I never intended this to be a ranting blog, but I’ve got one that has been brewing in my brain for a few days, and I need to get it out. And that problem is the system that the US (and most of the rest of the world, for that matter) has in place to broadcast media entertainment into our homes. Yes, the television.

Years and years ago, television was broadcast over the air, and anyone with a television set and an antenna could tune into the channels, and watch them in the comfort of their own homes. The broadcasters owned the studios, the cameras, the broadcast stations and whatnot, and the end user (that’s most of us) owned the television and the home antenna. The way that the television studios paid for the content they were creating and sending to our homes was that they would display ads for products, both in shows and between segments of shows – the “commercial break”. This is all self evident to most people who grew up with television, which I will assume is most people who read this blog.

Now, the problem I have – that’s been making me horribly mad the last while – is that right now I’m paying money – hard earned dollars – for the television company to send the content to my house and show me ads while watching said content. Have you ever noticed when you rent or buy a DVD of a television series that the running time of a 30 minute episode is 22 minutes? When watching a movie, there’s always that warning in the beginning that “this movie has been edited to run in the time allowed”, which means that for every hour of movie, you get 16 minutes of ads, interrupting the vital flow of the story – and you lose parts of the filmmakers vision. How can’t you, when you compress a 2 hour and 15 minute movie into the 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM time slot? You lose 40 minutes to advertisements, so 25 minutes of the film have to go.

I was watching the Princess Bride the other day on TBS (hey, it was on, and I love that movie), and I had to turn it off. They cut so many of the good character building lines from the film that it really weakened the narrative structure. And it made me think. Do I really want Qais growing up, watching cut down versions of things, and on top of that, paying my hard earned paycheck dollars to show him extra ads for stuff we don’t want or need?

Further, the broadcast company decides on when to show things. I know people, and I’ve been one of them at one point in my life, who can’t do things on certain nights of the week – as they have to be at home, watching ads they are paying for, to catch the latest installment of their favorite TV show. It’s downright ridiculous.

The other side of this is cultural deprivation. So much of modern social culture depends on shared experience with popular media. I’m not going to deprive Qais of that either. The balance I’ve come to in my head, so far, is that he can watch as many movies and television shows as he likes, as long as it’s on DVD or on demand media. We’ll get NetFlix setup for him, and hook him up with Hulu, and he can watch what he wants and needs.

Just no to the insanity of broadcast television.

Last night I shifted the home wireless network from 802.11n only to n/g. This allows my iPhone to get on the network properly in the house and not rely on 3G speeds. Though they are fast, they aren’t as fast as the cable modem. This will also allow me to start working with presence detetcion. In essence, allow my phone to instruct my desktop at home to change status messages and perform other tasks when I’m acutally in the house.

Part of the reason I had set the network to 802.11n only was to ensure video delivery to the XBox 360 in my living room was clear. Since I’ve never really used it since I set it up, and we’re probably going to suspend our NetFlix account due to lack of use… yeah. That’s gone. And we’re not using the big stereo in the living room anyway so I don’t need to have the airport express out there anyway.

I’ve been using the “nightly experimental” builds of Safari’s rendering engine (WebKit) on my home desktop for several months now. When I was prompted to install the new version tonight, it occurred to me that I haven’t worried about the stability of the builds since the second week I was running the nightly builds. Thinking a little more seriously about this, it’s amazing that I’ve probably run close to 45 different revisions of the engine and never had an issue with rendering glitches, stability or performance. That’s quality software in my book – especially as they have been working on a rewriting/re-factoring their new JavaScript engine during this period.

And it’s stable. Rock solid, even.

Aka, why I hate modern web browser developers.

Color is important to most photographers. They spend a lot of time working on getting the color in their photos to ‘pop’ without going over the line of ‘too much photoshop’, or, even worse, the horrible Web 2.0 Flashy HDR Effects Madness. You know the kinds of photos I’m talking about – where there’s so much local contrast, dodging and burning that the photo isn’t even considered to be a photo anymore.

But I digress: the problem I’m currently facing I “fixed” in March of 2007, around the time I posted this picture. One of my friends commented on how washed out my photo looked – and he was using a PC. The problem was that I had been shooting all my photographs the AdobeRGB color space, and had been outputting the files with the same space. What I didn’t know was that everyone who didn’t use Safari as their web browser wasn’t seeing what I was seeing.

You see, most web browsers (apart from Safari) don’t care what color space an image is saved in. It assumes a rather limited profile called sRGB. There’s a lot of reasons people give for this, and they are all stupid. Modern computers have well enough processing power to handle this.

So – when I first came across this problem, I just told all the tools in my image workflow to output with sRGB, and I was in good hands again. However, I recently migrated my whole workflow to Apple’s Aperture program, with Photoshop for final image manipulation and output. Somewhere in the transition, my color profile settings got eaten. I’m not sure when or where. This means that most people who look at my photos are looking at them in a way that I didn’t intend. They are most likely seeing a muted, washed out version of what I’m trying to put together.

This was pointed out to me just under a week ago. I’ve since updated all my application settings, and I think that I’ve gotten it right – or at least close to right. A friend of mine has graciously offered loan me his color profiling device (a small camera that looks at the monitor and figures out what you should be seeing), so I can produce consistent results. I’m also going to have to remember to periodically check my work with FireFox, just to see if it’s horribly broken again.

I was going to post today about color profiles and image formats, but I’m still backing up my photo library. Last night I finally got around to setting up the share needed on my file server to host a networked backup of my Aperture library. I forgot to start the backup before I went to bed last night, so this morning at roughly 7:30 AM, I started to backup 355 GB of pictures and associated metadata. It’s 13 hours later, and I’ve gotten over 200 GB copied across the network. Hopefully the rest will be done by tomorrow morning.