A Man and his Penguin

Part of this post was written on June 20th but not uploaded, then I appended more onto it today.

Today, I became part of the future of television.

My copy of the first episode of Doc Martin was added to
SurfTheChannel.com, and it has "New Show!" next to it. My online handle,
3rdalbum, is also displayed on the video page.

I’m rather pleased, and I’ve decided to put the rest of the episodes on
there. I can edit and fully upload one episode every two days. If I have
a day off work, I can do an episode in one day.

Unrestricted video-on-demand is the eventual future of television, and I
helped the online community to make what we currently have, even less
restrictive. I also hope the site puts Doc Martin on its front page as a
featured show; that would be really good.

I’m also going to put in an occasional advertisement. As in, one
advertisement for every three or four episodes. Actually, in the second
episode I’ve put in a hilarious advertisement for Firefox that I found
on Youtube. It’s the one where the other browser logos are making lots
of funny noises, and the Firefox one tells them to shut up.

I’ll also put in an ad for Ubuntu, in a later episode. I just need to
find one that’s short, brings the point across, and has good production
values. I’ve had a quick look, and I might have my work cut out for me.

In other news, Asus has released the Atom-based EeePC 901. Pricing is
the same for the Windows version as the Linux version, but the Linux one
has 8 gigs more storage. I think more people will buy the Windows one
because they’ve completely missed the point of the machine, but I’m sure
the Linux sales will be good due in part to people who already have
Windows and want a bigger SSD.

My boss decided to get rid of Firefox off the work computers. The
extended warranty program is now filled out online, and the website
displays the contract in a popup window. Of course, Firefox’s popup
blocker was turned on, my boss thought Firefox was "causing problems",
and promptly removed it before I even arrived to work.

Removing it opened a can of worms. All saved web pages try to open in
Firefox when double-clicked, and of course Firefox is no longer there.
My boss called the IT support line to get them to fix it, and they decided that installing IE 7 was the answer. But, of course, we were
running XP SP 1; so he spent hours running Windows Update and spyware
scans (surprisingly, found some!), and then installed IE 7, and found
that it didn’t fix the problem anyway.

I apologise unreservedly for what I wrote here before. As this blog post was written piecemeal, I was in a bad mood while writing that part. But that’s still not any sort of excuse for writing that in such a public place. I was wrong to say what I said, and I’m ashamed.

Isn’t IE 7’s font rendering just awful? They’ve applied some horrible
anti-aliasing to the fonts on the web pages, which just makes it look
blurred. When I was younger, and the CRT monitor was king, I liked
anti-aliased fonts. Heck, merely two years ago on my old
computer’s CRT monitor, I turned on anti-aliasing for XFCE
and liked it. Anti-aliasing looks shit on an LCD, which is why
Ubuntu’s default font settings are so great.

My father works specifically with fonts as part of his job. He agrees
that Ubuntu’s font rendering is nice.

Today, thanks to the Gentoo wiki, I managed to replace the ugly PC speaker noise with the playback of a short sound file. I will post a distro-agnostic version of the howto. I also uploaded the third episode of Doc Martin and I’m just about to watch the latest episode of Doctor Who.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 5:46 am and is filed under Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.