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Who whould have thunk MTV would ever get into the music video business?

16,000 videos online, more added every day.

Hotel wall in NJ.

Nj Style

All the proof you needed that andy samberg does a better mark wahlberg than mark wahlberg.

Do not look gift AppleTV in the control port.

I haven’t written much about the woes I’ve experience with my AppleTV[1], since the topic seems well-covered.

But mostly, it hasn’t really ever worked.

With a 40GB hard drive vs. a 160GB music collection and a 50GB video collection, actually syncing anything to the device is a lost cause, which means I’ve always been running in “streaming” mode from the iTunes running on my PowerMac G5. Over 802.11g.

I realize I’ve just enumerated three key barriers to victory - the relatively slow wifi network (in an apartment house where we, alone, have about 10 wireless devices, not to mention what our neighbors have going on), and the streaming thing. Oh and the PowerMac G5 was plenty fast… four years ago. [2]

But the basic issues were:
a) can’t navigate the menus without significant / constant hangs
b) entire OS on unit hangs requiring reboot
c) other general suckery

I had sort of written the thing off as the gen 1 Apple “hobby”-itis Jobs referenced a while back, joyously concluding I’d, you know, rabidly buy/pre-order a gen 2 at the first possible moment. Because with Apple, often it is right to throw good money after bad.

Then a funny thing happened. Well, two funny things:

a) I bought an iPod Touch, and discovered that the various and sundry major menu performance issues I experienced via the AppleTV user interface (i.e. over the TV) didn’t seem to effect the ipod touch/iPhone “Remote” application. So playing around with that sort of got me in the mode of thinking all may not be lost

b) then, some time in the last few weeks, clearly some sort of code push happened to made the AppleTV front-end… well, work. As in, for the first time ever. Oh yeah, here it is. What do you know… it looks like my AppleTV has been under some kind of DoS attack for… two years.

Still periodic minor pauses, but no hangs in two weeks.

So dig that AppleTV out of the compost heap, and re-engage.

[1] I have a first gen 40GB model

[2] but on unrelated note, the last three tower macs I’ve owned have had really good lifespans: PowerMac 9500 1995-2001, PowerMac G4 blue and white 1998-2005, PowerMac G5 dual-core 2004-current.

One more small voice in the chorus.

Google is apparently doing OK and has some money to invest in world-changing ideas.

Their project 10 to the 100th is the opportunity for you to submit those world-changing ideas. Submit by Oct 20, 2009.

This has kept me up some nights recently, mostly because I’m arrogant enough to think I have one of those idears, then I go out and Google it, and someone is already doing it, and I get to start over. I have 17 days to get, what, 10x smarter? It’s a task that almost suggests a persistent, altered state.

I’ll either need to sleep on the couch for the home stretch (as I’m doing tonight, because I grew weary of waking up Kelley walking in and out of the bedroom), or bring the laptop in.

Perhaps a worthy idea is a system to allow cats to crawl all over you when you want, and not when you don’t. Seems like a win-win.

Key caps below:

You can do it.

Third exercise, this via the free wordpress for iPhone app. Very nice, clean, basic. Did I mention free?

Return to actual content soon…