The Writer's Strike

Here's my take on the Hollywood writer's strike.

I fully support the right of organized labor to strike, and I sympathize with the economic hardship associated with people being put out of work.

However, could there be something less important to the overall functioning of the economy? These jobs are not going anywhere; so the flow of product will be interrupted for a while, so what? There are billions of dollars worth of productivity going to China that will never return to this country.

Striking writers are not going to force the producers to get Chinese writers to scab for them.

So people don't get to see fresh episodes of CSI or Desperate Housewives for a while, and they have to watch something that is slightly crappier than normal.

Entertainment is an important industry to the USA, one of our leading exports. Strikes are just another one of the economic checks and balances that help the marketplace adjust.

Don't worry, it will all be over eventually and we can get back to watching our normal stupid crap.

Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth today became the longest lived monarch in British history, surpassing Queen Victoria.

She is not yet the longest reigning monarch, still 8 years short of Victoria's 64 year reign.

I think last years movie "The Queen" did a lot to improve the popular image of Queen Elizabeth. It was really a great film and effectively brought out the difficulties of being in such a publicly scrutinized position for your entire life.

Central banks cooperate

The central banks of several leading economies have agreed to cooperate to reduce the affects of the current ongoing credit crisis.

How much better would the world be if the elected governments could decide to cooperate so easily, instead of filtering everything through the lense of national pride and electoral politics.

Led Zeppelin reunion

Another popular culture event that I should relate to, at least based on my age (49). In fact I find the current Led Zep reunion tour entirely uninteresting, much like the fact that the Eagles have a hit album right now.

So what, am I supposed to get all excited about some fat old millionaires playing 30 year old songs to a crowd of fat middle-class, middle-aged hippie-never-were's desperate to latch on to a long passed image of their own youth?

Now, if they could actually make me 18 again, that would be worth paying for...

Christmas Shopping

Shopping for Xmas presents always gets me down. Most gifts for kids end up getting forgotten after a few weeks, and gifts for adults tend be obligatory gifts.

I much prefer giving and receiving birthday gifts. It always seems more personal and genuine.

I'm tired of being told endlessly that the fate of the U.S. economy depends on me spending gobs of money on useless junk that noone needs or wants.

Little kids are the ones that deserve and appreciate Christmas presents

Media MVP

I bought a little box (Hauppage MediaMVP) that hooks up to your TV and your home network that allows you to stream video and music from your computer to your TV and stereo.

I bought the hardwired version. There is a wireless version, but my router is close to my TV and had an open port, and I thought it would work better running wired, based on some reviews (also it requires 802.11G and I have 802.11B).

The server software that comes with the MediaMVP is really awful, constantly froze up, so I ended up buying a copy of SageTv with support for MediaMVP, which works like a champ. SageTv is a bit of overkill, since it supports PVR cards with scheduling and full DVR functionality. For me I am just using it to play downloaded AVI files. I used to download AVI's and burn them to DVD's, which was time consuming (4 hours to convert a 2 hour movie), and wasted a disk.

You need a decently fast computer as your video file server, but the MediaMVP box does the decoding onboard. It has a CPU and starts a version of Linux internally. I think the SageTv software replaces the Linux it comes with, though. You can do all of what SageTv does using open-source software and a lot of time, but I just wanted to watch my TV, not play with software.

This is a really good solution if you want to watch AVI files on your TV, not on your computer screen, but don't even bother to try to get the MediaMVP software to work.