I suppose some may think that a form of paranoia is overtaking me, or that I am getting more easily annoyed as I get older. Chances are good that both are happening - let me explain. A couple years ago I bought a PVR (aka DVR or Tivo). Mine is from my satellite company, Dish Network. Works fine, never had a problem with it, love it.
But recently, I have noticed that the programming is getting out of sync with the clock, meaning that when I set my PVR to record a show, it often misses the last 30 seconds to 2 minutes of the show. This only happens when the show continues past the hour or the half-hour just a little. It’s just enough for you to miss the preview of the next episode, or even the conclusion of the show. Really annoying.
Why is this happening all of a sudden? I don’t remember having this problem until just a few months ago. Why would the networks start doing this? Certainly the way they sell commercials has changed, breaking up many of the ad time slots into short 5-15 second bursts of high volume intense messages. Who knows, maybe in time they will get even shorter, possibly just a subliminal blur of logos and product names that flows right into your cortex. But that’s probably not be related to my timing problem.
Here is where the paranoia comes in. Believe it or not I am starting to think that the networks are doing this intentionally, just to annoy me. I think that is it entirely possible that they have this plan where, for their most watched shows (and consequently their most lucrative ad time), they are intentionally running the shows past the hour so that I will be dissuaded from “Tivoing” that particular show and choose to watch it real time! Then I won’t miss the ending. and will be more likely to pay attention to at least some of their ads.
I suppose there could actually be some business reason that they are doing this, like the ad rates for the show I’m watching are higher than the next one coming up. Therefore they extend the show a couple minutes so they can cram in a couple more spots while people are glued to their sets. Makes you feel manipulated doesn’t it?
Well, I’m not going to give up! Even if I have to reprogram my shows manually to extend the time a few minutes into the next hour, or pause a live show for 15 minutes and then advance through the commercials.
The days of ad agencies forcing you to watch Immodium and Preparation H commercials at dinnertime are just about over, my friend. No wonder the networks are getting desperate.
Wednesday, March 16
Tuesday, March 15
Free WiFi Update
In recent posts I have commented about the growth of free WiFi, how important I think this trend is, and how I strongly feel that public internet access should be free. Well, I just ran across a website where a gifted and generous fellow has put together an entire site dedicated to helping people set up their own WiFi hotspot, include the free software to do it with!
To borrow my daughter's favorite expression, Awesome!
If more people follow this gentleman's lead, free WiFi will hit the tipping point and all the technologies that take advantage of WiFi will really take off. It will have an impact similar to the transition from dialup to Broadband.
Check it out: http://www.publicip.net/
To borrow my daughter's favorite expression, Awesome!
If more people follow this gentleman's lead, free WiFi will hit the tipping point and all the technologies that take advantage of WiFi will really take off. It will have an impact similar to the transition from dialup to Broadband.
Check it out: http://www.publicip.net/
Monday, March 7
Submit your Ideas
As an accompanyment to this blog, I am setting up a second discussion to encourage people to submit their ideas on what they would like to see the inventors and engineers of the world work on next. Take a look, think about all the technology in your life that is lacking, or annoying or maybe even infuriating. Then submit a suggestion for how it should be.
Go Here
Go Here
Wednesday, March 2
New Sharper Image Must-Have
Got the new SI catalog in the mail yesterday and I couldn’t resist commenting on a cool new gadget they feature on the front cover.
It is the amazing “Treat and Train” Professional Dog Training System. Basically, it’s a whole system that includes a training manual, DVD, and here’s the best part: a small remote-controlled dog-treat dispenser that plugs into the wall in the room where your dog does all of his misbehaving.
The most impressive thing about this system is that the remote-controlled dispenser relieves you of that awful job of having to present your dog with a treat from your hand. Simply push the remote control, and a treat is dispensed along with a tone to alert Sparky that he has a reward. Incredible! Just think, no more worry about the little guy licking your hand. Heck, you don’t even need to approach him. Voilá, you can train your dog from your couch while you watch TV.
For only $169.95, you will save all the time it previously took to hand Sparky a treat when he was exhibiting good behavior. Of course, you do get the training manual and the DVD, so I guess you really only paid about $150 for the Pavlovian dispenser. Aside from the big question of whether the training system is effective, (you are actually the one getting trained in case you didn’t know) one has to wonder if Sparky will learn to love the dispenser more than you?
Whatever the answer, Sharper Image continues to deserve my highly revered #1 spot as
“the quintessential source for overpriced stuff you don’t need.” However, I think that in this case, they should also get honorable mention for “solving a problem that people don’t have.”
Hmm, I wonder if I could adapt the idea to work with my kids, maybe a remote-controlled auto-parenting cash dispenser linked to the completion of household chores. Or, now that more and more schools let you turn in your homework online, maybe this little private ATM machine could be linked to their schoolwork!!
Nah, they’d figure out a way to hack into it.
It is the amazing “Treat and Train” Professional Dog Training System. Basically, it’s a whole system that includes a training manual, DVD, and here’s the best part: a small remote-controlled dog-treat dispenser that plugs into the wall in the room where your dog does all of his misbehaving.
The most impressive thing about this system is that the remote-controlled dispenser relieves you of that awful job of having to present your dog with a treat from your hand. Simply push the remote control, and a treat is dispensed along with a tone to alert Sparky that he has a reward. Incredible! Just think, no more worry about the little guy licking your hand. Heck, you don’t even need to approach him. Voilá, you can train your dog from your couch while you watch TV.
For only $169.95, you will save all the time it previously took to hand Sparky a treat when he was exhibiting good behavior. Of course, you do get the training manual and the DVD, so I guess you really only paid about $150 for the Pavlovian dispenser. Aside from the big question of whether the training system is effective, (you are actually the one getting trained in case you didn’t know) one has to wonder if Sparky will learn to love the dispenser more than you?
