Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 864 – Scott Alan Miller

February 17, 2008: Another Dr. Who Day

No sun today for Oreo. He was not very happy about that. He looks forward to lounging in the sunlight on his lazy Sundays.

We finished watching the first season of the new Doctor Who. After that Dominica decided that she wanted to get to know some of the older, classic episodes so we went back and started watching Tom Baker, Peter Davidson and more.

We did some computer work today. I have had some quick hardware projects saved up for Min so that she could get some hands-on experience on some commercial HP machines that we finally got around to today. So now my Windows XP desktop that I used mainly for remote access to the office has three times as much memory as before which really helps and it now has an additional half terabyte of storage.

I did a bit of work getting a middle-ages Compaq Deskpro ENS desktop installed and set up with OpenSUSE 10.3. Dominica added in some additional memory. It is now ready to go to the school in Castile.

We decided that today was going to be a blow-off day as well so we just settled in and watched Netflix (all Doctor Who, all the time) and then went to bed around eleven.

February 16, 2008: Addicted to Doctor Who

I was up at nine this morning. Oreo was up and asking to move out into the sunlight. He loves sunny weekends, no denying that. Dominica slept in but not nearly as long as usual and was up around ten or so.

We decided to take it easy today and spent much of the day watching the 2005 season of Doctor Who which Dominica is completely addicted to now. We almost made it all of the way through the 2005 season (which is also known as Season 27.) Netflix is definitely awesome. We are so happy about how well this service is working. I can’t believe how inexpensively they are able to deliver this service. Although one thing that people often forget is that delivering a DVD requires a lot of money for the postage and anyone who gets one can easily make themselves a copy of it. But the Netflix download service is DRM’d and it is very difficult to copy and the cost of “delivery” is near nominal. But you can watch the shows as often as you want so the usability for legal service users is far better through the download service.

We relaxed all day. We also watched a little of The Cosby Show and the early 1980s classic Porkies. Porkies is one of those movies that almost everyone around my age or so has seen and knows very well but I never saw. Or if I did I can’t imagine when or how although the movie itself seemed just a little bit familiar. Not a good movie by any stretch but one of those movies that people who grew up in the 80s just need to have seen I suppose.

It was a light day and for the most part we did nothing. I did have some changes going on at the office that I needed to pay attention to and that kept us from even considering doing anything strenuous today which actually worked out well.

Pretty boring day, really, nothing much to tell.

February 15, 2008: Pontoon

Oreo was nothing more than a furry sack of potatoes this morning when we tried to get him dressed to go to daycare. It has been a really long time since he did a five day daycare week. He isn’t the young puppy that he used to be and his greying face definitely shows it.

On my way in to work this morning I finished listening to Garrison Keillor‘s latest book “Pontoon“. “Pontoon” was okay but definitely not one of his best works. It was slow, hard to follow and rather sad. One thing that Garrison has begun to do recently, which I find very strange, is to take some of his most popular “News from Lake Wobegon” vignettes and to modify them just slightly and to include them in his books. He is definitely getting more mileage from the stories this way but it is strange.

The same thing happened with “Lake Wobegon, Summer 1956“. After reading the book I later heard one of the more memorable scenes from the book abridged and used as an episode in A Prairie Home Companion. And it is always the same episodes that are put onto the collection albums so you hear them several times if you buy the collections.

Most of “Pontoon” is not based on any PHC skits but as you come to the end of the book several of the storylines come together and mash several “New from Lake Wobegon” episodes together into a single, huge scene. In some ways this is extremely interesting because it explains how so many stories in the “News from Lake Wobegon” can happen in such a small space and it provides hours of backstory filling in the gaps and fleshing out the characters and events in some of the well known stories. But it is also strange that after reading a lengthy book that the climax of the book is the bit that you already know and, in some cases, know very well.

Unfortunately that was the last Audible book that I had queued up on my iPod Nano so I will have to get it restocked with books over the weekend. It will give me a good chance to get the latest music from Amazon’s MP3 service moved onto my iPod as well. I have been buying tons of great stuff from there recently. I love that service. And I found that lots of good new stuff was on there today too.

