it (and, quite frankly, being an all-around douche). So, a guy who games the system for a living was bitching about being banned from a free tool that he'd been posting how to hack. Topping it off, a whole bunch of other SEO folks (many of whom I've been reading for a few years now) hopped on and defended the guy.

I just don't get it.

I understand that the whole idea behind this widget (MyBlogLog) and behind other sites (like Digg, Flickr, etc.) is community. You build a community and you get more than just the functionality of the widget, you get the benefit/fun of the community. It's all so Webtwopointohy.

Finally, a voice of reason came through my feed reader. I'm hoping we're reaching a tipping point. I'm hoping we're reaching the point where every sales and marketing guy out there looking to score some quick money doesn't look at every new site and widget as something to game and make money. Now, I'm not against making money. I'd love to create a site that has some value to people and figure out a way (ads or not) to make some money. But the group of folks who exist solely to put up a site with ads, get it on Digg, and get enough sheep to click on it need to go away. They used to be called spammers, and it's about time we go back to calling them that.

Lost is Lost

Lost is nearing the midpoint of its third season, and I'm nearing the endpoint of caring. After a phenomenal first season, and a second season that meandered but eventually built up steam to an interesting season finale, the third season has been disappointment after disappointment. While the Others are interesting, the pieces of the story, the revelations, the so-called answers have been so incongruous and so minor that it seems rather obvious the writers and network are stretching the story out to ridiculous lenghts.

Every article during the first two seasons talked about not wanting to be The X-Files and never answer major questions. Well, at least The X-Files answered something each season. Each mythology episode of The X-Files at least furthered the overall story. I just don't feel like Lost is moving in that direction. The backstory device is running thin the 3rd, 4th, 5th time they revisit a characters backstory, revealing such intriguing story items as "the meaning of Jack's tattoos" and "how Locke lived on a drug farm."

There's a chance that Lost's uninterrupted run will lead to the show hitting its stride again, but I've got less faith this time, given that at least the "bad" episodes in season two were fun to watch. There's just not been anything particularly great this season.

Lost is still ok. It's not as good as Veronica Mars. It might even be worse than the exposition-heavy Heroes. Where those shows differ from Lost is that they're at least advancing their stories in ways that make you want to turn in each week. Lost, to me, is falling to 24 territory: a show where I could just read a recap of an episode and how it fits and be happy enough to have not spent the hour wondering why the show isn't better.

I do think, though, that like The OC, if the show doesn't pick up by the end of its third season, I'm not sure I'll be there for the start of the fourth.

PTBNL Episode 3

Finally, Episode 3 of the Podcast To Be Named Later. The sound quality is craptastic since I used the mic built into my MacBook.

However, you'll hear some awesome music by:
Hallelujah the Hills

Taxpayer

and ...

Dear Leader.

Mostly Dear Leader. Like a lot of Dear Leader.

I'll put up a full track listing later.

The much awaited ... stuff

It's been a busy few weeks. The biggest news is probably my latest purchase: I got my first non-PC in the form of a MacBook Pro. I'd been looking at getting a laptop for a while, mostly because my existing laptop is old, underpowered, has a half-working keyboard, and had been resigned to sitting on my stereo so that I could stream music to it. I couldn't even bring it anywhere, as the battery life was simply miserable.

Working at a web hosting company, spending a majority of my day ssh'd into a Unix box, I'd gotten very comfortable at the command-line again, much like I was back in my college days. Between the command line and the browser, I didn't really use any major Windows applications at the office or at home. I use MS Office, occasionally, but I don't even use that at home (where I use OpenOffice). My PC is still a great box, but it was a glorified game machine.

Taking it one step further, I'd realized how much of my life really is in the browser these days. My mail goes to Gmail; my calendar is Google Calendar; my RSS feed reader is Google Reader. A few years ago I ranted that I couldn't see ever moving completely to a thin client/browser world. Granted, it was in the middle of a major Comcast outage, where they weren't sending any traffic to Yahoo!, which is pretty significant. These days, while there are minor outages, it's rare that I can't get to my data online. When I can't, I can get it via my cell phone (and once Google gets Calendar working on a phone, I'll be pretty much set). Finally, with Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo!) exposing your data in interesting ways (RSS, iCal feeds, private HTML), you can always pull it down into your thick client and access it offline, should you need to.