Whatever the answer, Sharper Image continues to deserve my highly revered #1 spot as
“the quintessential source for overpriced stuff you don’t need.” However, I think that in this case, they should also get honorable mention for “solving a problem that people don’t have.”
Hmm, I wonder if I could adapt the idea to work with my kids, maybe a remote-controlled auto-parenting cash dispenser linked to the completion of household chores. Or, now that more and more schools let you turn in your homework online, maybe this little private ATM machine could be linked to their schoolwork!!
Nah, they’d figure out a way to hack into it.
Wednesday, February 23
Town Freaks Out over RFID
According to recent reports, the town of Sutter California is simply not ready for the Twenty First century – one wonders if some of the more vocal inhabitants there were even comfortable with the Twentieth. This small town surrounded by farms about an hour north of Sacramento made it onto the map recently when parents rose up to shield their town from a new fangled technology in the form of high tech student ID cards. Concerned parents were horrified to learn recently that the school board (there is only one public school in the town) had decided to try out new ID cards for the students with imbedded RFID tags containing the student’s ID#.
RFID tags are small passive computer chips that can be powered up by a special coded radio signal and exchange small amounts of data with the reader. They are rapidly proliferating in every corner of the globe because they are cheap, need no batteries because they are passive devices, and are perfect for ID cards, inventory tags, and may eventually replace bar codes on boxes of cereal. In this case, the school principal’s plan was to require all students to wear the ID tags and install readers at classroom doors to make it faster and more accurate to take attendance.
Apparently the thought of each child having an electronic chip in their student ID card was just too scary a proposition to comprehend for this town of 2,885. Most of the ensuing uproar, which ultimately forced the project to be abandoned, was centered around privacy rights. Some even voiced concern about possible health effects of wearing the ID tag. News crews came from far and wide, interviewing the irate parents as they picketed the school. The ACLU even came, adding their usual rhetoric to the privacy debate, claiming that the badges made every child a “walking homing beacon to stalkers with scanners.”
Never mind that the badges contained an encrypted 15 digit ID number that could only be read by the school system. Never mind that a scanner that would work at a distance would be so bulky that that the “stalker” would stand out like a sore thumb. Never mind that thousands of companies around the world use the same system for their ID badges and also in smart cards that people carry in their wallets.
Clearly this was no longer a reasoned discussion – it had rapidly devolved into an emotional reaction to technology. Some parents even quoted passages from the bible.
But maybe the tone of this uproar is being misinterpreted. Surely these parents aren’t worried about the school knowing where their children are when they are at school. And for a small school such as this, chances are that most everyone knows each other anyway. I’d be willing to bet that if you asked 5 people at random, you could find out what your friend had for lunch.
Maybe the parents are really not so worried about stalkers in their neighborhood, and maybe most of these people are not really worried about walking near the scanner any more than they are worried about passing through the metal detector at an airport or the scanners set up at the entrance to clothing stores and drug stores. Maybe it’s something else.
What if they are really worried about the future and not the present? What if they are really worried that their next drivers license issued by the state of California will have such a chip imbedded in it? What if they are more worried about being tracked themselves as they go about their day?
Maybe an innocuous ID badge for kids is seen as the first small step toward a society where your every action is recorded by some system or another and each person is profiled and logged and tagged and tracked wherever they go. Now I’m freaking myself out.
RFID tags are small passive computer chips that can be powered up by a special coded radio signal and exchange small amounts of data with the reader. They are rapidly proliferating in every corner of the globe because they are cheap, need no batteries because they are passive devices, and are perfect for ID cards, inventory tags, and may eventually replace bar codes on boxes of cereal. In this case, the school principal’s plan was to require all students to wear the ID tags and install readers at classroom doors to make it faster and more accurate to take attendance.
Apparently the thought of each child having an electronic chip in their student ID card was just too scary a proposition to comprehend for this town of 2,885. Most of the ensuing uproar, which ultimately forced the project to be abandoned, was centered around privacy rights. Some even voiced concern about possible health effects of wearing the ID tag. News crews came from far and wide, interviewing the irate parents as they picketed the school. The ACLU even came, adding their usual rhetoric to the privacy debate, claiming that the badges made every child a “walking homing beacon to stalkers with scanners.”
Never mind that the badges contained an encrypted 15 digit ID number that could only be read by the school system. Never mind that a scanner that would work at a distance would be so bulky that that the “stalker” would stand out like a sore thumb. Never mind that thousands of companies around the world use the same system for their ID badges and also in smart cards that people carry in their wallets.
Clearly this was no longer a reasoned discussion – it had rapidly devolved into an emotional reaction to technology. Some parents even quoted passages from the bible.
But maybe the tone of this uproar is being misinterpreted. Surely these parents aren’t worried about the school knowing where their children are when they are at school. And for a small school such as this, chances are that most everyone knows each other anyway. I’d be willing to bet that if you asked 5 people at random, you could find out what your friend had for lunch.
Maybe the parents are really not so worried about stalkers in their neighborhood, and maybe most of these people are not really worried about walking near the scanner any more than they are worried about passing through the metal detector at an airport or the scanners set up at the entrance to clothing stores and drug stores. Maybe it’s something else.
What if they are really worried about the future and not the present? What if they are really worried that their next drivers license issued by the state of California will have such a chip imbedded in it? What if they are more worried about being tracked themselves as they go about their day?
Maybe an innocuous ID badge for kids is seen as the first small step toward a society where your every action is recorded by some system or another and each person is profiled and logged and tagged and tracked wherever they go. Now I’m freaking myself out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
