Digital Meld

Hulu, how we love thee. We could try to babble on for a few paragraphs telling you how swell online video streaming is, but if you’re reading this post you probably already know about the glorious video-mecca known as Hulu… so we’ll skip the appetizer and get straight to the main course. Here is our ultimate list of ten television shows (past and present) that are a must-watch on Hulu… they’ll give you literally hundreds or hours of mind-melting pleasure to help pass the boring work day, lazy afternoon or lonely night along quickly.

DISCLAIMER: These choices are listed in alphabetical order and were made because the shows are on Hulu in their entirety (or almost). With the exception of an episode missing here or there for various licensing issues you can enjoy all of the shows and their seasons as a whole, none of that “revolving episodes” crap like most of the top television shows on Hulu. To the list!

30 Days
30 Days is a reality show on FX from Morgan Spurlock, the creator of “Super Size Me.” If you haven’t seen “Super Size Me” it is a wacky documentary where Spurlock brilliantly eats McDonald’s food every meal for 30 days. Yes, it is as disgusting as it sounds. Well, in “30 Days” he takes the same premise and mixes it up a bit. In the pilot for the show he and his fiancé try to live on minimum wage for 30 days. In other episodes other volunteers get involved, including a homophobe moving to San Francisco, a Minuteman living with illegal aliens and a able bodied man living in a wheel chair for 30 days. The show has it’s flaws and they are quite obvious to the viewers but overall each episode is varied and entertaining and maybe even a little thought provoking.

Running Time: Three seasons (18 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 13 hours of mind-melting goodness.

Alfred Hitchcock Hour
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour is a classic mystery and suspense television show which was broadcast on NBC starting in 1962. Each episode is it’s own twisted tail and holds up pretty damn well nearly fifty years after the fact… they are brought to you by the visionary that was Alfred Hitchcock so not a lot else really needs to be said.

Running Time: Three seasons (88 of 93 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 70 hours of mind-melting goodness.

Arrested Development
Arrested Development is easily the best show to ever be cancelled on television, or at least the best cancelled show in the past ten years. AD is also a darling of the internet age and has become one of the most watched shows in all of the land… too bad the idiots at Fox didn’t know what they had when this show was on. Either way, thanks to the power of the interwebs you can enjoy Arrested Development in all it’s glory.

Running Time: Three seasons (53 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 19 hours of mind-melting goodness.

Firefly
Firefly is another great show cancelled by the idiots at Fox in 2002 halfway through the first season. The show is from the super-geeky Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Angel fame) and is a mash-up between a wild west shootout and a space adventure series. At first glance the show and the premise can seem a little cheesy but we urge you to give the hour and a half pilot a chance, because after just a few minutes you’ll be hooked. This show was perfectly written and perfectly cast, it’s just too bad it was on one of the most horrible networks who didn’t know what the hell to do with it. As a side note, there was a movie made about the show in 2005 named “Serenity” which basically condensed the entire series into a two hour feature film.

Running Time: One Season (14 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 11 hours of mind-melting goodness.

Mail Call
Mail Call is a documentary television series on the History Channel starring R. Lee Ermey that focuses on the past and present technology and equipment used  by the United States Military. Not all of the episodes are on Hulu but seeing as every show simply focuses on a few set subjects jumping around in order is not a problem. R. Lee Ermey is a hoot to watch regardless of setting (his role in Saving Silverman is a classic), and it is pretty great seeing him get all riled up over some of the crazy equipment our brave men and women have used.

Running Time: Three Seasons (33 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 12 hours of mind-melting goodness.

News Radio
News Radio was a great sitcom during the mid-nineties about a New York City news station that was unfortunately doomed after the tragic death of one of it’s stars, Phil Hartman. The show isn’t actually hosted on Hulu but it is searchable via Hulu thanks to a partnership between Hulu and Sony Pictures Entertainment, so you can watch the first three seasons in their entirety via Crackle… which is Sony’s poor effort to copy Hulu, they don’t even have embed codes for Pete’s sake. The show actually ran five seasons in total but with the loss of Phil Hartman you really aren’t missing much during the last two seasons, although Hartman was in all of season 4 he was killed before production of season 5 began.

Running Time: Three Seasons (49 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 18 hours of mind-melting goodness.

Start-Up Junkies
Start-Up Junkies is a reality TV series from relative television new-comer MOJO. The premise of the show is simple; you follow along as start-up “junkie” Ron Wiener tries to knock one out of the park with a high-tech online postal mail service. For all of those interested in just how the high-stakes, high-pressure world of tech startups are, this is a must-watch even if the pitch is a little iffy.

Running Time: One Season (8 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 3 hours of mind-melting goodness.

