People who are into web technology have been waiting for Google Calendar to make its debut for months. Well, tonight - it happened! Here is a little write-up I did on it. If you have a Gmail account already, you can pretty much just go to the Google Calendar website, tell it to turn it on, and you are there. If you don't have any Google accounts (Gmail, portal, homepage, etc.) then you will need to set up an account. I think that just entails picking a username and password, and giving them an email address to contact you at in case you forget your password. The look and feel of Google Calendar is pretty nice. It has nice features too. It can bulk import from Yahoo Calendar, export iCal events, and can send reminder notifications to your cell phone. It might be useful for reminding you of when your favorite show is on. People who do not have TiVo or another DVR/PVR might really like that ability.

I managed to write some reviews of a few series and episodes tonight. I have a backlog of shows I have watched over the past couple weeks that I need to enter reviews for before they disappear from my TiVo. Hopefully, I will get that taken care of in the next few days. Then I guess I will be up to Level 7. Sometime this Spring, I want to write reviews for a bunch of my favorite TV series.

They had a really great episode of "Prison Break" TV show this weekend called Brother's Keeper. If you have been watching the series but felt a little lost, like you didn't know a lot about how the characters got into prison in the first place - this one clears all that up. I felt like it was a really well written, directed, and acted show. In general, the series is pretty good. This one though, it was masterfully done. Not everyone that reviewed it liked it. I think most did. But liked or disliked - it engendered strong feelings and reactions from viewers. If you are watching the series and TiVo-ing it - make sure you see this one, don't let it get overwritten before you watch it.

For once, this week I actually contributed nearly as much as I read on here. Before now, I had not contributed more than a couple of things per week. I managed to do a lot more. I am still pretty much in awe of this site. This week that sense of awe extends to include the moderators, who are founts of both knowledge and wisdom. If you read this, and you are a moderator - thanks for helping make this site have such high quality content!

I watched a few minutes each of a couple TV shows tonight while I was eating dinner and checking the latest news online.

• World War II: The Complete History - Six Months To Run Wild
• Charlie Rose - neat interview of former blogger Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox, about her new book

Did not get to watch a Puppets Who KIll episode like I planned. I did watch the Blooper reel. That was pretty good.

Macintosh computers are dramatically different now than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. I noticed the Apple Macintosh ads have been running here the past couple of weeks. So I thought I would say a few things I have learned about them by first hand experience. They replaced the whole guts of the operating system with Unix (FreeBSD Unix, to be precise). That gave it the natural ability to accommodate more than one processor at once. This is turning out to be very handy. They just started adopting the new "dual core" Pentium processors. It is really two CPUs in one chip. So the computer runs twice as fast, roughly. Since modern processor clock rates seem to have 'hit a wall" at least for a while. this is a useful way to get the computer able to "go faster". The look and feel of the Mac is pretty nice. They have this appearance they call Aqua. Buttons have a sort of translucent gel or crystal look to them. Another look is Brushed Aluminum, which is what the border of a lot of the windows on a Mac look like. Right mouse click in text fields in most Macintosh applications, and a little menu pops up. One is spelling. You can pick the command Check Spelling As You Type - and it will from then on. Any misspelled words will have a jaggy little red line drawn under the misspelled word(s). To correct their spelling, just right mouse click on the word and a popup menu will appear with a list of the most likely proper spelling for the word you meant to type. You can get Macs with more than one button now, finally. And third party mice that work with the Mac which include more than one button and even scroll wheels have been around for ages. Apple adopted USB ports in the late 1990s. This gave them a higher degree of compatibility with products originally intended for all those Linux/MS-Windows PCs out there. Mice, printers, etc. You should still check the label if you are buying something new to see if it works on Mac OS X. However, the odds are decent that it will. So, if you have older products, do not assume they won't work with your Mac. You can always go to Apple or the manufacturer's web site to find out for sure. Well, or try it, if you are the daring-do type. Some other cool things Macs have done for a while. A Macintosh has the ability to turn itself off and on at a certain time each day, if you want it to. This can be kind of handy for people who like to read the news for 10-15 minutes before they go to work on weekdays. The Mac can turn on 5 minutes before you wake up. You hop out of bed, grab your coffee or breakfast, and head for your desk to read your news. You can also have it set to turn off just after your regular bedtime. So if you forget to turn it off, it does it for you. Macs have also had very powerful automation built into them since the early 1990s. Something called AppleScript lets even the most novice programmers write programs to control their favorite application or the Mac itself. Some applications will even record scripts in AppleScript for you based on actions you are taking. Then you can go in and hand-edit the script you want in order to make it work slightly differently. The scripting language looks very much like English. More like English than any other language I have ever seen before. It makes COBOL look like a Latin description of a physics problem. As if that was not easy enough, in 2005 they introduced OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Tiger has a free utility called Automator. Using Automator, you can put together runnable scripts using drag-and-drop. It has a set of vocabularies for the OS and the most popular applications for it - iTunes, Finder, and a bunch of others. You drag little actions from a window on the left into a window on the right. There they connect up to each other. So, as you build a series of "steps" - the output of one automatically becomes the input of the next. You end up telling the computer very little about what to do, yet it is able to do a lot for you without any action of your own. It is very nicely done. This requires almost zero programming skill or talent. Apple has had their own web browser out for only about 3 years or so. However, in that time they have raced to create one of the most powerful web browsers available. At this moment, I think the Firefox browser might be slightly more powerful. However, Apple is even catching up with that leading browser now. One very cool capability that Apple supports throughout their operating system - the browser, the screensavers, etc. - is RSS. RSS is simply put the best way to keep up with current events and news. Most news sites publish their news in RSS format now. And Apple's software makes it easy to display that information so you can read it quickly. Apple itself provides their top music lists and new product lists and hot news in RSS format. The iPod and iTunes are something everyone has heard of. Of course these things work on the Macintosh. The latest rage is buying TV shows and music videos from inside iTunes. The current generation of iPods can play these videos - letting you watch and listen from a device small enough to wear in your shirt pocket. And if you have an old iPod or you don't have any iPod - you are hardly out in the cold. You can watch the TV shows on your Mac (or PC) using iTunes, just like you would listen to your music. In addition to TV shows, songs, albums, and music videos - Apple is rumored to be working on a way to sell movies. No way to be sure if that is going to happen or not, however they did just buy a huge data storage facility in Newark, NJ. And Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, has a very good business relationship with the head of Disney/ABC. So, people sort of expect that Macs and PCs running Apple's iTunes software, as well as iPods, will soon be playing full length movies. The dominant format for storing video and playing it back SMOOTHLY these days is Apple's own invention, H.264. That and MPEG-4 movie/video format seem to trace their lineage back to Apple's QuickTime video format. It has been the leading video file format since its inception in the early 1990s. These days, streaming Apple video may even be outpacing the well known RealPlayer streaming video which has been popular for the last decade. The lowest price Apple you can get is the $599 Mac Mini. For a hundred bucks or so more you can get a version of the Mac Mini that has a "dual core" processor in it. That one will run really fast. It is even capable of playing full resolution TV shows/video received through a TV-receiver like the El Gato EyeTV devices. Something to think about as you ponder making the transition to digital television. Only a few more years left to do that. Time to start planning now. Well, that is today's Mac. And those are some ways the Mac can help you watch your TV shows. I can be a replacement for your TV set. On the other hand, you don't have to replace your TV to watch more shows than you can get now on cable or off the air. The Mac gives you more options for more television stuff. I would go to an Apple retail store some evening or weekend and check it out. They have the Macs set up to try out. The lighting is very good. There are lots of accessories like digital cameras and iPods on display. You can see and learn a lot. Each Apple store is like a museum of the present.

