Jay Leno Losing His Audience to DVR Machines

Jay Leno Losing His Audience to DVR Machines

Evelyn Violet Ely

Evelyn Violet Ely
Originally uploaded by davextreme

Born at 3:04 PM on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 6 pounds, 13 ounces, 19 and a half inches long. Katherine and Evelyn are both doing great.

Peter and the Wolf

Recommended companion to Fantastic Mr. Fox: Suzie Templeton’s 2008 Academy Award-nominated, stop motion-animated Peter and the Wolf short. If you have Netflix, you can stream it.

Christmas Playlist 2009

I’ve been very carefully building a Christmas playlist for the past few years. I only add one song a year, and I only listen to the songs on the list between Thanksgiving and the Epiphany. There are now nine songs on the list.

1. “The Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues
2. “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley
3. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Judy Garland
4. “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon
5. (New) “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby
6. “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” by Dean Martin
7. “Baby It’s Cold Outside” by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Jordan
8. “Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy” by David Bowie & Bing Crosby
9. “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade

My mom has Bing Crosby’s Christmas album on vinyl. As a kid I used to love playing records, and she has a great collection of Christmas albums. It’s hard to pick, and I already have a Bing Crosby tune on the list, but if anyone is allowed to appear twice on a Christmas playlist, it’s Bing Crosby.

Previously

The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings

I refer to this from time-to-time when people complain about Christmas starting earlier each year. In fact, it’s been going on for at least 80 years. Just as SNL has never been as funny as it used to be, Christmas shopping season has always started earlier than it used to.

From the FDR library, The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings.

After Six

Put This On links to a fashion-based 30 Rock joke. The setup and payoff of this gag make up one of my favorite understated jokes on the show. It highlights the mayhem of Liz’s life and the nature of Jack’s character perfectly.

Real Simpsons House

Real Simpsons House

"Exclusive" iTunes Extras

Ars Technica has a piece about iTunes Extras, a new scheme where you get bonus materials with movie downloads like you get with DVDs. A few thoughts:

1. A big pet peeve about DVDs for me is having to bother with animated menus. I really just want to put the disc in, hit play, and, you know, watch the movie. I haven’t bought a movie from iTunes, but I wonder if the extras add this annoying extra step to watching a movie. Surely there’s a way to still be able to get to them that still lets me get straight to the movie, since that’s what I want most of the time.
2. The main point of the above-linked article is that the extras from iTunes are not exclusive, but are also available on the DVDs. But why would I want exclusivity? Exclusive content means I’d have to buy it twice to get all the bonus materials (if I wanted them).

The Web in Danger

Anil Dash collects some doomsaying about the Web.

My take: someone smart needs to put together something that’s not the new Facebook or the new Twitter, but that connects all these things. The future of the Web is taking back the Web from the need for a site to entrench itself.

Facebook is convenient because everyone’s on it, but why can’t I have a site¹ or a program that puts all my friends’ stuff together even if they’re not on Facebook²? If I like Flickr or Picasa better than Facebook’s photos, and Twitter better than its status updates, why isn’t there a site that knows all those sites belong to me, and presents them to my friends in a handy place of their choosing?

What I see is an RSS reader³ where I give it one site, and it says, “hey, this looks like it belongs to a person. Do you want to subscribe to his other sites?” Then it would build a newsfeed like Facebook’s, but you’d be able to customize it, or use another reader, since we all know Facebook likes to change its feed every few months and we can’t do anything about it. We can’t jump ship because we’d lose our friends’ updates and nothing’s properly decentralized.

I’m not enough of a programmer to know the right approach. Perhaps we all put links to an OPML file in our site headers that the software could see to go find other sites we own. Maybe XFN and rel=”me”. Point is: there are lots of great services out there. We shouldn’t have to funnel them all into one social network to use them.

1. Friendfeed sort of does this, but then everyone needs to use Friendfeed. You can’t decentralize halfway.
2. And yeah, you can add other apps to Facebook, but it’s a step I shouldn’t need to do, and one that requires your friend to add his other feeds to Facebook, have a Facebook account, etc.
3. But it wouldn’t need to be an RSS reader by name. It could just say, “give me the Twitter/Facebook/etc.” username of a friend”, and go find the RSS feed on its own.

Lorenzo von Matterhorn

Lorenzo von Matterhorn has a very large web presence.