Random Fact of the Day:

A tidbit that you can learn only by poring over random Wikipedia articles:

‘Jan‘ from The Office (NBC TV show) is the sister of the CEO of Flock (as in the browser company).

It’s all one big happy family I guess.

Random Quote of the Day:

“Oh, I get it! Silicon Valley is like Hollywood, but for nerds, and without the chicks” – from a commenter on Valleywag (which in my humble opinion has started to read like a tired rag these days).

Random Find of the Day:

http://reddit.com/user/FunFact – this guy adds a comment to every top-voted reddit submission with a ‘fun fact’ about a topic in the article. He’s gotten so popular that there’s another guy (http://reddit.com/user/did_you_know_that/) copying him.

It’s been a while since I posted anything, so I figured I’d resume on a light note 🙂 On the bright side, my HD PVR conundrum was solved yesterday and I have a Tivo HD on the way thanks to woot.com!

After reading a few reviews (and partly because I was in the mood for some change {lame, I know}), I decided to ditch BlockBuster Online and switch to Netflix for my movie fix. I’ve been with BBO almost since they started (Sep ’04?) so this was a pretty drastic move! In a few hours of playing around, I’ve found a few things I like about NFLX:

• Multiple profiles: Now, the wife & I can both have our own queue without one of us hogging the movie queue.
• Stream to PC: This is the one thing I’m most exited about – not because I want to go from watching movies from my couch on a 40″ screen to sitting at a computer chair watching movies on a 19″ screen, but because I’m fairly certain that this is just a pre-cursor for Netflix providing movie downloads on the XBox.

I’m not too impressed by Netflix’s UI yet – a couple of things that annoy me  – for one, why doesn’t the search box just take to me the movie I’m searching for when it offers me suggestions:

It offered me the right movie in the dropdown, but when I select it, it does a search on the term rather than take me to the movie directly. All that AJAXy autocomplete goodness wasted!

The other annoyance: Why is this popup displayed for every movie I add to my queue?

BBO used to let me bulk-add movies to my queue without any annoying popups! I’ll probably also miss the occasional game rental and in-store exchange from Blockbuster, but I’m hoping the larger selection and stream to PC features make up for it!

Here’s wishing everyone who sees this entry a happy new year 2008. In the spirit of a light and lively new year, here’s a new year greeting in legalese I got from someone at work:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all…and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make this country great (not to imply that this country is necessarily  greater than any other country), and without regard to the race, creed,  color, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual orientation of  the wishee.

This wish is limited to the customary and usual good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first. “Holiday” is not intended to, nor shall it be considered, limited to the usual Judeo-Christian celebrations or servances, or to such activities of any organized or ad hoc religious community, group, individual or belief (or lack thereof).

Note: By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all. This greeting is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. This greeting implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for the wishee her/himself or others, or responsibility for the consequences which may arise from the implementation or non-implementation of same. This greeting is void where prohibited by law.

I finally gave in to geek pressure and decided to get ourselves a new TV. The gorgeous Samsung LNT4065F. 40″, LCD, 1080p. The TV’s due to arrive later this week or early next, so I thought I’d do some early research to figure out how to get the most out of it.

My current setup is a relatively ancient 27″ Sony flat-tube TV we bought as soon as we moved to Seattle back in ’04, so this is a significant upgrade in terms of screen size (27->40), technology (analog SD tube -> digital HD LCD) and most significantly, resolution (480i -> 1080p).

Our primary use of the TV is to play DVDs (thanks to BlockBuster Online and iTalkies), TV (via our trusty Series 2 Tivo and basic Comcast cable) and an XBox 360 Premium that I stood in line for 8 hours to buy on launch day.

The only HD-capable device on this list is the XBox 360 – capable of doing 1080p games and 1080i movies over component and 1080p movies over VGA. So, this one was easy – I picked up a Xbox VGA cable for cheap that I can use to get upscaled DVD playback and I’m all set of experience movies and gaming at full HD. I thought about getting the XBox HD-DVD player given the great deals we’re seeing on them this holiday season, but figured that it wasn’t wise to invest on either side of the HD format wars till there was a clear winner. Moreover, only some movies are available in HD-DVD and others are in Blu-Ray, so it didn’t make sense to confine myself to a single format till dual-format players become more common down the road.

My DVD player – a Panasonic home-theater-in-a-box from the same bygone era – doesn’t upconvert DVDs to 1080i. I figured I’ll let this one slip and keep my current DVD player, especially since it supports 480p and use the XBox for DVD playback when I really wanted upconverted video.

Cable – this one’s tricky. I don’t have digital cable , so the only HD-channels I can get right now in HD are the local channels through the TV’s built-in QAM tuner. The bigger problem for me, even if I do switch from cable to Satellite or OTA/ATSC, is how to get a PVR solution that supports HD video. The Series2 Tivo that I’ve owned for the past couple of years clearly doesn’t support HD-video of any kind. My significant other is addicted to the Tivo and would immediately disapprove of any solution that involves losing the PVR functionality (I know – I asked!).

