Monday, June 18, 2007

The Weekly Dammit

New feature! I thought that I'd try to consolidate some of little annoyances into one weekly post instead of agonizing over whether they were, separately, bloggable. These are not earth-shaking issues, just relatively minor annoyances. They don't even qualify for an f-bomb, so (probably) no current events--and, yes, I'm taking bets on how long that will last.

Dammit #1:
San Jose Mercury News: Citing the drop in readership and ad revenue, the San Jose Mercury News has decided to stop publishing Perspective, the Sunday op-ed section. They will keep the two page spread in the daily paper that includes about five short columns plus 8-10 letters from readers. None of whom, apparently, read the Sunday section. To boost revenue, the Merc is expanding the the Tech section from a weekly to a daily. So get your geek on!

I know that some consider the age of the printed word to have passed, but I'm not one of those people. While I do read several newspapers online whenever I get the chance, I love the morning ritual of coffee and the paper then breakfast, and the fact that Hannah and Charlotte also like to "read" the paper with breakfast. (And that's just the newspaper--for me, the smell of a new, freshly printed book ranks up there with the smell of chocolate chip cookies, hot from the oven.)

God help us if Macy's ever goes out of business; their incessant sales must be responsible for more than half of the ad revenue in the Mercury News and who knows how many other papers.

Dammit #2:
The Washington Post does not deliver to my area.

Dammit #3:
Studio 60 is still being canceled. I know I've whined about this before, but NBC is in the process of burning off the final episodes, which just further rams home the point that they no longer have the guts to give a scripted show a chance. Especially when they can use the time slot for another piece of "Realicrap TV." The final shows are on Thursday nights now; you can also watch them online.

Dammit #4:
Possibly to mess with those of us who prefer TiVo to sitting through commercials, NBC and other stations are screwing with the scheduled start and end times of some shows. Not all the time, but enough to make you miss the final minutes of certain shows. Time changes are often noted in the schedules posted online.

Dammit #5:
The Series 3 TiVo-HD runs about $800 from TiVo, though you can get it from Costco for $600. Which means we'll be waiting a while before upgrading. Read Thomas's posts on the Direct TV DVR and you'll know why we're going back to TiVo--eventually.


I guess that's enough for one week. And look, Ma! No politics!

3 comments:

KrisRobinson said...

The smell of a new book...me too! And the sound of the binding cracking for the first time a book is ever opened...priceless. Sometimes in the bookstore I just handle the books...it's the only really creepy thing about me (in my opinion).

I hate the odd start and stop times. I must say that my TiVo actually caught the last 10 minutes of the Grey's Anatomy season finale even though they made it run late. My TiVo machine loves me.

Anonymous said...

Look at me, delurking. =) It was great to meet you last weekend! And I love the new feature. Btw, as a proud owner of a Tivo HD, I can say with authority that it's worth every penny.

Melanie K said...

it was great meeting you, too! i hope to be able to wax euphoric about the TiVo HD soon too. Hmmm, maybe i should buy it for Thomas for his birthday. :)