Sunday, March 20, 2005

Thoughts on television

When will television producers begin to get it?

A new show comes along, that people like to watch (pick your own example, because I don't want to single one out) and they start watching that instead of other stuff that's on. The year after, there are 10 shows like it! The main reason we watch the new show, however, is because it's different from everything else. If they'd just grasp that simple fact, perhaps we'd have a broad spectrum of innovative programming to watch rather than having to choose from among several clones of the same concept.

Update on the cell phone / organizer issue

In this post I hypothesized that the cell phone would be better than the organizer. It is, in fact, better.

The desktop software enable me to export some contacts from Palm Desktop - of course in the lingua franca of data exchange the comma-delimited file, rather than some contact standard - and import them into the Desktop program for the phone, then sync them to the phone. A cumbersome process, but it works. Maybe there's a better way but I haven't found it yet.

It's got one nagging problem - you can't download schedule items from the PC software, only contacts. If I want a schedule item on the phone, I have to enter it by hand, which is not only a pain but violates one of my cardinal rules: if data is in a computer, one should never have to re-enter it to move it to another computer (and your cell phone is a computer, nake no mistake about that). So, I'll have to see what can be done about that, but otherwise the cell phone is "good enough".