It's ridiculous how much we currently pay for cable. We get movie channels we barely watch just to pick up 12-week runs of a couple of original series we love and most of our "basic cable" viewing is limited to 4 or 5 channels, but we're FORCED to pay for a bunch of channels we don't want to get those few.

I'm basically paying $900+ a year for basic HD cable, Showtime, HBO, Starz, and Encore, plus a DVR-equipped cable box. What if I paid $180 a year ($15 a month) for a VOD over set-top box service, plus $1 a show for some fave series.

Buck a show for "True Blood", "Entourage", "Nurse Jackie", and "The United States of Tara" would be $48 a year (each show has a 12-episode season). We could even set weekly budgets. At $6 a week for pay-per-view series, plus $15 a month for VOD, we'd save close to $35 a month and support the shows we liked directly, encouraging their continued production with a very tangible revenue stream.

As consumers get a chance to really vote with their dollars and pay just for what they watch, the economics of television are going to change, hopefully in the consumer's favor. More signal, less noise, lower cost.

As we approach the holiday season, I'm going to be seriously contemplating whether a $100-200 set-top box is going to replace my cable box. If the cable providers don't start changing the way they do business, they'll lose my business.

HTML5: Up And Running - by Mark Pilgrim - O'Reilly

In the 1970s, ABC's "Schoolhouse Rock" took the tedious process of making a law and distilled it down into a 3-minute song that many of us can at least sing the first few bars from ("I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill, and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill..."). Marc Pilgrim takes a different approach with the first chapter of this book, distilling the early history of HTML into fourteen eye-glazing pages. But if you can muddle through the initial proposal and discussion of the IMG tag, you get to Pilgrim's primary take-away of the chapter: HTML is not so much a thing, but a collection of things.

This is good, because the history of HTML has not been a smooth, step-by-step process. Different releases of different browsers have adopted different features of different specs at different times. I can personally recall rejoicing, back in the 90s, when both IE and Netscape finally implemented support for HTML tables. So it's no wonder that the second chapter dives into methods for detecting whether or not a user's browser supports certain HTML5 features.

If the first chapter was boring, the second is discouraging. First he shows how to check if Canvas is even supported. But once that's determined, you have to check if all the features of Canvas are supported. Moving on to the Video tag, even when that is supported, video format support varies across browsers. Basically, in these early days of HTML 5 support, it's like touring the United States early in the 20th century. Flush toilets and electric lights took longer to come to some areas than others.

After the third chapter started breaking down some of the new tags and how they affect the DOM, my eyes were good and glazed. This book is more discussion than documentation. If it was a car repair manual, instead of merely showing you the steps for changing the oil on your Honda, it would give you the history of the internal combustion engine, then detail different kinds of lubrication systems.

In short, there's a lot of valuable information in this book. Mark Pilgrim is no slouch on technical know-how or understanding of his topic. I just find the manner of presentation to be organized in such a way that I don't feel I have quick access to the information I want or that the available path to acquiring that knowledge is optimal. It's short on lab, long on lecture, and isn't something I'd make part of my permanent library.

FULL DISCLOSURE: An advance reviewer's copy of the book was made available to me by O'Reilly based on the promise I would review it and post the review on my blog (and at Amazon). I was free to say what I liked and under no obligation to give it a good review or quash any bad reviews (as is evident above).

According to a commute tracking site I use, in the last 15 weeks I've put over 3,000 fewer miles on my car, almost 2,900 pounds less carbon into the atmosphere, and spent $400 less on gas by riding the bus.

Take that, BP!

Part of the credit goes to Sound Transit's clean convenient buses and to the free bus pas from Microsoft.

Hey friends, just got to guest blog for Mike Witmer's "Pinkerton" comic strip.

Sorry I've been so bad at guest blogging here on my own blog. Between the Microsoft contract and side projects... and obsessively facebooking... I have been neglecting my blog. I hope to remedy that soon.

Anyway, if you'd like to read my guest blog about guilty pleasure foods, you can check it out here.