Current Inefficiencies:

As a cable or satellite customers I am only given a small number of choices about what program plans I can choose.  These packages are predefined, pre-priced, and inflexible in their offerings.  After deciding to use a certain company, Comcast in my case, love it or leave it, is the only option I have vs. broadcast thanks to an obstructed southern skyline at the appropriate angle from anywhere in my yard or on my roof.  Comcast offers a small number of packages that each add onto each other until you can subscribe to everything they offer.  I do not have a need for everything they offer but I do have an interest in a specific selection of channels.  My problem, or issue, is that to get the channels that I want I have to subscribe to a mid-range package just below the premium offerings, paying a premium price for content that I don’t use.  Satellite services such as Dish and Directv offer packages as well with no customization outside of the different options in each package.

Streaming Options

An alternative medium for me to cable is online.  I watch the same shows, at the time of my choosing, with basic time-shifting built in, via sites like Hulu or OVGuide.  I find this refreshing in that I can usually find what I am looking for and watch it on my own schedule.  This is great for a missed episode or a recommendation from a friend or absent minded viewing while I work, but not for my primary shows where I want to relax in front of the television and not a computer screen.  Options are starting to come out that stream web content directly to the TV but the technology is still immature and the user interfaces typically focus on specific features but miss the principles of K.I.S.S interface design.  A recent option that is gaining momentum is ZillionTV – they plan and might actually succeed in bring the streaming content of the web to our living rooms – they get it – just like Tivo gets time-shifting for the masses.

À La Carte

If the cable and satellite companies will not give me any options there is someone out there that will.  More often I am willing to find my show a few days after it airs via OVGuide, and ignore any commercials that might get in the way, my irritation to this is that I usually have to watch it on my computer.  Advertisers have to understand the potential lose of revenue this leads to in scale – the cancellation of the Jericho series is a prime example of how time-shifting and online content can scare away funding from advertisers for a show that is loved by its fans.  I however would be more than willing to watch commercials if they were relevant to the programs that I watched or preferences that I specified, or better, that I could train my set-top box to understand – the Tivo style thumbs up / thumbs down applied to commercials could tailor advertising content directly to me – in such cases I would be apt to actually watch them vs. time-shift around them when such an option is available.

Wish List – Listen Up Service Provider

I would like to see the following:

• A basic, simple fee, to support the generic infrastructure of providing service.
• The ability to subscribe to specific channel for a fixed price per channel and a discounting price, or sliding scale as I add channels to my account.  I am uncertain what a single channel should cost but it should scale to reward those customers that subscribe to more channels or specific packages or recommend combinations.  Channel prices could vary as well as there is no reason why premium content should cost the same as broadcast content, but the service provider should be cautious about overpricing – as an example I would be willing to pay fifty cents for each broadcast channel or a standard definition cable channel, one dollar for each high definition cable channel and two dollars for each premium channel such as HBO or Showtime.
• The ability to subscribe to a particular program on a particular channel at a particular time, but not to the channel itself.  This might require an additional service such as having DVR access added to the account, as an additional fee, so that should you use a provider supplied or personal DVR, the show is made available to your signal at the specified time, or after normal broadcasting time potentially for a discount, for viewing either in real time or via a DVR.
• The ability to have commercials tailored to my preferences.  Taking this option a step further training of commercial would be ideal.  In practice of defining preferences I should have the ability to opt out of certain categories of commercials that are not applicable to my purchasing needs, desires, or habits.  Applicable to a training technique I would like the ability to start fresh and tell the service what I like and dislike.  To do this would require that I actually watch commercials, which I am okay with, but after a period of time I would expect the advertising content to begin to tailor to my liking and applied bias.  Once advertisers understand that viewers don’t mind watching most commercials and would likely be happy to do so should the content be somewhat personally tailored, all involved parties would win – I might even be more opt to use the Tivo “Press thumbs up now to learn more…” feature.

Infrastructure

Asking for a upgrade in service from the service providers is easy but what would such an infrastructure upgrade entail.  In most cases the connectivity to the market from the provider is already established.  There would be the need for innovation on the side of the provider to add the above functionality to their content management and distribution systems.  The technology seems to be close to some of the ideas already in that Comcast at least offers a significant amount of content on demand and I see much of the services I mentioned as an extension from that base with an added layer of management that understands more about my personalized preferences vs. a presentation layer to the masses.

