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Daynotes
Journal
Week of -3 January 2010
Latest
Update: Saturday, 2 January 2010 13:35 -0500 |
12:05
- I'm starting the new year a bit early because I refuse to have one of my weekly pages straddle two years.
Barbara
is working today, but will then be off until next Monday. I'm doing the
usual end-of-year/start-of-year administrative stuff, including
developing plans for the Maker Shed Science Room for 2010. Things are otherwise pretty quiet around here.
We just watched series one of Nurse Jackie, which one of my friends recorded for us on his DVD recorder. And we've been pigging out on another Showtime series, Dexter,
in which the lead character is a forensic analyst who also happens to
be a serial killer. The twist is that Dexter only murders people who
richly deserve it and have slipped through the legal system unpunished
or even undetected.
Barbara and I disagree about the entire
premise. She thinks taking the law into one's own hands and committing
murder is wrong, period. I think a justifiable murder is not only not
wrong, but can be a moral act. In fact, I can see myself doing what
Dexter does, although I wouldn't ritualize it and I would commit each
murder by a different method and leave the body where it fell rather
than risk disposing of it. Of course, disposing of the body at the very
least complicates forensic analysis, but I'm familiar enough with the
entire field of forensics to avoid problems there.
I'm probably
in the minority. As Heinlein commented, most males have an unhealthy
tendency to obey laws. That's never been a problem for me. I have zero
respect for the politicians who make the laws, so why would I have any
respect for the laws they make? I don't break a law if there's a
significant likelihood that I'll be caught doing so, or if the law
happens to be one I agree with, but otherwise the law is immaterial. I
have my own moral compass. I don't need politicians to tell me what's
right and what's wrong.
00:00
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Wednesday, -1 January 2010
00:00
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00:00
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13:58
-
I'm still doing end-of-year/start-of-year stuff, including pulling new
archive sets to DVD. Of course, the DVD burner in my main system picked
now to die. It's an ASUS DRW-2014L1T, about a year old. So I headed for
the workroom, looking for a SATA DVD burner. I was delighted when I
spotted an old but unused Plextor PX-716SA. The manufacturing date was
December 2004, but I figured it'd still be good. Wrong.
I
swapped out the drives and put a Verbatim MCC004 16X DVD+R disc in the
drive. The burn ramped up very slowly, reaching only 8X or so by the
time it was a third of the way through the disc. Then it abrupted
dropped to 0.0X for fifteen seconds or more and then started writing at
4X, at which speed it remained until it finished writing the disc. I'd
set it to do a verify, not that there was much hope for that disc. And,
of course, the verify failed. Thinking perhaps I just had a bad disc, I
tried burning another disc, but got the same results.
I didn't
have any more SATA burners on the shelf, so I started eyeballing some
older mothballed systems, planning to pull a burner from one of them.
Then I decided it wasn't worth the hassle. I jumped onto New Egg's web
site and ordered a $30 Lite-On burner with free shipping. That'll
arrive early to mid next week, but I can wait. In the interim, I just
finished my archive set by writing them to ISO files, which I'll burn
once the new drive arrives.
09:53
- Oops. I forgot to post my New Year's Resolutions. Oh, well. They're pretty much the same as last year's. I'm no longer writing books per se, but I will be writing a lot of new material for the MAKE Science Room this year. (Actually, there are already 65 more finished articles in the queue, which I hope will be posted before long.)
I've
been watching the Fox/TWC battle and, wonder of wonders, rooting for
the cable company to win. Apparently, no one but me has noticed a
logical inconsistency in Fox's position. Fox claims that it needs
$1/subscriber/month from TWC for the right to broadcast OTA Fox
programming because ad revenues are insufficient. But if that's true,
why does Fox continue its money-losing OTA operations? Why not drop the
OTA operations and convert what's now the Fox broadcast channel to a
cable channel? That way, Fox could keep all ad revenue rather than
paying some of it to its local stations, and could also claim that
$1/subscriber/month revenue as a cable-only channel.
What we're
really seeing here is the beginning of the end of "free" OTA
programming. There are too many middlemen between the content producers
and the viewers, and those middlemen are adding zero value. In fact,
they're now adding negative value. Local broadcast stations are likely
to be the first casualty, cut out of the loop as the national broadcast
networks transition to national cable networks.
