Google Video. Yep. Now, if you really want to, you can watch a poorly compressed low resolution episode of CSI or Star Trek Voyager or (for whatever f*&^ing reason) The Brady Bunch for a mere $1.99 USD.

Um. Or not. Personally, I’ll save my money and instead of spending $51 ($44 USD) on a season’s worth of crappily-encoded episodes of CSI, I’ll spend $54 for a season on DVD. Some of which are even in high def!

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t watch enough TV to justify spending that kind of money on that kind of quality when I can, 95% of the time, order what I want from Amazon and have it on DVD at my house within a week. I also don’t buy music online, so maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. Maybe someday when music is $0.10/track and TV episodes are decent quality. Or, you know, 5 years from now when physical media has gone the way of the poor, poor Dodo and I have no choice.

Damned kids. Get off my lawn.

While pecking away at a post on my other, more literary, weblog, I realized that I waste a lot of time. A lot of the time I waste is wasted simply reading the web, the vast majority of which is just not useful to me beyond being random trivia I absorb and occasionally pass along. The vast majority of this vast majority of not-really-useful-content comes to me via web feeds. To quote myself:

One easy way for me to make more time is to stop reading through thousands of stories via RSS. I’m of the opinion that the blogosphere has (as quickly as it started) jumped the shark. Once upon a time, weblogs acted as human filters for the sea of dross that flooded through the intartron. Now blogs seem simply to amplify the noise, not only adding to the flood of garbage (one piece of real content will get reflected back a dozen times, with little or no added or useful commentary) but also drowning out the useful-but-less-noticed content that’s out there. Job one, therefore, is to cut my RSS subscriptions from “anything that’s ever caught my interest for more than 30 seconds” to “feeds for things I actually need to monitor every 2 hours”. This will make a nicely compact, useful, and efficient list.

As an example, I got out of bed at 9am this morning. After making coffee (mm, coffee), I read my email. That was finished by around 9:30am. Since then (it is now 1:43pm) I’ve been reading through my RSS feeds. What the hell is with that? That’s four hours of my life I won’t be getting back ever, and only about 6 of the stories I read required any sort of real attention or action on my part (all of which were related to the MDC).

Enough, say I. Right now I am subscribed to 185 feeds. Having looked through those, I’ve found that only fourteen (14!) are things I actually need to monitor regularly. I’ve put those 14 in their own folder. The rest will be getting moved into a web-based feed reader system (bloglines or such) where I’ll check them once every couple of days.

I honestly have no idea how people who boast they’re subscribed to thousands of feeds ever get anything done.

I think I’ll make 2006 the Year of Figuring Out How to Waste Less Time. Paring down my feeds is step 1.

As pointed out in about 1000 other places, the folks over at Performancing have released a fantastic new Firefox extension that turns your browser into a fully-integrated blogging tool that works with a variety of different blogging software. I’m using it right now to post to my custom WordPress install, for example.

You can grab the extension here, and check out the Solution Watch review.

Update: The HTML formatting could use a bit of love, but I’m sure that will come in time :) The HTML formatting is fine if you don’t rely exclusively on the WYSIWYG editor. Neat!

So, the good folks over at Performancing have put together the beginnings of a pretty slick little blogging extension for Firefox.  If you’re curious, you can grab it here.

Note: read the start of the page (above the “Install” button).  That’s where it tells you how to use the extension (hint: F8 and the little clicky button in the lower-right corner of your browser).

The account wizard worked beautifully for my custom WordPress install (you’re soaking in it), which is always a nice thing.

Let’s try some test text: bold, italic, underline, bigger, smaller, link.

So del.icio.us was down for a day, and that was severely cramping my style, so I started casting about for a replacement service. I found Jots.com which has pretty much everything I’m looking for in a third-party bookmark service: RSS feeds, blog autopost tool (nicer than del.icio.us’s), and bookmarklets. There’s no Firefox extension for it yet, but we’ll see what happens there.

