When the Cable That Was Free™ went away¹, we were left with a hole². No longer did we have House Hunters and Designed to Sell to watch nor reruns of Project Runway or Top Chef during the times we ate, but instead were left to regular programming.

It was mildly harder for The Girl™ — having been used to some form of cable throughout her life, whereas I have only had cable sporadically throughout my lifetime and only then, the first time just before I exited my teenage years³. But, cable didn’t have such a hold on us that we’d actually pay for it. A quick rundown of shows we watched revealed that we could either watch them online if they weren’t on regular programming or we could download a show.

We eat at about 6pm — early. I generally start cooking shortly after 5pm. Being homebound helps in that regard and I generally have our dinner ready to go or 3/4 of the way there by the time The Girl™ arrives home. We’re generally sitting at the coffee table at 6pm and we skim the channels trying to find something to watch. Previously, this was the aforementioned House Hunters. Lacking cable, we looked for a replacement.

We found Two and a Half Men. I’d been intrigued by the show for a few years now — the combination of Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer and a kid sounded like some kind of weird Three Men and a Baby twist. However, it’s occurred to me that if a show has had some kind of staying power, then perhaps it does have some legs to it.

And who would have known? The comedy is far more riskier and clever than some of the sitcoms I’ve seen in the past — Friends really?

I’m officially addicted⁴.

—

¹ Now that TV is going all digital (have you not seen the numerous February 2009 Doomsday-esque ads for your TV not working!), our cable company that provides the Internet has switched to converter boxes for their actual TV cable and so no more cable pipes in via the standard cable cables. ↩

² Not gaping. ↩

³ I also was sans TV from the years 1998-2001, opting instead for a homemade solution of a big ass speaker, a tiny little audio receiver hooked up to a Discman as well as books, books, books. ↩

⁴ We watch the show twice daily — at 6PM and then again at 10:30PM. ↩

As designers become increasingly frustrated with typography on the web, the decision to default to type that most have on their computers or pick a dynamic text replacement method such as SIFR or using PHP is one we fuss over.

This is one issue that plagues me — the choice to use dynamic text replacement or what a user has. I originally intended this site to make use of SIFR but decided against it in the end due to the recent redesign I did of the peripheral blogs (as we call them internally) at Gapers Block. We purchased Archer specifically for this redesign (there are four in all, accessed from the navigation at the very tope) and wanted to make full use of it.

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Around the time Christopher Nolan’s restart of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins was coming into theaters, I discussed with some friends the notion of opening weekends, DVD’s, film piracy and what the future of movie-going could be like.

I suggested then, the idea of having movies be released on DVD or on demand cable. Soderbergh did something very similar with Bubble in 2006.

Some background: I used to be an opening-night junkie.

I’m not anymore and as I grew weary of getting tickets and standing in line for an hour before the movie started so we could get good seats, I grew to like the idea of having a movie accessible on opening night right in your own home.

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