New bed = oversleeping. This is a bad thing from some perspectives, but it also tells me that my bed purchase and mattress choices were good ones. I can’t believe what a difference it makes. I will stop babbling about my new furniture now, well, after I tell you that the new dresser has made getting dressed in the morning a pleasure. Okay, I’m done now.
Andy’s Researching the 2004 Oscar Screeners shows just how far video sharing has come. This must be some truly scary shit for the movie folks. Now, let’s see if they have put the extra time they’ve had since the Napster explosion, and the lessons learned from the music folks, to good use in working through the problem. I mean, really, they need to look at their content distribution system very carefully here.
The one really huge difference here is that movies, far more than music, draw a premium price during their initial run. Meaning, you can go to a theater and see a movie, but you can't take it home until several months later. This definitely works against the movie folks when it comes to sharing. This time period where they create this "artificial" scarcity is also the time period where pirates are most likely to want the film. Obviously, the theater experience is supposed to be a premium viewing experience from a screen and sound perspective, but this is being eroded as time goes on and home theater gets better and cheaper. Theater owners who have been overcharging us for everything from tickets to popcorn may find themselves the first set of business victims of this new content sharing battle. After a film''s theatrical run, there is a long gap until it is commercially released as a for-sale product. The scarcity during this time period is even worse than the scarcity during the theater run, thus, sharing will continue during this part of the movie's lifecycle.
So really, the movie business has two issues where the music business had one. During the initial theatrical run and the ensuing time period until the commercial release of the movie on DVD, there is no legal way to take a film home, and so, sharing during this time period of a movie's life will still be an issue even once their equivalent of the iTune Music Store is launched. Of course the second problem is some sort of electronic distribution like the iTMS, and I have seen several companies working on this problem already. In all cases, they are going about things the way that pre-iTunes Music Store online music ventures were done, with Draconian DRM, limited access time, and no ability to burn to DVD or CD. I predict that these ventures will be equally unsuccessful as the early online music distribution was, and that they will have to come around a bit, despite the lessons learned in the music sharing battles, which, of course, continue even now with legitimate online music distribution only making partial inroads. They should cut out the middle man, and begin rethinking the way the distribute movies now, or the next few years will be even more painful for them than the last few have been for the music companies. It definitely looks like the hardware companies are well on their way to creating a device demand for this content.
I’ve updated the RSS feed for this site to include the full text of each post. I made this decision based on my own experiences using NetNewsWire. I would rather be able to peruse the entire entry via the newsreader, and I am guessing that others would want to do the same. Finally, I can only imagine that when I get an RSS reader for my Sidekick, I will want to be able to read full posts from it, as the overhead of then visiting sites would be a pain in the ass.
PalmSource stealth releases OS milestone If you were thinking about buying a PalmOS based device, you might want to consider holding off for the devices that support this new version, as it includes some really big leaps in their architecture.
So the furniture came in the afternoon. What a difference it makes. I wish I had taken a before picture. Next up: window treatments.
So, I have been using Dave’s Share Your OPML site for about a week now, and I have to say that the idea is a great one. I have already discovered a bunch of feeds that I never knew existed by browsing the lists of subscriptions of people whom I respect or otherwise have some level of context for from the Web.
Having said that, there are a few things about the site that make it far less useful to me than it would otherwise be. First, it catalogs feeds by their URL, not by the URL of the parent site, at least as far as I can tell. As a result, it tells me that I am not subscribed to feeds that I actually am subscribed to, just not that particular version of the feed. This becomes more troubling as sites get three or four different feeds for different RSS formats.
The second issue is one easily fixed. When looking at people's subscription lists, the name of the feed/site links to the feed, as it should. However, there is no link in the listing to the actual site. I want this because I don't want to mess up my subs lists with sites that I won't want to have in my list. The ability to get to the site in one click makes it far easier for me to tell if I really do want to give a particular feed a try.
I guess the moral of the story with both of these issues is that RSS feeds are a part of a particular Web site. This application fails to close that loop, and treats the feeds just as feeds, as if there weren't greater context to the posts and information than just a feed. With a couple of adjustments, that feed to Web loop could be closed, and things would make a lot more sense.(to me)
Update: I just noticed that the Top 100 feeds list does link to each individual site rather than the rss file for the site, so, clearly, this is something that Dave could do, perhaps with an icon in each line item, in people's subscriptions lists.