Anyhow, from here on in, my “Today’s Links” posts are brought to you by Jots.com. It’s a viable del.icio.us competitor with a much nicer design and interface.

del.icio.us has been down for a couple of hours so far today. It was also down for a couple of hours (5? 6?) a couple of days ago. I’ve been using the service lately because the Firefox Extension, LazySheep bookmarklet, and blog autoposting service have made it useful as a blog-post-link-aggregator. It’s less useful when it’s offline.

Oh well. Hopefully Yahoo! (who apparently just bought del.icio.us for an undisclosed-but-rumoured-to-be-healthy amount of money) will be able to throw enough money at the problem that del.icio.us will become a reliable service again sometime. Right now I’m just moderately irked because I’ve gone to tag a half-dozen sites in the past couple of hours and keep running into the “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible” error message. Grf.

I’m looking for a shared online whiteboard application. Ideally:

• It will be free and open source. Free is necessary. Open source is a clear “nice to have”, but not absolutely necessary.
• It will allow whiteboard sessions to be saved and loaded.
• It will have background options — ie: the background could be quadruled for simple charting, etc.
• It will not require Flash or other plugins.
• It will have a variety of brushes or shape-drawing tools. This one isn’t strictly necessary, but it’d sure be nice to have.
• It will be cross-platform (in an ideal world, it will “just work” in, say, Firefox 1.5).

Don’t suppose anyone could point me at something like this? Thanks!

Check out the Lazy Sheep bookmarklet. It’s really very, very good.

Paul Graham, prolific and excellent essayist, has written an essay about Web 2.0.

Does “Web 2.0″ mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn’t, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don’t need it.

Movie

Boolean and I just finished watching The Elephant Man, starring John Hurt and directed by David Lynch. This is an utterly phenomenal movie, telling (part of) the story of Joseph Merrick. It’s tragic and heartbreaking, while also somewhat uplifting. I won’t bother with any more trite cliches, I’ll just strongly recommend you rent it sometime soon.

Food

Last night, somewhat on a whim, I did a garlic-rosemary sirloin tip roast with potatoes, onions, and asparagus, accompanied by a nice bottle of wine from Portugal (Quinta D Encontro ‘Bairrada Superior’ 2001, $19.95 @ LCBO). Sirloin Tip roasts are roughly half the price of Prime Rib, which is a bonus, and I think Sirloin Tip actually makes for better sandwiches. Tonight’s dinner was leftovers, transformed into total yumminess as Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches with Cordon Bleu Beef Gravy, extremely fresh thick-sliced white bread from the local bakery, and fresh, very lightly steamed, peas. So, a $22 hunk of meat from the local grocery fed 4 people for a nice proper meal, and had enough leftovers for 3 more sandwiches (I’m having the last for lunch tomorrow).

Games

A bunch of us have been playing a strange little web-based space game called Ogame lately. It’s interesting, fun, not very time consuming (unless you’re phik), and a strangely interesting diversion every so often. It’s not for the weak of heart, however, as there’s basically no documentation. Still, if you like space games (or even just resource management/building games with an exploration/piracy twist), you might get a kick out of it.

Books

Tried reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. Didn’t make it very far. It…I dunno. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time, but after an hour’s reading, it still felt very much like he was just rambling aimlessly. Felt much more like a drunken weblog than a novel, I’m sad to say. Abandoned it.

Started reading Oblivion, a recent book of short stories by David Foster Wallace. I’m only about halfway through the first, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it. It’s a bit of a jarring leap from Roald Dahl to this, I find, if only because Dahl’s stories are actually short, while Wallace’s first in this volume is 64 pages long or so.

Work

For those of you who don’t know, I work for the Mozilla Foundation, managing the Devmo project. It’s coming along nicely, but we’re always interested in having more people come on board to help out. If you’re interested in Web or XUL development, drop by the Devmo Wiki and take a look around. The place is still a bit rough around the edges as we’re still officially in “alpha” stage (which, here, really means we’re still building stuff), but we’re hoping to shape things up for a beta in the near future. Comments, suggestions, editorial help, and content are always welcome.