links for 2006-11-30

units of measure

the FU or Friedman Unit refers to the length of time its namesake thinks will bring about results in Iraq. we’ve been through 4 or so of them, so far. no results, at least none anyone is happy with.

The Horse’s Mouth:

If six months is a Friedman, what is 150,000 troops? I propose that these extra troops (imaginary though they are) be called McCains with 100,000=1 McCain. So Friedman wants 1.5 McCains sent to Iraq….and a pony.

now we have the McCain, unit of troop strength.

He should know better as a vet, but the rest of these jokers are just playing Risk.

TiVo update

So I finally got through to TiVo world HQ and found out that the box — which I got for free, you may recall — has lifetime service. As in no fees. Ever.

Nonplussed is the word I think I want. Now to see if it works and what it can do.

<update to the update> It may be dead, with a bad drive. From what I can tell, a persistent screen of “Almost Done. Just a Few More Minutes” is a bad sign. My hunch is that warranty service is right out (it’s almost two years old, though it has been sealed in a box all that time, til today). Perhaps the holiday hardware sales will have to be leveraged here.

Or perhaps it’s something else.

More as it develops.

links for 2006-11-29

close the book on it

Dear Novelist,
 Images Banners Nano 2006 Winner Large

You did it.

Despite everything else going on in your busy life, you managed to pull off the creative coup of writing a 50,000-word novel in just one month.

When the going got tough, you got typing, and in four weeks, you built vast worlds and set them in motion. You created characters; quirky, interesting, passionate souls with lives and loves and ambitions as great as yours. You stuck it out through the notoriously difficult middle stretch, and pressed onward as 80% of your fellow writers dropped out around you.

And now look at you: A NaNoWriMo winner. And the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and we’re proud to have had you writing with us this year.

Continue reading “close the book on it”

paying for TV

CBC prez: High-def TV has no business model:

Cory Doctorow:
CBC president Robert Rabinovich has decried high-def TV as having no business model. This wouldn’t be newsworthy except that the promise of HDTV is the excuse given for the Broadcast Flag, which says that paranoid studio executives should be in charge of what features TVs are allowed to have.

The idea is that if you don’t give them their design-veto, they won’t put movies on high-def, and then the money won’t come in. But when the head of Canada’s national broadcaster announces that there’s just no way any broadcaster is going to make its money back on high-def, it makes you wonder if the Brits don’t have the right idea.

In the UK, a digital TV system called “Freeview” gives the public 30 free standard-definition TV channels, for life, over the air, for one setup payment. Instead of trying to lure people into throwing away their old sets and buying all new, Hollywood-crippled ones, the Brits just created free cable for life. Amazingly, lots of people voluntarily switched — and soon they’ll be able to shut off the old analog towers and use that spectrum for better, more internetty things.

“There’s no evidence either in Canada or the United States that we have found for advertisers willing to pay a premium for a program that’s in HD,” Mr. Rabinovich said. “So basically they’re saying if you want to shoot in HD, that’s your business, we’re not going to pay you more.”

The one setup payment comes with the TV License requirement as well, I expect. If you live and watch TV in England and it’s related states, you pay an annual fee to the privilege and in return you get Doctor Who and similarly un-airable-in-the-US shows, without commercials (at least on BBC1/2). Here we sell TV based on advertising, so we get Desperate Housewives.

The difference between the two approaches has been a lively debate topic on USENET in the past, with so-called libertarians claiming the state-owned (ie, owned by me and you) is evil and the communards of the TV license scheme suggesting that selling eyeballs and attention results in pretty crappy product. I’m sure you can’t guess where my sympathies lie.

For more on how the domestic broadcasting model came to be, look for this book.

snow day

Or more to the point, ice day. Snow would have been one thing, but what we had was lots of ice and it made for treacherous conditions. So school was closed, in favor of sledding, reading, movie watching (My Neighbor Totoro), board games, and general marveling at the day. Beautiful blue skies, no wind, but cold, like it-never-got-up-to-freezing cold.

Home-made pizza for dinner, managed to slice open the end of my thumb on a recalcitrant food processor blade, and had to shape the crusts and dress two pies with a sandwich bag on my right hand. A deep cut, too, perhaps a quarter-inch. Can’t count how many times those blades have gotten me and I’m amazed they’re still so sharp. How sharp? When you can’t feel the cut at all and don’t know you’re cut ’til you see that you’re bleeding, that’s how sharp.

Within a few hundred words of the end of NaNoWriMo 2006, and may wrap it up tonight it if it doesn’t pain me too much. I have discovered an obvious thing about this. You just write when you have a moment or two, not when you “have time.” It always seemed hard to do that, but this year I have made a point to just tack on a few words whenever I got the chance and it has really made a difference.

That said, perhaps I’ll try and do it now. Tomorrow looks to be more of the same — cold and clear — with another snow storm in the evening, so I may have to grab my moments when I find them.