Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Salon: U.S. generals call for Democratic takeover. 

A bit of a smackdown between Ze Frank and Rocketboom. Competition is inevitable, and a good thing, imho. 

67MB movie demo of my entertainment system. 

Why doesn't Howard Stern have a podcast? (Or does he?) 

Grace Davis explains why "we don't mind the crazy ass real estate prices and earthquakes." 

O'Reilly has a $7.99 booklet about OPML written by Amy Bellinger. I'm sure it's good, Amy does good work. 

I was checking out Google's new custom search engine feature (released today) and was surprised to see them support OPML format for "annotations." Screen shot. 

My TV has its own computer 

Kent Newsome: "No one other than a honking nerd wants to watch TV in a little window on a computer, when a big screen HDTV plasma is sitting 20 feet away."

I have a 46 inch LCD TV, made by Sony, and it's great, and it does HDTV, and I watch broadcast stuff on it regularly, like the World Series (Game 3 starts in a few hours) and serials like Studio 60 and Lost. I said it before, HD changes not only the way you look at TV, it changes the way you look at everything. I've been struggling to find a way to explain this, and haven't come up with one yet, but I recommend if you want to find out more, find a friend with an HD setup and watch one of your favorite shows at his or her house. It's not enough to go to a store to get a demo, or to see a quick demo at a friends' house. For me, it was watching Phantom of the Opera at Scoble's house in Half Moon Bay that made the difference. Two weeks later I had my own HD setup. Yes, it happens that quickly.

But Kent is missing something that I think a lot of other people miss. His big honkin plasma TV probably has a PC video-in jack on the back, and while the UI to switch between the cable box and PC is klunky, once you learn how to do it, it's not difficult, and it opens another door that's totally worth opening. I know, because in addition to HD, I also bought a Mac Mini with a 120GB hard drive to watch movies that come from its hard disk. I'm developing quite a collection, thanks to Netflix and Handbrake. But it also means I don't need an aggregator from Tivo, I just use the same one I always use, a copy of Radio running on one of my servers in Dallas. Why? Because my TV (through the Mac) also has a net connection.

I think maybe I should write a book about how you invent and promote standards for fun and profit, because what I'm doing here is exactly what I did when I started blogging, or publishing in XML and then RSS, or started pushing audio blog posts as enclosures in my RSS feeds. You start by putting two things next to each other that you think should work together. Then you shorten the distance, and shorten it again, and keep optimizing until you have something that other people could use. Then you tell them about it, and tell them again, and again and so on until you have a standard.

HD and Macs and cable, Bluetooth (for the keybaord and mouse), RSS and TCP/IP. All these techonologies come together in my home entertainment center. I don't watch TV on my computer screen, but I do watch my computer on my TV screen, if you get what I mean.

BTW, Engadget has an excellent HD website, they tell you what's on, and about new technology that's relevant to HD users.

Dave Zatz wonders whether it's time to get HD. Yes, yes, yes. If you want to help figure all this stuff out, we need you to have the new eyes that you get from HD. Think about it this way. If there was an upgrade available for your eyes that gave you 3D vision when you just had 2D, would you pay $1500 for that? Yes, it is that big a difference, imho.

A 67MB movie demo of my entertainment system.

Another Republican for Cut and Run 

Lindsey Graham: "We're on the verge of chaos, and the current plan is not working."

Seems the Republicans are finally ditching Dubya.

I love what Nancy Pelosi said at the end of her 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, when asked if she would go for impeaching Bush after she becomes Speaker of the House.

"Wouldn't they just love it, if we came in and our record as Democrats coming forth in 12 years, is to talk about George Bush and Dick Cheney? This election is about them. This is a referendum on them. Making them lame ducks is good enough for me."

No matter what, we've got the change we were looking for, even if the Republicans retain control of Congress. They can't recover in two years from the kind of internal warfare they're waging against each other now. No matter what, Bush is already the lamest of lame ducks.