Wednesday, March 26, 2008

New Amsterdam and Hulu

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across an ad for an interesting show: New Amsterdam. I believe I saw the ad in a show I'd recorded and watched at a later date.

Which was a problem, as the pilot episode had already aired. It was not scheduled to run again in the near future. So I thought "bummer!" and blew it off. I saw another ad and my curiosity was intrigued, so I went to the network's web site to see if I could watch it online. No such luck.

Then I remembered I had visited this web site a while back when it was in beta; it did high-quality on demand streaming of network shows, but I couldn't remember its name. I later stumbled across an article about it, and put two and two together.

It's called Hulu, and they do have the first five episodes of New Amsterdam. They're in fairly high res; they scale well to full screen on my 1280x960 laptop display. The streaming quality is very good; it only paused a couple times, and each for less than a second.

Since it's free, there are a few commercials, and they aren't skippable. They're 30 seconds long, and only come one at a time. There's a dot in the scrubber, so you can see when they're coming up. While they're running, there's a countdown timer 'til the end. I just muted them and let them go by. No big deal.

I'm really happy with Hulu's service.

BTW, Hulu has the short recap BSG episode up now; it won't be on TV for a few more days.

Oh, and New Amsterdam is a good show. I give the pilot episode 4/5 stars. I'll watch the rest over the next few nights, and watch the rest on the DVR, after the next episode records next Monday.

After I'm caught up on New Amsterdam, I'll re-watch a number of episodes from BSG season 3. I got it on DVD at Borders this past weekend at a nice discount, thanks to their rewards program. Woo hoo.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Two cool book decoration styles

Two very cool ways of turning a book into another work of art:

Brian Dettmer's insanely creative Book Autopsies - (37signals)

And here are more pictures of Dettmer's work.

Fore-edge Painting: Frost

Here's a third; more bizarre to me:

Georgia Russell’s Book World | paintalicious

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

So looking forward to being home...

I've had a terrific time here in Austin. I've feasted in the best food, all of which I just can't get back home.

I've enjoyed working in the Austin office. It feels so good to get things taken there; it's so nice to be appreciated.

I really enjoyed SXSW over the weekend. It was so much to get an overdose of such geekery, and to hang out in a wonderful town with my Bay area friends. But the past weekend just wore me out.

I am so looking forward to being home tomorrow. I miss my cats, my family, my house, my car. It'll be good to be back to the familiar. But then I'll miss this wonderful town.

There are always tradeoffs; we must carefully weigh the options and make the best decision.

I've loved being here, but it's time for me to go home.

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Having fun at South by Southwest

I love Austin. I love my friends. I love geeks. And I love to hang out and learn stuff.

This weekend, I'm hanging out with my friends at South by Southwest here in Austin, which attended by geeks, and I'm learning stuff.

Very cool weekend.

Oh, and I love good food. I ate dinner tonight with my friends Esin and Jessica at this wonderful Cuban restaurant. Austin has such good food.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

a good summary of today's iPhone news

From Web Worker Daily comes the best summary I've read so far of today's iPhone enterprise and SDK news:

iPhone: SDK Today, Enterprise Features in June