Hulu gave me butterflies in my belly, but will they last? I have my doubts.

Hulu means “cease” and “desist” in Swahili and in case you missed it, Hulu.com is a new site that’s a joint venture of NBC and News Corp. Here’s what the Hulu About page says:

Hulu’s ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how you want it. We hope to provide you with the web’s most comprehensive selection from more than 50 content providers including FOX, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and more to deliver premium programming across all genres and formats, television shows, feature films, and clips. Watch full-length episodes of current primetime TV shows such as The Simpsons and The Office the morning after they air, classics like Miami Vice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and clips from Saturday Night Live, Nip/Tuck, and others. Hulu also offers full-length feature films like The Usual Suspects, Ice Age, Three Amigos!, and The Big Lebowski as well as clips from films such as Napoleon Dynamite, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Devil Wears Prada and many more. Hulu is free and ad-supported — available anytime in the U.S.

Hulu was founded in March 2007 and is a joint venture owned by NBC Universal and News Corp. In addition, Hulu has closed a $100 million investment from private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.

Hulu’s small, but growing team is headquartered in Los Angeles, California with a Research and Development team in Beijing, China.

Hulu launched publicly in the last week (or two). The site’s user interface is fantastic, the video quality is good enough for me, and the content is remarkably sparse. In fact, the lack of content is down right disappointing. When I heard of the site’s impending launch several months back I had high hopes. Tonight I visited the site for the first time hoping I could watch "Heroes"; unfortunately, only Season 2 is available. Another complaint: Why can’t I embed videos? They’re running ads periodically in the video, they’re getting their money. Why not allow me to embed videos?

Even with the disappointing lack of content the site got me excited. Maybe the TV networks are waking up. There can be no doubt the future of TV distribution is the Internet. I hope the networks embrace this sooner rather than later and provide us with the content we want, on our terms. Hulu hasn’t realized this, but it’s got promise. More than any other implementation, I’ve seen thus far.  I hope they don’t lose interest or steam, but I’m realistic about these things. Check it out yourself, it’s free if you don’t count the commercials every ~10 minutes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

I just read Roy’s blog post about XML-RPC interfaces and client side blog writers. I’ve tried out ScribeFire, which Roy reviews with:

ScribeFire seems *very* *very* unpolished. Their forums are filled with reports, and nobody responding to them. It didn’t seem to work very well with my test Tabulas account, so I’m not exactly filled with hope on that front.

I tried out ScribeFire a few months back and was initially very pleased with it. However, after a couple weeks of fighting with bugs I abandoned the plugin. It was just so damn buggy. Anyway, Roy mentioned Windows Live Writer; so, I downloaded and installed it. This is my first official post with it. Wow! this is frickin’ sweet. This is a really polished product. It’s even elegant, which is a clear indication this product was a Microsoft acquisition. It even has a bunch of useful plugins for things like Flickr, Picasa, paste from Visual Studio with syntax highlighting, and more.

I do have to complain about the install experience. It took forever. I have no idea what it was analyzing, but it "scanned" my computer for minutes. Also, it’s a damn shame Live Writer isn’t still open source as it was prior to the Microsoft acquisition of the company. Why Microsoft felt the need to close source this is beyond me. Doing so only diminishes the value of the product to users and Microsoft. Just idiotic.

88% Geek

I really think I could have done better, but I’m just terrible at these kinds of multiple-choice standardized tests. 😉

Man divorces two wives in three minutes | NEWS.com.au
”(My first and second wives) are like good friends but I never imagined that both of them had collectively decided to divorce me,” he said.

“I admit that my relationship with them had been strained over the past few months but I never expected our marriages to end in this manner.”

Man, this would be a total bummer. I imagine his wives mocking him incessantly without his knowledge.

www.Bitstrips.com. I wonder if this is search engine index-able.

Mårten is wonderful. SteveB and I just bumped into Mårten and his lovely (and equally brilliant) wife Anicka at the San Jose Airport. They were on there way to Phoenix to celebrate with MySQL..errr…new Sun execs. We were all delayed. Every time I speak with Mårten he impresses me. Now that I’ve met Anicka I’ll tell you I think she is even cooler. 🙂 Anyway, in usual Mårten form he made me laugh my ass off, one particularly choice quote, which for his sake I’ll not put into context was: “It feels good, like when you pee in your pants…it’s warm.”

Main Page – Data Sharing Summit
The Data Sharing Summit is back, and bigger.

We received such a positive response to the Data Sharing Summit in September, 2007. And, given the ongoing emergence of different data sharing initiatives, such the finalization of the OpenID2 spec, emerging Open Social and other social graph API’s, the 1.0 release of the Higgins Framework, as dataportability.org, Social Networking Portability, FOAF and XFN as standards gaining traction, DiSO, MT activity feeds, etc. we decided that it was a good time to hold another summit.

Our purpose is to provide gathering spaces in which all parties can work together on the challenge of data sharing. We create the agenda the day it happens. It is about getting things done and figuring out the tough problems – there is no committee deciding who does or does not get to ‘present’ it is about breaking up and really diving in figuring out the solutions and building the consensus to get adoption.

We are pleased to announce the following two Data Sharing events:

* The Data Sharing Workshop, April 18 – 19 at the SFSU, Downtown Campus.

* The Data Sharing Summit, May 15, at the Computer History Museum.

I attended the first DSS last year. It was valuable, fun, and, with Kaliya as the facilitator, very well organized. I recommend it highly; although, I do not believe I’ll be able to make it this year I would merrily were my schedule to permit.

I was never really into Basketball when I attended UNC. It just seemed strangely jingoistic, but now I find myself oddly proud of being a UNC Alum when basketball season comes around. I’m not yet painting myself Carolina Blue or anything…or even watching the full game for that matter, but this photo does make me grin. Not only does Dook have a crappy Computer Science dept relative to UNC, but apparently they have a crappy basketball team in comparison too. 🙂 What three frames could show UNC punking Duke in Computer Science…hrmm…