I may have mentioned before that I have had “issues” with TiVo. I may have mentioned that TiVo’s customer support is based somewhere in the fourth level of hell and staffed by demons who usually speak English, but not always. I may have mentioned that I would really really really love to have a DVR to record my favorite shows but I’ve given up on that impossible dream after two, yes two, attempts at buying a TiVo, each of which made a root canal look like winning the lottery.

I may have mentioned before that I can get kind of carried away with weird analogies when I’m trying to tell a story and get side tracked on barely related topics.

So anyway, I’ve been using NetFlix as my poor-man’s TiVo for a while now. I’ve caught up with all the available Office DVD’s and most of Monk. Unfortunately that still leaves me about two years behind what is currently being aired. But I’m not bitter… much.

Well, today all that changed. I stumbled across a link to Hulu. At first I thought it was just another YouTube knock off. They had some great SNL clips, really impressive video quality and, oddly enough, the clips were from the show that aired just a few days ago. Then I saw a link at the top of the page. “Browse TV”. Hmm. What could that mean.

Hulu hosts TV shows, on demand, over the interweb, for freeee!! They have the most recent episode of The Office! All of seasons 3 and 4!! GLEEEE!!! There are commercials, but they are tiny web commercials and only one per break! I can deal with that!! Oh, this may change my life forever. It also may completely ruin my career and get me fired for watching TV during business hours.

I guess that last part could be looked upon as a “con” rather than a “pro”, huh?

[Edit: Ok. I lied. I misread the listings. They don’t actually have all of season 3 of The Office, but they do have all of season 4. They have “clips” from season 3. Not as cool, but still, enough to be excited about.]

There were well over a thousand pictures collected from the various digital cameras that joined our mission trip to New Orleans this year. A few times during the week, I gathered up everyone’s cameras and compiled short slide shows.

Once we got home, it was my job to take all the huge, uncompressed, unedited image files that we’d collected and serve them up so everyone could download their favorites. Fortunately, BlueHost offers some really cool image gallery applications for free. (Along with oodles of storage space and unlimited bandwidth!!) I installed Coppermine.

Once I got all 5 gigs uploaded, all I had to do whats point Coppermine to the directory containing the images and it auto-magically created scaled down thumbnail and preview images. Awesome!

You can see the gallery here.