It's been almost five and a half months of unemployment, but this evening, I was offered -- and I accepted -- a position working on a contract basis as a content editor for the Yahoo Search Marketing division of Yahoo. I'll be categorizing and proofreading the "sponsored search results" advertisement submissions.

I'm excited, because Yahoo is, by most accounts, a great company to work for. Since I'll be a contractor, I won't get all the employee benefits, but I will get some -- for instance, the soda machine in the break room is set to "free." And there is a reasonable chance that I'll eventually be hired as an actual full-time Yahoo employee, at which point I will start exploring the wonderful world of stock options.

I don't start until May 17th, so now I have about two and a half weeks to relax and collect as much of my unemployment benefits as possible.

In my new position, if I find out anything about "Desperate Housewives," I'm damn sure keeping it to myself.

My friend Anna is now part of an operation called Script Alley, so if you've got a script -- or some other type of writing -- that you want read and covered, check it out.

I moved my wireless router from inside the cabinet with my computer to the top of the computer desk, which obviously vastly improved the wireless signal, and now I'm getting faster-than-realtime transfers from the TiVo to the computer -- assuming I'm saving the file on the computer in TiVo's MPEG-2 format. Transferring non-MPEG-2 video files from the computer to the TiVo is still taking a long time, as my computer desperately tries to transcode the video file and play music out of a 28,000-track iTunes library and run a web browser and a few other programs that are living in the background and taking up valuable processor time -- all with a mere 400 MHz processor and 704 MB of RAM. (How do you like that second number? That's a result of the computer coming with 64 MB of RAM six years ago, and then me adding 128 MB pretty soon afterward, and then me adding 512 MB after a precipitious memory price drop about a year later. Obviously, one does not have to add memory in pairs in this particular Macintosh model.)

Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2006, page A13: "The network-cited incidents, by contrast, prompted no fines. The one on CBS' 'The Early Show' occurred in December 2004, when a contestant from 'Survivor: Vanuatu' referred to another contestant as a 'bullshitter' during an interview."

Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2006, page E1: "Years after the 1970 show, Asner had a change of heart. 'No one could hate spunk, not even a curmudgeon,' he told the AARP magazine. 'I should have said, "You know what? You're pretty goddamn perky. I hate perky."'"

Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2006, page D1: "Rain delayed the start of the game for one hour and 57 minutes. The emotion, however, began right on time. 'Bar-ry (bleeps), Bar-ry (bleeps),' fans in the left-field pavilion chanted."

Jackbooted DirecTV thugs haven't yet kicked in my front door, so I guess it's safe to tell: a few weeks ago, I hacked my DirecTV TiVo unit. As it turns out, the DirecTV TiVos are the easiest of all TiVos to hack, because there exists a reasonably foolproof method called "The Zipper" for doing so. I had opened up other TiVos to replace hard drives, and I'm comfortable with opening up computers and swapping hard drives, so for me, the hardest part of running The Zipper was having to borrow a friend's PC in order to actually do the hacking. (It's not set up to work with a Mac.)

Now my DirecTV TiVo has the "Music & Photos" functionality of a standalone TiVo, but there's much more. It displays caller ID information on-screen so I don't have to look at the display on my phone, which usually entails getting up. It does "soft padding" -- automatically adding one minute to the beginning and two minutes to the end of every recording, unless there's a conflict. I can make a Telnet or an HTTP connection to my TiVo and do all kinds of stuff, including reading the log generated by the soft padding routine, which looks like this...

Tuesday 19:27:00 : Rise and shine!
Tuesday 19:27:01 : Processing current recording(s):
Tuesday 19:27:01 : * Jeopardy! on [387 ABCW] until 19:30 (Season Pass)
Tuesday 19:27:06 : Both tuners available; using requested padding (120 seconds)
Tuesday 19:27:07 : Adding 120 seconds end padding
Tuesday 19:27:17 : Processing next recording(s):
Tuesday 19:27:17 : * Family Guy on [296 TOON] from 20:30 to 21:00 (Suggestion)
Tuesday 19:27:17 : Not time to add start padding yet
Tuesday 19:27:17 : * Scrubs on [383 NBCW] from 21:00 to 21:30 (Season Pass)
Tuesday 19:27:17 : Not time to add start padding yet
Tuesday 19:27:17 : Next end padding setting due 20:57
Tuesday 19:27:17 : Next start padding setting due 20:27
Tuesday 19:27:17 : Next wake up will be 19:57
Tuesday 19:27:17 : Back to sleep...
Tuesday 19:27:17 : Checking every minute for kill signal...............................