So, my options are:

1. HD Tivo: Luckily for me, Tivo launched it’s HD-capable Series 3 last year. More recently, they launched the scaled down and cheaper HD Tivo. This PVR supports upto 20 hours of recorded HD content from OTA or digital cable (via the CableCard). Sounds perfect, except, that it costs $249 + $12.95/mo. That puts it out of this year’s tech budget!
2. Media Center PC: As I detailed in a series of earlier posts, I put together a killer quad core PC earlier in the year that runs Vista Ultimate and Windows Media Center. I’ve been using the XBox as a Media Center extender for a few months which works pretty well. So, all I need to do is get a TV tuner that supports HD and I should be all set, right? It turns that life is not that simple. Most HD tuners support decoding only QAM or ATSC signals – i.e. only free-to-air channels can be decoded. There are a handful of TV tuner cards that support CableCard so that digital cable channels can also be decoded, but get this – those cards are only sold integrated into a new PC!!! That’s right – you can’t just buy a CableCard capable decoder and plug it into your PC – you have to buy a cable-industry Certified PC that in their words “would absolutely be able to deliver on the wide range of things that you couldn’t predict with certainty would happen on a home-built PC“. Hmm.. we all know what means -thanks to DRM requirements, there’s no way a home-built PC can use a CableCard tuner right now! So, my HD-MCE dreams end there – even if I wanted to pay ComCast the extra $5 a month for the CableCard!
3. Comcast’s HD-PVR: Comcast gives^H^H^H^H^H rents an HD-capable PVR (nee DVR) for the low low price of $13.95/mo. This sounds like a good option till you read reviews of the DVR and realize that it’s a piece of cr*p. I’ll pass, and wait till Comcast starts offering Tivo’s which they’ve started doing in some regions already.
4. Do nothing: The PM in me decided to go with this option for now. As discussed above, all options have significant downsides or costs that do not align with current priorities 🙂 Therefore, I decided to do nothing for now and be content with SD cable programming and the Tivo Series 2 till such a time when the above issues are resolved. Tivo prices are sure to drop in the next few months and Comcast will probably start offering Tivo’s in the Seattle region sometime next year.

So, I’ll just wait a few months till options 1 or 3 above become viable. This is definitely the best option given current realities…

PS: The fall update for the XBox 360 introduced support for viewing Xvid/DivX streaming video. So, a 5th option, of questionable appropriateness is to download err.. place/time-shifted videos from that European site that charges € 1/month. That’s a viable option for viewing the occasionally TV show at 720p as long as € 1 < $13.95 :-)

I rarely write anything about politics or my view of the world, but Arvind’s post “Africa: why it’s fucked up and what you can do” appealed too much to the armchair economist in me to keep quiet. Particularly interesting is this quote:

The main problem with Africa is petty dictators. Don’t take my word for it — a Ghanaian economist argues passionately for this view in this video. One phrase in particular is worth quoting — “Africa’s begging bowl leaks” referring to the futility of conventional foreign aid because of government corruption. He also explains how Africa’s traditional societies were free markets, even if not industrialized, and what Africa needs is more capitalism, not less.

Maybe the begging bowl is the problem. Africa needs to stop looking towards the West with a begging bowl and start looking towards the East with a photocopier instead. They need to open up their economies, encourage entrepreneurship and emulate what Asia has done over the past 50 years. After all, in countries like South Korea, China, India and Vietnam, economic liberalization has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and that has in turn led to political stability.

Also interesting:

• Zimbabwe just divided by zero: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7115651.stm
• A virtual currency for Zimbabweans to order gas and other commodities: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6660637.stm

Reason #253 that Facebook rocks:

You can keep track of other crappy social networks using their corresponding facebook apps:

+1 for Extensible Platforms and the Social OS.

Today, while shopping at Costco, I had the option of picking between Tellicherry pepper and Malabar Pepper.

Both grown in the “tropics of India’s Southwestern coast” no less…

Tom Friedman is probably turning in his grave bed now and mumbling something about the world being flat.

3rd time’s a charm I guess. I finally realized that the best place to watch the Blue Angels show is from the I-90 bridge when it’s closed. Not Genesee Park, not some random location in Mercer Island, but right there on the bridge. I took my parents to the show today inspite of the fact that I hated it the last two times I went and managed to get the best view of the show that I could have hoped for (without owning a boat or a prime piece of lakeside real-estate). We parked in some spot north of the Bridge, near Martin Luther King Way and walked down to the I-90 bridge just before it closed and managed to get a spectacular view of the show with the planes flying right over us a couple of times.

Here’s a pic I clicked, technically not of the Blue Angels, but of the Patriots Jet Team: