Pablo Fernicola's Personal Blog

As Spring continues to take over the Pacific Northwest, the deer are making their usual appearance. It is fairly common to see them around our house, but a few weekends ago we spotted a couple close to downtown Redmond (half way between home and work).


This is close to Marymoor park, a nice place for them, but fairly dangerous because there is a lot of traffic in the area. Every year, we usually come across a couple of dead deers on highway 520, next to the park.

Don't know how this happened. Probably it was because we don't channel surf by the SciFi channel that much (we tend to use only the Favorites button on the Comcast remote), but the bottom line is that we managed to miss the existence of Battlestar Galactica for the past three years!

We finally got into the series this weekend. We got the DVD of the mini series, and watched it Saturday. We also got season three from Costco and ordered Razor, and we will go through those on a future weekend. I am still debating whether to get season 1 on HD DVD, although the price is a bit too high right now.

We already got a couple of the new episodes recorded on the Media Center, and have the series programmed in it. I got the free downloads on X Box Live as well, and downloaded the podcasts to listen to while running.

If you have any suggestions as to how best to approach the series, please leave comments.

The series has many layers to it, and touches on interesting and complex plot themes. Not as brainy as Twin Peaks, but with a certain darkness reminiscent of Blade Runner.

If you also managed to miss Battlestar Galactica, get going fast, as the final season is underway.

Recently I visited Washington DC, to attend the National Academy of Science's e-Journal meeting. A side meeting took me to Dupont Circle, and that gave me some time to drop by the Starbucks facing the square, which has the distinction of being the first Starbucks store I ever visited.

Now and then I get people asking me what I have been up to (and not blogging about it). Well, last week we released the Tech Preview for one part of the project my team has been working on.

Tech Preview blog

This is a very exciting milestone and kicks off the public phase of what I expect will be a fairly impactful set of tools to help with scientific information dissemination. And, certainly, information related to medicine and related fields tends to impact all of us at one point in our life.

With the fresh HD DVD news, I am going to kick off a discussion on my views on the future direction for HD and video content consumption, based on my personal experience.

I love movies and enjoy watching the good ones several times, going back to them as if they were great books. I also enjoy the extra material that comes with many discs. But, this behavior does not match the mainstream public, so one angle in this discussion will relate to the different audiences, and another to the technologies involved and their likely evolution.

Read below and see if you agree with me that the future is in streaming content...