In addition to the content providers’ themselves there would be a new market waiting to be tapped by set-top box manufacturers to add in the new features and take advantage of a new way of providing the same content to the same defined market in a new way.  Advertisers would need to rethink how they market.  They could take a given product and market it to defined groups of like minded viewers in different ways tailoring the presentation where it made sense.  They would need to understand that some viewers are not appropriate audiences for certain products and they would have to respect our preferences to get us to agree to and honor a potential new partnership where time-shifting became a technique of the past.

Outside of the proposed benefits to Advertisers I was curious to see what my new cable bill would be assuming that the at a minimum the discreet channel subscription was made available.  With a basic fee of $10.00, 6 standard definition channels at $0.50 each, 19 high definition channels at $1.00 each, and 5 premium channels at $2.00 each, my monthly bill would be (10+3+19+10) or $42.00 – Normally my bill for my cable package is $74.00 monthly with about three-fourths of the content not wanted and not viewed.  This approach would continue, I am assuming, to pay the providers bill, and it would make me a happy, satisfied customers knowing that I am paying for precisely what I asked for and nothing more – wrap the service with a convenient, easy to use, subscription management system accessible via the web or the set-top box and bill me monthly for the either the high water mark of channels I subscribed to for the month or offer me a range where I can pay a set price for a specific number of channels but limit my options to change them to a few times a month to minimize abuse.

I certainly won’t hold my breath but I would love to see the cable and satellite content providers implement even one of the above ideas.  If I had my choice the discreet channel subscription would be a great start and likely the easiest to implement in scale.

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I missed the airing, as did Tivo, of the first episode.  The week in between, although unintentional, allowed me to catch some reviews of the show online, however scathing they might have been.  I also heard Whedon on NPR describing his new masterpiece.  To be honest though the show is complex and I don’t believe it can be summed up in even a few episodes or short conversations.  The characters are rich and deep, at least when they are not in their doll state, the stories that involve the “actives” are technically detailed, in the T.V. sense anyway, environmentally stimulating, action packed and somewhat dramatic.  Whedon mentioned during the NPR interview that each episode was very similar to a pilot for Eliza – the person she is playing is never the same and continuously evolving – even in the doll state she is constantly becoming more aware of herself, current or former is yet to be seen.

The various story arcs present are what has truly entangled me into show and made me glad that Tivo didn’t miss a beat each Friday night.  The short list from what I have seen include a rogue personality only known as Alpha who, with the help of a particular set of imprints and intelligence, has escaped after murdering everyone in his path with exception to Echo for whom he has a soft spot.  I like the concept of what is being done with Alpha but it is very similar in description to another character named Alpha from the J.C. Hutchin’s audio book 7th Son.  The chief of security, Dominic, seems to take his job to heart but has little love for that which he protects.  There is a certain static, yet undefined, in his reactions and relationship toward the Dolls, in particular Echo.  In each episode, or near, he has suggested that she be put in the attic, and I am assuming not in the nice fun playful way.  Topher, the scientist that built and runs the imprinting technology, is busy trying to figure out who, possibly Alpha, has compromised their computer systems and now has the ability to remotely reprogram or deactivate the “actives” while they are on assignment – assuming they answer their phones.  If it is not Alpha, and there is only minimal evidence to the audience that it is, that would open up another possible long reaching story arc with a potential corporate or government nemesis.  Speaking of government, FBI specifically, agent Ballard is trying every trick to learn about the Dollhouse.  He has some interest in Echo, or the person she was, but there isn’t so far a real connection, other than a few photos about why he cares or what she might mean to him, other than a case number.

So far each week has been entertaining.  My favorite has been episode 5: True Believer.  The story is interesting and captivating, even if the technology is a bit far fetched, but I love the immersion they provide Echo into the cult.  I liken it to the events surrounding David Koresh but with a twist.

