Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice...

Not a lot going on at the moment. Lots of irons in the fire, but everything is moving sooooo slow. Just a lot of waiting to see how things pan out.

An odd thing kinda work related since I got back in Vegas. Two different "friends" have called me up, asking me to do some artwork for an iPhone game they are working on. Both of them flaked out on me. I've been wondering if it was me, something I said or did? But I can't think of anything. I thought I was going out of my way to be accommodating. When they brought up how much they should pay me for the work I even told them to pay me what ever they thought it was worth. Both times they went incommunicado before I actually started doing any work so it isn't like I am out any time or effort, but it still strikes me as very odd. They called me. I said I would be happy to do the work. They said they would get me the specs and such, and then nothing. Shrug.

So what else,

I signed up for Netflix even though I was tempted to boycott them because of their use of pop-up advertising.

Just borrowed the box set of "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr." staring Bruce Campbell. I've been wanting to watch the series since I missed it back when it originally aired and it is still on my Amazon.com wish list.

Cool fun fact about "The_Adventures_of_Brisco_County,_Jr." I just learned by reading the show's Wikipedia entry: Two Mare's Leg pistol props from the show were later reused in the science fiction television series "Firefly" as a rifle by the character Zoe Washburne.

Going to drive my dad to California for a doctor's appointment next week on July 7-10th. Might do Disneyland with the niece and nephew the following weekend. Monte Cristo sandwich at the Blue Bayou restaurant! Whoo-hoo!

Found my mom likes to play Solitaire on the computer, so I showed her Spider Solitaire. She quickly got addicted to it and was complaining that she is wasting too much time playing it when she has other stuff to do. So then just to be mean I introduced her to the web version of Book Worm, a Pop-Cap word game you can find at Yahoo Games. She is in her office playing it now and has been for over an hour now. hehehe.

Got my replacement passport in the mail last week, still really upset that I lost the last one. I can't believe nobody turned it in because I know it fell out of my DMV study brooklet at the library.

Speaking of the DMV, I passed my driver's test today and now just have to wait for them to mail me my new Nevada driver's license. Got a piece of paper that said I passed though, so I am no longer in fear of driving around on my expired Queensland Australian license. I had been hoping that if I get pulled over, the police officer won't notice that "11-02-09" is actually February 11th, and not November 2nd. Australia uses the DD-MM-YY format. Loosing my passport and a 2 month wait to get a driving test appointment is why it took me so long to get my license in case you were wondering.

I'm still waiting on the lab to have my replacement tooth veneer ready so my dentist can finish fixing my front tooth. The temp tooth is holding up pretty good though (knock on wood).

I finally got an answer from Hover (formerly Net Identity) and have access to my hewitt.org email address again. The website domain is gone but that's okay. All I really wanted was to keep was the email address and if the URL was still active I would have just redirected it here.

The lovely Kristina is still dragging me to Stoney's about twice a week. I mostly sit there, guard the table, watch the purses and people watch. At least it gets me out of the house. Plus the waitresses are HAWT! Out of my league, especially with the way my love life has been going, but HAWT none the less.

Meanwhile back in Perth, Brad sold my car, the 2003 Daihatsu Terios known as "The Hamster." He appears to have gotten a good price. I do wonder if not having a car there means that I will wind up back in Perth.

And that is about it for my exciting life at the moment. Thank you for your support. And stay tuned next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel.

On-Demand Entertainment

I’ve made the jokes in the past about the year 2000 coming and going without flying cars, jetpacks, and the silver jumpsuits. Please don’t send me any links for flying cars, jetpacks and silver jumpsuits; because yes, I know there are various websites where there are prototypes. Granted, almost 2010 and still not actually available in Wal-mart, but that crap really isn’t what I’ve been waiting for.

