For the second time now, Hulu has admitted that they are blocking third party applications from accessing the service because the content holders told them too. Previously it was Boxee, this time it’s the PS3.

There’s a lot of backlash from various people on the internet. Many of them with some really well thought out comments on the subject like “Hulu should grow a pair”.  Now I do understand the point they’re trying to make, however ineloquently, but I can’t completely agree with it.

On the one hand, Boxee and the PS3 aren’t doing anything wrong. They’re just making the Hulu experience better for users. The same users who made Hulu so popular in the first place. These users win because they get more convenient access to an already great service. Even, Hulu seem to benefit because it gets to serve more ads to more people, making them more money.

Of course, even a great service like Hulu isn’t going to be very useful if it hasn’t got any content. Sure, right now, Hulu is my go to source for watching television. (Except for LOST on ABC, which should be rectified before this coming season.) But, if the people who own all those TV shows that make Hulu so popular disappear then they’re losing the users, including me. Basically, Hulu is forced to say “How high?” when the content owners say jump. Hulu can’t survive without them and while it’s in the best interest of the content owners to support Hulu they can get by without them.

That’s what happened to Joost. I signed up for the beta checked it out, realized it was a sweet piece of software and had tons of potential. Then never used it again because there weren’t enough shows worth watching. I don’t care how well the technology works if they don’t have anything worth watching I’m not going to use it.

So sure, the user complaints are justified but Hulu really doesn’t have a choice in the matter. Who knows maybe all the complaining will convince the content holders that people actually want to watch their shows. The they’ll change their evil ways and everyone, on any system, can have their brains turned into goo.

How are you all doing today?

I started this post almost 3 months ago with the tentative title: Twitter Shitters – No one cares. The original post was heavily influenced by this comic & post at Penny Arcade. As well as a friend who decided to link their Facebook status to Twitter which caused them to show up in my news feed every 20 minutes. The whole concept of micro-blogging seemed stupid to me. I mean who really cares that you’re sitting on a bus waiting to get home? I sure didn’t. Luckily, the post didn’t turn out that great and I ultimately decided not to publish it. Since then my thoughts about Twitter have changed quite drastically and when I discovered this post sitting the unpublished queue I decided to revisit it.

My conversion from Twitter-hater to Twitter-liker (I’ve yet to tweet while taking a dump) started when I created my account way back in January. I did it mainly because I’m just plain interested in the web and create accounts for almost every service I come across. At the time I didn’t see much of a use for the service and quickly forgot about it.  I didn’t think about it again until after I made the decision to go to PAX.  I found a group of people in the PAX forums who were trading Twitter IDs and forming an official Twitter group appropriately called the Twitter Shitters. I joined in since I figured it would be a good way to get connected with the PAX community and give me an easy way to keep track of anything I wanted to write about while I was there.

Before I left for PAX, I linked Twitter to my cell so I could update via text message so I wouldn’t have to rely on my phone’s crappy WAP web browser to update. My lack of a decent web browser kept me somewhat isolated from the community aspect but throughout the day I found myself updating more and more. Since it turned out to be such an excellent way to keep track of everything I saw and is probably the main reason I wrote so much about PAX . While I couldn’t regularly check out what everyone else was up to it was neat to get a glimpse of what everyone had done throughout the day and their thoughts were. There was even a meet up of the TSers which I unfortunately had to skip due to a very early flight.

Since then I’ve become hooked on the service. I follow Wil Wheaton who in addition to posting amusing thoughts also lets me know when he’s written something new on his blog. Felicia Day keeps me up to date with the Guild and Dr. Horrible news. Even CNN has a Twitter account for breaking news. Beyond the news and updates I get Twitter is actually a lot of fun when you have a group of semi-connected people like the TSers. I get a kick out of some the “conversations” that spring up. Which range from frustrations at work and puppy cams to the latest video games and to strange observations on life. I find myself compelled to update or respond to others several times a day.

As much as I like Twitter, one thing I refuse to do is link it to my Facebook status. I don’t want to be the guy who updates his Facebook status every 20 minute with the current status of his commute, that’s just annoying. I figure if anyone is that interested in me they can always create an account and follow me.

Tonight I decided to clean this place up a bit. A few updates, a new post and a slight layout change. Amazing! Anyway, I bet you’re wondering: “What’s new with this Ryan fellow?”

No? Well let me tell you anyways….umm…not to much. I work about ten hours a day, then I run ~2 miles and end the day with a bit of Halo 3. I live a very exciting life. I’ve actually been really enjoying running each night. Almost to the point where I look forward to it. I’m trying to push myself a little faster/longer each day and my goal is to ramp it up until I can easily do 3 miles a day.

I did attempt to see Dark Knight this weekend but about two hours into the movie the fire alarm went off and they shut the movie off. Luckily it was just a false alarm but oddly enough when the alarm went off no one in the theatre got up to leave. Everyone just started complaining about the movie being shut off . When they got around to turning the movie back on they didn’t bother to rewind the movie so I missed about 10 minutes of it. About 10 minutes after that they cut the sound to the movie and I left. So I’ve seen 4/5th of the Dark Knight, at least I got two free tickets out of the deal.

As for the movie what I saw of it was awesome so far. Heath Ledger was excellent as the Joker. I went in halfway assuming that all the press about his performance was hyped up because of his death but I was very wrong. I’m hopefully going to see it in IMAX back at home this weekend.

I’m calling it quits. As of today I’m forcing myself to stop work on FoolCMS, my custom built content management solution. You might ask “Why?” or more appropriately “Why the #%&@ do I care?” or “Where am I and how did I end up here?” or the all time favorite “Where is that damn back button?”. It doesn’t really matter what you ask, because the same words will be displayed for all possible questions.

1. I don’t have the time to add all the features and neato-cool stuff I’d like to.
2. Wordpress (and many many other solutions) has more features and does them better than I would trying to do it on my own in my spare time.
3. I’ve got better projects to waste my time on, well one project really and it’s a bit stalled…but I’m getting there.
4. Anytime I do work on FoolCMS I usually end up breaking something and Then I spend the rest of my time trying to figure out what it was. Then I get distracted and work on something else that I broke months ago.
5. I’ve got a Wii and Team Fortress 2 just came out…

So there you go. It’s done, over, no more FoolCMS. I mean it this time. For real. Ish…

So welcome to RandomFool.Net version 17.0 as near as I can figure. Beta. (just in case). It’s a bit vanilla looking right now. It’s basically a modified version of the default Wordpress theme. But I’m new at this whole editing theme business so give me a break (and/or a KitKat bar). It’ll get better eventually. At least I’ll have less stuff to break now when I do get the urge to fiddle around.