Next on the list is the Apple iTunes Store.  Face it: Australian television is pretty bland.  The highlights:

• Four episodes of “Two and a Half Men” every single day.  This is Australia’s hottest comedy.  Charlie Sheen is pretty cool and all, but c’mon.
• Since the other cable network is Fox, you can be sure to find The Simpsons.  Seeing as how they’ve been making that show for 20 years now, there’s a lot to see.
• “The Mentalist” — oddly enough a television show about a San Francisco detective who uses his powers of observation and occasionally hypnotism to solve cases in a wacky fashion is high drama.  This is only because it has an Australian Star.

Add to this the fact that TiVo only recently made its first appearence on these shores, and only works for some channels, and ‘Pay Television’ costs a pretty penny and doesn’t get much, and you can see why I’m a big fan of the iTunes Store.

With the aid of a DVI -> HDMI cable and a television that can handle it, we just plug our laptops into the TV.  We can download and play episodes of House, Lost, and Ugly Betty for about $2.00 US each (Note: Apple tries to direct you to the HD versions.  They cost 50% more and take twice as long to download.  You don’t need them.)  You’re also going to need an American credit card and American mailing address.  I can talk about that later.

For a long time, I’ve been one of those rather pragmatic people who dismissed e-Books.  They’re expensive, and it’s hard to be much more convienient then paper.  Paper is cheap.  It is durable.  It is pretty easy to read.  Ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, it’s been pretty hard to beat.

But, being a man of disposable income, and an early adopter, and always looking for yet another chunk of hardware to haul around, I picked up an Amazon Kindle 2 about a month ago.  Actually, I had to have it shipped to someone in Mountain View, and have one of my coworkers bring it to my in Australia.

Actually, I didn’t get it just because it seemed like a cool gadget.  Ostensibly, I’m trying to cut down on having to either haul books back to the states when I return, or get rid of them.  This should help.

Anyway, the thing is pretty awesome.  It’s small and lightweight.  It is very legible (although not in the dark, but then neither are the books for which it stands in).  And what’s more, I’ve already put a pretty tall stack of books and magazines onto it.

Right now, one downside is that since I’m well out of range of the nearest “Whispernet” network, I have to manually download files from amazon.com and copy them onto the Kindle, but that’s pretty easy.  I do kind of look forward to being back in network range, when my subscriptions to Time and Analog will magically show up.  It’s also a bit small, although with the print size that I read (with my 34-year-old eyes), I can get just a bit less on a page then a typical trade paperback, which is fine.

At this point, I think that all of the basic websites and blogs are in place.  I think that Meathook Reality has some issues, though.  For those keeping score, here’s the domains I’m currently bandying about publically:

• http://adam.haberlach.org (I closed down bill, bette, and anna.haberlach.org since I never got them off the ground)
• http://athena.haberlach.org (currently a placeholder)
• http://adamhaberlach.com (placeholder: may become my professional site some day)
• http://mediariffic.com and http://radioriffic.com (future companies or projects)
• http://meathookreality.com (Now-defunct blog of my now-defunct law school career)

I’ve not yet moved the galleries, or http://lindajudson.com.  They’l get their chance.

If you’re really looking for some historical documents, take a look at the News Nipple.  There’s files in that directory timestamped in 2001.  There were parts of that site that were blogs before the word was even invented.

Anyway, this means that access to this site and others should be faster (and lower latency).  While my home DSL has never been particularly unreliable, I suspect that the hosted solution is going to be even better.

So far, I’ve moved nameservice off onto the new machine, and Athena’s site-under-construction I need to grow a pair and get my mail hosting moved as well.  That’s the scary bit, since I kinda need my mail.  Right now I pretty much just redirect everything to my GMail account.

Anyway, I’m going to throw out a shout out with big props to Slicehost.  Clicking on that link will actually take you to a referral page, which is great for me (or you can just give them my email address).  They come highly recommended by me and others, and it takes literally 5 minutes to get from entering your account information (reasonable rates, IMHO) to having a root shell on a virtual machine.  Their admin tools are not fancy, but have everything you’re likely to need, and I’ve had no problems with the infrastructure.

Not to sound like a crotchity old fart who’s been riding Moore’s law right on up the curve, but back when I was in high school, this sort of thing pretty much wasn’t even possible, at least not on computers that any old person could get their hands on.

Our “physics simulations” generally consisted of artillery-style warfare along the lines of Scorched Earth.