This probably will never be on DVD

Just thinking about this idioticy makes me shake with rage. I put the first season of the Drew Carey show onto my Netflix queue a while back and now that it has made it to the top I decided to add a few more seasons just to be prepared. Well… they don’t exist. Apparently Warner Brothers decided after releasing the first season in 2007 that it wasn’t profitable to release the rest of the series. So as of right now the Drew Carey Show is not available legally in any form for any amount of money.

Warner is telling its customers to pirate. There are so many methods of getting this content out to the public for little or no cost to the content provider other than formating it correctly. They could put it on Hulu and gain ad money on the customers who watch it with little or no cost to Warner. They could put it on iTunes at a minimal cost. Hell, they could just sign a deal with YouTube and put the content up for streaming to the biggest audience on the Internet. But they haven’t done any of thing. They released one DVD set and decided to give up on maintaining the legacy of a classic show. It’s backwards. It’s abhorrent.

What’s worse is that if I will never want to buy the Season 1 DVD, which is still in print, because I Warner has told me that there is nothing else coming. What is the point to hanging onto one season of a show that ran for nine years?!

Things are getting stressful. I think I need to withdraw from Italian and just rethink my plan for getting my Language requirement completed. If I don’t I fear I may have a complete breakdown. Without Italian my day will be much shorter and my work will be less to stress about. I’m not completely swamped right now but I’m completely stressed for some unknown reason and just looking at a page in a foreign language is nearly enough to cause me to panic. Ugh. I feel so defeated but if I continue at this pace I’ll feel like I’m not being true to myself. And we all know what Polonius said.

My use of Wave has really taken off with the discovery of the public section. It isn’t built into the current version but you can create public waves by adding the public contact. Then you can search though the public waves, by tags, by specifying ”in:public.” So now I’m a member of several anime Waves, a whole network of PlayStation themed waves and a writers wave. I’m not quite sure yet if Wave is going to replace public forums. In order for that to happen there needs to be a more effective grouping method. If you can group a series of waves together then yes, this is the next generation of the web forum. Now that I’ve used it for a few hours today I can say that Wave is going to be my primary direct communication tool when it goes public.

I’ve had detailed conversations with multiple people, while one person was responding to one part of the conversation I was replying to another. It was very exciting. I’ve created image galleries. Yet I’ve only just scratched the surface of the potential of the tool. Hell, just watching someone type in their message has changed the way text messages work. Now I can start writing my reply before their finished their comment. That idea alone makes my head hurt. I’ll take some screen shots in the next couple of days to show exactly what I’m doing with Wave.

I didn’t plan on only talking about Wave in this post… or for the next couple of days. But with my college stress coming down on me and homework unfinished… it really is the only positive thing I can think to write about. I’m going to write about a concept for a novel that’’s been sitting inside my head for a few weeks now about a complete technological reset of the world. Using Wave bought this idea up again. What if we can just say to everyone , “Stop what you’re doing… this is better!” And do that for transportation, getting information, receiving news, the method for getting television, ect. Well, I’ll go over it in more detail later. I need time to iron out the wrinkles in the concept before I can put it down in any sort of logical or concise way. I realize the brief description of the concept is an incoherent ramble.

I got my Wave invite!  I’m going to be playing with it over the next few days . The bad part about only allowing in a small number of users is that those users can’t take full advantage of the service. But I already know some AniBloggers from twitter who have it. So I will be abusing them in order to learn exactly what the service can offer.

I finished Snow Crash this morning. It was a very odd novel. Neal Stevenson has such a unique view of the way the world works. He creates a satire  it by building a world around the concept he is satirizing. It is an odd thing to explain. In Snow Crash the idea he was satirizing was the attempt to control information. The model he used in order to show the danger of information control were franchises. No matter where the protagonist went the world was exactly the same. There were always the familiar Uncle Enzo’s Pizza and the Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. Always governed by the unbreakable law of a three ring binder. Did I mention that the concept was hard to describe?

