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Stupid Local TV Broadcasters

I missed 45 minutes of Destination: Lost Wednesday night because of a major storm that ripped through the Twin Cities. (It was no Category 3 or higher storm, but it did a little damage).

The local ABC affiliate, Channel 5 KSTP, used the hurricane system and people’s fears of those storms to sensationalize the storm reporting for as long as they could, including 45 minutes of Destination: Lost and the first 20 minutes of the season premiere of Lost.

I have it on my TiVo – it’s just them repeating themselves for an hour – high winds, look at the radar, blah blah blah.

But that gets me to my point: ABC is unwilling to re-broadcast the premiere this weekend, due to cast contracts and the residual payouts. At least they’re admitting it’s about the money, so they can screw over their viewers.

Being technologically aware, I just went out and downloaded it from an HDTV rip and burned it to DVD. 42 minutes long now and no commercials – just because my local affiliate wouldn’t broadcast it.

And the television industry considers this an illegal act. An over the air television show, currently stored on my TiVo, and I can’t go download a copy and watch it on my TV. I purchased Lost Season One on DVD a week and a half ago. I’ll spend money where it’s deserved, for a quality and innovative program like Lost.

But yet, god forbid you miss one show in a series, you are not supposed to download them. What if it’s a show like Lost, Alias or 24 where you miss one episode and it can seriously set you back in understanding the plot?

The TV industry needs to get with the times then and offer a technological solution if they want to make this illegal. They should be ashamed of themselves for being the Luddites they are. Sony Betamax vs. Universal was settled over 20 years ago and yet here is history repeating itself.

Last.fm Follow-Up

I signed up for an account at Last.fm and downloaded and installed the XMMS plug-in. (I manually downloaded the plugin from their site, and then thought to check Synaptic. Sure enough, it was in the Ubuntu repository!)

It’s pretty cool so far – after listening to only two or three different artists it already had Weezer at the top of the recommended list for me, and I’m a huge Weezer fan. It will be really interesting to see it when it really kicks in with other users in addition to just figuring out my listening habits.

If you’re really curious about my musical tastes, you can see my Last.fm user page here.

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Sonic

A follow-up from my visit to Houston last week: I finally had the chance to eat at a Sonic, “America’s Drive-In”.

The funny thing is, none of us had any idea it was only a drive-in. I see the commericals all the time on ESPN, and have wanted to stop there to see what it was all about. I see the breakfast food commericals about ten times more often than I do for their burgers.

They were all over Houston, I saw more Sonic’s than McDonald’s (which is fine with me). Drive through or drive-in are your only choices, maybe outdoor seating if you were lucky. Had a Jalapeno Double Burger with Tater Tots and a Lime-ade, all three of which were quite good for fast food.

Definitely better than your normal chains such as Hardees, McD’s or BK. Step up from Culvers ups here in the north, but not quite as good as an In ‘N Out out west.

And our thoughts are with you for those of you in Houston right now.

Last.fm

I’m very intrigued by Last.fm, formerly Audioscrobbler.

Download a plugin for your favorite music player (Linux players included!) and start listening to music. From there Last.fm will start recommending music to you based on what you and others listened to that’s similar.

I can’t do justice to explaining it, so go read the FAQ. I’m very intrigued in Last.fm as a way to get introduced to more music, but not sold on using XMMS as my music player as I love Muine and am starting to test Banshee.

But I love the concept of Last.fm. Social networking tools own me.

Ubuntu Blog

I was taking a peek at WordPress.com (more on that in a minute) and it showed one of the top hosted blogs there is the Ubuntu weblog.

It already has some nice tips and tricks posted (like the bash command append). I’ll definitely be adding that to my blogroll.

WordPress.com is similar to Movable Type – hosted blog solution for users who don’t want or have a server to host their own blog on.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger Update

I had mentioned in my Colony 4 upgrade post some of the problems I was having. It turns out the icons weren’t appearing because I had a custom theme chosen. Choosing Clearlooks set everything right again, though Ubuntu seems to have changed the Tomboy icons in the panel and in the Applications menu.

Doing an apt-get upgrade after getting home from traveling resulted in 24 hours of panic. Upon upgrading, my networking stopped working. It seems I wasn’t the only one with this problem, but thankfully one of the posters in that thread mentioned how the upgrade seemed to have stopped half way through. Going to a terminal and doing another apt-get upgrade and a reboot fixed the problem, thank god.

Overall, I’m still very happy with Breezy Badger. I’m waiting for the X.org packages to get a bit more stable as it seems I upgrade them almost daily and then I’ll get my monitor and ATI drivers working properly.

Just a few weeks from Breezy Badger going final!

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Back again

And… I’m back. Spent most of last week traveling in Houston for work. This was my first significant time spent in the big ole state of Texas, and in some ways it’s a different world down there.

First, housing is much cheaper. Like 50% cheaper than here – and with no state income tax, cost of living must be much lower. It was 90 and humid all week – I loved it. I had the opportunity to go to Minute Maid Park and watch the Astro’s play. It feels like they just tried to cram a MLB stadium into a few spare blocks they had open in downtown – the place is tiny. All the modern amenities, but looking into the outfield and just seeing walls and no bleachers wasn’t right.

Demographics were very different. Texas state flags were everywhere – they don’t call it the Lonestar State for nothing.

Now, back to blogging.