I can now transfer recordings to my TiVo from my computer, in just about any video type -- for example, if I were to use BitTorrent to download an episode of the Australian version of "Deal or No Deal," I would probably prefer to watch it on my TV rather than on my computer. The big drawback is that it takes at least twice as long to transfer video as it does to watch it, partly due to my slow computer (the video has to be transcoded into TiVo's MPEG-2 format if it's not already) and partly due to the fact that I don't have a particularly fast wireless connection between the computer and the TiVo on opposite sides of my apartment.

Also, as has been demonstrated on baseballrelated.com recently, I can also transfer recordings from my TiVo to my computer, although without a DVD burner, this is mainly only useful for capturing screenshots. I first tested this ability with the greatest episode of "Charmed" ever. Paige (played by Rose McGowan) has only recently learned that she's a witch as a result of having been brought in to replace Prue (played by Shannen Doherty, who everyone involved with the show hated). At her office, some guy (played by some guy) has been annoying her and the other women, but instead of filing a formal sexual harrassment complaint, she casts a spell on him in order to cause women to sexually harrass him. In the "Charmed" universe (played by a Los Angeles studio backlot, which looks like San Francisco if you squint), casting spells for personal gain is bad and can cause them to backfire on you -- in this case, greatly increasing the size of Paige's breasts (played by balloons under Rose McGowan's shirt). Eventually, Phoebe (played by Alyssa Milano) remembers that her contract says she's supposed to have the largest breasts on the show, and the balloons are deflated.



I know the screenshot doesn't look that good, but this was my first attempt -- I've since figured out what to do for better quality. Anyway, from this point, we go on to have four more seasons of Rose McGowan not getting as much screen time as I'd like her to have, culminating in the current (and last) season, in which the blonde daughter from "8 Simple Rules" (played by the blonde daughter from "8 Simple Rules") has been brought in solely to annoy me, as a college student who has only recently learned that she's a witch -- and this despite the fact that it's been pretty well established that, in the "Charmed" universe, brunettes are good witches and blondes are evil witches (for example, there was an episode in which three evil witches were played by Jenny McCarthy, the blonde from "Cleopatra 2525," and a former pink Power Ranger), so this better be leading up to a big good-versus-evil confrontation. I mean, bigger than the good-versus-evil confrontation that they have in just about every episode.

In conclusion, I wish I had hacked my TiVo sooner, and I wish I had never gotten sucked into watching "Charmed" in the first place.

Dear Jim Knows, I just purchased a 20 oz bottle Pepsi with the "Free Ride" promotion. Among the prizes listed is "$20 cash for gas". They must mean a credit or a discount. If it's cash, how can they enforce what it's for? -- Jeremy M.

First of all, if you've been following this blog for a while, you should know not to trust any Pepsi promotion that doesn't involve free downloads from iTunes. In this case, that's doubly true: it is cash, but it's new cash equipped with RFID technology; Pepsi is cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security in this thinly-disguised test of cash tracking. If you do not use the $20 cash for gas, you may find yourself getting a "free ride" to Guantanamo Bay. (This also explains why gas prices have been going up recently -- fewer transactions will be initiated with the special Pepsi cash-for-gas.)

As he's done for quite a few years now, my friend Jason set up an NCAA tournament picking group on ESPN.com. I know very little about college basketball, but it's just for fun, so I always give it a try. And this year -- well, I'm not sure if you'd be able to see the group scoreboard without signing in on ESPN.com, so I'll just paste in a screenshot here...



You may notice that I have 280 more points than the next highest person in the group. You may notice that I did better than 99.8% of the other people picking on ESPN.com.

So, what's my secret? Well, I live in Los Angeles, so I picked UCLA to be one of the two final teams. I'm from Florida, so I picked the University of Florida to be the other final team, and to win it all. (My final score prediction was Florida 71, UCLA 63 -- not too far off from the actual score, which was 73-58.)

If only I'd participated in an office pool (i.e., if only I had a job) -- I may well have ended up with some cash.