It was a fantastic read. Crazy. Enjoyable. Full of action and plenty of intellectual thinking and problem solving. The only problem is that the end is left a little too vague. I normally like ambiguous endings. But some of the threads of the novel were left half finished. You could probably guess the resolution. But it wasn’t explicit i n the text. Much of it is simply assumed.

New episode of You Look Nice Today is out and, as usual, it is fantastic. I have already listened to it several times. Go check it out!

Thanks to the kindness of @serial I was able to get a Google Wave invite. Unfortunately Google is holding onto most of the user invites for now. According to twitter people who have been invited by wave users, not google, are starting to get their invitations in their email. So I’m impatiently waiting on Google. I’m hoping that wave can not only replace email but also instant messaging. I’m just board with all the instant messaging clients out there. They haven’t evolved at the same pace that my use of the web has evolved. So instead of sitting and having a conversation with a single person on IM I’d rather just hold conversations within twitter. I’m always on twitter so there is no chance of me missing your message. I can view your message at my leisure and return it at my leisure. There isn’t the stigma of having to talk to a person right NOW that comes with instant messaging or SMS. So hopefully Wave will combine the convenience of real time with the distance of twitter.

Katamari Forever Teaser

I got the new Katamari on Tuesday and have been playing it almost exclusively. Thanks to missing class Wednesday due to a cold I was able to play though each of the levels. I also recently played though the original Katamari recently so I can compare the two without factoring in nostalgia. There is no difference in the feel of the game. But the art style and the new resolution are absolutely gorgeous. The ability to see the items I was rolling up clearer made a huge difference in my enjoyment of the game. Granted the rank went from delightful to phenomenal there really isn’t much they could have done to make Katamari more fun. The new Global rankings feature adds a new level of addictiveness to the game. I’m not only competing against my self and my friends but against the whole world. Which, while it makes me try harder, also makes me feel painfully inadequate.

Really Microsoft? If you wanna advertise your product at least hire someone competent to do it.

And try not to use an Apple computer in your next attempt.

Dvorak.org/blog

A new Article posted last week at MyMac Magizine. Click for the full article, below is a preview.

NBC Universal and News Corp. invested heavily in the new online video service Hulu in an attempt to take control of their digital media. NBC pulled their media from iTunes late last year fearing Apple’s continuing dominance in the content distribution space. But NBC is missing the point of digital media and Hulu will always fall short as a solution for digital distribution.

Looking at Hulu, it is a very impressive service. Although still in closed beta I was able to sign up early and get an invite. The selection is very impressive with NBC offering over 70 shows; that’s right 70, and 37 networks signed on the amount of content will keep anyone busy for a very long time. Brand new shows become available on Hulu about an hour after the show has finished airing in Hawaii. Already it has a massive amount of content, new shows are available much sooner then they are on iTunes, and it’s all free. Where could Hulu possibly fall short?

Hulu is representative of the studios hanging onto the old model. Granted it’s a step in the right direction but it’s really just a much improved version of youtube. Hulu falls short by missing the wants and needs of consumers. But they could fix the problems very easily. The model the studios should adopt is as follows;

Leave the steaming as it is

Hulu is a wonderful platform, and it’s a step in the right direction. It’s the perfect hub that studios can use to allow their customers to watch their media streaming from the Internet. Two factors of Hulu stand out as a step forward for online streaming content, the fact that shows and movies are not broken up into smaller streams so they can sneak more ads in. The benefit of creating a central hub for content is that I don’t have to go to four different websites to watch the content that I want. Hulu allows me to watch NBC, Fox, and all the studios that are using the service in the same easy to use sandbox. The biggest surprise about Hulu is the embed function, I can now embed full episodes of Family Guy or the Simpsons onto my blog or website, you don’t even need a Hulu account to watch embedded media. This is a shocking feature that I’d never think commercial television studios would adopt.