The
Comcast/NBC deal was the first crack in the dam, quickly followed by
this Fox/TWC battle. This trend is likely to continue, with all of the
broadcast networks eventually transitioning into cable networks. I
expect to see all of the broadcast networks duplicate their OTA content
on new cable networks. Then, some year soon, when contracts between the
national broadcast networks
and their local affiliates expire, I expect to see the
networks refuse
to renew them, leaving the local affiliates hung out to dry. Dropping
OTA boardcasting will reduce viewer count, certainly, but those lost
viewers are exactly the kind of viewers that the networks don't much
care about. They're generally poor and rural and of little interest to
advertisers. Losing them will cost the networks some revenue,
certainly, but that lost revenue will be offset by reduced costs.
The
local affiliates won't really be missed, either. Right now, the only
real value they provide is their local newscasts, and those are
increasingly becoming unnecessary. For example, Time-Warner has its own
cable channel here, on the basic tier, called News 14 Carolina. TWC
runs a statewide news operation, which is at least the equal of the
local stations' news operations, and probably considerably more
cost-effective. For example, all of the local affiliates have their own
weather crews. News 14 Carolina has a weather crew as well, but it
serves the entire state. In the Triad, we see Tara Lane doing Weather
on the Ones. Charlotte gets Tara (who lives in Charlotte) doing
Weather on the Fours, and Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill gets Tara
doing Weather on the Sevens (or vice versa). I suspect Tara gets to use
the Bathroom on the Zeroes, but is otherwise working flat out for her
entire shift.
And, of course, not only are the local
affiliates not doing anything useful, they're sitting on a
lot of valuable RF spectrum, all of which would better be allocated to
wireless networking. So, although there will doubtless be a lot of
posturing and a lot of lawsuits and federal court cases, I have no
doubt that local affiliates are going away, with their
spectrum auctioned off by the federal government. That leaves the
cable companies and satellite companies and phone companies as the
remaining delivery mechanisms for all those cable networks.
The
trouble is, the next logical step--and we're already seeing the first
baby steps--is for cable networks to go away, replaced by Internet
networks. We'll still have A&E, the Home & Garden Channel, and
so on, but they'll be IP networks rather than cable networks. The cable
systems become just another middleman, and are adding no value. What we
need from the cable companies is just big, fast, dumb pipes. We'll find
our own "content", thank you very much. Initially, we'll find that
content on those Internet networks, but in reality they're just another
middleman, and they'll also be adding no value. So, ultimately, I see
the landscape being local pipe providers that we'll all use to pick and
choose the content we want to watch, which will be provided directly by
the creators of that content. No middlemen at all between us and the
creators. That transition may not be complete for 20 years or more, but
we're definitely heading in that direction.
13:35
-
Something just happened that illustrates how little network TV we
really watch. Barbara and I were taking a lunch break when we started
trying to figure out which network affiliate corresponded to which of
our cable TV channels. We both knew that the NBC affiliate, WXII, was
on cable channel 11 and that CPT (PBS) was on cable channel 4. Other
than that, we had no clue. I thought CBS was on channel 2 and Barbara
thought maybe it was channel 7. (It's channel 9, as it turns out.) I
thought Fox was on channel 7 or maybe 10 and ABC was on whichever one
Fox wasn't on. Barbara wasn't sure. She checked the TV section in the
paper to find out. Now that I know, I've already forgotten. It's been
years since I've watched anything on ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox.
Barbara
is nearing the end of her annual deep cleaning, with only her own
office left to do and some minor things in other rooms. As long as she
was cleaning the downstairs guest suite, we decided it was time to do
something I'd wanted to do for a long time. Our industrial upright
freezer has been in my lab, taking up space. I've also been vaguely
uncomfortable having food storage sharing my lab space. Finally, we had
two spare microwave ovens and a convection oven stored out in the
unfinished area of the basement. I've wanted to have a microwave and
that convection oven in my lab, but I simply couldn't spare the counter
space.
So we decided to do some rearranging. We moved the
freezer out into the unfinished area of the basement, which was a
project in itself. After cleaning the area where the freezer had been
sitting for years in my lab, we moved a microwave cabinet into that
space. The convection oven sits nicely on the top of the cabinet and
the microwave oven in the interior area designed for it. I've even made
sticky "Lab Only" labels for each of them, not that either of us is
likely to use them for cooking food, but it's good practice to label
things that shouldn't be used subsequently for food preparation. I'll
use the microwave primarily for heating water or solutions quickly, and
the convection oven will serve as a very efficient dry autoclave. I
also have a pressure cooker for when I need a wet autoclave. And the
microwave cabinet has a drawer that'll be useful, along with cabinet
space underneath that I can use for storing acids or something.
00:00
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Robert
Bruce
Thompson. All
Rights Reserved.