I sure wish I could watch the Packers-Cowboys game on the NFL Network tonight and, even more, the Redskins game next Thursday night. I called Cablevision a few minutes ago to inquire about the channel, which is not in their lineup. Before I could even get to a rep. I heard, “Press 1 if you’re calling about tonight’s football game.”
How nice of Cablevision to anticipate my request. (I can only imagine the thousands of frustrated Cablevision subscribers unable to watch what is one of the two best regular-season games of the year.)
In their pre-recorded message, Cablevision said there was no NFL Network to be had on their system but reminded me that I can get every Jets and Giants game and 50 other regular season games during the year.
Last I checked every Jets and Giants game is on broadcast television — you know, the kind that requires nothing more than rabbit ears.
The network that I manage at work is flexible enough to allow me to do most of what my job requires from my Mac. If I can’t perform a task on my Mac, I am able to connect right to my PC at the office via our VPN and Microsoft Remote Desktop. A goal when setting it up was to be agnostic where ever possible– PC and Mac friendly.
I still have not bit the bullet. To that point, Apple released an upgrade to Tiger this week bringing my version to 10.4.11. This upgrade includes a number of general operating system fixes meant to enhance the stability, compatibility and security of my Mac– Apple’s words, not mine.
68 megabytes later, the only difference I can see is that my Safari has been upgraded to 3.0.4. Initially, Safari kept locking up on me until I discovered that my version of SafariStand had to be upgraded. Steve– please add this to the Safari wish list: the ability to force a single Safari window without a 3rd party program. Look, I only have a 12″ Powerbook and screen space is at premium. If I’m already using tabbed browsing, why am I also tracking down stray windows that have opened up?
Leopard goes back on the shelf until I find a compelling reason to install it or if I get bored at my parent’s house over Thanksgiving weekend.
Yankees need to convince Andy Pettitte to come back. The Yankee rotation looks a lot stronger with him than without him.
The Captain is having some tax issues with the state of New York. Think someone in Albany must really be upset that the Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2000 and figures to pin it on Derek Jeter? It’d be hard not to going on his postseason numbers for 2007: 3 hits in 17 at bats, grounding into 3 double plays… Just sayin’.
I’d like to upgrade my PowerBook G4 to Leopard at some stage to the latest version of OS X Leopard. I have not read many good upgrade experiences so far. This brings us to my next point. An external hard drive from Best Buy arrived this afternoon. I picked this up in preparation for the worst and something I should have been doing anyway (making regular backups of my data). My plan is to back up my entire Mac, pop in the Leopard disk and hang on tight.
In fact, a friend of mine required assistance over the weekend when Leopard killed her PowerBook. Her upgrade simply did not work because of a third-party plugin she had installed for Quicktime.
Imagine that– some silly program installed probably as an afterthought was able to bring down a rather sophisticated piece of software. Defeated by mere mortals!
Apple has some pretty decent tech support online if you feel like wading through a lot of junk to find what you need. My question is why would Apple not check for incompatibilities before allowing you to potentially lose all your data?
Alex informed me that his shiny new iMac did not come with Leopard pre-installed. Not only did he need to perform this upgrade himself, but was required to type some byzantine Linux commands to get the process completed. This is not the Apple experience I remember.
Apple seems to have taken a huge step backwards. I remember when I upgraded from Panther to Tiger– I wasn’t even home. I tossed the DVD into my PowerBook, answered some questions, and came home to a brand new operating system after going out for dinner and drinks.
Hello, this is my first post at the Eulelog. I would like to thank Alex for giving me the opportunity to post on his blog. I’ll be posting more over the next few days. Stay tuned.
Perhaps, it’s no surprise, but EuleLog hasn’t exactly been the most active of blogs. Today we hope to change that. Please welcome Rob to the site. The Yankees, Apple and NASA [Rob add more here] fan should have plenty to add to the site. Check out some of his favorite stories at del.icio.us/xrobx99.
Three days after removing Don Imus from its cable channel because of a joke with clear racist and sexist undertones, NBC turned its airwaves over to a new episode of the long-running Saturday Night Live. Given the network’s central role in the Imus affair turned national obsession, it was fair to wonder whether SNL might lose its nerve, fearful that one of its own jokes could spur a similar wave of resentment and protests. To many fans’ likely relief, the show went on as scheduled, retaining its usual mix of humor and abuse, including a skit about a recently married gay couple from Connecticut. Given SNL’s long tradition of satire, it was some how comforting to see NBC uncompromised by its own new-found morals.
Along the way, however, the network and society’s hypocrisy became amazingly clear thanks to a commercial for, of all things, hair products. At 11:56 p.m., between SNL skits, Unilver-owned SunSilk ran a 30-second spot making fun of blonde-haired women, per age-old stereotypes, as money-grubbing bimbos.
Not all hair jokes are alilke and blonde women don’t have same history of discrimination as do African-American women, but making fun of blondes is a clear vestige of more sexist times.
The Unilever SunSilk commercial from NBC’s April 14th broadcast of Saturday Night Live.
What’s truly amazing is that no one at NBC Universal, or Unilever for that matter, thought that a commercial with a spiteful hair joke might be inappropriate given recent headlines. With NBC unmoved for days after Imus’ original comments, however, it’s hard to imagine the network finding the foresight to block similar material.
Unilever, by the way, is the same company that owns Dove, famous for moving commercials that attempt to boost young girls’ self-esteem by appealing to their inner-beauty. As the Rutger’s women hopefully recover from Imus’ hateful words, should six-year-old blondes be subjected to their own ridicule care of SunSilk’s advertisement?
Imus claims to have learned something from his career-ruining experience. It’s time NBC, and its advertisers, are asked the same question.
The National Hockey League should be ashamed of itself. The hockey all-star game should be a chance for the world’s best hockey players to show off one of the world’s most exciting games — a glorious display of passing and shooting.
Unfortunately, for the few Americans actually watching the game on television last night it was hard to follow any of that excitment, because Versus, the NHL’s broadcast partner lacked the basic competence to shoot the game properly. Instead, the choppy camerawork resembled that of a zoom-happy camcorder owner.
Hockey is hard enough to watch on television, without introducing tight shots that leaves the viewer missing action and constant nausea-inducing camera cuts. What’s worse, Versus actually missed several goals in the first period thanks to ridiculous behind-the-goal angles that cut out significant parts of the rink. If there’s one cardinal rule for a sports broadcast, it has to be to show the scores. Last night, the NHL’s broadcaster couldn’t even match that lowly requirement.
If the NHL and Commissioner Gary Bettman are serious about running a professional sports league, it’s time to stop the amateur hour.
Senator Hillary Clinton made a subtle but interesting comment in her post-SOTU remarks to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann. Here’s what she said in response to a Matthews question about whether she still “feels a sting” from the Republicans’ efforts to kill her health care plan in the early 1990s:
“You know I really don’t … I have too many people I represent right now, Chris, who are struggling because they don’t have health care. We’ve got more than 46 million Americans, nine million children. Let’s put down the idealogical battleground and once again try to find some common ground.”
Last I checked, Senator Clinton still represented just New York state, yet there were no specifics about New Yorkers’ health care difficulties. Instead those she represents morphed into the 46 million uninsured citizens across the country. Was it an omission/slip-of-the tongue or the deliberate strategy of a nascent presidential candidate? Let the fun begin…
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — The public financing system for presidential campaigns, a post-Watergate initiative hailed for decades as the best way to rid politics of the corrupting influence of money, may have quietly died over the weekend.
The public financing system designed to clean up presidential campaigns in the wake of the Watergate scandal may have died on Saturday when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) announced her bid for the White House.
