The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Is the Media catching up?

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Last night, BBC2 started the third season of Heroes in the UK.  This is less than two weeks since the show premiered in the US.  This is great news for those living abroad who have less time to wait and avoid online spoilers until they can watch the show.

Previously, a show like this would take a few months to be shown in the UK.  Typically, a show starting in the Fall season would premier here in January or February.  I believe the motivation was to allow the show to run continuously without reruns.  But this makes it difficult for fans in the UK when surfing the Internet and not wanting to find out too much before getting a chance to see the show.  It’s a lot like taping a sports event and then trying to avoid the sports news until you get a chance to watch it.

I think piracy has helped bring this about.  The big assumption that people are trying to steal content without paying is not always correct.  If more shows are managed like this, you would see a lot less illegal downloads.  If networks offered fee-based programming online, pirated tv shows would dwindle.  Even iTunes shows wait until the UK premiers before something is offered.  But at least they didn’t have to wait long for Heroes.

Still, it did take nearly two weeks to be shown here.  I read a blog post from torrent freak a few days ago, ‘Heroes’ Causes BitTorrent Boom, which says that downloads of the show last week broke new records.  Even two weeks is a long time on the net.

By releasing content earlier, the US TV networks can control their own content before it spreads via piracy.

If you use the Marware Nike+ Pouch . . .

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. . . make sure the sensor is in the right way.

A few years ago, I started using the sensor with velcro strapped to my shoe. It worked great. I even wrote about it.

This week I got a new pair of running shoes and started using a Marware pouch. I found that my three mile runs were being logged as two miles. I was gutted and the pouch was on its way to the bin.

Then I read the instructions more carefully. I had put the sensor in upside down.

Now I’m back from a run and want to post this before I forget. If you found this post because you are googling Marware pouch problems, I hope you find this tip useful.

My Hindi Course

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On Monday night, I started a ten-week course in Beginners Hindi. I spend a lot of time speaking with people in India, and I thought it would be fun to learn a bit. After all, I’m pretty fluent in Mandarin and still maintain the basics of my quickly fading Vietnamese– so I thought I would pick up some Hindi.

I’m taking the course at the Abingdon & Witney College in Abingdon. I don’t know why I didn’t just take a course in London– I’m there every day anyway and could have just postponed the commute a few hours– but the teacher seems nice and the class is small.

I have four new classmates. All of them are English and have very interesting reasons for learning the language. There’s a lady who travels to India from time to time and wanted to use some basic Hindi. There’s a young, free-spirited, student who travels all over the world and has fallen in love with India. There’s also guy who teaches foreign languages and liked the idea of picking another one up. There’s also a woman who married a man from India and would like to pick up some Hindi so she could converse with his parents. It’s a nice group.

The class is not very structured. The teacher kept asking us how we prefer to learn? She handed out a vocabulary list with not very many words on it– but all of the spelling were transliterations. I asked whether the transliterations were consistent (like the Pinyin in Mandarin) and always spelled the same way. Apparently they aren’t. Several books spell the same word several ways.

I asked about the alphabet (Devanagari) and how long it would take to learn it. One thing we always said in any of the Mandarin courses I’ve taken over the years is “If it had an alphabet, reading this would be so much easier.” Hindi is character-based, and I thought we would probably do okay learning to read it–despite how difficult it might look. If children could learn using Devanagari, surely we could too. We spent the second half of the class writing 6 of the letters and learning how to pronounce them. It actually is a lot harder than it looks.

Anyway, we’ll see how this goes. This doesn’t look like an intensive course, but it’s a start.