In the past couple weeks I’ve picked up a couple new pieces of software that I’m enjoying. Thunderbird for email and Firebug for web development. Thunderbird isn’t really that amazing, it’s just that it’s better than other alternatives. But Firebug has a lot of great features including tools for inspecting DOM, CSS, HTML, and even a Javascript Debugger. It’s really a must for any web development. Not that I’ve been doing much actual web development lately.

A friend of mine has invested in a company called TVU Networks. It’s got a pretty interesting story. They have a windows client which can receive their own special streaming video broadcasts. They also have software for video broadcasters which allows anyone to become a broadcaster. “Just another YouTube” you say? Not quite. YouTube has two major problems: infrastructure cost and content licensing. It’s damned expensive to support that much data storage and bandwidth usage. Rumors were thrown around that said YouTube spent 300k/month in bandwidth alone. And then there’s the copyrighted content which they constantly have to take down lest they get sued to hell.

So how is TVU Networks different? Infrastructure cost: their technology is peer to peer and specifc for live streaming broadcasts. A broadcasters streams their content out to TVU clients but they don’t need to have the massive bandwidth requirements that traditional video sites do, in fact neither does TVU. A single stream from the broadcaster replicates to all the clients with very limited upstream bandwidth. The corollary to this is that anyone with a broadband connection can broadcast live streaming video to any number of people all over the world. They rely on other users’ bandwidth to scale massively in the same way that other peer to peer networks do. TVU also doesn’t require the storage infrastructure that YouTube does because everything is streamed they don’t need store the videos at all. It also feels like it simplifies managing copyrighted content because you can simply cut off a broadcast stream at any time. But I’m not positive about that.

So what’s it good for? I tried it out and there were actually quite a lot of channels. The video quality is better than YouTube, but not quite up to broadcast quality TV. A lot of the channels look like re-broadcasts of regular TV streams from foreign countries. Several broadcasts were chinese language channels(the company is based in the US and China). It seems very good for expatriates who want to get their home content. And I’m sure there’s an adult market for this too.

I like everything I’ve seen so far. If I can get a shot at it, I might try and invest in them if they are looking for more funding.

I’ve been super busy at work lately, but last night we had the chance to sit down at a semi-nice restaurant. We were going to go to try Town in San Carlos, but it was packed so we just walked on down the street to see what we could find. (Incidentally for those single folks Town looks like a pretty busy mingling bar and restaurant).

Spasso is a small place in downtown San Carlos on Laurel Street which is supposedly brand new. That was probably the reason we got a table in 20 minutes without a reservation. We don’t get to eat out that nicely much and I felt a bit guilty bringing baby with us because he was a bit fidgety, but it was nice to relax and have a sit down dinner together. Tracy had a teriyaki skirt steak and I had veal piccata. Also we had a caesar and the filet mignon tapas. I’d say the food was very well prepared and prices were $15-25 for an entree. It’s worth a shot and I’d definitely go back.

This week at work I spent a bunch of time dealing with things I don’t normally deal with. We were signing a contract with a 3rd party and I had to spend a bunch of time managing the process of getting the deal closed.

I’m glad I don’t have to do that on a regular basis. What an annoying job just having to track people down and get signatures. I must’ve spent 5-10 hours reading and re-reading contracts, tracking down people, getting approvals, countersignatures, managing documents, and faxing. If that were my primary job I’d seriously go nuts.

People are far too unpredictable and unreliable. That’s why I like math and computers, responses are deterministic and you frequently don’t have a lot of dependencies on other people.

Um.. I think Ultimate Bet is the first place I’ve heard of to spread Roshambo. I’m trying to think up a witty comment to emphasize the stupidity of this idea, but it’s not coming to me. It’s dumb.