TMI: The DVR Generation

The last few weeks have been a very busy time for me thanks to an unusual confluence of work projects that all had to be completed around the same time. Most of this was my own fault. I'm a lifelong procrastinator with an unusual job position that I haven't gotten around to fully defining (but that's on my "To Do" list), so I volunteer (or cannot talk my way out of) lots of odd projects (and I particularly look for ones with no well-defined due dates). This generally works in my favor since I can then work on one project as an excuse to procrastinate on the other N-1 projects. And magically at the end of each job review period, I come out looking pretty productive.

Fortunately, I did foresee that my free (or what other people would call sleep) time would be greatly impacted, but technology came to my rescue.

I'd been meaning to purchase or build a "Tivo-like" device for many years (it was on my "To Do" list, which, by the way, has actually never been written down as maintaining a "To Do" list is also on that list). Procrastination kept paying off as technology kept improving and prices kept falling. Finally, a few weeks ago, it became as simple as disconnecting my existing cable box, driving to the local cable office down the street, swapping boxes, driving back home, and connecting the new box. [Note however, that reverse-engineering the wiring and cabling of one's own fairly basic home entertainment setup that hasn't been touched in several years can still be trickier than first thought].

Now, I don't know how I ever lived without a DVR (Digital Video Recorder), and can see how other people almost worship these things.

It turns out most hour-long dramas only have ~40 minutes of actual content (minus commercials, credits, and recaps of previous episodes). That's a whopping 30+% compression ratio with no loss of data! It's even more dramatic for sporting events where I have no emotional ties to have to see the whole game live. I managed to squeeze 4 to 8 hours of Australian Open tennis coverage into about 2 hours. It helps if one is only interested in the style of tennis played by Hingis or Federer, and want to check out a newcomer like Baghdatis.

The downside of all this? There are actually a few minuses that have emerged so far:
1) I have to figure out how to catch up on 30-40 hours of non-tennis programming on my DVR. In the meantime, I have to avoid anybody at work or on the street who mentions the words 24, Lost, or House even if it's not in the context of those TV shows since you never know when a conversation will take a sudden turn in that direction.
2) Some evenings, I find myself with a painfully full bladder because I've skipped all the commercials and forgot about the ability to pause and go to the restroom.
3) I've also quickly picked up a bad habit of wanting to hit fast forward even if I'm watching live TV. I've even caught myself trying to find a remote while sitting in a long meeting...
4) The DVR from the cable company does not allow easy copying of shows I might want to keep around "forever".

I imagine my next few blog entries may be TV related as I catch up on things.

TMI: An Armenian in Paris

Several months ago a colleague / friend of mine, Vicken Khachadourian, wrote a humorous story about meeting the singer whose songs have held significant meaning throughout Vick's life. His story was even published in a few Armenian newspapers that circulate in major US cities. It is also posted on the armeniapedia.org site. Somehow I managed to play a tiny part in this, meaning I've already achieved my 15 words of fame with the Armenian community. This does not even make me rank with the same Z-list celebrities as, say, Kato Kaelin, but I've had a strange compulsion to mention that dude's name in my blog for some time and finally found an excuse to do so.

Because no two people ever occupy the exact same physical location in the Universe, I might have a slightly different perspective about some of the events I was involved in. But to clarify a couple of things in the story:

- I backed out of seeing the concert with Vick in Montreal because I was still suffering from jet lag and other varied minor ailments after the India trip, and I did not feel any performer was worth flying cross-country to see (no offense to the city of Montreal intended).

- A trip to Paris does not need much justification, and I needed a vacation at the time. That said, Paris was refreshing, and the Aznavour concert turned out to be much more than icing sur le gâteau. I may dedicate a future blog entry to other interesting things that happened during that trip.

- I would not describe myself as opportunistic - I've let more opportunities of all kinds slip though my hands than I can count. I've actually found myself standing close to famous people many times in my life. However, the most interaction I've had was to smile at Patrick Stewart and have him smile back at me as we were exploring the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas. He seems much more jovial in real life than his Capt. Picard character. My general modus operandi is to leave them be.

- "Sommelier" was spelled correctly after all. But I'm not familiar enough about the wine scene to know if the person helping us should have been identified as a Master Sommelier. The whole staff at Ledoyen was incredibly friendly, professional, and helpful.

But why are you still reading this? Read the story. It's better than these ramblings.

News: Cat dials 911

I suspect this news will spread pretty quickly. A man was saved by his cat.

I've heard of cats who were trained to use the toilet and flush afterward. Recently a Russian cat circus has been appearing in New York (looks like the photo album section is currently generating some MySQL errors though).

I have to remember to train some pets if I find myself older and still living alone. Fortunately the worst thing that's happened to me so far is dislocating my shoulder at home -- part of a series of stories I may share eventually.

Welcome 2006

Tried to include this SVG file in my blog, but I guess my ISP doesn't know how to send a file type of image/svg (everything is basically sent as text/plain).
It was kind of fun spending some hours the last couple of weeks getting refamiliar with HTML. Then once I started doing that, then I had to dabble in CSS, DHTML, XHTML, SVG, Javascript, etc. (I knew I was getting too far when I started looking at AJAX).

It was an interesting exercise to discover how browser still differ in respect to supporting the numerous standards (or even in how they parse files in some cases). A challenge was determining the minimum code that would still render pages pretty closely in all the browsers with no Javascript errors.

Not sure if I fully achieved that with the Merry Christmas entry. [For readers outside the U.S., there was some silly feud going on between FOX News host Bill O'Reilly and Comedy Central Daily Show's Jon Stewart - search Google for more details.] The simple SVG example looks the same in IE (with an Adobe plugin) and Firefox 1.5 with native SVG support. Looks a little different under Opera 8.51. At least, I got a taste for what developers must go through when trying to make an application DB and/or OS independent.

So, now that that's out of my system, back to writing articles in mostly plain old text!

Hope 2006 turns out to be the Best Year Ever for everybody.