I've spent the last week taking the Creative Zen Portable Media Center for a test drive. I love it! Maybe I'm in the minority, but I can think of tons of opportunities where catching up on time shifted television while I wait is more conducive to a screen that fits in my pocket (and that's only one of the PMCs features). For instance, Wyatt regularly falls asleep in the car when Robin and I are on our way to run an errand; this typically means I'm waiting in the car with a sleeping boy. For commuters, watching video as a passenger is an ideal way to pass the time. On plane flights, watching the pint-sized screen is no worse than craning your neck to see the plane's overhead screens (and the headphones don't require a goofy adapter). In fact, having a PMC will probably make me more likely to watch television because all my downtime happens when I'm not at home. A more complete review should be available over the weekend. I've got tons of pictures; I just haven't had time to resize them yet. If you can't wait to get your hands on a PMC, Amazon is taking pre-orders, with a free $288 dollar Suunto N3 Smart Watch when you use the coupon code SMARTWATCH01 before August 31 (I would settle for a free car charger, who knew?).
Since I'm sure you are all eagerly awaiting my video footage of the Iowa State Fair, you'll be happy to know I finally uploaded it to my Neptune account. The footage is mostly unedited, but I did eliminate any of the really rough stuff. You can see hormone fed animals, pigeon rolling, and everything Iowa has to offer on a stick. A few people asked why I'm using the Neptune service as opposed to just posting the video on my site. Quite honestly, it's to reduce the server load caused by lots of requests for video. A second reason is, Neptune makes video publishing insanely simple (I pay them for the privilege of saying that). I capture my video in Windows Movie Maker, perform any necessary edits, and output my movie through a wizard to automatically upload it to the Neptune server. They also have at least one really great customer service guy named Jim who gave me a real answer to my concern about lack of support for non-IE browsers, instead of the typical CS song-and-dance; hopefully their entire support team is that good. I'm not a big fan of their Web interface and wish they would dump all the Flash, but there is nothing else that comes close to the publishing simplicity; for now I'll live with the interface to keep the ease of output.
At what point did it suddenly become a sensible move to recommend beta software? If you watch the mainstream tech news, you see security experts recommending the beta browser Firefox, in favor of IE, because it is supposedly more secure. My guess is this is security through obscurity; no one is devoting much time to trying to hack Foxfire because very few people use it. Sure there are risks associated with using IE, however, most of the risks are related to users stupidly clicking on malicious links. As the saying goes, there is no security patch for human stupidity. Gmail.com might be the most coveted email accounts on the planet; the site still claims the service is a beta. The question is why would you consider relying on a beta service for two of the most fundamental areas of computing? Do you use beta software as a standard part of your computing experience? What do you or don't you expect from it? Post your thoughts in the forums.
