Inspired by a dream

Not necessarily my dream, but that's not important.

Conversations with my mother

I learned from my mother last night that one of my cousins has been trapping beaver. This conjured up images of 1) Davy Crockett and 2) Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka... She later said that there was no limit on trapping beaver, and he could take as much as he wanted. I don't think she heard me giggling...

Cloud storage for iTunes?

Ars Technica sums up my thoughts on cloud storage for iTunes nicely:

Removing local storage would bring the iTunes Store model dangerously close to that of Netflix and other streaming services; at a minimum, customers would no longer be able to claim even the limited ownership they have of their media in the current format.

A backup, on the other hand, might be more appealing if it's pitched the right way. As it stands, recovery of iTunes Store-purchased media is far from difficult— often a note to customer service will do the trick— but being able to get whole seasons of TV shows off a cramped hard drive without this extra step to get them back indicates that a cloud-based library- or backup-type solution might actually be helpful to some users.

This is the kind of thing that makes me nervous. The last thing I want is for Apple to be able to do the kind of crap Amazon has pulled with its Kindle content. Case in point: iTunes had the season finale of Leverage up a full week early. They pulled it from the store pretty quickly, but if you were a subscriber or beat them to the punch you could get the file. With a cloud-based storage system, it would be all to easy for Apple to yank the file back.

On the other hand, storage is an issue. Video content is not trivial, and while my desktop can handle it (so far), our Apple TV is perpetually cramped for space. Having a way to deal with that would be nice if they can do it without 1) resorting to streaming and 2) being dicks about access à la Amazon.

The pirate's experience

This graphic sums up my frustration with watching movies on DVD/BluRay nicely. Not every company does this (Disney is among the worst, TV anthologies are generally better about letting you at the content), but enough do that it can be pretty irritating. The worst is that once you get locked in the warning-preview cycle with no way out except to chapter skip all the way to the menu. I run into this all the time when I forget to take the disc out and just want to access Netflix. I have to then deal with the warning and previews just so that I can stop the disc and switch to streaming.

As a side note, it's not just pirates who can go straight to the movie. Netflix streaming pretty much drops you straight into the picture as well.

What kind of pretentious jackass posts on a comment thread as "The Writer"?

One who a) forgot his seldom-used anonymous blog was connected via Google, and b) had no idea comment posts would pick up the author's name from the blog and plop it in the post.

Anyway, hello to any Leverage fans who come strolling by. Sorry there's not more to see here.