The show has merit but unlike others that start and you instantly judge them, Dollhouse has to grow on you a bit, perhaps in the same way that Jericho did – start with a bang – get to know the characters – start telling the story.  The story concept is a bit foreign, or at least new, and the seasonal arcs needs some time to grow – there seems to be a breadth of background that we only learn in small chunks – but the picture seem to be more significant each time we get one.  The characters are interesting, simple at first, but as you watch additional layers are added, or removed, to reveal something deeper, not philosophical, but attention grabbing with slight detail that if missed would diminish the whole.  Just like Buffy and Firefly, and continually assuming Fox doesn’t find a way to screw with it, Dollhouse has potential to be a great show – okay maybe not “great” but a classic in the same sense as the others.

Risk is one of my favorite games and while lately I have taken a liking to the modern version, Risk 2210 A.D, I still enjoy the classic game without the extra complexity.  I have never really used the web to learn strategy and have always relied upon playing often and with different tactics, learning my particular strengths through repetition.  I have never excelled at Risk but I am learning that I spread my armies to thin, much to early in the game.  I tend to take advantage of, and have had luck with, investing my troops in the conquest of my neighbors, near the start of the game, or within the first few turns.  If things go well I will have amasses enough countries to bring in enough reinforcements to be able to hold what I have taken and perhaps even entrench a little before the next explosion through my new borders.  This tactic seems to do well until the game starts to conclude and one or two players have clearly started to rise up as the dominate forces in the world at which point I have either entrenched enough to survive their turns or my armies are mere fodder for the advancing troops.

Settlers of Catan is a game that has come up several times but I have yet to play.  From reading the Wikipedia page on the game it sounds intriguing.  I get the idea that playing it will be similar to making the computer game Civilization a multi player board game.  Not having ever played Settlers’ I don’t have any strategy to start from and the way it looks much of the game is chance regardless with resource production being controlled by a spin of the dice.  The real strategy in the game seems to be about where you locate your cities and build your roads to keep others out of your territory as you expand your range of control.  This game gets rave reviews from nearly everyone I know who plays it so I am somewhat excited to give it a try.

Nuclear War is another of my favorites and one that I have played countless times over the years.  Strategy might be just a kind way to say – use whatever means you have at your disposal to systematically destroy ever ounce of your opponents population.  You might have to wheel and deal a bit, or create an alliance to get rid of your pesky neighbor so you can focus on your real enemy at the table.  The game is simple for the most part with early propaganda, secret cards to steal population from your opponents, delivery systems to make sure your warheads leave a lasting impression.  There are some other cards, specials, that give you advantages in aggression and defense should you need them – and you will need them.  This is, or can be, a very fast played game once all the players get the hang of it and with the only real objective to destroy all other people in the world but yours it makes for some great entertainment.  In many cases it is hard to not destroy the entire world once you start launching your nuclear strikes, not from your strikes but from the all engaging retaliatory strikes that follow – sometimes just surviving once all out war starts is the hard part.

Illuminati is one of my favorite card games but I rarely get play it due to the time it takes to play a full game.  With the various expansion packs that go along with the non-collectors version of the game, not to be confused with the collectible card game Illuminati, there are plenty of organizations to build your network upon and the wide variety of connections and special powers that come with each as well as the Illuminati themselves make strategy a must.  I don’t need much help anymore building my networking and going on the offensive to accomplish my goals – I do prefer the ultimate destruction of the other Illuminati vs. playing for the specific goals, there is something more satisfying about wining by systematically picking your opponents networks apart piece by piece.

Munchkin is by far one of my favorite Steve Jackson games, just below Car Wars on the list of all time favorites – now if someone could just convince SJ Games that Car Wars was worthy of saving, upgrading and expanding…I digress, that is a topic for another day.  Munchkin in great in its pure form where you play a particular set and maybe an add-on or two.  The mechanics are simple and easy to master with much of the strategy being intertwined with fate and the draw of the cards.  Countless times have one or more of the players been gimped with unusable equipment, no race, no class, and a handful of excellent cards that just get rotated out while the character is assembled.  A few times we have doubled the amount of life available to extend play, particularly when we mix and match the different sets, just to get the true munchkin feel with some decked out character weilding a short sword, a photon torpedo launcher and protected by a tin foil hat and cute curly elf shoes.

