Recommendations

TLDR # Netflix again cancelled several of our favorite shows, me and the family are Fuming! In this post I explore what might be Netflix decision process, and try to identify potential flaws in it. At the end I offer some solution ideas, because I like to improve things, not just complain about things.

It is really basic premise, and I didn’t even invent it. Alas I have to warn other potential Tivo customers, after giving company many chances to make things right and a month of monumental efforts (mostly mine). Also, this is Not an investment advice regarding Tivo Inc (NASDAQ:TIVO).

Today I want to reflect on Zen of iOS and overall Apple philosophy. But first, there’s a disturbance in the force that I must deal with. My overall tranquility has been compromised, and by Apple Genius Bar employees, no less.

Yes, there, I am out in the open now, ready to admit it. For the longest time I’ve been watching Netbooks, saying to myself – it’s really a useless toy, why spend money even?

I noticed that they took down Most of the movies I liked on Hulu as my recommendations, a year ago. Only Girl Next Door remains, which brings up a thought of a Chicken-n-Egg situation. Specifically – Do they put Young Guy attracting movies because that is their demographics, or is their demographics this way because they put Young Guy attracting movies?

I watched another excellent Nova show today, called The Spy Factory. It is an excellent in-depth investigation of the failure of US Intelligence when it came to preventing the 9/11 attack. I won’t go further into details, as the entire show is available for online viewing right on the official PBS.org site, so I recommend you watch it. Once you finished (or perhaps you already seen it on TV), come back here for some more afterthoughts of mine.

Hi, Happy Thanksgiving! This is just a quick post to tell you that Google has released Picasa 3, and it is even better than the earlier versions. This is undoubtedly best software to manage your photo collection. I have been using it since version 1 and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

There is still about two weeks to Microsoft’s acclaimed Professional Developers Conference 2008, where all (or at least a lot) will be officially revealed. But I want to jump the gun and theorize, or perhaps even Dream, of what’s to come. It is widely expected that Microsoft will launch their next generation Cloud OS (Operating System), named Strata. Obviously this is mostly targeting servers, but the concept of servers and clients is becoming more and more obsolete as the computing devices undergo daily transformation.

Creative titles aren’t my specialty… Anywho, today I decided to try something that really made sense, and strangely enough, it does exist! Perhaps this is not news to anyone, but I really don’t recall seeing such a handy Map and Photo mashup available on our beloved Flickr.com site, just try Explore feature!

UPDATE (Jun 2009): Hulu.com took down most of these excellent movies, and replaced with (*expletive censored*). So I had to come up with a new list of recommendations. I just came across some excellent full length movies on Hulu, that appear to be available to everyone (in USA probably) completely free and legally! Here are some examples:

Yesterday Scobleizer reminded me about the whole Mac versus Vista debate, with his post about Vista on Dell’s Tablet. It seems not only Robert is having that issue, here is an Attorney with similar complaint:

Season Greetings! This post is probably a bit overdue, but maybe you’re still planning a big bash for New Year’s and this is definitely something useful for the new year!

Lately I felt that I have been posting way too much on Technology or plain fun stuff, and not at all enough on Meaning of Life, as the sub-title of my blog implies. I have been contemplating for a while to break this trend, and today, the opportunity just screamed out at me while driving to work.

Short post today, since it’s very late. I tried out Opera 9.50 Alpha today, and while it may be as lightening fast as they claim, that doesn’t help me any. If it can’t render Google Reader properly, which is critical web app for me, it’s no good… I realize it is Alpha, so I will just let them work on these kinks for now.

First, I promise not to celebrate each week in the future 🙂 , but I think the first week was so thrilling that it’s worth writing about. Lets start with words on the platform itself, which is WordPress. I actually tried Drupal first, but found it too cumbersome for just managing simple blog. WordPress was simple to install and extend. I ran into some issues with some widgets, but overall, it’s excellent and very recommended.