Zibblog

After reading a post about TV watching by Nate, I felt like writing up what I’m currently watching (as an aside, I have to agree with Michelle that the whole household has to take responsibility for what is on the tivo). This probably doesn’t cover everything, but it’s what I could remember.

Weeknights

• Poker After Dark: 6 man winner take all texas holdum games with 5 hours of tv per game.

Sunday

• Battlestar Galactica: kind of waiting for Universal HD to catch up with SciFi Channel

Monday

• Prison Break
• 24: best season yet
• Heroes: absolutely love it
• Studio 60: it’s no Sports Night

Tuesday

• NCIS: it’s no JAG (take that however you want)
• The Unit: if you haven’t seen this one, season one is available on Netflix. :)
• Veronica Mars: this has been my least favorite season, but I’m still hoping it isn’t the last.
• House

Wednesday

• Friday Night Lights
• Jericho: favorite show of the new season (except maybe for Heroes)
• Lost

Thursday

• Smallville: I’m still watching but please let it end so that I can finally see the final scene of Clark putting on the suit
• CSI
• Grey’s Anatomy: I’m unashamed that this is probably my favorite show on TV (Writers’ Blog)
• Shark: I felt like this one started great, but I haven’t been that into it lately.

Friday

• Las Vegas: this hasn’t been the best season, but I can’t pass up Vanessa Marcil and Nikki Cox in HD.
• Monk: another show that I used to like a lot more

Stuff on at various times or currently on hiatus

• Stargate
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Don’t miss this one! Season 1 is available from Netflix or you can catch it on one of the Nickelodeon channels.
• Eureka
• Dead Zone

The other day, I saw this post on Zatz Not Funny about Netflix Instant Watching. What I found interesting is the opinion that we either need to enable everyone that asks or “call it a beta and let folks apply”. I’m not really sure what the difference is and why we need to let people apply. It got me to thinking about how beta applies to web apps that are constantly updating. At the point that you are pushing bug fixes and interface changes every 2 weeks, is it a really long beta period or a bunch of point releases?

In a totally unrelated note, the feature also got mentioned on TWIT and dl.tv. For the most part, both mentions were pretty good. The only thing that irked me was Patrick Norton saying on multiple shows that we spent $40 million developing it, but I’ve seen this stated incorrectly in other places as well. The $40 million is what we budgeted to spend on it in 2007 including infrastructure and content licensing.

For a while, one of the big projects at work has been the instant viewing feature for the Netflix website, which involves serving up high quality streaming video realtime to PCs. After having to be pretty careful about what I say about video on the computer for the past few months whenever the subject comes up in conversation, the feature is finally out in the open. There’s isn’t much to say that isn’t in the press release. I’ve been working on web applications for long enough that I’ve forgotten about how much trouble client applications are. Here’s some links to some mentions of the feature. I’ve been fairly happy with the articles so far.  I’ve also been kind of irritated here and there, but they can’t all be positive. I just can’t wait until I hear from a friend that happened to be included in the rollout, so that I can get a trusted third party opinion.  For all you Mac and Firefox people (which includes me), you’re out of luck for the moment at least since the feature requires IE and Windows.

• Hacking Netflix
• NY Times
• Variety
• Forbes
• Gizmodo
• O’Reilly Radar

Somehow, the bears have become the NFL’s first team to clinch a playoff spot.  This is despite have a quarterback who fairly regularly throws 3 interceptions in a game.  I guess it helps when the rest of your division is really bad.  Hopefully, they can finish the rest of the season strong and win a first round bye in the playoffs and home field advantage.

Netflix’s CEO is going to be on 60 minutes tonight for anyone interested.  They shot some footage at work awhile back, but I had almost forgotten about the whole thing until an email went out a couple of days ago.