I've also had a desire to get creative again, whether its restarting the podcast (which will happen), blogging more, working on my website, or just generally brainstorming other ideas, I've needed a way to get untethered from my PC. It's cold in my little office during the winter, and I can't neatly multitask in front of the TV. With most of the creative ideas requiring the authoring of at least a little bit of code, I was looking for a laptop that would let me use my friendly Vim application to hack some HTML, CSS, or Perl.

All that put together lead to me looking at a Mac. Not because they're trendy, but because it's the nicest Unix machine you'll see. OS X is a very pretty, and functional, interface on top of a Unix backend. I can take my laptop to work and scp files from a terminal window to our data center at rates that greatly exdeed anything I can get over FTP. I can pop open a terminal window and quickly turn on apache and mess with some Perl code before I upload it to my website. I can open up GarageBand and pull together a podcast a little more easily than I can in Audacity on the PC. The ability to neatly run Windows in either VMWare or Parallels while inside of OS X is what pushed me over the top. (Actually, it was one of my co-workers showing me IE running in coherence mode inside Paralells, which meant he could have IE next to Firefox next to Safari on his desktop, allowing him to test 3 major browsers at the same time. Very cool.)

So, I pulled the trigger and picked up a MacBook Pro. It took me a little while to get used to the differences between the Mac and Windows, but the learning curve to being productive is really shallow. I've nearly replicated all of the functionality of my Windows PC, but with the ability to do it from anywhere in my house. I can listen to music streaming from my iTunes library while I type this up, waiting for Heroes to buffer up enough on the DVR so that I can watch it without commercials. Soon, I'll probably throw together another episode of my podcast, which I can do significantly more easily now that I don't have to start up a bunch of different applications (I'm still figuring out how to make the built-in mic work, as it seems to record to quietly).

So, I hope that my new found freedom will allow me to be a bit more prolific. With work and general life stuff, I've had to cut back my posting at The House That Dewey Built -- I've sort of just become the tech guy and will let Jeff and the new folks concentrate on posting (though, I might have to throw something up there when the feeling hits me). I've got plans to at least throw something up at ryantoohil.com and let it be my testing ground for learning more CSS and JavaScript. I'm feeling a bit more invigorated, which is nice.

I actually want to build my home page around my little Mii off of my Wii. I haven't gotten a good screenshot yet, but here's an approximation. And yes, I'm a huge dork.

Hopefully, this desire to be creative will last. I'm going to try to get something up most days this week. I'm thinking that I'll finally revisit the "So you want to have a web site" series. I'm planning on getting up a Dear Leader-centric podcast.

If you're still out there reading, feel free to leave a comment. I'm curious to see how many are actually reading this. Checking my logs, I've got at least two readers in Google Reader (1 is me ...) and 2 in NewsGator. If I was smart, I'd move to FeedBurner so I could track it, but I've got no desire to do that just yet.

That's all for today. Heroes is starting, and I'm hoping that they'll recover from their recent doldrums and put together a fun episode that doesn't smell like fish.

Lots of stuff ... eventually

I've got lots of stuff percolating around my brain, but I just haven't had time this week to write any of it down. I'm hoping to get back to a more regular schedule shortly.

In the meantime, I can tell you that I'm very deaf but very giddy after seeing Dear Leader, Taxpayer, and Hallelujah the Hills last night. All three bands were awesome, but Dear Leader stole the show by putting on what may have been their best live show ever ... including a ridiculously good cover of "Born to Run".

Phenom.

More Google Calendar and Evite Fun

After now having at least 2(!) people besides myself using the little Greasemonkey script I wrote to allow quick adding of Evite invites into Google Calendar, I've finally added my script to userscripts. Maybe I'll eventually have 10 people using it. Then I'll be famous. And maybe rich.

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