TV

A little over two years ago when I moved to San Clemente I gave up my TV based on Eric's advice (ok, I actually just did not hook it up - it sat in my living room for two years till I moved to Mountain View). At first what I really liked about giving up the TV is I only had a few shows I bought from iTunes and some DVDs and stuff from college so I usually did not stay up late watching TV. This was very useful since I was starting a new job and was not ready to ignore the work day starts at 8 am rule. Over time I started finding websites where I could watch low and mid quality copies of shows which I have written about before. And the amount of available shows on iTunes increased.

Since then NBC and all the channels it owns (turns out they own everything) pulled out of iTunes. This caused a drop in my TV options for a bit. Then hulu was created (Julie gets credit for pointing this out to me). As more and more shows have been added to that (including the daily show and colbert report) there has been almost too many TV options. However, hulu is a bit tricky since it will sometimes only have a few seasons of a show or parts of a show.

To deal with getting hooked on a few shows I recently joined netflix. So far netflix has been awesome (well except for at first when they put a hold on my account and didn't tell me till I called to ask why they were not sending anything). However this has led to two issues. The first is that I almost have too much TV to watch now and sometimes actually feel bad that I'm falling behind on the daily show (I had to drop the colbert report subscription on hulu because it was too much TV). The second I don't have a real concrete issue. But it bothers me that I now get TV by mail. How backwards is that? Instead of using the cable that comes into my house or the DSL line, I use the internet to tell a company what shows to mail to me each day. Now I do know that if you are sending enough data eventually IP over USPS does actually win for speed and cost, but that's way more data than 3 or 4 episodes of a show each day. It also seems like the least environmentally friendly way too (especially when you account for all the paper packaging). Yes they have some DVDs you can stream, but 10,000 DVDs is actually not as many as you'd think (their mailing option has over 100,000 DVDs). Netflix plus hulu feeds into my preferred (semi-obsessive) favorite way of watching TV - pick one show and watch it from beginning to end then if it is good enough watch it all again (maybe not immediately). To help with the watching it a second time a person less honest than the person I pretend to be online might use the program handbrake especially since it will encode to ipod and iphone formats.

I think I could stretch and make some comments about getting rid of cable allowing a faster transition to TV over the series of tubes and even tie it in with developing nations that leapfrog the US in certain technologies because they are not tied to legacy infrastructure, but it is 1 am and I'm too tired to get it to make sense and definitely too tired to make sure I don't come off as totally arrogant when saying it (I'll save any tolerance you have for arrogance for when I get around to discussing why offshore drilling is a bad idea and is contradicted by what is often the news story just before or after it about how prices are stabilizing as demand goes down due to increasing prices and many of these changes will pay off in the long run, not just short term fixes. And the candidates claiming to support alternative energy given the main way to support it is to increase oil prices (ideally giving the extra money to efforts to help the environment, but even without that part it still works). Also I recognize people are struggling right now, but their problem is not high gas prices it is too little money given the total cost of goods they buy, if gas prices are high but they are given more money or other prices go down then there are still incentives to avoid oil, but people won't be struggling and since they still have incentives to avoid oil it both brings down short and long term demand and provides room in the market for alternative energy sources (how do you do this? well reducing taxes for the poor and creating more social programs is a good start) - hm that was almost like a blog in a blog, but with really bad grammar - sorry - oh and I guess I just ruined any chance I might have of running for president in the future. Actually that's another interesting topic - in 20 to 40 years we'll be able to look at what candidates put in their facebook profile and blogs in high school and college! There's going to be a whole generation that cannot run for president.).

Ok, now it is time to admit why I really joined netflix - hulu got me hooked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but only has the first two seasons. I was feeling very awkward about admitting I like the show since I always thought it was a silly high school show. But reading through the hulu comments apparently everyone else had the same issue that they thought it was a silly show for high school kids and then watched a bit and realized it is actually good. The interesting thing is the story is about the girl who would normally be killed or need saving, but in this case is the strong hero so to be good it almost has to look like a silly high school show from a distance. I would warn though that the first season is a bit too goofy (later seasons are still plenty goofy) and low budget so don't judge till season 2, and the movie doesn't count as part of the series at all. I also started watching Angel, but my opinion is it is not goofy enough. Watching Buffy leads to the same conclusion Julie had recently - Joss Whedon is a genius (same guy who created Firefly and Serenity, which is a large part of why I gave Buffy a chance). Oh and along those same lines if you have not seen Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog it's time to go check it out (also a Joss creation and stars Neil Patrick Harris). It's only three 15 minute clips and is free.

Circling back to hulu. A few tips that may not be totally obvious. First - subscribing to a show is great since you just have to watch your queue rather than checking each show to see if there is something new. Second - some shows expire so double check if you are going to wait more than a week or so to watch something (this is mostly true for new stuff like the Colbert report). Third - when you mouse over the video, on the right side there are some buttons that appear. Full screen is self explanatory. Some shows have a 480p button that switches to high res - definitely worth selecting - video is clearly better and I've sort of convinced myself that the audio is also better. And if you are going through your queue it won't stay in hi-res so you have to set it each time (and yes for some reason to have to leave full screen to set hi-res).