My prediction for the future has always been about on-demand TV. I imagined that new episodes would still come out as normal, but you could watch them whenever you want. I imagined it would be a subscription service of some sort that is also bolstered by normal commercials, except that the company would have some demographic information about you so that the commercials you saw would be suited to you. Maybe there would be subscription levels that eliminated the commercials. I dreamed up the basic idea as a kid back in the mid-80’s when I got annoyed that every Saturday I would see episodes of “Thundar the Barbarian” and “Battle of the Planets” that I had already seen even though I knew there were episodes that I hadn’t seen.

One of the big, unforeseen problems that appeared to have delayed my prediction coming true, was the rise of DVD sales. It is still coming true, it’s happening slower than I thought; because companies have to be weaned off DVD sales before it will really take off. For example if you go to Hulu.com, a legal streaming website from Fox, NBC, and other studios, you will only see full seasons of older and not-as-popular shows. Anything they think they can still make money on by selling on DVD, they will only show a few recent episodes of that expire as new episodes come out. It is still good if you want to watch current episodes online or if you miss an episode, just don’t expect to be able to watch The Office from season 1 episode 1 to current. The office DVD boxed sets are still making them money.

I think there is some turbulence in the DVD world though; the rental market especially seems to be bouncing around. When I left the country five years ago, it seemed like you couldn’t find a street corner without a Starbucks and a Blockbuster video store. Yeah, Starbucks is hurting, but I can still stop for a Frappuccino (tm) no matter which direction I am heading when leaving my house, and yet I only know of one Blockbuster around here that is still open. Everybody I know has a Netflix account now. Granted, the type of people I am likely to hang around is also more likely to adapt to this new paradigm (Wow! I’ve always wanted to legitimately use “paradigm” in a sentence.) I do wonder though, what this is doing to the DVD sales.

Speaking of Netflix, a subscription based streaming site, has also started to do streaming. I am a bit annoyed that a lot of the stuff that I was looking forward to watching right away isn’t available for streaming yet; I just signed up for their 2-week, free trial today. But what if you don’t want to watch TV on your computer? You just decided that your child didn’t really need that kidney transplant after all, and instead you bought that spiffy, giant, LCD HD-TV! There are already tons of adapters that allow you to connect your computer to your TV. Netflix goes on and on about that on their site. It’s just a step away from having your cable box do all that instead of your computer.

I’m telling you, it is going to be the wave of the future. The only thing I am worried about is the corporate greed. Now, I’m not one for labeling big corporations evil for wanting to make a profit, but just like the bloated music industry, the TV and Movie industry isn’t going to want to be slimmed down or miss one possible penny. I recently went to iTunes to buy True Blood season 1. They waited until the season was over to make it available, so you couldn’t buy a season pass and watch it as it aired. Now that it is available they also are charging $2.99 an episode for standard definition, which is usually the price for the high definition (HD) version. Sorry, not enough money left on my gift certificate I had to pass. I just borrowed the DVDs from a friend. And quite frankly, the amount of money they are charging for digital shows is about the same as what they charge for the boxed DVD sets. The same price even though they don’t have to press the DVDs, box them up, ship them to the stores, and have the retailer mark it up. The point of all the above is that I am worried that we are going to wind up paying more to just watch normal TV.

I’ve tossed around some thought to how this will fall out. Because of how business works, I see the broadcast companies being the service providers you subscribe to. The production companies, the people that actually make the shows you watch, would be the content providers. I imagine the quality of the shows will be much better because you won’t be watching just any old crap that is on. You’ll always have your line-up of favorite shows regardless of when they first aired. I do wonder how that will affect the line-up of shows; will we still have a bunch of sappy, barely funny sitcoms that keep coming back season after season, while critically acclaimed and well written shows get canned? I also thought that maybe they wouldn’t release new episodes like they do now, each episode airing at a fixed time each week. But instead maybe they would just dump a bunch of shows online at once each week. The problem with that is I can see shows starting to missing deadlines like other industries.

I’m sure there will also be some nightmare distribution thing that will go all wrong and screw things up and everybody will complain. But, there ya go. That is what I’m waiting for.