The Spot at 45 Commerce Street in Newark, New Jersey is set to have a little party for us Eleven80 folk tonight. So we are hoping to make it over there this evening to support them. We don’t have final details on this yet so we are playing it by ear.

Dominica is addicted to the idea of taking a cruise. She has been investigating Disney Cruise lines as well as things like the QE2 and the Queen Mary 2 to go from New York to Europe. It would be really cool to be able to take the QE2 before she is retired later this year and moved to Dubai to become a floating hotel.

I found a great reference for beginning BASH programmers today: 10 Seconds Guide to Bash Shell Scripting.

Something that I have not used in a long time that I am returning to recently is “My Yahoo“. I really like the Yahoo start page which acts as a personal portal that I can use both at home and at the office. They have done a lot of work to the Yahoo “My Page” since the last time that I looked at it and I like that it shows me email, weather, RSS subscriptions and more all in one view. I often find that having RSS subscriptions in a dedicated feed aggregator (how is it possible that the standard dictionary does not have that word?) is a problem because I move from machine to machine and don’t want to manage the feeds. My Yahoo fixes that and makes it easy.

Interesting tidbits about Yahoo. At the moment their search engine is considered to be on par with Google competing to be the most useful search engine in the world. Yahoo is more popular, overall, than Google (not for search but in page views) in the United States but Google is more popular globally. Yahoo has recently been the target of a rebuffed Microsoft buyout but could yet still be purchased by them if a better offer comes through.

In the news today is word that researchers believe now that the same genes that allow some humans to resist colds may be the same genes that cause weight gain leading to obesity. I now know why I almost never get a cold!

Another era is coming to a close as Verizon, AT&T and Alltel prepare to shutdown the United States’ last remaining analogue cellular services on Monday. This is estimated to effect hundreds of thousands of customers clinging to antiquated and costly legacy services and will hit extreme rural regions the hardest as digital service is not yet available in all areas where analogue has been available for some time. Analogue cellular devices are more costly to maintain than digital and use more electricity making them environmentally unfriendly. Maintaining two separate systems has been expensive for these large carriers and the government, as of Monday, is no longer requiring them to support the old systems.

Scott Adams commented on Death by Frozen Poop.

Comcast today has stated that even under the FCC’s 2005 Net Neutrality law (providing equal access to the network for all customers) Comcast is claiming that discriminatory blocking of applications and customers on their network is within their purview under the heading of “reasonable network management.” Is it any wonder that net neutrality is critical today if even with it in place companies believe that they can get away with picking and choosing which paying customers get service and which do not?

Mary Lou Jepsen has left the OLPC project to start her own for-profit company to capitalize on technologies that were developed for the OLPC. She is predicting that we are just two years away from the production of the $75 laptop! What amazes me is that we can talk about a $75 laptop but can’t make a $75 desktop! It seems to be that cheap desktops would be far easier to produce. And yet the cheapest that I have seen to date is $199.

The OLPC project is in the news recently as they attempt to test the XO in Haiti in a project giving the laptops directly to students.

Work was busy this afternoon and I was stuck in the office until well after six thirty.

I did some research on the AppleTV based movie rentals and discovered that they are insanely expensive. The idea is great and, in many ways, beats out the Netflix approach by providing a system for people with slow Internet connections to be able to get 720p HD h.264 movies over the Internet by caching to iTunes (downloads could take eight hours or more but you could start it during the night or when you head off to the office) but the cost is so high that it is hard to imagine anyone taking advantage of it. Five dollars for an Internet based movie rental is way too high. For less than the cost of two movie rentals in a month you could have a full subscription to Netflix and get unlimited movies! Only those rare people who can’t watch more than one movie a month are likely to find this to be very useful.

We got home and met up with Kevin and Pam and we walked over to The Spot to check out the scene there. The Spot was very busy – we were very surprised. There was barely any space anywhere. It looks like The Spot is going to be very popular. We hung out there until a little before midnight then came back to Eleven80 to get some pizza.

