Junk Food For The Soul

I’m growing a little tired of the “Twitter is going to replace news outlets” whining. We keep hearing this because the news sources themselves are the ones who are terrified of this … and never shut up about it. But like most other cases, progress doesn’t necessarily have to do away with one piece of the puzzle when another comes along. However, the picture does change.

Twitter isn’t going to replace mainstream media. It just becomes part of the investigative cycle. Gone are the days when to get a story out you had to make contact with a reporter and convince him to write something. You would give him bits and pieces of the story until the reporter could persuade his editor to run with it.

Now everyone can talk to everyone. The holy veil has been torn down. No longer do we have to wait for one high priest to enter the “Holy of Holies” once a year and then pass on the word.

Yet, people still go to churches.

Society still wants to hear what pastors, priests, and the like have to say. Yes there are more of them, but people still trust that these men and women of the cloth have devoted their lives to knowing and understanding religion and therefore are more informed than the average man.

They are, in effect, religious editors.

Reporters aren’t going anywhere, but they are changing their routines. The few who aren’t already will simply have to spend more time actually listening to people … and doing so online. They will have to monitor blogs, the phones, other news outlets … and, yes, Twitter.

But it’s the role of the editor that I believe has become more important. John Q. Public still depends on journalists to sift through the news and make sense of it. To bring in the experts to shed light on the parts of the story that might be the most important and to make sure that both sides of the story is being told. You know, good old-fashioned journalism.

A news source doesn’t have to always break the news to be an important part of the story. Bloggers and Twitter users might be able to break a story quicker, but they normally don’t have the resources to really tell the full story.

So don’t worry mainstream media guys, people still trust news outlets like CNN and the New York Times … they just may not always turn to them first.

Adam Journalism, Technology mainstream media, twitter

Adam Technology

Would it surprise anyone to find the service down?

Adam Misc, Technology

Well, just had my first “Blue Screen of Death” with Vista. Only had Firefox open, but it didn’t like something I was doing. I was creating a new Widgetbox widget and suddenly everything went blue. The machine quickly restarted by itself and when it came back to the desktop I had this error window and I couldn’t connect to my home network. I decided to turn it off … you know, give it a timeout and let it think about what it had done. Turned it back on a few minutes later and it seems fine.

Fingers crossed.

Adam Technology

What happens when you ask the whole world to download your software at the same time? They do.

Better be ready.

Adam Misc, Technology

I know some people who may not be quite as hip to the whole Internet generation seem to think that YouTube and similar sites are to blame for people taping themselves doing stupid things and then posting them to the sites. But I’m actually thankful to have sites like YouTube. Without them people would just commit crimes and then possibly get away with it.

Thanks to YouTube and the like we can now catch these idiots. Like the FL kids (sigh … another example of how whacked out my home-state is) who were just ordered to post an apology on YouTube for posting a video of themselves throwing a drink at the Taco Bell drive-thru clerk. A short 10-12 years ago when I was young and stupid I knew people who did similar stupid acts and none of them were ever punished for it. The only way they would get caught was to do the crime right in front of a cop. Now they are essentially providing the police all the evidence they need to catch them. The cops just sit back and reel them in.

Adam Florida News, Technology

Sweet! Just got a good deal from TiVo. As I mentioned earlier, one of my TiVo units broke so I was going to replace it with a newer DT unit. So I looked on TiVo’s website and found the one I wanted – $99. Not bad.

But off to the side of the order page was the part where you order the service plan with it, and the cheapest plan is $12.95 a month. Um … I’m payin $6.95 a month now for the recently broken unit. I don’t really like the thought of doubling that. When I bought the second box I was getting a cheaper rate because I had a second box.

So I called up TiVo to find out how to transfer the current plan from the broken box to the new one. Shawn in Customer Support wasn’t very helpful. Nice enough, but he said $12.95 was the cheapest plan and that I would just have to cancel the plan on the broken box and activate the box with the $12.95 plan when it arrived.

Hmm … that was enough to make me reconsider the purchase. I only use the second unit a couple of days a week. It’s not a need. But I decided to take him up on his offer to transfer me to the “Retention Center” to help me cancel the account. I really didn’t need their help with that part, but the word “retention” sounded promising.

Glad I did. I told the woman who answered – sorry, missed her name – the same story about my broken TiVo, having 2 boxes and wanting to get new box under the same plan. To my surprise she said no problem and even gave me the $99 TiVo for $69.

