Life is grand

Our apartment block’s TV feed is on the fritz. With the Irish Grand National on today my girlfriend was none too impressed. So it was that I was relieved to find RTÉ Live and well impressed as it streamed down the entire race to my laptop on the couch as the TV across the room showed static.

Nice one RTÉ.

Now they just need to stream everything and not just RTÉ produced content. Missing Studio 60 tonight is going to hurt.

The 2007 Cricket World Cup is coming up in March. Thankfully Ireland is such a cricket mad nation I, a cricket fan, won’t have any problem watching any of the games.

Oh wait, sorry, that’s India, not Ireland.

The Irish would rather pick up a cricket bat and beat you with it than sit through a cricket game. It is a shame really as the average Irish fella, and wan, is sport mad. They love their sport and are fiercely competitive even if just sitting at the pub counter swilling pints. I’d bet a hurling fan or an Irish rugby supporter would, were their preconceptions and love for the English set aside, be leaping off their stools in excitement during a Pro20 game.

Sadly I’d be beaten by that aforementioned cricket bat should I even suggest it.

Being a cricket fan though I am determined to get my cricket fix. Going down to the pub, even a sports pub, is not going to happen. They’ll probably rather show reruns of the Croke park massacre than show a second of cricket in an Irish pub. Local TV channels are not showing it. A mate has Sky Sports which is showing it but… he is Irish. Not going to happen.

It turns out I have exactly two options if I want to watch games from the CWC while living in Waterford, Ireland. 1: Fly to the West Indies and buy some scalped tickets. 2: Get Sky Sports.

The funny bit is option 2 would probably end up costing as much as option 1. Sky is expensive, to get what I want it would cost €64 a month. I can’t subscribe for just the two months the CWC is on either, oh no, Sky will be with me for a solid 12 months. That is €768.

Anyone know of an affordable way I can watch cricket in Ireland?

The first two episodes of Studio 60 just aired on TV3 and my faith in Aaron Sorkin has been redoubled. What a genius. It was great to see familiar faces from The West Wing too. Danny and Josh were two of my favourites and they look set to be as good in this series.

It has that same feeling I first got when I watched The West Wing. That feeling of “This is a TV show? My God, TV can be good, really good.” Excellent production values, snappy dialouge, complex, interwoven storyline and no punches pulled.

So finally, something I can look forward to on telly apart from just Top Gear on Sundays.

(Studio 60 is on TV3 at 10pm every Thursday. Watch it, tell TV3 to keep it.)

I just saw an interesting new feature from Sky, the satellite TV provider. You can program your set-top-box on your mobile phone. So if you are away from home and hear of an interesting show you can whip out the mobile phone, find the relevant show and set it to record. Presumably the Sky mobile server then communicates with your set-top-box at home.

A simple but useful idea. I wonder how much mobile phones will come to be remote controls for all manner of other fixed devices? I wouldn’t mind being able to SMS my car to turn on the heating 5 minutes before I get into it.

(Apparently we are allowed to blog about Joost, just no screenshots as of yet. If I got that wrong then tell me and I’ll yank this down.)

I got a beta invite to try Joost out today and was pretty stoked. Finaly, I’d get to see what the hype was about.

I downloaded the 9mb file to a Windows XP VM in Parallels on Mac OS X. The installation was pretty good, even doing a system requirements check which the VM passed. The app installed but when I tried to run it it said it could not access the 3D hardware. Fair enough, nothing can do that in Parallels yet.

So I booted into Windows Vista Ultimate, downloaded it again and installed it. Running it though gave me a nice big error message. Fair enough I guess, it does say Windows XP with SP2 only (though there are apparently ways of getting Joost to work on Vista. I am just not going to bollocks about with that.)

So I grabbed my girlfriend’s laptop which had Windows XP SP2, installed the app and… you guessed it, it didn’t work. No dedicated 3D hardware in her work laptop. OK.

So I grabbed her other laptop, an Acer with a 256mb 3D graphics card. It installed and to my delight it ran. The screen went dark and then the strange but oddly cool Joost crystals whirled about the screen. Pretty.

I like the interface, clean and simple though I do worry about the average computer user being able to figure it out. Some of the icons are not intuitive.

So, what about the video?

It didn’t work.

I could list the channels, view the item entries, see the thumbnails, do searches, install plugins, check out the chat forums and everything else, except watch video. Sometimes Joost would tell me it couldn’t load the video but most of the time the crystals just whirred and nothing played.

Is my home broadband not fast enough? Joost says it will average about 320mb per hour download and 120mb upload per hour. I’ve downloaded 1gig files in about 45minutes and uploaded a few hundred mb in an hour.

I suspect something is up with the bandwidth but I wish Joost was a bit more informative about what was happening.

I’ll find a Windows XP machine at work (which has mega-bandwidth) tomorrow and see if it works better.

Fantastic! Top Gear is back tonight at 8pm on BBC 2. Apparently they will be showing Richard’s 300mph crash and James in a Veyron. Crikey.

Good evening lined up. Beer, supper and France vs. Portugal.

I went into the shop earlier looking for a box of OJ and came out with a six pack of Carlsberg and a pack of crisps. Go figure.