I walked Oreo and we ordered in some late night pizza from New York Pizzeria and then it was off to bed.

February 14, 2008: Happy Valentine’s Day

Happy Saint Valentine’s Day everyone! And happy birthday my niece, Madeline! I don’t think that she reads SGL but someday she will look back and this and know that I remembered her birthday.

For Valentine’s Day Dominica wanted a Pajamagram. She asked for it weeks ago. I think that she thinks that I forgot but I didn’t. And since I don’t post the dailies until after she should have it it is safe to mention it here. That and she never reads the site. I scheduled the delivery so that it is supposed to arrive tonight. UPS has it “out for delivery” at the moment. Unfortunately Dominica never gets the packages so I have to get it and bring it up to the apartment. Not much of a surprise. (Ryan can sympathize with me.)

Oreo was incredulous this morning when we got him dressed for daycare. He was sure that he was going to get to stay in bed and relax. He is going to be so tired by the weekend. It is a good thing that I have Monday off so that he can sleep some more.

The weather was much improved today. It is still chilly but the wind isn’t so bad and the slush has mostly gone away. The walk into the office was fine and passed quickly. I ate a poptart on the way in. Saves time and money.

Dominica and I were attempting to make some dinner plans for tonight when my team in Bahrain scheduled me to work tonight at eight o’clock. Of course, why would I get Valentine’s Day dinner time free? How silly of me. What was I thinking.

Dad’s old laptop is starting to die. This is the HP Pavilion with the AMD XP 32bit processor. It is overheating something awful and shutting down on him all of the time. Not much use to him anymore. Or to anyone. This is the same unit that I caught my food on the power cord one day and broke the power connector socket so that it almost never works. It is an old laptop and has been around for quite some time. It is ready to be retired from active duty.

Yesterday, Rocketboom’s correspondent in Kenya, Ruud Elmendorp, provided a good, short documentary on how that country is coping with their recent structural breakdown. Good video for everyone but especially good for students looking for good “current events” coverage.

This weekend is going to be a little busy because I have to take my final for my Project Management class. This is the last test that I will have in the class. On the following weekend I will be turning in my final paper for the class. So the next week or so is going to be quite busy with that. But then project management is complete and I get to move on to “Object Technologies” shortly thereafter.

Lunch was falafel pita from the truck outside the office. Cheap and tasty.

I am really looking forward to this weekend. I am just very worn down. It has been a long week. I don’t get a lot of opportunity during the week to catch up no sleep when something happens and I miss sleeping on Sunday night. It really takes a toll on me all week long.

I didn’t get to head for home until six so it was around seven when I finally got home. I was hoping to be able to pick up dinner on the way home but my mobile phone died on the way home when Dominica called me and we didn’t get a chance to discuss dinner so it had to wait until I was home as I didn’t know what she wanted. She called while I was just getting to the train to tell me that she had gotten the Pajamagram that I had sent. I was very happy that it actually arrived today and that she went and checked the package arrivals at the desk.

On my way past “The Spot” – the new upscale dinner club opening just down the street from Eleven80 – I stopped in to see how the progress was coming and they said that they are going to push through the night to get ready. They are planning on having a party tomorrow night at four to midnight for the Eleven80 people and the NJ Devils to go check the place out. So we are planning to go there tomorrow night.

I got home and we ordered dinner from Food for Life next door. I called ahead and then went over to pick it up. We had very little time to do anything tonight between getting home a little late and then having to work in the middle of the evening.

We watched a few episodes of The Cosby Show and ate our dinner in bed with Oreo who fell asleep as soon as we finished eating. At eight thirty I went out and took care of the mid-evening work that needed to be completed and then we went to bed very early – before ten.

Netflix, AppleTV and the End of Television

I have written before about the downfall of broadcast television – including cable television and other “one to many” legacy distribution systems for video content. I have written that the DVD would be the last big physical media format for movies and that BlueRay and HD-DVD would never have the chance to be as popular because the end of physical media had arrived. They will go down as the last effort of the industry to hold on to a changing marketplace.

