Jennlog

Last week, I cancelled my DirecTV service. The three months of “Vacation” from DirecTV that I arranged over the summer proved to me that I can successfully live without cable and satellite television. The WGA strike’s affect on the more random, transient programming I watch didn’t hurt either.

Don’t get me wrong, I still watch television shows — and, lucky for me my favorite “Must Watch” network shows are programmed and provided by NBC, FOX and ABC and not CBS.

I say lucky for me, because the video quality on CBS’s “Innertube” service has left me feeling that CBS hates the Internet, hates their viewers or both.

Today, I decided to check out that much-hyped CBS reality show where the show producers abandon 40 or so kids in some ghost town with a hope that they go all Lord of the Flies on one another.

I notice a change almost immediately in CBS’s feed. Maybe they dumped the Real Networks-based streaming service and its constant “buffering…” messages that annoyed me the last time I wrote about Internet televsion?

CBS replaced the “buffering… buffering… buffering… ” with — well… — I’ve recorded a 30-second audio sample (yes, the video was just as poor as the audio). Various press releases state that move networks (the service that really impressed me with their ABC and FOX stream delivery) now includes CBS as one of their clients, so this quality problem would appear to be CBS-originated rather than a move networks problem. Which is good, because I really like the other stuff move networks delivers to my house.

Anatomy of an Internet Television Show

NBC (Ignore the downloadable shows, they’re only for Microsoft owners using the Windows-only version of the Internet), FOX and ABC place complete episodes of most of their interesting shows on the web.

Most of the network streaming services make you watch the same commercial five or six times in the place of the twenty minutes of commercials you’d normally see during a one hour show, with ABC being the only network mixing in their own show promotions with the commercials.

I actually prefer this approach to traditional advertiser-supported television. If an advertiser wants to pay a network some money in exchange for me to view an episode’s worth of tv, even if there’s no chance in hell of me ever buying or using that product, then good for them and great for me. I’ll take six 15 second commercials in exchange for twenty minutes of random interruptions any day.

So, what do I watch?

NBC

• Heroes
• 30 Rock
• NBC Nightly News

FOX

• The Simpsons
• Bones
• House
• Kitchen Nightmares
• Hell’s Kitchen (Hell’s Kitchen link currently plays American Dad)

ABC

• Grey’s Anatomy

CBC
(the trick is to click pause and let the show download first)

• The National
• Toronto 6pm News (when it works)

Shows I can live without, but wish were available online:

Bravo

• Project Runway
• Top Chef

FX

• The Riches

Local News

I live next to the foothills in Boulder within an apparent RF deadzone (ask any cab driver trying to bill my credit card at my house). I wish there was one local Denver TV station that streamed or allowed the download of local news rather than splitting their stories into tiny clips as added “multimedia rich media extras” linked from Web pages.

It’s been over a month since my last post, I apologize. I’ve been working with Michael on getting the Beta ready and we should be sharing it with the world shortly.

Tour.net hasn’t had content on it since 1995 and I recently decided to sell. Even though there hasn’t been content on it since 1995, the domain still generates between 500 and 1000 visitors a month. With over 90% always originating from China.

For not having any content on it, it still averages between 500 and 1000 visits a month and most of those originate from China.

… Yallery announcement tomorrow.

My parents were here for the last two weeks and I didn’t get a chance to look at my blog, let alone post to it. I’ll gather some thoughts and post something soon.

I also plan to reply to Jake McAuley who posted a comment to my previous post requesting that I teach him (and I presume others) how to effectively report spammers after I effectively reported him off of his provider (I also presume) after I received UCE from him.

It seems one of the latest updates (Security Update, Pro Applications Support, iTunes or Safari 3 Beta) from apple has killed the 17″ Powerbook.  I won’t be installing them on the 12″ Powerbook or the dual g5.  There’s one other instance so far on the Apple Discussions board.  Thanks apple! 

I did have my regular breakfast item at Buck’s this morning (the Devine, yum) with a friend and an old friend of his from Bell Labs. Smart guys. This also means I didn’t make it to the Palo Alto OpenCoffee meeting. But, as there was only one other person confirmed to attend on meetup.org, it was probably no large loss.

This has historically been the highest traffic day for my personal servers due to the spontaneous concentration of links to my Honourary Canadian Citizenship Certificate (HC3) generator.

To the CBC, to Amber MacArthur and everyone else who has linked to the HC3 page on Canada Day (and everyone visiting my blog today) — Have a happy Canada Day, eh.

A friend just reminded me that I’m no longer the #1 result for my name on Google. I replied that it’s probably a good thing because I’m not interesting enough to be the #1 result.

I’m sitting in FreshStart Coffee Co. right now, on Bay Street in downtown Toronto. It occurred to me that the Boulder Opencoffee group met yesterday and it was the first meeting that I’ve missed since Jason Mendelson started them earlier this year.

Seeing that I’m in Toronto until Monday, and I was wondering what’s happening here in the tech-ish funding-esque microcosm, I did a search and found Opencoffee Toronto. They meet every Thursday down on Queen St at the Tequila Bookworm Cafe. I’m going to try to make it to their meeting tomorrow.

I’ll also be in the Bay Area next month and will be missing the first Boulder OpenCoff^H^H^H^HBeer event. I will try making the Palo Alto OpenCoffee.

It was a really windy night here in Boulder last night. I was in the middle of an email when the power slowly died over 30 seconds — every time what I assume to be a branch hit the powerline, the lights and everything would blink off just a little longer, then nothing.

I counted at least 4 branches drop on the house before going to bed. The largest one shook the front of the house, and while it settled, made a loud scraping noise.

Here’s the cause of the shaking:

Jenn’s front yard tree

Jenn’s ex-front yard branch

No broken windows this time. Now, where did I leave that chainsaw?