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip
Studio 60 is a now cancelled NBC drama from Aaron Sorkin, the man behind “The West Wing” and “A Few Good Men.” The show revolves around the characters “behind the scenes” of a Saturday evening comedy show (think SNL) and follows their stories West-Wing-Style throughout the week as they prep and go through the show. Think of it as a serious 30 Rock. The show is actually really good, and it sucks that the other horrible network in the room NBC has no clue how to market dramas to the real world. Either way, thanks to the power of Hulu you get to see the whole series in it’s entirety.

Running Time: One Season (22 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 15 hours of mind-melting goodness.

Survival School
Survival School is another reality series from the television new-comer MOJO. It takes you through 10 episodes of recruits heading into and going through the Air Force S.E.R.E. program. They widdle the 500 potential applicants down to 47 admitted to the training and almost half of them won’t make the cut at the end. 9 of the 10 episodes are there for the taking, for some strange reason episode 8 is a no-show.

Running Time: One Season (9 episodes in total) are on Hulu, for about 4 hours of mind-melting goodness.

National Geographic
Okay, so this last one really isn’t a television show as much as it is a collection of specials from the National Geographic Channel. However there are some great things to watch, including a look at Arlington National Cemetery, the FBI, Inside Special Forces, Air Force One and more.

Running Time: 17 full featured documentary films and 24 episodes from various shows are on Hulu, for about 34 hours of mind-melting goodness.

And there you have it. A rundown of 10 television shows currently on Hulu that can keep you busy for over 200 hours, or about eight and a half days.

According to ValleyWag, Apple is in “serious negotiations” to purchase the micro-blogging juggernaut Twitter for upwards of 700 million dollars… yes that’s $700,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes. Facebook offered $500 million in cash and stock options for Twitter just a few months ago but Twitter passed as the value of Facebook’s stock is really an unknown. However, Steve Jobs and friends have over $29 billion in cash just sitting in the bank and collecting interest… so Steve could just whip out his checkbook and make $700 million out to cash if he wanted to.

The move would be a strange one for Apple who with the exception of their .Mac service steers clear of the interwebs, but it also makes loads of sense seeing as the iPhone is the perfect fit for a service like Twitter. It all may actually just come down to the fact that Apple wants to scoop up Twitter and it’s huge potential before one of their rivals at Google or Microsoft does. According to ValleyWag the negotiations are “serious” and they are looking to officially announce the purchase by June 8th.

Well, the time has come. Microsoft has finally release the first release candidate for their new operating system, Windows 7. The 64-Bit version is 3.05GB in size and the 32-Bit version is 2.36GB in size. What are you waiting for? GO GO GO!

For the last month or so, we’ve been seeing an increasing number of instances in which our heavily used SharePoint intranet sites were becoming un-responsive due to "out of memory" errors.  On 3/12 I modified the application pool configurations for two of these sites so that they would automatically recycle once they consumed 1300 MB of virtual memory.  I’ve found that 1300 MB is the sweet spot and you’ll usually start experiencing stability issues with the worker process if you get much further than that.  Keep in mind that even though the virtual memory limit is 2GB for a user mode process on a 32-bit system, you’ll start having problems long before you actually hit the ceiling of that limit. 

This change has only been in place for about 2 weeks, but already we are seeing significant improvements in the stability of the applications.  Referencing the event logs for Event ID 1073, I found that just between the dates of 2/26 – 3/11 (prior to the change) we had 18 out of memory errors.  Here are our stats since setting the virtual memory limits on 3/12:

• 56 automatic app pool recycles – These are graceful recycles which have zero negative impact to the end user
• 0 out of memory errors
• 0 support calls from users stating that the intranet sites were down

You’ll want to continuously monitor the recycle stats and adjust the limits as needed, but making this simple change can go a long way towards making your life easier as an administrator and keeping your customers happy.

For all you Apple lovers. Priceless.

Today’s 1920×1080 wallpaper comes at you courtesy of Nine Inch Nails and is part of the Downward Spiral Deluxe Edition released in 2004. You can view all of our Wallpaper of the Day posts by viewing our wallpaper category.

We’re also bringing today’s wallpaper to you in full 1920×1200 resolution because that’s just how we roll.

Enjoy.

I am a PC. Wait! Do not leave my little Apple friends. By the end, you will like this article I promise. So hang on just a bit longer. For years I have been anti-Apple. I don’t mean that I have been a troll on the blogs and shutdown any pro Apple articles, I’ve just hated their sleek ‘overpriced’ computers. I just sounded like I was envious didn’t I? Well not exactly.

Open source advocates will at least agree with me that it is the freedom of choice and cost (or lack of)  that makes their environment great. After all, open source systems allow the end user to use their apps the way they see fit; if they don’t like some parts of the application, they can change them at will.

