So far so good.

Two nights ago my projector decided to stop working for no particular reason. In the middle of watching Jericho with my roommate, the thing just clicked and shut down. With any luck, it’s nothing serious.

I called Sharp today to find out what their deal was on repairs, etc. It turns out that the projector has a 3-year warranty and, although this particular model needs to be sent in for service, this process is going to be reasonably straightforward.

Sharp is going to e-mail me some shipping labels, which will then let me ship overnight to their repair facility (on them), which will then repair the unit in “usually one day”, and then overnight it back to me. I should have a working projector again by next Thursday. Huzzah.

I just got back from 300. It’s two hours of softcore war porn. Intensely homo-erotic. Insanely violent. Impressively corny.

And damn good entertainment.

NewsCorp is not the first, nor will it be the last, media giant to try to create a video platform to oust YouTube. They will all fail, because what the big media companies want is a closed, proprietary, self-contained video system that lets them keep control over their content.

The reason YouTube, like the mp3 format in music, works, is that it’s open open open open.

You can’t just leverage big media content against it and win. You just can’t. Because content will find it’s way up there anyway.

Fox, NBC, CBS, ComedyCentral, whoever, they’d save a lot of money and effort by dealing with YouTube than trying to beat it. You can monetize with YouTube. It doesn’t need to be YOUR system.

I was thinking about the dropping numbers of newspaper circulation everywhere as I bought today’s LA Times at the store. I’m part of the problem - I don’t subscribe to a newspaper, despite the fact that I like reading a physical paper.

Most of the time, what gets in the way is convenience. I don’t buy the paper every day because it’s 50 cents and I have to go out and get it somewhere. If I get it from a stand I have to use quarters, which I need for laundry.

When I get to Oxy, there are free copies of the paper provided in the dorms (or “Residence Halls”), but I can’t get into those anymore because I don’t live on campus. So either I find a copy lying around campus or I actually go out and buy it.

But what if there were two subscription options at the LA Times? What if I could subscribe for pick-up instead of delivery? The Times has a stack of papers at most of the stores I go to, so what’s the difference to them if they deliver it to the main entrance of my apartment or if I pick it up myself?

I think they should have an option where they mail you a card that lets you pick up one copy of the newspaper every day, from any vendor. That would be a sweet system. Eventually, the sidewalk drop-boxes could be retrofitted to take the card, so anyone with a card subscription could stop through and pick up a newspaper anytime.

Cool, huh? I think it should happen.

“Parking Enforcement” AKA “I can’t find anything useful to do in life so I’m going to make other people miserable” ticketed me today at 11:05 for being in a no-parking from 11-1 on Wednesday’s zone.

Now, admittedly, I was parked, past 11, on a Wednesday. But five minutes? Come on.

That rule exists so that the street sweepers can sweep the streets. The street has not been swept. In fact, I’ve been watching, and the street is rarely swept. I think the damn sweeper should be the only one allowed to ticket for that violation, and it damn sure wasn’t trying to sweep the street five minutes past eleven this morning.

This city needs to find a more considerate way to ream people up the ass. What a waste of $50.

According to Scott Adams’ recent post, he set up some Google Alerts for they keywords “Scott Adams Dilbert,” which conveniently lets him keep tabs on what the blogging children of India have to say about the comic. He keeps tabs via his Blackberry.

I’m guessing he’ll have these alerts forwarded to his Blackberry for a few weeks, tops, before the pings become too frequent and annoying.

But mostly, I’m just curious if my multiple, bolded use of Scott Adams Dilbert in this post will show up in his Blackberry, and if it does, when. I won’t know, of course, unless he blogs his answer, which he won’t, but if he does, that would be too frickin’ cool, dude!

A Wired plug on my Google Homepage caught my attention today: Movies on demand, at the Movies.

The longer, real title “Movie Firms Working on Digital Film System” is far more accurate, but the concept is still something that realistically should have been set up years ago.

[Film studios] are working on a new digital film delivery system that, if successful, could give theater operators the flexibility to put a popular movie on an extra screen as quickly as the demand for it arises. At the same time, theater operators could boot out a surprise stinker and even book in for a day or two an art-house film with a small but devoted audience.

Theaters have had trouble in recent years getting people to actually show up at the screen to watch new movies. Rampant piracy and the advent of affordable home-theater setups, including wide screen TVs, have put a real damper on the allure of going out to the “big screen.”

I remember hearing a figure that said theaters spend an average of $13 in advertising per customer that sits in a chair. That’s not a great ratio. I also probably remembered it wrong, but I think I’m in the right ballpark.

A big step in filling that gap would be the ability to modulate screenings for demand. How many times do theaters screen a movie to one or two people, while they tell dozens that another movie is full?

Even better would be the ability to show any old movie on-the-fly, but I’m not sure how practical that is. In any case, this sounds like a cool system: good for consumers, good for theaters.

Sometimes I don’t really understand the way my mind works, but it amuses me, so I keep it around.

I was working on my screenplay when I noticed that Celtx, the awesome freeware program I use to write, has a little button in the toolbar that looks like a Dr. Mario capsule.

Wouldn’t it be great if it was a Dr. Mario button, and when you clicked on it it launched a game of Dr. Mario? Talk about a great way to deal with writer’s block!

In fact, I can’t really think of a program that wouldn’t benefit from having a Dr. Mario button. Some one go do it!

Several weeks ago I started a series of ten posts explaining some of the fundamentals of good blogging.

You can find last week’s post here.

Tip #3: Write good headlines

Your post titles matter a lot more than you think they do. They’re big and bold and styled to be important, so search engines think they’re important. Which means…they’re important.

A lot of people spend time coming up with clever, gimmicky one-liners for their posts, which is admittedly fun, but you’ll draw a lot more traffic a lot more consistently by being practical. Think about what it is you’re actually writing about, and then, think about how you would go about googling it.

In the ideal situation, your post is answering some sort of question. Make that question the title of the post. That way, the next time someone googles “how do I tie shoelaces,” your post is far more likely to show up.

Absolutely not.

Tuesday night’s Frontline presentation on the news media featured a section on the LA Times, and the current, possibly idiotic, owners of the Times explained that they were trying to make the LA Times a more local paper in order to increase readership.

That’s stupid. The LA Times is in a position halfway between The New York Times and the Who Cares Times. No matter where I live, I will probably subscribe to the Sunday NYTimes just because it’s an iconic, national newspaper. When the World Trade Center went down in 2001, I bought the New York Times issue the next day, because it’s the status symbol paper.

The way newspapers and other old media are going to grow their readership is by broadening their appeal, not narrowing it. Assuming that the LA Times can’t and shouldn’t compete with the NYTimes, the Washington Post, the WSJ, and…USA Today is insulting. It can and it should.

Don’t get me wrong–the LA Times should continue to cover local news, events, weather, high school sports, and everything else that a good local paper covers, but it damn well better not focus on, and I’m slant-quoting from the documentary here, “the things people in Los Angeles care about: Style, Fashion, Hollywood.”

I’m insulted. If I wanted tabloid crap, I’d buy tabloids. I want good journalism, journalism that I can’t get from CNN, The Drudge Report, or even NPR. I’ll buy the LA Times if you make it worth my while. But budget cuts and shallow topics are not the way to do that.