ESPN.com:: “After learning that Roger Clemens had officially un-retired on Monday, the Yankees made an immediate, internal decision to avoid a public squabble with the right-hander.” Thank god. There isn’t anything to be gained by getting upset about this. Clemens was a great Yankee, and I wish him the best in Houston. If he is happier being closer to his family, I, for one, certainly wouldn’t begrudge him that happiness.
I’m working from home today in order to take delivery of some new bedroom furniture. Woot woot!! It’s been a long time in coming, but I think I have finally gotten into a “nesting” groove with my house. Like so many other things in my life, I tend to look too much at the big picture, get overwhelmed, and get frustrated. This tends to get worse with the house because it is a large place for one person, and the big yard and pool only make that worse. This year, I have resolved to focus on one room, or one outdoor project, at a time. I decided to start with the bedroom because it ends up being where I spend the bulk of my time. As a result, the guest bedroom also gets an upgrade.
It's worth mentioning that this was all set in motion by one of the best customer service experiences of my life. Last summer, in July, I decided to look into getting new bedroom furniture. I went to a few stores, and decided that I liked one particular set, but that the amount of money was beyond what I wanted to spend at that point. I hadn't been back, or even really thought about going back, until I got a call from the saleswoman who talked to me in July last week. That's right, six months after I was in the store, she called me to let me know that they were changing around their showroom, and that the king bed I was looking at would not fit in the new location, so they were replacing it with a Queen size and needed to sell the King at a deep discount immediately. I went in over the weekend, and walked out with almost a fifty percent discount on the entire set of furniture I wanted. Rest assured, when it is time for the new dining room table, I know what store and salesperson I will be going to first. It's this kind of personal customer service that I find missing in most of my consumer type experiences these days. She even called me this morning, not because she had to, but because she wanted to make sure that my delivery experience went as smoothly as possible. So thanks Kelly, I really appreciate it. In case you live in Atlanta, and are looking for furniture, Kelly works at the Storehouse in Lenox Mall.
Clemens to pitch for Astros Sweet Jesus.
Medium Footwear is a beautiful flash site, and the sneakers are equally beautiful and clearly inspired by the classics of sneaker design.
Why does qbert.com resolve to Sony Pictures?
BBC NEWS: ‘Chemical weapons’ found in Iraq Woah. I think the funny thing about this is how dissapointed it must make one of the political parties in this country.
Of course, I’m also excited to check out the SuicideGirls Live Burlesque Tour when they are in town on January 28th. I’ve never been to a burlesque show before.
Saddam’s an OutKast: Hey Allah! Hahahahahaahaha.
PVRBlog discusses the new TiVo to Go features that TiVo announced at CES today. Sounds great to me. Of course, with some hacking you can do this today with a series 1 TiVo, but it’s great that they are going to bring this to the masses. I just wish that I didn’t have to wait until Fall 2004 for the feature.
Philips Mirror TV has to be the coolest idea for home electronics that I have seen in a while. I must have one or two.
Like Pete, I have switched to Thunderbird as my primary mail client on both my Windows and Mac OS X machines. It works, it is fast, and it is the same on both platforms without punishing me in order to do so. Worth checking out.
I got my machine back from Apple when I returned to Atlanta after the Christmas holiday. They ended up replacing not only the hard drive, but the display, display bezel, keyboard and some other parts. This was odd to me because I only took it in for the hard drive issue. The new keyboard is nice though, I had worn shiny spots on a bunch of the keys on the old one.
As you might expect, I had to reinstall virtually everything after having the hard drive replaced. It made me realize just how great I think iSync is. My Safari bookmarks and contacts were on the machine in a few minutes, and it saved me the terrible task of rebuilding these things. This also made me realize that Apple needs to extend iSync with an API that third parties can take advantage of in their own applications. It would be great to have my NetNewsWire subscriptions or Transmit bookmarks move over in the same way. I went to the iSync feedback form and asked. I wonder if I shall ever receive?
Wow, NFL STREET from EASports Big line, looks like it might be the next killer Football video game. The gameplay looks very fluid, the character modeling is impressive, and the arenas look very well done.
Merry New Year.