Of Miles Rausch

The cable television industry is broken.  Certainly, it’s not as broken as the economy (DOWee!), but it’s based upon a single logical fallacy, that viewers watch channels.  This is simply not the case.  When is that last time you said, “I’m going to watch a little NBC“?  People don’t say that; people say, “I’m going to watch America’s Got Talent because it’s what I consider quality programming.”  (Okay, maybe no one’s ever said that, but you see my point.)

It was, with this in mind, that I began a spreadsheet.  One by one, I searched out the shows we felt we must keep up with: Lost, The Office (the last episode of which had me in tears, I laughed so hard), Grey’s Anatomy, Jon & Kate + 8, Scrubs (if it has another season), and Project Runway (for Holli).  The goal was find legal, online ways to view all of our shows.  This mission was made exponentially easier by the networks themselves.  Both NBC and ABC offer full video versions of some of their popular shows online.  This means that, as long as what you watch is popular, you can find your shows for free.

Unfortunately, there were two casualties to this process: Project Runway and J&K+8.  For Project Runway we’ve managed to find another, temporary solution (and the show’s almost over anyway), but jayenkayplusay seems to have no decent online presence.  We’ve decided that we can purchase VHS tapes for Carol to use to tape the show for us.  However, with us being short a VCR, this means we will only be able to watch the show when we’re there.  If anyone has any other ideas regarding this dilemma, please leave a comment.

EDIT: After doing some research for this post, I discovered that TLC has added JK8 to their video library, boasting entire episodes of the latest season until the end of December.

After doing the research and adding up the potential cost of this new method, we sat back in awe.  The results were astounding.  We discovered that we could save around $37.90 a month by getting our television online.  iTV was our winner.

It’s been two weeks since we made our choice, and so far it’s going well.  Also, we’ve been doing it a lot more.  And by “doing it” I mean reading, of course.  Holli has turned into a voracious reader, even though her work hours are getting closer and closer to full-time.  I split my time between reading, Half-Life 2, and programming/research.  It’s much quieter, and I feel better reading than I do watching TV.  With all this new reading time, I have a goal to read and remove enough books from my “library” to allow us to get rid of a bookshelf.  There’s one shelf in particular that could use a chucking.

If you’ve been considering getting rid of TV, be ready to fill that time with something.  Do some research to see if your “must have” shows have an online equivalent.  Our goal wasn’t to get our TV for free, but to get it online somehow.  Even if you have to pay $1.99 or $2.99 per episode, that cost will still be much lower than paying for a full cable subscription.

Have any of you done this?  Do you have any tips for would-be switchers?

We are constantly encouraged to think big for our clients.  Whether it’s an exciting new campaign, or way to grow their business outside of advertising, we try to bring ideas that paint upon a broader canvas.  As Jack says, leaders think about what happens after what happens next.

It would seem that Google is elevating that idea times ten (a hundred times).  Project 10 to the 100th (10¹⁰⁰ is the mathematical notation of a googol) is in part a celebration of ten years of Google, but it is also a community project.

From their project’s Why page:

Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big.

In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

In other words, helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike.

Will it work?  Will great ideas be unearthed?  What big ideas do you have?

Braving the icy north, Tony toils away at his workstation.  “Compute, damn you!” he mutters into his thinning notebook.  His fingers carefully scrawl the runes of a foreign language called “math”.  Somewhere, a watch beeps.  His bloodshot eyes peer up at the nearest clock.  With a dry chuckle, he realizes that he’s now a year older.  “Happy birthday to me…” he breathes as turns back to his stubborn figures.  The watch ticks on.

Or maybe he’s watching The Office; I don’t know.

Happy Birthday!

Today is the day of birth for:

• Carol Gregg (Mother-in-Law)
• Jeff Gabhart (Groomsman)
• Sue Rausch (Aunt)

Happy Birthday to you all. Some would think that having three birthdays in the same day means that this post is three times as clever. Those people would be wrong.

ur spelling it wrong

Some of you may have heard about this over the weekend, but Google leaked an announcement of its new, open source web browser, dubbed Google Chrome.  I say “leaked” because it appears they (snail) mailed some press materials that showed up a day early.  The announcement was meant for today, not yesterday.  As such, there’s little to nothing online from the Internet giant.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-01-n47.html was sent a Scott McCloud illustrated comic book talking about the new Chrome web browser.  Scott McCloud is awesome, if you’ve never heard of him.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html is Google’s “oops” post.

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ is a Google book with scanned pages of the comic book. It’s a great read, and the web browser is explained in a way that is entertaining as well as informative, all without being technical.

http://www.google.com/chrome is the URL at which (presumably) we’ll be able to download Chrome for Windows when it’s released.  Apple and Linux versions are in the works.

http://ejohn.org/blog/google-chrome-process-manager/ is John Resig (creator of Javascript library jQuery)’s take on what Chrome can mean for web developers in particular.

It’ll be interesting to see how Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Opera and others respond to this.  What do you think?  Is the browser market too cluttered?  Is there room for improvement?  Would you consider switching browsers?