I’m not a big fan of the Oscars, but The Mrs is. In fact she just said, “I realized tonight that this is my Super Bowl.” When we cancelled our cable TV about four months ago, I think the prospect of being without a reliable source of supply on Oscar night seemed like a dim and distant danger.
We spent most of our non-parent time this afternoon trying to find someone streaming the actual ceremony. ABC in conjunction with Facebook streamed the red carpet ceremony (and Wayne Sutton was there tweeting for Kodak – go Wayne!), but nobody in the US was streaming the actual ceremony. The Mrs was getting a little panicky by around 7:00.
I did a Google search for “Oscar live stream” and got a lot of useless junk and nearly picked up a Trojan horse virus. Twitter came to the rescue. I did a search for “Oscar stream” and in and among the ill-informed retweeting of a misleadingly-titled Mashable article I found an actual live stream of the Oscars, from Sky Movies in the UK via Justin.TV. We kept our fingers crossed in the final minutes leading up to the 8:30 start time as some middleweight celebritainalists who we might not know even if we lived in England waffled on with the typical pre-Oscar waffle.
Now, at 8:34, The Mrs is relieved to see that they are, in fact, streaming the actual ceremony. Hopefully it lasts. Who knows how many international laws, copyrights and test-ban treaties they’re violating. I have no idea how it’s actually happening. It might be somebody in his mum’s basement in Barking with a disassembled cable box and a soldering iron. It doesn’t look like a webcam pointed at a TV screen, but it doesn’t exactly look totally legit, either.
Anybody remember this Qwest TV commercial where a guy is checking into a motel and asks the morose twenty-something clerk if there’s any in-room entertainment? She responds with, “All rooms have every movie ever made in any language anytime, day or night.”
What happened? That was a decade ago. When will that happen?
How soon until you can just go ahead and watch all the stuff that’s streaming all over the world, no matter where you are? I suppose for a while it will continue the way it’s going now: the companies that own the rights will continue to try to control the dissemination based on geographic, political and economic boundaries that mean nothing to the Web. And the people who like to subvert that kind of thing will keep trying to find ways around them.
Thirty-eight minutes in, and the stream is still streaming. So far so good.
I wonder how we’ll be watching it on Oscar Night 2011?
:::UPDATE::: It’s Monday morning and Jean just told me the pirate stream cut off just as things were getting interesting, so I guess it must have been discovered by Sky TV or U.N.C.L.E. or Interpol or whoever looks out for that stuff.
Come to think of it, it might actually have been Interpol.
The unkindest cut was that it happened just as she got a glimpse of Oprah. So cruel.
photo from nasaimages.org
Tagged as:
future,
gadgetry,
television
I have a huge amount of thinking-and-writing work that I need to do, which has a habit of not getting done in the office, where there’s an Outlook inbox and a door. I love the interaction I get with my colleagues, of course, but some days I need to shut myself away and concentrate on the big stuff that actually moves things forward, not just the little stuff that keeps things afloat.
So this morning I dropped The Boy off at daycare and headed to a nearby coffee shop, sat down and made an ambitious to-do list for the day, but felt pretty good about diving in.
Then I spent the next hour trying to connect to the @#$%! Internet.
I find it increasingly frustrating that my work needs to be tied to one network, on one machine. There are so many easy ways to put your data in the cloud and work on it from anywhere, on anything. It is literally easier for me to do about half of the things I do on a daily basis on my iPhone than on my computer, when you consider the need to turn it on, find a power source, wait for it to boot up and connect.
The upshot is that I’m back in the office (but dressed for being outside the office) with half the morning gone.
Bring on the cloud!
Tagged as:
cloud,
rant
Mashable makes an extremely valid point in the debate about the safety of location-based apps. As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new tool that aggregates public check-ins from location-based apps that users have posted to public places like Twitter and lets you search them by zip code. (I’m not going to link to it or even call it by name. I think it’s completely irresponsible to create something that exposes other people’s vulnerabilities, whether or not you’re claiming to do it for their own good.) My friend Wayne Sutton has a good rundown of the whole issue.
I used to worry a lot more about security and anonymity on the Web. I’ve relaxed a bit, although I still try to use common sense. I’ve stopped accepting Foursquare requests, for instance, from people I don’t know. (For one thing, if I don’t know who you are, why would I care where you are?)
But here’s what it comes down to for me: I was burgled twice in my old house, almost certainly by the same people (they entered the same way, were very tidy, and only took consumer electronics that could be easily sold – I assume they waited until I had replaced everything before coming back a second time). Those people robbed my house because it backed up to the woods, because I didn’t have a back porch light and because there was no one there to see them. Also, I’m sure it was clear I wasn’t home.
In other words, I’m not worried about a crackhead with an iPhone casing me on Foursquare, when the vast majority of the robberies in my town are someone kicking in a door or breaking a window, grabbing a laptop or a DVD player and running. If the typical burglar around here had a device that he could use to check Foursquare or Gowalla, he would have sold it by now.
