Dave Mancuso dot Com

Burn a disc on one side, burn the label on the other side with the same optical drive. Check out the story.

I got it from Brad. I guess I shouldn’t have been so close to him this week at the office (nudge, nudge).

But y’know, if the world didn’t suck at times, we’d probably all fly off into space.

Brad wrote about TiVO. He wondered why I haven’t written anything about it.

Isn’t it obvious? I’m not writing because I’m spending all my time watching TV.

Seriously, with all due respect to the feelings of the people who put down TV for political and programming reasons, there are some things worth watching on TV. The problem is that I don’t have the time to sit around (or stay up) to catch the few shows I want to see.

TiVO solves that problem for me. Rather than watching crap, I set the box to find a show I want to watch and it records it. You say “so what?” OK–unlike a VCR, TiVO finds the show whenever it’s on, on any channel, forever, avoiding repeats if I want, until I tell it to stop. That way I don’t have to keep looking for when Extreme Homes or Hometime is on, for example. Then I can watch or delete them as I find time, on my schedule instead of the TV’s. That is worth $5 a month to me.

The second big thing to TiVO is the 30 second skip. This is a button you can set up to skip 30 seconds ahead instantly–no waiting for fast forward. The first big attraction of this is to skip through commercials by hitting the button five times to instantly skip ahead two minutes, for example. The second big attraction is to skip through parts of a show you don’t want to see. I do this with the TechTV show The ScreenSavers all the time.

I can watch an hour show in probably 30 minutes this way.

I’ve actually cut down my TV watching by using this box, and I watch the stuff I want instead of junk. That seems to me like a solution to a problem.

Now, I can catch junk with TiVO too, like Futurama episodes (I never saw them when they were on prime time). But at least I get to choose.

Hey, I can even search genres or interests for shows I might want to catch–that’s how I set TiVO to record the AMC broadcast of George Pal’s The War of the Worlds. I haven’t watched it yet, and I may just delete it if I don’t get a chance to play it in the next few weeks–but it was so easy to set up I couldn’t resist.

TiVO (or any programmable digital video recorder) helps you intelligently watch TV without being a political extremist.

Check out their research projects here.

Apparently my friends and I are Content Omnivores:
“Content omnivores are among the heaviest overall users of the Internet. Most are employed. Most log on frequently and spend considerable time online doing a variety of activities. They are likely to have broadband connections at home. The average age of this group is 40.”

Or maybe Power Creators:
Power creators are the Internet users who are most enthusiastic about content-creating activities. They are young, their average age is 25, and they are more likely than other kinds of creators to do things like use instant messaging, play games, and download music. And they are the most likely group to be blogging.”

I used the new Frequency beta to transfer the picture below. It’s Alyssa at the family reunion last October–she asked me to take that picture, so the pose was her idea…

🙂

Looks like Frequency 2.0 is a huge jump in functionality.

Go here to this site now.

See you later. Warning–this stie requires Flash and may suck you in for a long while.

🙂

…trot on over to this site and get your fix while you can. Somebody put a scary amount of time into indexing and scanning the entire Calvin and Hobbes catalog of strips–searchable even (I searched on Spaceman Spiff). It’s obviously a labor of love, but I can’t help but think that it violates copyright laws and will be gone soon.

I’m the one who does the grocery shopping in my family, mostly because no one can stand to shop with me. We have occasional debates about the “menu first” vs. the “buy the deals at the store” philosophies, but since I do most of the cooking, I shop the way I want (I get the specials and then make my menu–unfortunately it’s mostly in my head, and no one but me knows what we’re eating on any given night).

So I went to Giant on Saturday armed and ready with my special 10% off coupon.I got it a few weeks earlier as a “Bonus Buy” coupon and it had to be used by February 28th. Now was my chance to stock up, so I went at it with a vengeance.

Unfortunately, as I reached the frozen food aisle I realized that I’d made a terrible miscalculation. If you decide to really stock up, you need to make sure that you can handle everything you get. I was only two-thirds through the store and I’d filled my cart to overflowing. So much for the logical attack.

Sooo, I called Denise and asked her take to the kids and meet me at the store (what else could I do?). In the meantime I got a second cart and began filling it up.

By the time Denise got there, I’d filled up the second cart.

At checkout time, is $450 of groceries too much? Maybe it is, but after my discounts it was $113 less, so I rolled out of there with $337 of groceries.

I made a written menu after a “discussion” with my wife about the purchase and I came up with a month of meals fully laid out on paper. So I think I did pretty well. Say what you will, but once again, single-mindedness triumphs. I rest my case.

Now if only my wife would stop shaking her head.

But it’s still funny. Is anyone using Netscape 7 right now, unless it’s just to test compatitbility? It’s a good product, although I prefer it in it’s Mozilla (and Firefox, and Camino) form.

Goodle, Good News.