I recently went through the Sopranos Box Set (83 hrs over 30 dvd's). I could write novels on the subject matter, but this post has nothing to do with that. Rather I would like to share a greater frustration: Swapping so many discs is the most annoying experience when watching a full television show. I would have rather spent a few days ripping all discs to some home networked media server or even paid $$ to have the episodes streamed online (but I can't since I have to subscribe to HBO).

My previous post was my first new entry after recently upgrading servers (I ran out of space on the old one and the software was getting too old). This switch compared to past occurrences was significantly more work and more costly. I say more work because I had over 5 years of different sites, tools, configurations and accounts scattered all over and I had to ensure that each piece migrated without disruption.

In a half filled lecture hall in the fall of 2000, I heard an enthusiastic Compaq (now HP) engineer talk about his work with IPv6. He said eventually every single tiny device you own will have an IP address to connect to the internet. Most of the students passively dismissed this idea. I was among them. I was fortunate to have the time and the means to attend Google I/O last month.

A few days before Christmas I decided to watch Avatar with my brothers. I don't visit theaters often, so I thought it would be fun to watch it in IMAX 3D (based on great past experience). Considering it was the holiday season with more crowds the box office, I opted to purchase tickets online for a reserved seating show (a first for me). For security, I used a temporary credit card number (like I always do) and printed my confirmation/receipt and went to the theater a few hours later.

And the cycle is complete... Today Mozilla released version 3.5 of their popular Firefox web browser. The browser came with a exclusive Private Browsing mode which by their own words claims: "won't leave a single browsing fingerprint behind for others to discover". As silly as that statement is, Firefox is actually the 3rd browser to ship with such a feature. Chrome by Google (ironically Mozilla's primary "benefactor") introduced "Incognito Mode" last year, and even Microsoft's IE8 beat Mozilla with "