In the same way the Windows platform allows you to use any type of hardware, from a $199 netbooks to thousands of dollar Intel/AMD servers. The Windows environment allows you to go to an OEM and pickup a computer from them, or to simply build one yourself from literally hundreds of thousands different components from thousands of providers.

I could even argue that for a considerable amount of money less you could build a computer with the same specs of a Mac; some people could even build a hackintosh for far less money. However, at the end of the day I will admit, that the computer you could build would not be a Mac. If you look at my profile I state that I am PC and that even though I respected the Macs, they were just not for me.

Don’t judge me too hard. I have felt this way about Apple for close to three decades now. Many of you never saw an Apple II first hand, or a Lisa, or an original Macintosh. Most of you probably also never experienced the amazement of going from command prompt based computers to real GUIs. I was lucky that I entered the computer world right when all these changes were happening.

Like most people those days, I was introduced to the Microsoft/IBM world of personal computers instead of the sleeker looking Apple products. Was I envious of the Apple’s product line? The truth is that they were irrelevant to me. I was more excited the first time I saw an Amiga than when I saw the first Mac. Back then we said Macs were just a fad. A Fad.

Thirty years later I still sometimes think they are just a fad, but then I wake up from that dream and finally recognize that they dominate close to 9% of the overall Personal Computer market. I secretly read their hardware specs and laugh and mock them, but deep inside I am taking notes of their features and design. Eight years ago the first generation iPods came out, and they were again labeled as a fad. Yet that fad has dominated the digital music player market and sold more than 110 Million units in the first six years.

Apple introduced the iTunes music store to the world and has had over five billion downloads and they have perfected their user interface into the OS operating system.  Apple even has recognized that 90% of the world does use the Windows environment, so since Macs now are based on the Intel chipsets like their Windows counterparts they wisely created Boot Camp to allow you to use both Windows and OS X in the same Apple computers.

For decades I told myself that I would never buy an Apple computer. Remember, they are just a fad right? A month ago I would have told you the same thing. On the same note, I also said that I will never buy an iPod or even worse, an iPhone. I did however give one of my daughters a 30GB iPod two years ago while giving my youngest daughter an iPod Shuffle. I also eventually gave in and bought their mother a 3G iPhone for her birthday four months ago. All of that was irrelevant however as they were gifts, I refused to join the hype machine and I refused to get any Apple products for myself.

Going back a year and a half I bought a Sprint Mogul (HTC PPC-6800). I loved it and thought that it was Windows Mobile 6.0 at its best. I downloaded dozens of applications for it and bought a 6GB MicroSD card. I watched movies on it, had thousands of music files, played my fair share of games with it, and read a dozen or so books on it. It linked with my calendar with no issues, Word, Excel and PowerPoint worked like a charm. Like I said, I loved my Mogul. But that love was short lived.

After the honeymoon was over I faced the reality of the Windows Mobile environment. Constant reboots were required, IE mobile was a joke; Opera and SkyFire helped, but they were too slow and still missed some of the features I was looking for in a browser. Everything went further south when I upgraded my OS to Windows Mobile 6.1. At that point my phone would refuse to answer calls, IE was still a pathetic excuse for a browser and memory issues were common.

During that time I would see a coworker loving his first generation iPhone. The guy is as Microsoft as it gets and even has his own side business and also hates Apple. But he loves his iPhone. He kept pestering me about getting one. "Never! I will not become another Steve Jobs drone, Bill Gates for president," and so on and so forth. That iPhone sure did look nice, and he loved his phone and I could no longer stand mine.

A few months ago I bought a 3G iPhone for the wifie, and she loved it. So I now had a chance to play with this phone first hand. After first coming in touch with the Jesus phone I asked myself, Why is the darn company is called Apple? It should have been called the Serpent. Steve Jobs and company were tempting me to bite from the forbidden fruit. Why did I wait this long? This phone was everything mine wasn’t.

The iPhone was slick, fast, easy to use, ergonomic, responsive and it integrated easily with mail servers (all but Hotmail, wonder why?). So, I sold my soul to the devile and decided that I would buy one this year. Once uncle Sam gave me back what he borrowed from me to pay for AIG’s bonuses and vacations I bit the bullet and bought it.

I waited two weeks to post this as I had to make sure that I was not going to be disappointed. My first marriage to the Mogul had been turbulent, but now I had dated the iPhone for while and felt good about the commitment. I ended up choosing the white model because the black one is so prone to fingerprints.

I litearally use the phone for everything. Its my MP3 player, my phone and my portable gaming machine. I also have some books I am reading on it, the GPS is acceptable and it has a great browser. I’ve downloaded a couple of dozen apps and at work I forward my documents for meetings and take notes on it and send those notes back to my computer. Its onscreen keyboard is very accurate. This is not a phone, its a Swiss knife.

