Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I used to be good about blogging about books I read, but for about a year now, I haven’t reviewed anything… so there’s some weirdness that I’ll start up again by writing about a book I’m just a few chapters into.

The other day while hunting for something to read, I picked up my copy of A Game of Thrones, fully intending to re-read the series.

But then I noticed a recommendation on the back cover that said, “Reminiscent of T.H. White’s A Once and Future King…” and thought, “Wait I have that book and still need to read it!” I bought the book two and a half years ago, using a birthday gift certificate from Crissy’s parents and still hadn’t read it. That’s pretty sad. :-(

So I started reading it last night and it’s really really good! I can’t believe I’ve never read it before. For tonight, I had planned a quiet evening reading, but after about 2 weeks of cold, cloudy weather, the sun finally came out.

As a result, we’ll probably go out somewhere. After all, sun is so rare in Seattle; you have to go out and play when you get the chance.

(And if you’re keeping count, it’s now less than two weeks before our big move to Boulder! 300 days of sunshine per year, here we come!)

Sometimes I wish that there would be a tape recorder running when Crissy and I talk. We always end up cracking each other up and later can never remember what the joke was.

The other day, I was almost hit by another stupid Seattle driver and I swore rather profusely (years of playing hockey make me excellent at this). For some reason Crissy dislikes it when I swear, so in addition to giving me a very disapproving look, she asked me,

“Why don’t you use the Hindu gods’ names in vain instead? Wait, what’s Ganesha’s last name anyway?”

“Um, Ganesha doesn’t have a last name. He’s like Cher.”

<pause>

“Does he believe in life after love?” (referring, of course, to the very popular Cher song)

This of course devolved into us trying to decide the funniest Cher song that Ganesha could sing.

The whole “using God’s name in vain” thing is a little weird to Hindus. Our Gods love it when you say their name. In fact, our gods even have lots of names; the more names you use, the happier they are.

But I suppose if you said, “Parvarti! That soup is hot! I burned my mouth!”, even the easy-going Hindu gods wouldn’t be that happy. :-)

Hulu is an online video-on-demand service that offers streaming video of lots of popular shows. Since Hulu is joint venture between NBC-Universal and NewsCorp (parent of Fox), it’s not surprising that the site is dominated by their content.

Hulu seems to be designed to make money on the ads that are inserted into the shows. Each “commercial break” has one 15 to 30 second ad. Though they also have a syndication model, presumably the bulk of their money does (or should) come from the in-show ads.

Hulu has a large selection of shows and until recently they would post new episodes the morning after they originally aired. I alway thought this was a great idea, they can pick up a viewers that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

People who watch the broadcast either watch it live or Tivo it . People who’d watch Hulu either missed the episode on TV, don’t have a TV (or access to one), want to watch it again, or were watching something else. So Hulu picks up audience that the live broadcast can’t get.

So the services are complementary. And since the content is paid for by the broadcast, Hulu just needs to make back operating expenses. It’s a pretty good plan.

Now let’s go back to who the target audience of Hulu is: people who missed the episode on TV, don’t have a TV, want to watch it again, or were watching something else. What did these people do in the past? A lot of them downloaded it illegally.

So Hulu also cuts down on illegal downloads and recovers some of that “lost revenue”.

Now, Hulu did something I can’t understand. The only show I watched regularly on Hulu is Battlestar Galactica. Crissy and I just get limited cable, so I can’t see the broadcasts on the SciFi network (which is owned by NBC). So, for me to see it, I have to watch at a friend’s place or rent/borrow the DVDs when they come out.

Since the show is on Friday night (seriously, what’s up with that?), I miss episodes frequently. Since the show is a serial, it’s tough to miss episodes and really annoying to watch out of order.

Now with Hulu, if I miss an episode, I can watch it online the next day. Everything is great: I get to see my show and Hulu gets to show me ads.

Just recently though, Hulu changed their policy. New episodes are now posted 8 days after the broadcast. I’m fine with a delay before the show is online, but 8 days just seems stupid: by the time an episode is posted online, the next episode has aired.

So I can never catch up! It seems like it’s in NBC’s better interest if people are watching the broadcast version, so why would they prevent me from doing this? It’s a serial! I don’t want to watch it out of order. So now I’m stuck watching it on Hulu.

Aside from being annoyed about the delay in watching my show, I don’t understand the business model.

Let’s assume that Hulu viewers are less profitable than broadcast viewers. Why 8 days instead of 1 day? Let’s look at our use cases again:

• People who missed the episode on TV - now they are going to miss all the episode broadcasts, unless they watch episodes out of order
• People who don’t have a TV - doesn’t matter what the delay is, they will never see the broadcast
• People who want to watch it again - they already watched the broadcast, so you made your money already
• People who were watching something else - still not going to get them

Now the major downside, people will start downloading it illegally again! In fact, that’s exactly what the comments on the Battlestar page on Hulu say.

What if our assumption is wrong and Hulu viewers are more profitable than broadcast viewers. If that were so, NBC would try to put content on as soon as possible following the broadcast, if not earlier. They certainly wouldn’t posted it later!

Last, let’s consider DVD sales. If NBC was worried about losing DVD sales, the time gap doesn’t make a difference. It’s solely the availability that matters. Currently, NBC only has 4 episodes posted, so that shouldn’t affect future DVD sales.

I wish I knew that the reasoning was here. My guess is that someone thinks that Hulu is cannibalizing broadcast viewership. I think this assumption is wrong; plus it’s really tough to measure, for example, how do you know that a Hulu hit isn’t someone who also saw the broadcast? After all, broadcast viewership is really tough to measure for medium- and long-tail programming.

And what about conversions? Someone may see the episode on Hulu and then start watching the broadcast.

