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I have an often-repeated bad joke that I get to make around 6 every evening. I'll plop down on the sofa, pick up the remote, "Spud, want to watch some quality television?" Liz sighs and rolls her eyes, Diamond usually wanders over within petting range, and I turn on ESPN, specifically SportsCenter.

SportsCenter, just so the rest of this entry makes at least minimal sense to those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, is a sports highlight show that covers what's going on in sports mostly within the last 24 hours or so. The commentators come with a full complement of wry remarks, and it amuses me.

In any case, we're coming up on the best time of the year for SportsCenter, in my opinion. For a guy who watches SportsCenter, I'm moderately picky about the segments I pay attention to. I don't like hockey, soccer, college sports in general, boxing, football, golf, car racing, and tennis. I like baseball and professional basketball. Pretty soon those will be the two main sports featured on SportsCenter, and I'll be a happy camper.

A couple days ago, while SportsCenter was doing a NASCAR segment (It's a bunch of guys making a left-hand turn for hours on end. I know the spectators are only there to see wrecks, which is why I look up when they show a wreck, in the hopes the transmission will detach from the flaming car and rip through the stands, killing the flock of rubberneckers from Dogpatch, Alabama. I have dreams, too), when my geek brain began to try to figure out ways to make it better.

What I came up with was something like this: Wouldn't it be neat if you could do some sort of preferences arrangement, where you use your PC or HDTV or something to check of boxes saying that you're interested in baseball and NBA basketball, and while you don't like hockey, you'd like to also see any stories featuring Wayne Gretzky? Then the program could just sort of condense the bits you'd actually be interested in seeing?

Let's go a step farther. I'm a big Babylon 5 fan, for example. Actually, let's use an example from real life, from yesterday. I really the HBO series The Sopranos, which airs at like 9PM Sunday and 11PM Tuesday night. I forget about both shows. DAMMIT! Why can't I just punch in a request code that shows the damn episode when I want it? This doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to do!

Think of it this way: You'd still have the regular TV schedule. There are an absolute snotload of people who love consistency, and are more than happy to stop whatever they're doing at 8PM when "their show" is on. But you've also got the option to enter in a code or something that will request a different show. The networks could still set things up so that things were first available based on the original schedule (so, using the above example, the earliest I could have seen the latest Sopranos would have been at 9 on Sunday night), but after that, they'll send it to you when you request it. As long as they package the same commercials with it, the advertisers won't care, either.

It all seems so damn easy that I can't believe this hasn't been done yet. I've been thinking about writing an entry on specific events in my life where the Internet has actually helped me out in some way, or made my life better. I don't know if this one would qualify, but it would be neat to see.

Something I've been thinking about a fair bit lately is a premise which goes something like this: Are we settling for good enough? While in some things refinement and feature development seem to continue, I'm thinking more about the larger things. Take TV for example (to stick with the fraying thread from the first part of this entry). How is TV different now from back in, say, the 1950s. Color, remote controls, sound, more channels.

This is 50 years of progress? Is the basics of television as good as it gets, or has it been assumed that people fear change so much that no change at all is good?

As an aside, it occurs to me mid-way through this that I'd probably be a lot more credible if I were to do some research on HDTV and find out exactly what it offers. But what the hell.

I'll confess something to you now, my faithful readers. I actually started writing this yesterday morning, and then things promptly dissolved into chaos and anarchy. And then I tried to finish it off this morning, only to be given a task comprised of 100% pure tedium that I had to constantly attend to, so I wasn't able to finish this then, either. And now I've managed to finagle the teenist of breaks in the Task of Tediousness, and so I'm going to cut short and just finish this entry off, otherwise I'll have to try to take it up again tomorrow, and then it'd be even more disjointed, and would probably dissolve into crazed ravings at the end that don't make much sense at all.

Or maybe it's too late.