Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I remember a time when people used to buy media content by the piece. You bought  a book, record, video or game and brought it home to keep forever. I have no great nostalgia for those times because content was expensive and the selection was limited. The advent of the internet and digital distribution shook things up and for a brief few years a lot of people thought that they could just keep downloading everything for free. Nowadays however we are firmly in the age of the subscription service where you can have access to a large selection of titles for a relatively modest subscription fee as long as you keep paying month by month. Subscription services have become utterly dominant in music and video and there are some very compelling offerings in video games and books now too.  These subscription services appear to offer an unbeatable value proposition. The monthly fee offers an enormous library of content and this fee is often less than you would have to pay for a single pie...

Many years ago a friend explained to me why Apple's Itunes music store was a huge success despite the fact that (at the time) there were many ways to acquire digital music for free. Apple realised, he explained, that for most people "Easy is better than free".  The power of that concept has been proven by Apple and other companies over and over since then but my inner nerd has never been fully comfortable with it. The cost of "Easy" is rarely just financial, invariably you must also sacrifice some functionality as well.  Most recently this point has been brought home to me once again through the world of TV providers (cable companies).  First a bit of background: Ireland is a small country with only a small number of free to air TV channels  so most people rely on additional cable, satellite, aerial or internet based services to extend the selection and in particular to access the large range of channels available in the much bigger neighbouring market in the UK...

How do you feel when something you like is judged to be worthless by the court of public opinion? I recently starting watching the SyFy show Z-Nation on Netflix. I like the show a lot. Unfortunately I am not going to explain why because I cannot do so without sounding like I am trying to justify my opinion and make excuses for it.  The problem is that Z-Nation was panned by critics. It was reviewed so poorly that if I had read reviews before watching the show I would never have risked it. Instead I stumbled across it by accident and didn't look at a review till I was six or seven episodes in. It was only then I became aware that the show I was enjoying was actually terrible according to most knowledgeable critics.  How should one react in such circumstances? Shouldn't one dismiss the views of critics because in the end it is only our own opinion that really matters? That sounds like a sensible position but I think we need critics. Today's world offers every one ...

A recent price increase from our long time cable TV provided prompted me to bite the bullet and switch to satellite. It isn't a whole lot cheaper but the satellite service offers more channels and some better channels hat were not available from our old provider. Almost every channel we regularly watch is actually a free to air channels. This means that anyone with the appropriate equipment  can receive these for free along with hundreds of other channels without any recurring subscription. A disadvantage of living in Ireland is that we would need both antenna and satellite dish to receive all the relevant channels but a once off investment of perhaps €500 would ensure we could watch hundreds of channels for free without paying a subscription. Why on earth did I opt to pay €20 every  month (rising to €30 in a years time ) for a curated satellite service? Because we don't watch TV the way we used to. Instead of sitting down to watch scheduled programmes at the same time e...