Microwave Biscuit

This is why I shouldn’t read the Sunday paper - Local antitrust fight goes to D.C. | Dallas Morning News

I had yet to finish my coffee when I read this article. It got me all worked up. I think that no company should dictate minimum sell prices of their goods. Just the other night I went to the local CompUSA which is going out of business (apparently they are closing half of their stores) to see what great deals I might find. I ended up not buying anything but I was shocked to find that while everything was heavily discounted the Apple stuff was only 5% off which I’m sure is due to Apple’s insistence of minimum pricing. In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t buy anything Apple (unless there was a really sweet deal on one of those gigantic cinema monitors) but it just ticks me off that if I opened up a computer store and wanted to sell Apple products at 20% off I couldn’t.

There is a relatively new round of commercials on TV for NetZero internet service. The “theme” of these commercials is the NetZero mission: The best internet service for the price (paraphrasing here). In the commercials they talk about staying true to their mission which I find completely ironic. For those that don’t remember, NetZero came on the scene in the late 90’s with the concept of free (but ad sponsored) internet access. At one point I signed up for an account as I thought it might come in handy to have dial-up access from time to time. As I remember (I could be slightly off) you browsed in kind of a window that had banner ads all around it. It wasn’t completely awful and of course you do get what you pay for.

So, as near as I can tell their original “mission” was to provide FREE internet access. I’m not sure how their current organization lives up to that original mission. If you poke around their site (link omitted on purpose) there is some reference to a free 10 hours per month plan but good luck figuring out how to sign up for it.

If I HAD to get dial-up access (thankfully I don’t) their deals aren’t bad - they have a pretty good feature set for $9.95 a month. It’s just that the present ad campaign about staying true to their original mission annoys me.

I heard about Meebo from a couple of different sources. Meebo is an online IM aggregator, meaning you can use it to connect to multiple IM systems like Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Google, etc. While there are several IM clients available for both Linux and Windows that do this, the nice thing about it is that you can sign on from any PC in one step and connect to all of your IM clients. There is also a WordPress widget available that you can enable on your blog so that visitors to your blog can IM you when you are online. I have set it up here but I’m not sure if I’ll keep it. We’ll see. The other cool thing about it is that you can “detach” it from your browser window (it basically creates a pop-up I guess) and give it the feel of a real IM client. The downside for me is that when I’m attached to my company’s VPN it won’t seem to connect. I’m guessing that it’s somehow filtered out by my company’s proxy or something.

Here’s a couple of pics:

There is a relatively new TV show that I enjoy a bit called “The Black Donnellys” which is on NBC Monday nights. I have a DVR built into my cable box and I had set it to record the show last night as I had other plans and wouldn’t be able to watch it live. I sat down this afternoon to enjoy my taped broadcast and found out that mysteriously the DVR recorded only the first 42 minutes of it. Why in the world did it record only 42 minutes? Who knows. This is one of the problems I have with technology today. Had this been 7-10 years ago, I would have either set my VCR to record it or watched it live. While my DVR has all kinds of magical features like the ability to record a whole season, search, etc. it doesn’t really help me if I expect it to record something and I only get a partial recording. At one point I had built a PC-DVR and it worked pretty well, however, due to the way our cable is structured I couldn’t record all that many channels so I decided to go with the new cable box/dvr combo.

In any case, fast forward a bit and I watched the first 42 minutes that my DVR had recorded and then went online to NBC’s website. They offer the ability to watch the whole show online although you can’t fast forward through the mandatory into commercial. So while cursing technology one minute, another technology (Web 2.0) allowed me to see the end of the show. While it wouldn’t have been the end of the world to not see the end of the show, I would have rather seen none of it than 42 minutes so being able to catch the end online was nice.