Well, every once in a while I have to justify naming the blog David's Random Ramblings.

Hands Free Cellphone Law

Recently a California state law went into effect that makes it illegal to use a cell phone unless using a hands free device. The overwhelming response has been that everyone has to buy a bluetooth headset. As someone who now works for a company in the general field of wireless communications I say go buy lots and lots of bluetooth headsets. You're not cool unless you have a bluetooth headset, but it is not cool to wear one so you should have multiple so you can keep them anywhere you might want them. (I actually honestly have no idea who provides the chips for those headsets, could be a competitor so maybe don't go on the shopping spree quite yet).

But I thought I could be cheap and clever and just put one of the old wired mic plus headphone in the car for the rare occasion when I talk in the car.

But just recently I realized that I speed almost all the time. I don't go too far over the speed limit, but typically I'm a bit over - in fact not being a bit over would typically disrupt traffic. So what's with the sudden freak out about breaking traffic laws? Especially since you could get multiple fines for being on the phone before equaling the cost of a decent bluetooth headset.

I haven't started following my own advice, but when it occurred to me I was surprised that no one else had brought this up yet.

The Dark Knight

I went to see The Dark Knight: The IMAX Experience. I'm sure this is the first time you've heard anyone mention this movie, not sure why it doesn't get any press. I'm not going to say if you should see it or not, but if you are going to see it I'd recommend going for IMAX even if it means buying tickets a week ahead of time. And whenever there is a non-action shot, make sure to check out the background rather than just looking at the people in the foreground.

Even though he did not realize it, one of the friends I went with made me very happy. He noticed during the credits that Anthony Michael Hall was in the movie and wondered who he played. This gave me a chance to pull out the iPhone I had just bought a couple hours earlier (after waiting a mere 2 hours in line - thank goodness I had some Arrested Development episodes on my iPod) and answer the question using IMDB.

Which brings us to the real reason for this whole post - I'm trying to test the RSS reader on the iPhone so I need a feed to update.

Shenanigans

I call shenanigans on this article. Ok, I completely believe that China is blocking lots of websites. I also think that government censorship is a very bad thing. However, I do not believe this is causing an issue for journalists.

There are a few reasons for my disbelief. The first is that (as I understand) in general the great firewall blocks people who do not otherwise have contacts outside China from certain material. Once you have a contact in another country there are all sorts of ways to get around it. More on this later. Second the article is talking about journalists in general so many of them are part of major news organizations that have journalists all over the world with varying degrees of web restrictions. And many of them have had reporters in China for a long time. So even if the average American or even average American company could not figure out how to get around it I would expect these companies to have invested in finding a way around it.

So how do you get around the great firewall? Well, lets start with the lowest tech. Perhaps you want to get to a certain Amnesty International site, you could write a NYT article about how you can't - or you could call an intern in the US (or perhaps India to avoid time zone issues) and ask them to print and fax or next day the information. Not great, but not hard to figure out. A bit more complicated, but instead of faxing send in an encrypted email (maybe average joe doesn't know how to do it, so hire a CS major from the local college to show you how). You could setup a proxy, takes a bit of knowledge, but a friend offered to setup one for me when I was there. You could probably use TOR which is a free program from the EFF and redirects web traffic through many computers so it is not easy to see where it is coming from or going to. Or finally the most likely - use VPN possibly combined with VNC. My understanding is basically all major companies have VPN setup (a way to securely join the company's network when out of the office), even the 100 person company I worked for used VPN (which was setup and maintained by one person). Plus I would think journalists need a way to securely submit their articles without government oversight or having them stolen. If just VPN is not enough then run a program like VNC or windows remote desktop (which comes with windows) that allows you to control another computer so instead of sending a website it is sending screen images and over an encrypted connection thanks to VPN.

Sorry, didn't mean to dig into the technical quite so much, but wanted to make it clear that any international journalist, especially if connected to a major news organization, should have no problem getting to anything on the web. So I say stop your fake whinnying and write about a real problem - perhaps all the Chinese people who really are not able to get to these websites.

Paul Reubens

Back when I was about 10 (for once that's actually the correct age) Pee-wee Herman got arrested for "dropping his pants" in a movie theater. Or so everyone put it. Being 10 I figured that was literally what happened (I took it so literally I thought he still had his underwear on). At some point kids realized that it was at an adult theater which made it seem a bit more justifiable. I haven't thought about Pee-wee Herman many times since then, but as I got older I figured that Pee-wee dropping his pants was clearly wrong, but didn't seem to match the amount of talk about it and backlash against him. The part that is embarrassing for me, is it is not until tonight, after seeing him in a small role, that it occurred to me that "dropping his pants" was a euphemism. The doubly embarrassing part is that even after having the epiphany the dropping his pants story was so ingrained that I had to look it up to be sure (thanks wikipedia for covering every question a person could possibly have).

Here's a crazy fact: the father of the guy who plays Pee-wee Herman flew for the British in WWII and was one of the founding pilots of the Israeli Air Force.