I do not have cable or satellite TV. I am fortunate enough to be able to receive all the network channels - the big 3, FOX, WB, UPN, and PBS - from my antenna. Does anyone know of a way to tell the TV.com setup thing that? It seems to only offer me cable TV provider info. Right now, it is making the "My Listings" feature pretty useless to me. About 98% of what is there, I cannot watch, and what is there that I can watch, is too hard to find.

I see I made Level 6 overnight. It must have been all the contributions I made this weekend. I have some more that I keep forgetting to type in. Hopefully, I will go from 6 to 7 a lot faster than I did from 5 to 6. I really haven't been working at it as hard as I should until this week. It is kind of fun, especially once you learn the right ways to do things. Hopefully, I have learned most of them now.

I was just thinking about TiVo a couple of minutes ago. I had just seen an article that said, thanks to TiVo, you never have to watch a bad show again. That is sort of true. TiVo will capture enough shows you really don't have to. TiVo is like fishing with a net. You can record whatever series you like, look for whatever shows match your favorite genre, see if anything good is coming on in the next few hours. It takes only a minute. Later on, when you are bored or holding a piping hot TV dinner in your hand, you can watch the best thing that has been on instead of the best thing on at the moment. It is really profound. And as I thought about it, I realized this would increase the maximum number of users possible to view a show higher than ever before in television history. After all, kids have scouts some nights, but tests to study for other nights. Married and single adults have social outings. People go out for sports, movies, grocery shopping, and errands on weekends. So, without TV, some of every possible time slot has part of its potential viewing audience just decimated by the logistics of life: needing to do something else at the time that show airs. With TiVo, anybody who has a TiVo and gets the station the show airs on can watch it. Sure, there could be another show on at the same time they watch instead. That does not happen all that much. However, the amount of time people have available to watch television does not really increase just because someone has a a TiVo. So, people probably watch a lot more of their "A list" shows and a far less "C list" shows. TiVo has probably increased the correlation between shows true popularity, and how much they are watched. There is probably less idle television watching going on today than there was 5 years ago. And what that means is a show's airtime is going to have less to do with how successful it is than it used to in the past. Shows that aren't very good probably won't do very well, even if they come on at a really convenient time for television. While that is great for the best, most popular shows - it could be really harmful to the so-so shows. Something has to air all day long and most of the night. But will profitability of having a truly marginal show dip significantly under the influence of DVRs? Prime time may still be prime time for watching television. But the television that is watched may not be what is on the air. It may be what has been on the air sometime earlier in the week.

I finally finished the first of two DVDs containing the season 1 episodes of the Puppets Who Kills TV series. Took more than a week but it was really work it. I must say, it is the funniest puppet show I have ever seen in my life. It is sort of a cross between Saturday Night Life, a Norman Lear sitcom, and an episode of The Muppets. But even that description does not do it justice. It was every bit as good as I had hoped it would be. Here are the episodes I watched. Episode 1 - Dan's Crush Episode 2 - Cuddles Gets Laid Episode 3 - Dash The Greeter Episode 4 - The Island of Skip Along Pete Episode 5 - Cuddles Goes to Jail Episode 6 - Bill's Brain Episode 7 - Cuddles the Safety Mascot My amazement of how good Canadian television is keeps growing. US made TV shows are great too. Everyone expects and knows that lots of US shows are good. I have not heard people I run into rave about a lot of these shows I like from up north. So I do not know if I just have a Canadian's taste in TV, or most of us Americans do not realize how much of our weekly series are made in Canada. I am guessing it is a little of both. I do know one show me and a lot of other people liked was X-Files. The first seasons of X-Files, which were shot in Vancouver were fresh and exciting. The last season or two were shot in L.A. They seemed kind of stale and unexciting compared to the earlier ones. Maybe that was coincidence. But now I am not so sure.