Saturday, January 1, 2005

First Day of the New Year Thoughts

Seems like a mostly-lovely day out my Los Angeles window. We've had a lot of rain lately but it always seems to clear out just in time for the rest of the world to watch the Rose Parade and resent us.

Didn't see Regis Philbin filling in for Dick Clark last night. Did see some of The Tonight Show, which aired live in the East and on which the lead singer of Motley Crew yelled out the "f" word. Will the fact that it was after Midnight spare Mr. Leno from a Michael Powell fine? If it doesn't, will he link arms with Howard Stern and raise a ruckus?

Trio is gone from my DirecTV. In its stead at the moment is one of those messages that shows you why lawyers shouldn't be allowed to write things of this sort: "TRIO is no longer available on DIRECTV. While NBC Universal continues to evaluate the future of TRIO in relation to its overall digital strategy, we have exercised our option to discontinue carrying this channel." Someone got paid for composing that last sentence.

Speaking of my TV: The TiVo folks once promised to roll out their new "TiVo to Go" feature (which will allow you to transfer shows from your TiVo over your home network to your computer) in "Fall of 2004." It is no longer Fall and it is no longer 2004, and "TiVo to Go" is still a no-go. I'm not mad, since I assume it's just a matter of it taking longer to perfect the software than they'd anticipated, and that's not unusual in this high-tech world of ours. But I wish companies would err on the side of pessimism when they estimate when such things will be available.

If you've been thinking of ordering any of the wonderful comic book fonts from our friends at Comicraft, now would be an excellent day to do this. They're running their annual New Year's Sale and until Midnight, their wares are as cheap as they'll ever be.

Here's hoping we got all the big disasters out of the way last year, and that '05 is relatively free of them.

• Posted at 11:15 AM · LINK