Oh well… and please remember, I haven’t see last week’s episode yet. Don’t tell me what happened. :-)

The Internet is a wonder; with it you get to learn all sorts of strange and interesting things. The other day a friend mentioned that I, as a vegetarian, shouldn’t drink Guinness because it has fish in it.

One quick Google search later and I learned that Guinness and other beers use Isinglass, which comes from fish bladders, as a finishing agent to clarify (remove sediment from) the beer. Strictly speaking, the
Isinglass stays on the bottom of the vat, but it’s likely that minute bits are still in the beer.

Wow, I wonder what else is in that glass. :-)

I came across this really good video that explains how banks, money, and debt work.

You should take some time to watch it, it’s one of the most eye-opening things you’ll ever see. And you’ll begin to understand what this “credit crisis” really is and how we got here.

The Google office in Zurich was really, really nice. It’s hard to describe everything with words, so here’s a video:

(Amazingly, that was my first time embedding a YouTube video. Hopefully it worked.)

The video is pretty accurate, nothing is embellished with clever camera work or editing.

There is one thing that was even better than everything in the video; even better than the slide, kitchen, game room, and fire pole: the fresh juice machine.

In the cafeteria, they have a machine that takes ripe blood oranges and makes freshly squeezed juice for you. The machine casing is see-through, so you press the nozzle and see oranges fall from a hopper, get split in two, squeezed, and then juice fills your cup.

It was the best juice I’ve ever had; I think each glass took 5 oranges to make. I drank around 4 glasses a day; even when my stomach was sick from all the orange juice, I had to go back and get more. :-)

It’s the coolest machine ever.

And the micro-kitchens: bars and bars of Swiss chocolate, Swiss cocoa, mounds of cheeses, and loaves of freshly baked bread. Even when I wasn’t hungry, I’d make myself a sandwich. I mean, how often in life are you so close to pounds and pounds of Gruyere?

The micro-kitchens also had mayo and mustard. And even though it was in tubes like toothpaste (um, weird!), it was quite tasty.

I’m very tempted to transfer there, but I think I’d end up being really, really fat (or, more accurately, fatter). :-)

In case you didn’t know already, Crissy and I are moving to Colorado in less than two months. Along with all the sadness of leaving friends, I realized that I’ll be leaving my hockey team, the Monarchs, behind.

This is especially tough; my first ever ice hockey game was with the Monarchs Hockey Franchise (which incidentally was my 3rd time skating on ice). We started as a single team and, so far, have grown to a franchise of 5 teams. So with the move, I’m retiring from the Monarchs as a franchise player after eleven seasons and four tournaments, the majority of which I served as team captain.

The franchise has been kind enough to retire my number and it now hangs from our virtual rafter.

Why #40? I never really had a number that I considered my own. In high school, I ran track and played tennis, so we obviously didn’t have numbers. In college, I just did intramural and club sports. So when I needed a number for the Monarchs, I decided that I could use some of the luck from the Bangaru athletic genes (which apparently mostly went to my sisters), so I picked Sri’s soccer jersey number.

Being me, I never remembered to tell Sri that I picked her number, so she was pretty surprised and happy when she found out 2 years later. :-)

One of my new friends in Zurich told me the following joke about Zurich:

A man nervously walks into a Swiss bank in Zurich glancing around furtively and clutching a paper bag to his chest. When he gets to the counter, he leans and quietly whispers, “I’d like to open an account and deposit one million dollars in cash.”

The bank tellers looks at him with a smile and replies in a normal voice that carries through the whole bank, “Oh sir, no worries. There is no shame in poverty.”

And like all good jokes, not only is it funny, it also has an element of truth.

Walking around the shopping district and especially the banking district in Zurich is like a auto show of expensive cars: Aston Martins, Ferrari, Mazarti, and Lamborghini, and other fancy cars I hadn’t heard of lined the streets.

At one point, I saw a guy driving a Porsche and I thought, “Poor guy. He can only afford a Porsche.” :-P

Things were pretty pricey in Zurich. This was made worse by the extremely weak dollar (thanks Federal Reserve!). For example, there are these little novelty shoes in the Amsterdam airport (brightly colored wooden clogs) that are 3.50 Euros. I first bought these as a small gift for Crissy’s mom and it was about $3 around 3 years ago. This time through, each pair was about $8.

Last August, when I was in Zurich, the exchange rate was about 60 cents to a Swiss Franc. This time it was basically one dollar to one Swiss Franc. Thankfully I was traveling on an expense account. :-)

So I came back last week after a very busy, exhausting, and incredibly fun trip to Zurich. The trip back was mostly uneventful. I really wanted to sleep on the flight, so I stayed up late the night before so I’d be exhausted while on the long haul flight back to Seattle.

This, of course, didn’t work. I fell asleep on the plane, and when I woke up I figured most of the flight had past, but only 5 minutes had went by. And I couldn’t fall asleep after that.

And to add insult to injury (or in this case, insomnia), the 10 hours of recycled air on a dirty plane gave me a really bad cold. Because of the cold, I was home sick for basically all of last week. I had to force myself to go on a short walk with Crissy on Thursday because I had been in the apartment for over 80 hours straight at that point.

I even forced myself to go to work on Friday, just to get out of the house!

I was close to going crazy being stuck at home. Since I was half asleep, I couldn’t do anything useful and I ran out of “brainless” things to do pretty quickly — I mean, you can only watch so much inane TV.

Anyway, if you’re one of my approximately two readers, you know that I didn’t have time on my trip to blog . I plan to write a few posts to talk about the trip. And instead of a chronological summary (like my India Trip posts), I’ll try a series of more topical posts.

You’ll have to tell me if this is better or not. :-)

And some more geek humor to tickle your nerdy bone: I present a real engineer’s calculator:

(If you don’t get this joke, congrats! You’re normal!)