1. I saw the video and it wasn’t “soft porn” at all. In fact, there have been steamier love scenes on Battlestar Galactica.

2. AP, if you transfer your land line to your cell phone, you will continue to get telemarketers, even if your phone is on the do-not-call list. They will call with “surveys” (permitted) or they pretend to be a charitable entity (also permitted).

And, don’t be surprised if you are sent unsolicited (i.e., junk) faxes on what is nominally a “land line.” If you got them before on a voice line you shared with your fax machine, you’ll get them on your cell phone.

And guess what, YOU GET TO PAY FOR THE CALLS and the airtime!

So if you go wireless, use a cell phone company supplied phone number. The Telemarketers are prohibited from calling them under any circumstances. No charities, no surveys, either.

Oh, one more thing. I suggest you turn off the built in GPS unit by setting it to “emergency 911 activation only” mode. Not that it won’t prevent the gub’ment from remotely turning the on-board GPS unit back on if they want to find you. But, hey. What a little paranoia among friends.

3. On the subject of television, I spoke to my daughter today. Her comment was 500 channels, 500 channels of crap. Duplication of programming, high numbers of repeats, old, retreaded, rerun programs off of broadcast TV, “superstation” channels from other cities (as if I care what’s on Atlanta or Denver’s “superstation”), and so on is the staple of fare today. There are some exceptions, of course, but the gems are trampled into the mud of the pig-pen.

So, of course TV, even cable TV is dying. HDTV helped because the output is perfect for viewing on a computer screen, but the culprit is high speed Internet service, IMHO, that can distribute the content for the viewing convenience of the users, not the broadcast TV station or cable company. The movie and record industries are trying to fight it (and failing) with their “nuisance” suits. The TV broadcast networks already see the writing on the wall (down load their shows while the cable companies are giving you download on demand), print magazines and newspapers are suffering a collapse of circulation because people can find out truth without having the have the editor and publisher of the NY Times as a “gatekeeper”.

The “business” people running these industries (the so-called moguls), in their never ending quest to squeeze out every last dollar of profit from entertainment even if the quality of their product is crap (lowest common denominator, copy-cat crap for the most part), have pushed pure entertainment so far down the slippery slope of irrelevance, that their audience is leaving in droves — for the Internet.

Honestly, I was watching one show last night, and the commercial break was *4* minutes long. I put the channel I was watching in PIP, and surfed until I found another show. Four minutes later, I reluctantly switched back. Six minutes into the show, another commercial break and this time I didn’t bother with the PIP, I just switched away. When the show I surfed to went to a long commercial break, the TV went off and I got online instead.

Michelle, you, AP, and Bryan plus the men at Powerline, and macranger, LGF, and so on, are part of a new paradigm of communication, for both entertainment and information. “Web 2.0″ was only an approximation. “Web 3.0″ will blow our socks off when it finally arrives.

georgej on September 20, 2007 at 3:28 AM