Axis and Allies is probably my least favorite of the strategy games.  It is incessantly detailed and takes inordinate amounts of time to play even a single round, let alone the game.  I recall the last game I played was in 2004 at our annual camping trip and after much time spent in the setup I didn’t last more than three or four rounds before having my armies disintegrated or splintered enough that I could not recover.  Twelve hours or so later the game ended.  My irritation isn’t at AA itself, from everyone that plays I only hear that it is a great game but requires a pretty significant investment in time to learn how to play it effectively.  I certainly have not played enough to understand even the basics of the game, let alone any strategy to be adept at playing it well.

This list could not be complete without mentioning Fireball Island.  While actually a game that requires very little strategy unless you consider the decisions about which particular trail to use to minimize the potential of getting turned into charcoal a strategy.  I have played games that are very short with only a few fireballs getting used and games that have taken hours upon hours to get the talisman to the boat, each time with the players trading out who has control of it over the last ten spaces.  We tried Fireball Island as a drinking games once as well, drinking a shot each time the fireball was deployed, I don’t recommend it unless you idea of a great gaming night includes getting snookered as well.

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To answer the questions about which I preferred though I think there has to be some understanding of what it was I was looking for and trying to do.  At the time I don’t think I really knew.  My friends and I played a good number of role playing games, computer games and board games, we discussed in-depth the aspects of various games we like and disliked.  We spent time writing rules and creating additional content for the ones we loved to play – all in the name of our love of the game.  My thought was to take some of this energy and try to build a community around it with Daggersden.  A blog to publish the content and a forum to discuss it.  I have always been a fan of Wordpress so the blogging engine was an easy choice.  For a forum I really didn’t know where to start though.  None of the open source or free forum engines integrated well with Wordpress.  I tried several of them early on as the site was being stood up – SMF, Drupal, phpBB – they all had arcane bridges that were barely supported and barely worked.  Things might be different now but this research and testing happened in 2004.

A friend of mine recommended vBulletin.  A great forum tool but with a hefty price tag as well.  It was an easy sell though as I had spent many hours, days likely, trying to force a fit using one of the other forums and vBulletin had a plug-in that did exactly what I was looking for, or so I thought at the time.  Granted the plug-in has grown a lot since 2004 and I have even offered source hacks to make it better on a few occasions, in particular around the nesting of parent to child forum relationships and the way they are displayed in the Wordpress admin console – I needed it to be possible to have five top level forums called “General Discussion” each under a different non-forum category, and be able to differentiate between them when creating a blog post that I wanted in the forums under General Discussion.

This setup, Wordpress and vBullein, worked for a while.  Lots of blog posts were made but as time went on there were little bugs that I just couldn’t get resolved with the integration.  User management wasn’t complex but it was problematic.  The tables were not one in the same and the bridge didn’t always work as expected, in particular for users that were admins or moderators in either product.  Editing and double posting became another problem.  This did get better but early on if you created a blog post and linked it back to the forum for discussion the post was one way.  If you used WP to edit your post the update did not get sent to VB as well and the author had to work with the admin, or a moderator on the VB side to get the content updated.  These problems were certainly not severe and had easy work around albeit manual ones.  The main problem I had with the bridge and still do today is that it disables the Wordpress comment engine.  Once you start using the bridge all comments are sent to the VB forum and any discussion requires the user to interact with the forum and not the blog.  This was sort of the point but the transition was not smooth and it was obvious you were leaving one and entering the other without any easy way to get back.

After a while I got tired of basically managing two systems and decided to scrap Wordpress and work with the forum only, adding the vBulleting Blog add-on for any user that wanted a blog as well.  Not my original design but by this point the site really had not attracted many active users outside of the friends that used it already anyway.  I decided I wanted to extend the forum a bit so I wrapped it with vbAdvanced to give it some of the spice I had with the forum but in a more native way to vBulletin.  It stayed like this until recently when I was notified my license was going to expire soon.  Since the monetizing idea never really took off and I really couldn’t justify continuing to pay for a site that wasn’t paying for itself I started to think about where I wanted daggersden to go next.

