tv without a tv

My latest television fave is ABC's "Ugly Betty" based on the telenovela. The story of Betty Suarez and the former fashion magazine she worked for, Mode. But since it airs on Thursdays bowling night, I've had to catch the reruns online. Both ABC and CBS have been posting episodes of the more popular shows that people can view online. Each episode is "sponsored" by a specific advertiser which interupts the show three times to display 30 seconds of their online ad. You do need a faster connection to view it and it sometimes stalls even on our dsl, but it's not bad considering you don't have to watch any of the commercials and watch your 1 hour show in 42 minutes.

San Francisco has finally agreed to a contract with Google and Earthlink to take the city wireless. This will be quite a challenge considering that cell phone reception is hard enough in its sloping hilly streets. Mayor Newson says this will bring the internet to low-income residents for $12.95/month with higher wifi rates for those who want to pay $21.95/month. It will be interesting to see how ATT and Comcast react to the deal. Will they lower their internet rates or ramp up the bandwidth to their customers? The Tech boom of the 90s led to a build up of the internet pipelines. But the actual users have not tapped into these speeds mostly due to a lack of infrastructure from the pipeline to the residences. Will this push for hi-wifi get the other companies to bring us the extra mile for users to really be able to download and watch a movie online? We'll have to see. OK, so what company is going to supply the Tenderloin and Hunter's Point areas with computers? Of course, Google complained that it was so much easier to work with Mountain View on this deal. Duh, Google practically owns half of Mountain View and probably more than half the residents already have hi-speed internet.

Lastly, in tech news, there's plenty of buzz on the Apple phone set to debut at MacWorld next week. I actually tend to stay out of the rumor mills regarding Apple stuff and just wait to see what they actually announce. Cuz they've announced stuff only to say it's not available for 4 more months anyway. What's another day to see what's coming out. Last year's Macworld was more like iPodworld which disappointed alot of Mac Mac fans, but I think this one will take a turn to Apple branching from it's desktop/laptop hardware, which is an interesting move since they haven't been too successful with that before. Regardless, Job's ability to create a Reality Distortion Field is legendary. And even though his keynote speech outline is practically trademarked and predictable, bottomline is that it works and it works well. I am looking to see how iTV progressed since he last introduced it and I'm wondering if the Apple phone is actually something people would like or a cover for introducing something really good. The iTunes phone was a bit of a dud.

And maybe, just maybe, they'll have another cute girly geek shirt like the "Mac Chick" shirt I got last year. I'm done with the baggy t-shirts and it's nice to have something more girly than geeky and not just because it's in pink.