Nathan's Occasional Blog

Hey Alicea, I know what I’m getting the family for Christmas next year … an HD CableCard tuner for our Media Center Edition computer in the living room!  Microsoft and CableLabs, the consortium run by the cable TV industry to approve new hardware, announced a couple days ago that they’ll have HDTV CableCard support for MCE computers by next holiday season.

This new hardware support means you’ll be able to plug your cable feed directly into your computer, and get access to all the HDTV programming (and everything else) that’s on the cable network (in our case Comcast).  With that you can ditch your cable box and use just one platform for regular and HD-DVR.  I’ve got a way bigger hard drive in our MCE computer than the cable box does (300GB vs 120GB) which means 3x the recording capacity.  Well, only 3x until I go out and get an external USB2 hard drive to store even more video on.

Because the CableCard format is currently just a one-way communication stream (down to your TV) you’d probably give up the ability to use Video on Demand and Pay Per View, but the increased quality (the cable box sucks for non-HD feeds), recording capacity, and “one-stop” for all your media wins in my mind.  Heck, we hardly use VoD (and NEVER use PPV) anyhow.  Besides, they’ve got a year to figure out how to sign up for that stuff via a web page … maybe even an MCE plugin!

I can’t wait!  Woohoo!

Yeah, Scott Adams is a must subscribe for those of you who haven’t yet.  His latest post deals with the murderer who escaped from a prison the other day.

I hate to take sides, but if I made a fake ID using nothing but a pack of Marlboros and a spoon, and made a set of civilian clothes out of pillowcases, then walked out of jail, I’d be feeling pretty good about myself too. I know for sure that I’d feel superior to the idiot who let me out. And that’s not even counting the part about getting away with murder.

I’m on the phone with my folks now and I’ve just learned that my dad has prostate cancer. Not sure how I feel right now … just kind of putting on a clinical face. I hate having this skill (becoming clinical), but it’s a coping mechanism. Anyway, I am sure I’ll process this in the days and weeks to come, but for now … hmmmm. Sayin’ a prayer.

Update [90 minutes later] – I’ve found another outlet. Drinking 18 year old single malt scotch. Hey, it works. Thanks to my beautiful bride Alicea for the refill she just dropped off. Sure I have to be at church tomorrow morning at 6:30a to set up, rehearse, and play a service … but this helps now. Gee, aren’t I the healthy one?

How to cause corporate financial loss
This article was previously posted under Q20051102 [Scott’s Place]

Applies to: Google (GOOG)

SUMMARY
This article outlines how to hypothetically cause corporate financial losses during the most recent financial quarter for Google using license plate borders available from the Google store.
Note: Past financial performance is no guarantee of future performance.  “Your mileage may vary.”

MORE INFORMATION
Please see the original article for further details.

Keywords: kbhowto kbgoogle kbplates KB123456

Ni!  [sorry for the Monty Python Holy Grail reference]

Check out Chris Pirillo’s posting from today about being sick.  As I mentioned in his comments, he’s almost exactly describing my 7 month old daughter!  🙂

I really hate the taste of coffee … I get a hot chocolate.  Guest that’s not an option here.  The description is spot on though!  🙂

You Are a Frappacino

At your best, you are: fun loving, sweet, and modern At your worst, you are: childish and over indulgent You drink coffee when: you’re craving something sweet Your caffeine addiction level: low

Yes, that’s right kids – the brains behind Dilbert (Scott Adams) is now blogging his personal life experiences in Dilbert.Blog.  It’s priceless, and one you MUST subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader.

“The best part of the story is the face he made when it became clear I wasn’t going to change my mind. It looked like someone had taken his dog and shoved it up his grandmother’s ass, put them both on his driveway, borrowed his SUV and used his gas to run over them repeatedly in front of the kids.”

Okay, so I took a semester of Finance in college and had a great professor – heck he literally wrote the book, which we got for free and got to keep (we got the “release candidate” for an updated edition).  Anyway, we spent a lot of time on how stocks are priced.  Pretty fascinating stuff, but it’s pretty simple in theory.  I don’t remember the numbers but it’s essentially the value of the company’s assets plus future earnings divided amongst all the shares.

So it’s interesting to see Thomas Hawk’s analysis of Apple’s announcement about selling 1 million videos on their new service, with the stock going up $3.05/share as a result.  Here are some key figures in his math:

• Let’s assume that of the $1.99 that Apple charges per download that they get to keep half.
• Roughly 1,578,947 downloads per month.
• Each month has a 2% increase in videos sold.
• By the end of 12 months under this analysis, Apple would have … cleared $20 million in earnings on their downloads.

So Apple’s stock is up $2.5 BILLION dollars in market cap on what potentially could be $20 million in earnings. This is on top of the fact that the stock today is already at a new 52 week high and trades at almost 40 times earnings with no other major news out on the company today.

It’s all about the HYPE baby!  Personally I can’t wait to see Jobs completely screw the compny again.  I saw another article (wish I remembered what RSS feed it was from) that lammented Apple’s product design, especially around the iPod line.  To paraphrase, they make a plain white box with no real interesting design features and one of the worst UI’s I’ve seen since DOS 5.1.  PLUS you get locked in to a propreitary device connection in iTunes (yes I know you can hack in with other tools, but that’s not what Mr. Consumer knows about).  When to short … when to short…..  I’ll leave you with a nice little picture from Yahoo’s stock tracker page.

Update: In response to the annonymous poster (why not post your name and let’s have an honest discussion?) I DO NOT own any MSFT stock.  Neither do I own Apple … or anybody else (outside my 401(K)).  I make no representation that I’m an expert stock picker.  I just question THE MARKET’s sanity.  Why value a stock at a huge bonus because of a relatively small increase in revenue?  Now, I also disagree with a lot of Stevie J’s business decisions (proprietary hardware for their computers has doomed the Mac OS to a few percentage points of market share), but he’s got a flare for reaching out to consumers (marketing) and Jobs isn’t really the focus of what I’m talking about.  The market is pricing APPL based on marketing flare, just like it did with the rest of the tech industry in 1999 and 2000 (note the chart above).  Pricing like this is going to burst the bubble hard down the line, and it’s going to hurt.

As for the Cubbies?  Well, the Red Sox won last year, and the White Sox just won this year.  I’d say the Cubs are in line for 2006.  🙂

Yikes! This is a cautionary tale on datacenter planning and proactive foresight. I can’t imagine the challenges they’re facing … 3TB of data a day!?! That being said, I’d absolutely LOVE to be part of that team.

This criminal really needs to find a new job…

Autoblog —

Carjackers are lame. Carjackers who can’t figure out how to drive a manual are even more lame. An employee of a Kansas software company was approached by someone with a shotgun who was looking to borrow the victim’s Chevy Camaro. Our would-be carjacker fled the scene after finding that his new ride had a third pedal. This marauder strikes me as someone who’s poorly trained for his chosen profession, so hopefully he finds a career change in the future. I figure there’s probably a position available in a prison laundry somewhere.

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