Bill Watt’s Blog

This article from Valleywag based on this Silicon Alley Insider article makes me laugh. It is mainly this comment:

“Dinner is probably served to a much smaller number of people, mostly single engineers who roll into work later in the morning. No matter if it’s free, after a while, you get tired of eating institutional grub three times a day and spending ten hours in the same office complex.”

That has not been my experience overall. People working in places like that do tend to take advantage of those perks more than you would guess. Ask Ackley about the FAIM dinner club and if everyone worked after eating. Also, from what I hear, the food is not very “institutional” by my standards.

Well- good for them. eBay’s food was not a perk but I enjoyed the people I ate with daily.

Look at what Paris does with a catch phrase like, “That’s hot!” and a show where she travels around the country doing stupid things. Now she has a new show where she’s looking for her new best friend. The show is apparently called “I wanna be Paris’ new best friend” and you can see the site on parisbff.com.

If I could make myself into a brand then think of the possibilities!

This is roughly where I plan to spend my noon to 1’s this week.

• Monday: South Beach Cafe (they did yell at me for having my laptop out but to be fair… they do have big signs saying it isn’t allowed from 12 to 2) and had a pretty decent little lasagna and side salad
• Tuesday: Korean BBQ (spicy pork)
• Wednesday: Apparently Primo Patio has a special jerk pork on Wednesday that I only just heard about. Ding ding!
• Thursday:  TBD
• Friday: I’m supposed to be catching up with some folks from StubHub so we’ll find something over by them (although it does look like someone booked a meeting to run till 12:30 so that may be an issue)

I like my Apple TV and the flaws have always been the kind where I thought, “Oh, this will get fixed in a patch.” Those patches have started happening. I downloaded my first HD movie and watched it today on the new TV. It looked really good, didn’t take too long to download (about an hour but it offered me the ability to start watching when it was at 3%. I chose to go on a Starbucks run instead.), and generally the whole experience was solid.

The problem is… I don’t want to pay $5 to rent an HD movie. This is why I have Netflix and have basically an all I can eat model. The convenience of downloading on the Apple TV or xbox is nice, the quality is equal to or better than standard DVD, and I get all the value these services bring me.

Here’s the rub… I also understand the value this brings the content producers. They know more about me when I purchase online, they have better cross-sell and up-sell options, they don’t have any of the packaging and much lower distribution costs but for some reason these content producers want me to keep paying the old prices. Why does it cost me the same to download a movie as it does to rent a physical DVD from a store? Their costs go way down, their control goes way up, and the value to the consumer doesn’t change accordingly.

I’d actually rather not watch than be squeezed into the old paradigm. I stopped going to the movies pretty close to when I got my big screen TV and now I have a 32″ 1080p TV in addition to the 55″ 1080i. I have multiple Tivo’s, an Apple TV, and xbox 360, pc’s, a slingbox and all kinds of other things that will let me get the content from the provider that does it right. The quality just keeps getting better with my home viewing experience so why would I spend $10 or more to have a social experience that I want to be a non-social experience?

Again, the content producers need to embrace their consumers. I won’t pirate content but I just won’t consume. There are a hundred ways they could be getting more of my business. They could start by giving me what I want in the format I want it and by not treating me as their enemy.

Dare to dream.

Seriously… it is like a parody of a real show. I know in parodies they make jokes about the drawing out of results broken up by alternating 5 min of content with 5 min of commercials (take “MILF Island” from 30 Rock). Idol may actually be worse than the joke.

So again I say, “Thank god for Tivo” and my ability to bypass Ryan’s jokes and commentary. Good for him that he’s made it into a career and I hope he’s banking as much as he can.

Oh- as an aside - I wish they had an American Idol / Ryan Seacrest character in the movie Idiocracy. I would “personalities” like this as a sign of the end times for our culture.

Even though it is tax day I hope you have a happy birthday.

From time to time I fall prey to thinking, “this is a really good singer” when I hear these kids on American Idol. I’m just now catching up on the Idol Gives back show from last week. I wasn’t going to but I heard some post show reviews that talked about Fergie and others and what a great job they did.

So- I’m fast forwarding (all praise be to Tivo) and I watch Fergie and John Legend. Pretty good. I generally like her voice if not her song choices. But then she introduced Heart. Holy cow… it is easy to forget what real, seasoned, artists can do. I wouldn’t even say this was the best I’ve heard them sound but it still woke me up. Also, when Nancy starts that opening riff it is obviously Barracuda and Ann’s voice still does the job.

I do wonder how they felt about Fergie jumping on stage with them. I know it was planned… I wonder if they liked it or if it was the cost of admission to the show? She has a big voice like Ann and did a really good job but I would have been just as happy if they’d just let Heart take it all the way through.

I’m off to iTunes to participate in the long tail once again and buy tracks instead of albums.

PS- it also makes me dread when one of the women (or worse yet, David Archuleta) tries to cover that song later in the season. Please… let me miss that episode.

Uh… just saw a commercial for Maid of Honor (IMDB) and a few things stood out:

• Isn’t this the same thing as My Best Friend’s Wedding minus Rupert Evertt as the wacky sidekick?
• What’s up with the crap vanity URL: MaidofHonor-movie.com

Based on watching “The Real Housewives of New York City” I’ve come up with the million dollar idea. It goes a little something like this:

1. find women with tons of money
2. build a tv show about their vapid lives

The profit comes in with the following revenue streams:

1. charge them to be on the show and sell sponsorships to all the brands they name drop
2. add a surcharge every time they say “my daughter and I are mistaken for sisters all the time” and the crew doesn’t laugh
3. charge the husbands to be edited out of the show so their friends won’t mock them

Hmmm… jackpot!

We went to Vin Santo yesterday and while the service was great and atmosphere what we expected I had a little problem with my dinner. Alice’s filet mignon came out perfectly but I got the pan fried pork chop and it came out raw. I mean raw. To say that it was undercooked would lead those of you who know me to assume it had a slight pink center but this looked more like a salmon dish and the center was cold to the touch.

Too bad… I did get a bite of one side that was cooked and it was pretty good. Next time I’ll go for the New York strip and be happy.