Michael had one of these Barcalounger setups in his living room and I fell instantly in love. Anyone have better seats for a home theater setup?

Why do I look at my referer log? Cause the coolest people link to me. Heheh.

Anyway, tonight the AmigoFisher blog linked over here.

AmigoFish? Hmmm, I remember my readers telling me that AmigoFish was cool. So, I read on. And tried it out.

It indeed is cool.

I am into digital photography, so did a search for that. That led me to the Studio Lighting.net blog and podcast, which let me to the Strobist blog.

This is the best of podcasting. People who care about what they do and are willing to share their craft with other people.

I’m gonna definitely do some more “AmigoFishing.”

Aside: Kevin O’Keefe, LexBlogger (a law blog) writes today that the best blogs send audiences away.

Well, the best search engines take you to great stuff.

I get the weirdest phone calls.

This afternoon I got a call that went something like this:

“Hello, this is Robert Scoble.”

“Hi, this is Michael Markman and I live right around the corner from you and wondered if you would like to see Moxi before you leave?”

“Sure.”

Now, Michael had emailed me before to let me know about Moxi and it sounded very interesting, so I wanted to make sure I saw it before I left. He pitched it as sort of a Media Center for cable companies.

Long story short I wasn’t doing much and the heat was keeping me from doing anything productive anyway, so I said “sure, wanna meet up now?”

Anyway, I just got back from spending a delightful hour or so with Michael.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

First, I didn’t know much about Michael. He was creative director on Moxi. Ran the team that designed the interface, which won two Emmy’s! (That was a clue that this would be a step above other UI’s). He also told me he worked at Apple for about 10 years in the creative services department back in the 80s/90s.

Anyway, he showed me through the UI. I wanted one almost instantly. And that’s where the story falls apart.

“Can I order this through Comcast?”

“No.”

“How about any other cable company?”

“Only if you live in a few select cities.”

Seems that you can have the best UI, a well-thought out system, with lots of great options, but if you can’t talk the cable companies into adopting it you’re dead in the water.

You know, I’m tired of putting up with a poor user experience on my cable box.

Everyone complains about the monopoly that Microsoft has, but at least you have a choice there. You can go with Open Office. Or Wordperfect. On the Office side. On the OS side there’s OSX and Linux. Wonderful competitors to Microsoft’s offerings.

But on cable or phone systems? We have absolutely no choice.

I want to buy Moxi. But the cable companies are keeping us from considering it.

And we won’t even talk about the IPTV systems that Microsoft showed me. Four HDTV video channels on screen at one time.

That’s blocked too.

Instead we have to put up with crappy UIs, poor feature sets, and crappy HD content.

Do you blame me for loading BitTorrent?

Anyway, thanks Michael for inviting me over. I sure wish everyone could use the system you helped design.