Just like the iPhone, the iPod Touch has sold well for Apple. Basically its an iPhone without the phone and features, and it has been an instant success. My nephews each scored one for Christmas, and two months later, they are still downloading apps for it. The final thing that sold me to jump into the Apple’s band wagon was the AppStore. The AppStore has something for everyone. You can find just about any application you might want. I have download two dozen applications and should download countless more.

I love my iPhone and I don’t have you anymore Steve. Get well soon so you can come back and come up with better ideas. Bill, you know you are still my bro but since you went to save the world like you where saving the cheerleader things have changed in your house.

At the end of the day, I always complained about how Apple, Linux and Sony ‘Fanboys’ are just that, fanboys. The truth of the matter is that I have been the biggest fanboys of them all. Microsoft has indirectly fed me for the last 15 years or more so I feel threaten by its competition. I should relax, Microsoft is not going anywhere for the next few decades. It is just becoming the IBM of this half a century.

I will now give Apple the respect it deserves, and admit that I have been wrong about them for most of the time. I actually am thinking of start programming some apps for the AppStore but for that I need an Mac. I might just get one. I will also start evaluating some of the software in the AppStore for you guys so check back for that soon.

The moral of the story if you don’t have one right now… go and get an iPhone.

Google purchased GrandCentral Communications nearly two years ago and rebranded it today as Google Voice. Here’s a lowdown from the official Google Blog:

We’ve just started to release a preview of Google Voice, an application that helps you better manage your voice communications. Google Voice will be available initially to existing users of GrandCentral, a service we acquired in July of 2007.

The new application improves the way you use your phone. You can get transcripts of your voicemail (see the video below) and archive and search all of the SMS text messages you send and receive. You can also use the service to make low-priced international calls and easily access Goog-411 directory assistance.

So, the service is currently only available to those users who were already with GrandCentral, but you can expect a wider release soon I’m sure. If you check out the about page of Google Voice it offers some pretty slick features, including one number for all of your calls and SMS/Text as well as transcripts of your voicemails. It will be interesting to see where Google takes Google Voice from here, and even more interesting to see how they integrate their tracking and ads into the service.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft is back atop the Forbes richest list with a net worth of 40 billion dollars. Not too shabby. He leapt hobbled past good friend and fellow philanthropist Warren Buffet ($37 billion) and Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu ($35 billion). Gates, who sat atop the list for over a decade has slipped in recent years due to Microsoft’s stock decline and also his withdrawal from everyday business at Microsoft and his focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mr. Gates was third on the list last year with Buffet topping the list and Slim Helu coming in second. The great stock decline of 2008 is to blame for Mr. Gates rise back to the top with the top three swapping losses of $18 billion (Gates), $25 billion (Buffet) and $25 billion (Slim Helu) in 2008. Buffet’s losses came mainly from his coveted Berkshire Hathaway stock which is down over $50,000 per share over the past year. Bill Gates is also a big holder of Berkshire but nowhere near Buffet’s holdings seeing as he’s the founder.

Either way, it’s good to know that the two biggest philanthropists in the world are also the two richest once again. Hopefully their riches actually increase next year, as a decline for the rich is an even bigger decline for the average Joe.

The LA Times came out with some disturbing news yesterday; the Online Publisher’s Association has launched new supersized ads in an attempt to reach web surfers who ignore standard banner ads. Seriously, do they think that making the ads bigger and more annoying will help them generate more cash? I think all it will do is annoy the crap out of what visitors they do have.

Twenty-seven of the top internet publishers are going to give the giant ads a whirl. I can officially tell you 27 sites that I won’t be visiting in the future. The beauty of the internet is there are competitors for nearly every site on the interwebs, so if ESPN wants to annoy me with giant ads then I’ll simply hit up one of the countless other sports news sites on the web. If I were these websites I’d think twice before putting up intrusive advertising.

I already avoid sites that have the full-page 15-second delay ads, or ones that require registration for the entire article or even sites that break a 500 word story into a few pages. I’ll be honest, I rarely click on web ads but I do occasionally click on them and buy something which lead to sales for that site. But I’ll more than go out of my way to NOT click on ads that are annoying. I don’t go installing AdBlock or anything but if your site has annoying ads I’ll simply find an alternative.

Here at Digital Meld we get about fifty clicks per every one hundred thousand page views, for a whopping .002 click-through rate. Awesome! With that said, we’re not in this for the money so we’re perfectly fine with that. Sure I’d love to quit the ol’ “day job” and blog all day, but for me to do that I’ll need to come up with alternative ways to generate funds. For years web ads have only been supplemental income for most websites, so what’s changed all of the sudden?