I got to keep my cheap plan and get $30 off the new box. All I had to do was confirm my shipping information and give her my credit card number. The box will arrive at my doorstep, at which time I’ll call back with my case number and they are supposed to switch the plan from the broken TiVo to the new one.

Thanks TiVo!

Adam TV, Technology, TiVo

I came home from traveling a few days to find that the TiVo unit in the bedroom has suddenly given up the ghost on me. It was paused on a show that I know I wasn’t watching when I left the house and was stuck. I unplugged the unit, plugged it back in and it came up with the familiar “Powering Up” message.

And that’s as far as it will go.

A while back it was making some ticking sounds like the hard drive was going out in it so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, but the ticking stopped probably a year ago. Well, whatever decided to take the life of my beloved TiVo has come back. Why it chose to take the newer of the two boxes I own is a mystery to me, but either way now I’m down to one TiVo … and (sadly) that doesn’t seem to be enough for me. I miss having the TiVo in the bedroom full of The Daily Show episodes that I can watch for a few minutes before going to sleep.

So I’ve decided I should buy a new one. (I lasted a whole 4 days before giving up the idea of a single box.) Why not, the new DT ones work with my cable box that has been collecting dust – and yet costing me $5 a month – for a couple of years now.

Adam TV, Technology, TiVo

Ugh, again?

Twitter’s down again?!!!

How long before the community moves to a new platform?

I’m ready to go when you guys are.

Adam Technology

So, I just got my new Netflix Player box a few days ago and I really like it. Works great, free content from Netflix whenever I want, and couldn’t be easier to use.

Then today I’m reading one story about The Daily Show being streamed online followed by another about how great it would be to get Hulu video on a set-top box. I marked one of the stories on my Google Reader Shared List and commented how much I wished a company would just come out with a dead-simple device that would allow me to watch all of this stuff on my TV. Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, great video podcasts, streaming services from networks like ABC and Comedy Central, everything. And it would need to be able to expand to any other service that popped up. Obviously a tall order licensing-wise because most of these companies don’t play well with others, but it could be done.

Then I started to think about that for a sec. “I want a box that would allow me to watch Daily Show on my TV? I can already do that with normal cable.” That’s when I came back to the reality that what I really want is the ability to watch anything I want, anytime I want. When I’m ready to watch The Daily Show, I want it available. I don’t want to hope that I TiVo’ed it. I don’t want to worry about the fact that I’ve had several episodes waiting on me and because I ran out of space my TiVo deleted a couple. I don’t want to have to watch a couple of minutes of each episode to see if it’s a rerun because I don’t set my TiVo to record first-run only since I sometimes have conflicts.

I just want to be able to punch up “Daily Show” and see their episode list. Then I can choose the episode I want and hit play.

Why can’t all shows be like that? If I want to watch a show like LOST on the night it comes out because I have to be able to talk about it the next day at lunch, I can. But in most cases the show is simply made available at a certain time each week and whenever I choose to watch it after that is my business.

Podcasts already do this. Each weekday a new episode of Buzz Out Loud, my favorite tech podcast, is made available sometime in the late afternoon. But I don’t listen to it that day. I usually open iTunes sometime over the weekend, download all the episodes I haven’t listened to yet and then burn them to a CD to listen to in my car. If I do a lot of errands over the weekend, I may be caught up before Monday morning. Most of the time I’m still listening to them on my Monday and Tuesday commute.

Because the content is timely, I don’t really let it go more than a week without catching up. The Daily Show, with it’s political and topical “news” would be a similar example on the TV side. But the other show that I listen the most on my daily commute is The Adam Carolla Show. It’s a daily radio show from the West Coast that I download online. Because it’s more than 2 hours everyday and my commute is only about 75 minutes round-trip, I couldn’t possibly hope to keep up with the current episodes. In fact, I’m months behind – and would have been a year or more behind if I hadn’t decided to skip the entire year that Danny Bonaduce co-hosted. But it doesn’t matter because it’s still enjoyable to listen to.

TV and movies should be the same way. You could accomplish something close by watching a lot of TV on DVD, watching streaming shows online, using the Netflix Player, etc. But what we all really want is an easy way to watch exactly what we want to watch at the exact time that we want to watch it. Of course, we’d also prefer not to have to take out a second mortgage to do it.

Update: Sounds like some people in high places actually agree.

Adam Movies, TV, Technology, TiVo