Tagged as:
foursquare,
gowalla,
location,
security,
wayne sutton
A follow-on to my previous post, that’s going to make me sound even more obsessive, but I’m okay with that. I’ve been checking to see if my Google account is enabled for Buzz yet. It’s not, but I can get to it on my iPhone. So far it looks pretty cool; Twitter-like features and a fairly tidy interface that looks like a lot of other Google mobile apps. I found I was already following seven people (how, exactly?) and nine people are already following me, including a couple of people from my contact list and a few I’ve never heard of, who seem to be from a country far, far away.
Turns out one of the folks following me has been busy today and is following 147 people, many of whom I know, so in classic Twitter fashion I was able to build my follower list by poaching his.
Even better (and apropos of my earlier identity crisis) you can search people by their full names, and their full names are displayed, not their Gmail usernames. So far so good, it looks like I’m “David B. Thomas” on Google Buzz, and I might be getting to sleep before midnight.
Then I scroll down the other guy’s follower list. 146 people, all shown in the Firstname Lastname format. And me, shown as “Thomas, David B.”
Should be fun trying to figure that one out.
Tagged as:
buzz,
google,
identity,
obsession
I went to my first unconference this past weekend, AnalyticsCamp, held at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill. I really enjoyed the format. For those of you unfamiliar with the unconference/barcamp model, there’s no schedule in advance. Speakers propose their sessions on a wiki, then on the day, they stand up and pitch their ideas, then post them to a board. If you want to go, you make a mark on the sheet. Some of the sessions were packed, some had only a few people, but it was very democratic. It’s also handy in that you get a sense of the speaker before you commit your time to his or her session.
I also just registered for IgniteRaleigh, which follows the same format but allows you to vote online. The topics range from social media marketing to what zombies reveal about society and psychology. So far it looks like the most creative and unusual topics are getting the most votes, which is great. If there’s one thing I’m tired of, it’s hearing the same old thing at conferences.
Once again I’m reminded why I love my job. My colleagues and I are breaking new ground every day, and finding new ways to communicate that people enjoy and want to participate in, not just endure. Unconferences are the real-world equivalent. If we all keep this up, we may never have to read another boring, jargon-filled press release again, and we may never again have to fight to stay awake while someone reads their PowerPoint slides to us.
Tagged as:
analytics camp,
ignite raleigh
It is 10:00 pm and I am lying on my back in bed, writing this post on my iPhone. Why would I write a blog post in the dark on a cramped keyboard that, no matter what you think of it, is not ideally suited to larger-than-micro blogging?
Because I can. I just found the Wordpress iPhone app yesterday and I’ve been dying to try it, mostly because I think it’s cool. Never mind that I’m making a lot of mistakes, my hands are going to sleep and I have three machines with full-size keyboards in the house.
And why am I obsessed with buying a netbook when I have three laptops?
I’m not going to try to explain the Shiny Object Syndrome. I’m sure many of you suffer from it yourself, or live with someone who does. No big shocker: it’s fun to get cool new stuff.
I wonder how much of that attitude drives social media participation, especially among the early adopters? How much of it is excitement at finding a new vehicle to listen and express oneself, and how much is the desire to get something cool and new?
I know that when I am immersed in the search for a new tech object (such as the one that finally culminated last night in ordering an Asus Eee 901 netbook with Linux), it becomes a way to carve out a little time to be fully (and selfishly) engaged in something outside my quotidian concerns. It’s almost meditative, as pathetic and Western as that sounds.
I get the same feeling when I’m trying to figure out a new (to me) social media tool like Ping.fm or Brightkite. I wonder how much overlap there is. Obviously you don’t have to love gadgets to love social media. But gadgets can certainly make it more fun.
Maybe we can identify a subset of people where the two interests intersect. What should we call them? Social gadgeteers?
Tagged as:
gadget,
iPhone,
netbook,
socialmedia
I’m looking in our cupboard at our bottle of canola oil, which proudly proclaims it is “expeller pressed.” Is that a good thing? It must be a good thing, right? Or they wouldn’t put it on the label.
I have a bottle of salmon oil capsules from Trader Joe’s, which are “molecularly distilled.” Is that a good thing? It must be a good thing, right? Or they wouldn’t put it on the label.
Small batch. Single barrel. All natural. First cold pressed. Unrefined. What do they all mean? Is that a good thing? It must be a good thing, right?
Itmustbeagoodthing.com seems to be available. I think you see where I’m going. Find all these nebulous claims on packages and brochures and commercials, explain what they mean, and whether or not it’s a good thing.
I offer this to you, as I know myself well enough to know I will never do anything with it. (Witness the fact that I own the domain 1001albums.com, the idea behind which also sounded like it was worth a million bucks at the time.)
If you launch itmustbeagoodthing.com and make a million dollars, send me some money someday.