Again being a big fan of Wordpress and wanting to get back to blogging vs. forum content for the main aspect of the site I started looking around again for a forum that was fully integrated into Wordpress, either as a plug-in or via a well developed and maintained bridge.  The forum had to be free and preferably OSS so I could extend or enhance it as I saw fit.  Turns out the forum market for WP has grown considerably since 2004.  A quick Google search shows many results in various states of integration.  I found Simple:Press Forum quickly and read a number of very positive reviews.  The main fact that it was a full featured forum that was also a WP plug-in was a great combination.  A quick download and installation had the forum up and running quickly.  Sadly, but understandably, there are not migration tools to get my vBulletin forum data into Simple:Press.  I tried in vain to create a migration script but found the schema mapping between the insanely complex vBulletin database and that of Simple:Forum to be to complex for my skills – that or I was just being lazy.

I have to admit that I wish I would have found a plug-in even half as good as Simple:Press in 2004.  I wouldn’t be writing this post today most likely.  I always wanted the blog to be the entry point to daggersden and the forum to be a natural, two-way extension of it.  This plug-in takes it one step farther and offers the ability to create a blog post out of a forum entry should you want to.  All in all I am very pleased with the transition away from vBulletin and am happy to have found a forum plug-in that satisfies my requirements – however lose they may be.

Security

I envision a solution that adds an authentication challenge to perform destructive operations such as deleting a picture or video.  This solution would require a tradeoff in that certain operations would be inaccessible unless the camera was docked at which point a challenge would be issued before the enablement of these operations.  The solution would need to be built into the camera and not require software installation on a single computer.  This technique would allow the typical mobility expected out of a digital camera and the flexibilty for the user to use whatever computer or operating system they want to manage their camera.

WiFi

I would like my camera to have the ability to bond to a WiFi network.  Perhaps extending the functionality described above around security the camera could be configured to connect to a particular wireless network with the typical connection options such as WEP or WPA2.  Once connected a share extended from a home computer could be mapped to the camera and on a schedule, perhaps every night, or once a week, the camera would connect and download all content to the share.  Even without the scheduling and automation the ability to point the camera at a network share and download content would be benificial.

High Speed Internal Memory

I reuse many of my sdram cards and rarely purchase the hi-speed ones required for some advanced, hi-speed camera operations.  I would like to see the camera include a small amount of interanal hi-speed memory that was used as a write buffer during camera operations.  Once the operation was complete or a particular amount of the buffer was filled the data would be transfered to the secondary storage.

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Prior to using any tool to help me search intelligently for new bands, tracks or types of music, I merely categorized it myself and tried, sometimes in vain, to describe what I was looking for to others. My main love is that of Symphonic Metal, at least that is what I have learned it is called. To me this is fast, rhythmic, trance inducing, guitar laden, heavy metal overlayed with rich melodic vocals. The focus is on the rhythm, depth, and the power of the instruments highlighted by vocals that add richness and character to the music. This is music that you can feel as well as hear.

My exposure to Symphonic Metal was pretty limited even when I tried to look around. In the beginning of my search I really could not narrow down what it was I was looking for. I could not quantify what specific parts of the music I liked in a terms that made search engines happy enough to produce usable results. * Any search for a metal band would land thousands upon thousands of hits.* Frustration was setting in quickly.* Prior to heading back to the album collection came a gift from Olaf. Pandora! And I don’t mean that allusive box.

Pandora is a fantastically simple web-based radio where each channel, that you create, plays music based on what you like.* You tell Pandora what you like by entering the name of a band or song.* It uses the Music Genome Project to find a Vector of the music you entered.* These Vectors are then presented to you as a stream of songs from a wide variety of bands that share the same Genes that make up the Vector.* You can further tailor any results by telling Pandora you like or dislike a particular song it has presented to you.* It uses this feedback, much like a Naive Bayes Classifier, to refine the list of Genes that appeal to the particular channel you created.

Pandora.com schooled me in what I really like about the music I listen to: use of string ensemble, paired vocal harmony, a vocal-centric aesthetic and minor key tonality, hard rock roots, a subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping, mild rhythmic syncopation, demanding instrumental part writing and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation.

I have discovered many bands that I would likely never have heard of just entering a song or band I liked to hear and pruning the results I was presented.* Here are but a few of my favorites:

• Nightwish
• Ark
• Xandria
• Beautiful Sin
• Kamelot
• Elis
• Aesma Daeva
• Waltari
• Rhapsody Of Fire
• Leaves’ Eyes

My quest to learn about new music out there has only really started but I look forward to using not only Pandora Radio but also any new generation of tools that come along to help.

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