Yesterday they officially launched Hulu - a website with a very stupid name but lots of great content. It’s basically a video site with loads of TV channels and and movies available to stream for free. Most videos are pretty good quality, and the player is nice. There is limited advertising throughout the presentations but it’s much less advertising than you’d get watching these shows on tv - typically it’s about 15 seconds of ads per 10 minutes during half hour shows.

It’s owned by Rupert Murdoch, so at least we know it won’t be taken offline like many other sites that offer similar things. I watched two new episodes of the Simpsons last night and was very impressed.

Oh, and it’s only available in the US. Sorry!

It’s been pretty miserable in the city the last fews days.

This photo (from the SF Chronicle) was taken on the campus at Berkeley (where my girlfriend now studies). It’s been pretty heavy rain for a few days now, I got soaked on my lunch break and we now have a leak in our office right beside my desk. Excellent.

So what is there to do about the city when inclement weather forces you to retreat to the sanctuary of indoors? Aside from the mundanity of going to work (six days a week at the moment!) there is plenty to do keep bored students occupied.

On Sunday the weather let up a little so I ventured out to do a few messages. My first stop was at the fantastic little shop called ‘You Say Tomato’, which is a British style cornershop that sells all British food. I bought Ribena, Weetabix and a bag of Dolly Mixture and paid the handsome sum of $23.00 for all of it. I believe the cashier was Dick Turpin.

Conveniently, Guitar Centre is only a few blocks from there so I spent several hours testing their new stock of Mesa’s. I have also fallen in love with a Taylor acoustic guitar they have there. It’s not cheap, around $2800 but it is quite possibly the greatest acoustic guitar sound I’ve ever heard. I went a stage further and plugged it into a little Fender acoustic amp and was blown away by the clarity and response from the guitar.

In the evening I did some baking. Yes, even guys can bake. I’m actually recognised as a great chef with my friends. My shepherd’s pie was a great success and all subsequent dishes have been the envy of many. Valerie and I baked a Bailey’s cheesecake using a recipe we found online. It was quite easy to make but unfortunately we didn’t have a blender and we got the proportions of some of the ingredients wrong so it came out looking a little brown and tasted only of Baileys. It wasn’t terrible, but not as good as we’d hoped. I think we’ll try it again this Sunday. I can steal a blender from the kitchen in my office for the day.

Tuesday night was good fun. I got a group of people together (including my new Korean roommate Sid and his buddy Ringo/Pingu - I can’t remember his name) to go to a Karaoke bar. Personally, I’m a terrible singer but I really have fun at Karaoke bars so I came prepared with a list of possible songs. Unfortunately we were competing for stage time with a birthday party and 2 strange but funny guys who sang the Spiderman theme song and other bizarre tracks. This meant that my performances would be limited so in the end I performed Any Way You Want It, by Journey, as a duet with Valerie and a solo performance of the Wilson Pickett classic, Mustang Sally. I have few photos which I’ll dig up and throw up here soon.

The rest of the week has been fairly quiet and uneventful. I have a report for university due in for next week which I need to make a start on. I also found out today that Pixar, the Disney-owned animation studio responsbile for Toy Story, is located in Alameda which is right across the bay between Berkeley and Oakland. I’m going to call them to see if they’ll show me around some day. There’s so many businesses located here. Bebo is on 2nd street I think, and the Wordpress guys are just a few blocks from where I live.

And just while we’re on the subject, what does everyone think of Apple’s new Macbook Air? Personally, I think it’s overpriced and quite rubbish really. I’m a big fan of Apple and stand by a lot of their technology but this one just sucks. Ohhhh, it’s thinner than a regular Macbook…big deal. It doesn’t even have a CD Drive! You have to buy an external one to use with it. Ditch the hype and get yourself a Macbook Pro.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Google’s share prices recently, because they’ve been going up…and up…and up. In fact, as of today, just one share in Google will cost you around $620. That’s insane! I’ve put together a few statistics just to really get my head around how huge this company has become:

So the highlighted figure is Google’s annual revenue. $181 billion dollars. One company. One hundred and eighty one BILLION dollars. Unbelievable. To put that in perspective, this is Wikipedia’s list of countries by GDP:

The oil-soaked United Arab Emirates generates $168 billion dollars of economic activity every year, which is still smaller than Google. At the moment, the search engine giant is almost bigger than Portugal. This blows my mind. I also recently read that Microsoft was bidding for a sizable stake in Facebook, like 20% or something. Turns out Facebook’s net worth is around the $500 million mark. Insane.

No, it’s not a novelty band - it is what it says it is: a notebook toaster. Designer Sasha Tseng has designed this cute little toaster that comes complete with a notepad on top that burns your message into the toast! Check it out:

How cool is that? I want one just so I can toast some bread that says “Haha, I used all the butter!”. Or to be cruel, “I used the last of the bread”. It’s a bit of a novelty and I’m not sure if they’re on sale yet but it’s a genius design.

This toaster comes only a week after the unveiling of the Transparent Toaster:

This also amazing piece of technology uses heat-retaining glass to turn your bread into the perfect piece of toast. It takes the guesswork out of browning the bread just right. No more fiddling with dials and stuff, just pop it out when it looks just right. Only downside I can see is that both toasters only do one slice at a time. I mean, that’s pretty slow - who eats one slice? Hmm, I wonder what the funniest thing you could write on the toast would be…