Who needs TV? Netflix + Hulu = all I’ve been watching since not long before the Writer’s Strike. The only current TV show I really care about is Smallville, and I can’t watch it anyway. Why? The local CW affiliate station is a digital station…and do I have access to a digital-ready TV? No. Besides, I’ve only finished watching the second season on DVD anyway…

Lately, I’ve been enjoying watching the A-Team.

Great theme music… :D

I had finished the first season about a week ago, but today I noticed Hulu finally decided to add the second season in! Upon noticing that, I checked The Pretender. There’s a second season of that up now, too. Cool.

Have you read Facebook’s terms of service? Here is one particularly worrying bit (and I’m sure there is a similar part of the MySpace ToS):

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

I bet you never saw that.

Before you upload anything you’ve created to a social networking/video/blogging site, make sure you read the ToS. You want to know what you’re agreeing to before you upload your work.

Have you uploaded music you wrote to MySpace? Guess what, they can use it for whatever you want. Because you agreed to it.

If you’re not okay with the possibility of Facebook or MySpace using your pcitures, movies, musi, etc, don’t upload it. While they may not actually make use of it, they can if they want.

• Yahoo’s Main Page After Microsoft Acquisition - Hopefully this won’t really happen, but you have to admit it’s real funny. (Click the image to open it full-size.)
• Danish Pirate Bay Block Breaks EU Law
• If you’ve donated money to Hillary Clinton, prepare to get more spam! Hillary Clinton sells emails to spammers.
• HD-DVD is dead. Ways to Extend Xbox 360 HD DVD’s Life.
• Bank Of America Won’t Let You Access Your Money - “[Bill] thought Bank of America would let him spend $5,800 on a home theater system just because he had over $10,000 in the bank. He tried to charge the system to his Bank of America Visa Platinum Check Card but was declined.”
• YouTube was down yesterday, because Pakistan ISPs were ordered to block it, which caused the internet to go down entirely in Pakistan, and made YouTube inaccessible globally.
• The Mobile Desktop - What happens if you bring your desktop computer into a Starbucks to use their WiFi?

Microsoft must really want to get rid of all those Zunes (screenshot from Hotmail promotional email):

I’ve been watching a lot of videos on Hulu lately (in between Netflix movies). I’ll probably write-up a review of the service sometime in the future, but in the meantime, I’d like to share what I’ve been watching…

I remember The Pretender from when it was still on, but not many details as I was fairly young.

Well, that was encouraging.

I’ve been going to a monthly teen writing workshop/class/thing at the local library, taught by one of the librarians and a New York Times bestselling author (I’m not going to give any names, or anything). Both of them liked the story (which is still in progress), and thought my writing was advanced for my age (I’m a month away from being 16).  So I’m excited about that (as well as being in the same room as a published author…)

I’d really like to get the story published (I’ve been doing research on magazines that print fantasy short stories), and I’m enjoying the class-thing.  I’ve been trying to get something published for a couple years now.

Again, cool.

• The MacBook Air is a totally amazing computer. Not only is it small, it’s feature set is amazing. Look at this comparision.
• “Over the past decade it has become increasingly obvious that countless web users are misrepresenting themselves by typing LOL (or “lolling” as it has come to be called) when they are NOT actually laughing out loud.” - NoMoreLOL.com. All I can say is WTH. Or maybe I should say LOL.
• Shooting yourself in the foot: Time Warner’s usage caps
• This is why Network Neutrality is important.
• A computer shop’s sales pitch: ‘We remove Vista’
• MicroYahoo Part II: It’s really going to happen. Microsoft has made a $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo!, a total of $31 per share.
• Frozen Grand Central - “On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station.”
• If you live in Italy, you can legally pirate music. A new copyright law passed legalizes P2P music downloading of any “degraded” music. That basically means anything in MP3 format.

Wise words:

“SELECT only what you need. Even though databases fetch data blindingly fast, you should still try to reduce the load on the database by only selecting that data which you need to use. If you need to count the number of rows in a table don’t SELECT * FROM, because all the data in all the rows will be pulled, wasting memory. Likewise, if you only need the post_id and the post_author in your plugin, then just SELECT those specific fields, to minimize database load. Remember: hundreds of other processes may be hitting the database at the same time. The database and server each have only so many resources to spread around amongst all those processes. Learning how to minimize your plugin’s hit against the database will ensure that your plugin isn’t the one that is blamed for abuse of resources.”

Source: WordPress Codex

I was contemplating the little cardboard cartons that you heat Hot Pockets in. The packages say that you should eat the food out of the carton while you’re on the go. So that means it’s “mobile food.”

So… You put your mobile phone in one pocket, and the mobile food in the other, right?

Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg sums-up the MacBook air: “If you value thinness, and a large screen and keyboard in a subnotebook, and don’t watch DVDs on planes or require spare batteries, the MacBook Air might be just the ticket. But if you rely on spare batteries, expect the usual array of ports, or like to play DVDs on planes, this isn’t the computer to buy.”

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