I have written these things and have been disputed again and again that television is so dominant and that the idea of getting videos on physical media is so core to our culture that it would be many years if not many decades before these things will change. But I believe that the end is already here. Driven, in part, by the industry division caused by the competing media formats which are too complex for the average consumer to differentiate between, partially because of the poor standards of HDTV and its inability to handle the de facto high definition standard of 1080p, partially because of intentionally misleading marketing and specifications on high definition display products but mostly because the time and technology are right.

There are several technology players who have stepped up to the plate recently to tackle the world of physical and traditional media. I have opined in the past that non-commercial services like YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and RSS feed based downloadable content from shows like Rocketboom, Wandering West Michigan and others through software like FireANT or Democracy would be the disruptive factors deciding the fate of media. I still believe that they will remain major plays and, over time, will come to dominate the marketplace as people turn away from commercial production finding more niche content delivered in a more personal way to be more valuable. But before that can happen there is an intermediate phase, I believe, in which commercial content will be delivered through next-generation methods and this will remove the underpinnings of traditional media.

Enter Netflix and AppleTV. There are others, of course. And some that came earlier. Amazon Unbox covers much of the same ground. But Netflix and AppleTV look to be the most disruptive and visible of the players in this new content delivery space.

The first serious, large scale implementation of a network delivery system for digital video content came from Apple’s iTunes. iTunes and AppleTV together form a cache and store content delivery network with complex Digital Rights Management (DRM) allowing for a simply and traditionally styled interface to television like content delivered over the Internet. Because of its cache and store architecture iTunes is able to function with very high definition video even over slower and less reliable network connections. The iTunes licensing team has secured a large volume of current television shows and movies that can be purchased through iTunes and watched on a computer, on a media center or on the AppleTV. The system is straightforward for most consumers and works very well. And the quality of the content generally meets or exceeds the alternatives of broadcast HDTV or DVD. Additionally the iTunes system blends alternative content from RSS/Atom feeds seamlessly into the picture allowing The Jet Set Show or Channel Frederator programs to appear as any other “television” content. Even YouTube can be viewed through the system. For consumers used to the high costs of cable and the unavailability of broadcast signals iTunes and AppleTV is a high quality, low cost competitor to traditional television with the advantage of having no commercials and all content being available on demand.

Netflix has recently entered the arena with their own disruptive service. Netflix’s primary business is as a movie rental alternative whereby movie renters can sign up for a monthly rental service and have DVDs or, more recently, HD-DVD and BlueRay Discs, delivered to them by post. The cost is extremely low and the ease of use and vast selection makes it very easy to choose over traditional rental services. Over the past few years Netflix has become very popular especially with the serious cinema market. The new service from Netflix is the ability to view movies over the Internet via a streaming video service. This service is included with all of the normal movie rental pricing plans making it “free” for their current user base to test and try. This service, for people with moderate quality Internet connections, provides instant access to a massive, and constantly growing, library of “on demand” movies, documentaries and television programs. For only a tiny fraction of the normal cost of cable service one can subscribe to Netflix’s unlimited download service and get unlimited, commercial free on-demand content. The system is new but massively disruptive.

What is truly amazing about these two systems and their competitive counterparts like Amazon Unboxed is that they are not competing with the content of current media but only competing with the content delivery system. By switching from traditional television and movie rentals to these services one will, under the vast majority of circumstances, save money, increase easy of use after initial learning curve, remove commercials, remove reliance on “schedules” or “hours of business”, reduce necessary planning, increase selection, increase quality and remove expensive and incompatible devices which are currently popular to “mimick” these types of services such as DVRs.

What we are seeing now is an adaptation allowing people to continue to use the content that they are used to while receiving it through modern methods. These new distribution systems will, in all likelihood, prove to be ideal conduits for new types of content that can be delivered just as easily as traditional content. The end of traditional television is here. No longer is television just a legacy technology delivering a unique form of commercial entertainment and content that was not yet available through modern means – now it is simply legacy.