To start off, it’s mix of both ESPN3 and ESPN Video.  Overall video quality was poor, a good deal poorer than what I get watching either site on my computer.  That is already on top of ESPN’s video quality being worse than what I get from Netflix or MLB.TV over the same connection.  I’m not sure if this is to do with Xbox Live today, when it was appallingly slow, or in general, so we’ll have to see how it shapes up in the long run.  The avatar-populated initial start is just a needlessly overdone way to show you “Top 3 things and a link to everything else”.  Once you’re into the menu structure though, it’s a solid NXE interface, if again, a bit slow on loading the thumbnail pictures.  The video interface itself is your standard Xbox video layout.

On the content side, the ESPN Video stuff is what you’d expect: mostly SportsCenter highlights.  I didn’t find any of their more off-beat stuff like Mayne Street or Sports Science although you can’t find that stuff half the time on the site anyway.  Upside here is that I haven’t run into any ads moving between clips which is quite welcome.

For me, ESPN3 is mostly about live events, and that’s where it tends to have problems.  It can never seem to decide how much bandwidth to use and so the quality changes constantly, and unlike Netflix on Xbox Live, the quality changes mean buffering pauses.  Those are awful at any time, but between pitches it makes me want to drown something.  I’ll see about watching the Lakers game Wednesday night and report back then.

If its a better live experience than the site, even with lower quality, it should be enough to keep my Gold subscription active.

Also, I caught the tail-end of a Michael Sandel lecture on John Rawls regarding “Redistributing wealth to help the disadvantaged.” (or so says the KLCS program guide) today.  I was moved to much pacing and thinking of the deep thoughts and I would write about said thoughts at length but, uh…

“Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.”

-Sydney J. Harris

… yeah.

(The subject of my un-novel deep thoughts was mostly about how the arbitrariness of personal attributes and circumstances affects my understanding of allocating “myself” in a (strong) Pareto-optimal fashion and my need for that in the first place.  Then I got stuck in a rabbit-hole trying to show that my need to be Pareto-efficient leading me to say, do activism, made/makes me inherently weaker at that (relative to someone with an similar set of attributes and skills) than someone driven to it because of… empathy, or something.  Bleh.)

Good thing that Sydney J. Harris quotation (or ironically enough, one eerily similar to it) has been seared into my brain for ages, huh?

Finally, for disclosure’s sake: I stole “think deep thoughts” from Scott Jennings.

1. I <3 Samantha Morton in this movie, so much.
2. A sex scene with Tim Robbins in it is weird, full stop.
3. I didn’t like the ending but I thought it was appropriate.  If you’re familiar with the theatrical ending to Blade Runner, you should get an extra kick out of it though.  Well, at least I did.

When I get back to my computer and hop over to my Gmail tab, I’m greeted by “please moderate this comment” email from WordPress. After dealing with the spam, I notice the yellow banner of “New WP version out, update now kplz.” I then hit “Upgrade Automatically” and it all works out (like it always does). (I even updated a plugin auto-magically.)

I was not sure at the time (and am still not) if I should have been more unnerved by a successful or unsuccessful outcome.

If it had mentioned anything about “insufficient data” though, I’d probably still be screaming.

While it does a lot of neat things with one piece of information: a name, a date, some math, it doesn’t seem to be able to deal with the sets it’s using to produce the information.  So, while I now know that Isaac is the 41st most common name for (male?) births in the US, I can’t get to what the 40th or 42nd names or, what the 41st most common name for girls is right now.

For that, Google gives me good results for “names US births rankings” in no time, and I also learn that the Social Security Administration’s website doesn’t like Chrome.

Thanks to Lifehacker for the idea I’ve shamelessly stolen.

EDIT: Just fixed it today after a rather simple find-and-replace on the wp_posts table.  (Export -> Do Notepad++ On It ->Drop Table -> Import Editted File.)  It was simple but oh so scary.   Let’s hope I didn’t break anything.

Obviously a badass.

Hey… how you doin’?

How you doin’ take two.

HERPES!

ZOMBIES!

Token minority!

What the fuck is up with her eye shadow?

HERPES take two!

[09:31] matty: do u play mohaa
[09:31] Cal: no…
[09:31] matty: kk
[09:31] <This user is now offline>

What the hell?

I just find it hilarious that people fail to understand that a falling dollar makes our exports more attractive.  That of course helps close our insanely-high trade defecit and guess what, helps the economy.

It’s just like China… except without the artificial undervaluing… and less widespread human rights abuses (hopefully).

I liked it quite a bit though, I must say.