Blogs

HDTV, Tivo

“Santa” brought us a new 50” Sony projection HDTV for Christmas, which raised the question of where to get HD content from. We’ve been a DirecTV customer for about 5 years now, and have had no issues other than a few outages during big snow storms. We use a Tivo receiver model, and are totally hooked on Tivo. However, the HD options for DirecTV were not very attractive: buy a new HD receiver with Tivo for $300 or more, pay more per month, and only get a couple of channels in HD, but not including our local channels.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and hopefully the rest of you will get to enjoy a day off or two with some friends and family. BEA has next week off, so I’m looking forward to a break after a busy fall. Christmas Eve always makes me think of my grandparents, whose house we visited for Christmas Eve dinner every year I was growing up. Although it was only 20 minutes away, at the time it was always a big adventure to drive through the Wisconsin countryside and get there for the mayhem of all of the aunts, uncles and cousins on my Dad’s side of the family.

Flying home

Flying over the midwest on a beautiful day.’ The white snow is spectacular across the plains. Missing the kids, looking forward to getting home. ' Mark Jenkins in the January ‘06 Outside Magazine:’ “The truth is, if your kids don’t change your life, you – and they – are completely missing out.’ If you choose to bring them into the world, children are the biggest adventure there is.’’ You can only hope that you can find the strength and courage and grit and love to live up to the adventure.

You know you're doing bad when…

If you’re playing on Monday Night Football and Al Michaels and John Madden are heaping praise on you, you’re in big trouble. Tonight is the same as many of the recent blow-outs. We’ve heard about how great Mike McMahon, QB for the Eagles can run, how good his arm is, how good his decision process is. At this point their down 14 points and haven’t been able to move the ball at all.

New B's

Well, the Bruins finally got bad enough that they had to do something big, and trading your premier player and captain certainly is big. At this point they’ve got less points than the Columbus BlueJackets (yes, they are a professional hockey team). They have less points than the Nashville Predators. And they’re no where near as tough, prideful or anything else as their ads suggest. As Barry Melrose said today on ESPN “Things can only get better for these two teams.

Way to go, Joe!

There’s an increasing “get out of Iraq” drumbeat in the mainstream media and the blogs these days. I’m no expert, but have sensed a widening gap between this rhetoric and the stories I’ve directly and indirectly heard from people involved with the effort. For anyone who cares about this, Joe Lieberman’s letter to the WSJ today is a must-read (unfortunately not on-line - I’ll see if I can dig up the text).

An Old Friend

A nice run under a nearly full moon on Monday night, a crisp New England fall evening. And I was joined by an old friend…Orion the Hunter made his first full appearance (at least to me) since the spring. For some reason Orion has grown to have some vague significance in my life. The passing of seasons and of time, a fellow traveler through the winter months, or some other subliminal connection.

Web 2.0 Users

I liked Nivi’s post working through the Web 2.0 customers. I think he missed a key point though, which is that some of the most interested work created is done by people building off of the work of others before them. In his categorization my only choices are “linkers” or “commenters”. I was going to suggest adding a category for “remixers”, but I think the right thing to do is fix the “creator” category to capture these folks:

Life of Hal

I always enjoy my friend Hal’s blog. We overlapped during my whole time at Sun (he’s still there as CTO of the Software biz) and his posts capture the essence of life as a traveling tech exec with a family and a love of sports. Somehow his posts fill in for the big gaps between dinners together (which are always in the bay area, even though he lives in NJ and me in MA).