The Middle

Ah, the battle of the 0-2's. (0-4's if you go back to last year).

I'm still undecided on who I want to win this game, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a tie.

If you haven't checked it out yet, there have been some great additions with the recent revamping of the Grateful Dead's official site.

The beauty lies in the Taper's Section, which has a sort of "this week in concert history" section, which includes hours and hours of MP3's from shows throughout the band's decades of touring. There are a lot of 45 minute "Drums" versions, and some of it is pretty rough, but it's also a great resource and a blast to listen to some of the rarer songs.

And bless their little hearts for even including a feed. It really couldn't get any easier than that.

I got to spend some time today talking with Andy Beal about SEO and related optimizations, which was pretty interesting. It turns out there isn't a secret keyword that will automatically move your site to the first result on google, and apparently my advice of "Get a more obscure last name, it worked for me" is not a sound plan.

Just one of the perks of my night job as "Technology Guy" for my favorite immigration lawyer in Raleigh, N.C.. (See what I did there?)

He had a lot of sounds advice, taught me a thing or two, and managed to not speak too much tech jargon for the lawyer and non-web-geek in the room. We'll see how much improvement can be made in her site over the next few weeks and months.

Lots of good stuff, lots of ideas to implement, lots of spreadsheets to fill, lots of <H1>'s to insert, and lots of links to acquire.

I need a "night job assistant".

Apparently, the one thing that Sen. Arlen Specter and I have in common is a bitter, angry hatred of DirectTV and their NFL Sunday Ticket monopoly. Arlen's says it best:

"... a lot of people, including myself, would like to be able to have that ticket"

Note: I'm pretty sure that satellites orbiting the Earth can cover all of Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., but that's not the point (and maybe even Raleigh, NC).

Football wants to be FREE!

Yesterday was of course Xbox Live Maintenance Day. As a few people noticed, myself included, this impacted the ability for 360 users to connect to their MS Vista Media Center PC's, getting a message along the lines of "Xbox Live connectivity required to play this game".

Upon seeing this yesterday, I naturally became completely irate with MS and started swearing at the idiotic decision to require an internet connection for my Xbox to talk to my PC. There's no 'internet' between them, just an ethernet cable and a cheapo switch.

But, as I traversed the green button to arm myself with more tales of user woe, I stumbled upon this thread.

Sure enough, consulting the release notes that came with my Vista pre-release build, I found this gem:

Description: For the length of the beta program the Xbox 360 must have access to Xbox Live. This is typically accomplished by connecting your Xbox360 to your home network such that the Xbox360 has Internet access.

Alright, I'll let them get away with it this time. If this makes it into the final release, it could really become a deal breaker. After all, that's what TV is for in the first place, entertaining you while your internet connection is down.

It would appear that Time Warner Cable, the local cable monopolist here in Raleigh, NC, is doing its best to drive users to its cash-cow High Definition DVR service.

As a loyal Windows Media Center Edition user, I've long awaited the upcoming release of Windows Vista for the native Cable Card support that's been promised.

Sadly, I learned today that TWC has essentially crippled the Cable Cards in this area by using switched channel technology, the end result of which is the inability to receive the digital versions of basic cable channels. Additionly, the early Tivo crowds are indicating that Universal HD is also unavailble, and TWCNC plans to add all new HD channels in a manner unavailable to Cable Card users. And we're talking about ESPN2HD here, not LifetimeHD. Is this sort of thing even allowed under the Cable Card regulations?

Can I still use a Cable Card to watch MNF on ESPN-HD? Yes, and that will be a great day. Can I watch the digital version of Monk on USA? No, that's restricted to the poor people using the TWC-supplied DVR.

I realize that it's a step in the right direction to have CC support, but the problem is the digital versions of these channels are so vastly superior to the analog counterparts, that you essentially lose these channels (at least on a wildly oversized HDTV, which is what I have, of course). At best, you're forced to pay our good friends at Time Warner for both the Cable Card(s) and the DVR, with all the associated hassle of switching between the two.

If you appreciate the Cable Card concept at all, I suggest you call 1-866-4TWC-NOW and voice your opinion on this matter. Tell them you want the digital versions of these channels, and remind them what an attractive package DirectTV puts together. Finally, go to this thread on the Tivo Community Forum and offer this gentleman any support or insight that you can.

I would hate for my first post in months to be meaningful.

Turns out today was Australia Day, a day for this country to "celebrate what's great about Australia and being Australian". Turns out, it pretty much just meant that all the stores between my hotel and the venue were closed up.

There was one nice suprise, however, when in the middle of the late night tennis match, fireworks erupted over Rod Laver Arena, giving each of the players quite a start. I did manage to run out from my subterranean lair to snap a few pics, enjoy. (And there's plenty more)

Australia Day Fireworks over Rod Laver Arena

Australia Day Fireworks over Rod Laver Arena

Australia Day Fireworks over Rod Laver Arena

Xbox 360 Fanboy points out this article comparing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a modded Xbox running XBMC vs. a shiny new Xbox 360.

While I don't argue with the conclusion in terms of media formats, they severely downplay the role of an 360 if you do have a Windows Media Center Edition machine.

To the best of my knowledge, the closest an XBMC machine can come to watching recorded TV is a hacked-up system of auto-downloading TV bittorrents from RSS to a samba drive, and watching them from there. It'll work in a pinch, but it's not exactly user-friendly. However, if you need to do anything but stream TV from an MCE machine, XBMC is the way to go.

It's much more polished than any other open source media app I've seen, it just lacks the hardware and software to do TV viewing. Perhaps someone will hack a MythTV frontend on the thing and complete the picture, but until then, anyone that wants to have the best of both worlds will end up using one of each. It's really quite a shame, as Microsoft could have completely obfuscated these original Xbox hacks if they hadn't been so shortsighted with the 360's media format support.

I eneded up staying way too late at the 'remote' office last night, so I got up a little late, and decided to grab some lunch on the way into work. Being boring and repetitive, I hit up the new local favorite of mine, Stalactites, a Greek joint. As my traveling companion Mike claims, they're the best gyro's outside of Greece. Mmm, tasty.

So as I'm walking out of there holding a giant gyro and trying not to spill food all over myself, I walk right past Kim Clijsters heading into a local department store. She apparently didn't recognize me. That just may be my Brush With Greatness for this trip, unless I see Roger at the grocery store tomorrow or something.