Euros accepted in NYC

Further evidence of the dollar's decline from dominance:

"Euros Accepted" signs pop up in New York City

Joost, you're making me crazy.

I've been a Joost user for many months now. I managed to secure one of the coveted Beta Tester invitations last year for my Mac OS X, and was delighted that Joost was putting streams of Babylon 5, Crusade, and Lexx episodes online.

Last week, I had a *SQUEE* moment, when Joost announced they were streaming all of the original Star Trek episodes (TOS, for the Trekkers), and immediately started watching some of my favourite old Kirk/Spock/McCoy plays that I haven't seen in years and years: The Ultimate Computer, Court Martial, and The Menagerie (Parts 1 & 2).

Joost worked great at first, but as time went on, the quality of the video streams have started getting choppier and choppier, and net lag has made Joost almost unwatchable. For four days now, I have tried to watch The Menagerie, Part 2, and not once have I been able to watch the whole episode through. Each time, the stream starts getting choppier and choppier as the episode plays, until by the middle of the episode, it just craps out and re-starts from the beginning. AAAAAAAAAGH!

At first I thought it was the fact that I had stepped down from a Comcast cable modem to a Clearwire wireless modem, which is slightly less fast, but still broadband. However, I'm still able to watch full-screen HD video streams from ABC.com (Ugly Betty, Samantha Who?) and NBC.com (Heroes), and PBS.org (Bill Moyer's Journal, NOVA) without much stuttering, so I am guessing that this is not a low-bandwidth problem on my end. I think that it's a problem on Joost's end. Either they don't have enough computing power/bandwidth to accommodate all of the new users that Star Trek is bringing in, or the rumours that the company is falling apart from the inside out are true. (I sure hope they aren't, because I like Joost!)

Either way, I am pulling my hair out here. Joost -- fix the lag problem!

ENG 351 Fiction Writing Assignment: Tigers are Predators, Humans are Prey

Here it is, my first attempt at writing a complete short story.

Kevyn 'Hagrid' Jacobs
ENG 351: Intro to Fiction Writing
2008.01.31

Tigers are Predators, Humans are Prey


“WE RULE THE PLANET!”

The challenge reverberated across the dry moat, echoing off the sculpted concrete walls on the other side. A skinny human male with spots of acne and only the very first stirrings of a beard stood on the lip of the moat, his fist raised in the air defiantly. Across the gulf, on the grassy enclosure beyond, lay two Siberian tigers, ignoring the boy, just as they ignored most of the noisy visitors to the zoo. A third tiger, a tigress named Olga, turned her head to look at the source of the disturbance.
( More predatory behaviour. )

Fastest time to Google EVAR.

Time I posted the previous LJ entry (the ENGL 351 story assignment): 14:55.

Time Google Blogs Alert email arrived letting me know Google had crawled the page: 16:02.

Time elapsed between publishing this story and it's being crawled by Google: 1hr, 7mins.

Damn. That's fast. Talk about an accelerating culture!