I did want to talk about being able to watch my computer on my widescreen television though. My computer is right in the small living room. Of course it is a huge part of life running 24/7. Earlier this year I finally bought a graphics card with 1920x1080 output. So if I want to watch something on the larger screen, I just click the screen to open the NVIDIA control panel and select to output to the TV. For some reason, video seems more at home showing there rather than on the standard monitor.
I have surprised even myself as how much more likely I am to watch YouTube on the big screen. Of course the bigger one goes, the fuzzier the picture becomes. I bought a Sony PlayStation 3 just to be able to watch Blu-ray discs but find that I'm willing to watch low-resolution crap over the Internet. I am able to do this, I guess, as I remember how horrible VHS video tape used to be.
One scary thing about YouTube though is how easy it is to keep searching for junk. I remember saying silly things about user-generated content when the website first captured the fascination of the public. Now, it has slowly developed into being a vast repository of public video images. For example, yesterday after a Facebook conversion I was able to find the TV commercial which threatened, "It's not nice to fool mother nature."
Watch a collection of Sri Lankan Mobitel TV ads
I just spent part of the morning letting YouTube cycle through playlists of the Palm Pre. I'm still vaguely keen on getting a smartphone. Bell Canada will launch a version of the device for Canada later this month. While at the site, perhaps anticipating a vacation that begins exactly a month from today, I found this collection of TV commercials from one of the Sri Lankan wireless providers. Imagine, so much of the world can come right to the screen where you're reading this ...