A friend came over on Saturday and had a laptop full of movies. He said he had bought the DVDs and just ripped them to his hard drive so he could watch random movies while sitting in a plane, or whatnot. One of the movies was “Gandhi.” What a wonderful movie. Anyway, I hooked the laptop up to my HDTV screen and watched it there. Other than being small (Sony’s HDTV doesn’t play 1280×1024 full screen for some reason, I gotta figure out if there’s some way to force it to be full screen) it was wonderful.

I wonder how many other people are doing that, though?

What prompted my post? This article by the Associated Press that says that most people won’t watch long things online. I think that’ll change over time as more of us get laptops with better screens and as more of us get screens at home that a computer can hook up to (most Windows Vista computers will be capable of playing video to an XBox 360, which is how I will watch, say, Ze Frank, next year).

Speaking of which, is there any way to play Quicktime movies full screen?

UPDATE: here’s the long video I’m watching now. It’s Ze Frank speaking at TED. What can I say? I’m an edge case. Just don’t call me that!

This one is wild (top story on MSNBC right now, it’s an article from Newsweek).

The basics: a director at HP leaks something to the press. A chairwoman gets pissed. Starts spying on home phone records and other stuff. Alledgedly catches leaker*. Then causes backlash because of her methods. Causes other board member to resign. The leaker was asked to resign (he’s still serving, cause he refused, saying that’s the role of shareholders). And the SEC is involved cause the reason the board member’s resignation wasn’t disclosed promptly or properly.

Me? Damn. I don’t know who to pick on in this one. The leaker isn’t nice and wasn’t smart (lesson: if you’re gonna leak, don’t do it with your own cell phone — didn’t this guy know about Skype and Gmail?)

The methods to find this person are over the line, though. If I found out my employer were using that kind of method I’d be looking over my shoulder and finding another job. I don’t want to work for the KGB. Even worse? The methods used to get the phone records involved lying to the phone company (which is against the law).

How far HP has fallen since the days of Hewlett and Packard. It’s sad.

*=the guy involved claims he wasn’t the leaker, but resigned just to protest the methods being used.

No winners here in my book. What about in yours?

UPDATE: Actually, the winner is Tom Perkins, the VC who quit the board in disgust. I totally agree with TechDirt on that one.

HP, do you have any honor?

As long as you guys keep linking to me I’m happy that someone is paying you to post. Heheheh!

Speaking of which, if you wanna get paid to blog there’s a lot better way to do THAT than get paid a few bucks to post. I know of a few companies right now hiring bloggers. I don’t even have to link to them. I bet that within a few minutes someone will post a link to the sites that are listing jobs for bloggers.

For everyone else: PayPerPost is paying people to link to me and make fun of me. Damn, why didn’t I think of that?

😉