Ah Blu-Ray. Have you learned nothing in your brief time on the planet? Nothing from, say, Betamax? Apparently not.

According to certain sources the Blu-Ray consortium is taking a stand against smut, certainly endearing themselves to large populations of conservatives. No porn on Blu-Ray. Ignore the assertions that porn drives the uptake of consumer devices, we don’t want none of them titties on our high def disks!

Those liberals in the HD-DVD consortium have no such moral code driving them so titles are already showing up in high def on their equipment. For better or for worse, really. I imagine the tolerances on adult actors and actresses will need to be made a bit more stringent given the level of detail available in both formats. I certainly don’t think I could handle Ron Jeremy in 1080p. I vomit a bit at thumbnail sized Ron Jeremy, seeing him in all his furry, rounded glory would almost certainly unhinge me.

Anyway, we’ll see who is around in 2 years.

Content aggregators are, to use a mildly overused phrase, a dime a dozen. Good content aggregators are harder to find. Thankfully Google decided to apply their, to use an utterly tired phrase, “Web 2.0 savvy” to instantly obsolete every other content aggregator with their Google Reader.

I’ve tried many aggregators, from standalone programs to various hosted solutions. They all had limitations and nagging problems. Google Reader fits my usage perfectly. I don’t have to host it for one thing. For another, the feature set is exactly as I’d like it. I just scroll through all of my new news items, they get marked as read as I scroll. I can catch up at work in a spare minute or at home. Subscriptions are easy to manage, and they provide an easy bookmark to subscribe to new things as you find them.

We’ll derive everything we need from Google some day, food and all.

A Special Christmas Tip

Here’s a tip for you YouTube addicts. If there’s a particular video producer you love, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for that producer. For instance, the NHL produces a weekly highlight reel under the YouTube user NHLVideo. To subscribe to these videos use this format:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/nhlvideo/videos.rss

If there’s a tag you want to watch, like NHL, use this format:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/nhl.rss

With Google Reader you’ll get access to the video off YouTube right on the reader and, like all RSS feeds, it’ll be updated whenever they upload new videos. Yes!

Flickr recently upgraded the benefits of both their free and pro accounts. The free accounts got limits increased a bit, but the truly exciting stuff was saved for paying members. Now you’re no longer limited in your upload quotas! This was my biggest pet peeve with the previous featureset. I’ve got gigabytes of pictures of Julia that I wanted to upload for relatives to browse through, but I had to do it piecemeal each month. I was always careful to leave a bit of quota left over for new pictures from the current month as well, since we take pictures often and the relatives want to see the new ones too.

I’m sincerely tempted to dump the entire picture archive into Flickr as an off-site storage mechanism. My only real caveat is that we’ve been using the now discontinued Adobe Photoshop Album to organize our pictures, carefully tagging them so as to make finding pictures easier later. There is no existing mechanism for leveraging those tags when uploading to Flickr, so it would require a lot of work to perform the same organization. Were I to have enough time it would be tempting to utilize the Flickr API and a bit of reverse engineering on the Adobe file formats to extract the tags for each photo from Photoshop Album and upload and tag them at the same time. Maybe even create sets on the fly, too. Tempting indeed.

A truly eye-opening video showing how to take one moderately attractive, utterly untalented girl and quite literally construct a possible pop star. Soon we won’t need humans at all, if we do even now. My faith in true talents like Britney Spears and Nick Lachey is being sorely, sorely tested.

Social networking in all its varied wonder arrived too late in my life to make much impact. I don’t need to connect to a thousand people, I don’t need a level of sharing in my life that social networking espouses. This may ring hypocritical given that you, dear reader, are reading these words in a blog. I understand that and, frankly, can’t explain it. Maybe I’m a one-way communicator, flinging thoughts in the form of words and not caring to make a connection. Maybe I’m full of shit. Either way, I choose what I choose… I’m past trying to explain my erratic, nonsensical whims.

I’ve heard the growing clamor over the various photo sharing sites and ignored them. I’m relatively private. That’s why you’ll struggle to put a real name to “ColdForged”, why I don’t have an easy way of contacting me, why my domain registration is private and why I’m not a “celebrity blogger” type of personality — well, it’s one reason anyway, aside from the fact that my readership is low and my output is, shall we say, irregular if not dry, staid, and ultimately irrelevant. My wife contributes to this as she is fiercely protective of our family and especially of Julia. Any type of unnecessary public exposure — like this blog, for instance — causes her concern and pause. I don’t blame her, to be honest. While the possibility of some weirdo targeting our family based on this blog seems remote, it obviously does increase our level of risk. If this place simply didn’t exist, there would be one fewer avenue of gleaning information about us.

Therefore, I limit Julia discussions and pictures. Some people relish the public eye (e.g. Dooce) and make the most of it. Admittedly I have to have some amount of the same desire or I wouldn’ t be doing this, but I think I walk a fine line between nothing and too much.

So why on Earth would I need a Flickr account? Much less a Pro account?

Relatives.

We all have them unless they’re dead. I have lots of relatives. And they all want pictures. All of them. Worse, they want pictures all the time. There hardly a day that goes by that someone doesn’t say “why haven’t you sent me any new pictures of the baby?” There’s a load of excuses but it got us to thinking about how we could make it an easier process for Julia’s family to see her growing up.

Enter Flickr! I’ve uploaded maybe an eighth of the known Julia pictures in the wild so far — there are roughly 3,800 of them at last count… yes, we love our girl — and continue to do so when I get the chance. Only Flickr’s upload limit of 2GB per month will come into play. Once they’re all up, we can simply make a Flickr upload a part of the picture workflow for new pictures and all the relatives can get whatever they want, whenever they want. And we get to keep control of the privacy of the pictures.

Here’s my Flickr page where I’ll make public photos available. Right now there isn’t a whole lot aside from some simply horrible shots we got of Glen Wesley and The Stanley Cup. Hopefully there will be more interesting things there someday.