I’ve been very happy to have a DirecTiVo this year, since both Enterprise and Smallville were on at the same time (and they’re the only two network shows we watch). Having the DirecTiVo meant we could record both of them and watch at our leisure, skipping the commercials.

But since we’re still waiting for our HDTiVo to arrive, we’ve had to watch the shows in standard definition instead of HDTV. That seemed like a good trade-off for not seeing commercials and not having to pick one or the other, but tonight, we made an exception for the season finale of Enterprise. Viewing it in HDTV was very nice — being powerless to skip the commercials wasn’t.

The show brought the third season’s story arc to a clean conclusion, but I was somewhat disappointed by the final twist [caution, spoilers!]. If you missed last week’s episode, you can find a slightly twisted summary on Trek Nation (thanks to Jeff for the pointer).

Now that new TV is over for a while, we can work on our backlog. The old TiVo has tons of Good Eats, a few movies, and some miscellany (it’s not full, thanks to Weaknees…we still have a movie we recorded the first week we had it, back in January ’03…wonder if we’ll ever watch it), and then there’s the rest of the only season of Firefly, not to mention the Mr. Bean episodes that Jeff and Diane have watched but I haven’t, and….

Too bad I don’t get a summer vacation to catch up on my viewing!

Ten years ago today, IBM officially joined the Web age when www.ibm.com went live. There wasn’t a whole lot to see on the site (though there was a 36.2-second sound clip from Lou Gerstner, welcoming visitors, and promising frequent changes), and you couldn’t buy anything on the site, either. But it was a start.

Of course, I’d already had IBM on the Web for a few months, by creatively misusing Mike Cowlishaw‘s GoServe for OS/2 as a server for HTTP 0.9 (Mike later rewrote GoServe to be a fully-functional and very capable true HTTP 1.0 server). My server (index.almaden.ibm.com) started life as a Gopher server, and its Web presence was a very thin layer over the Gopher tree — but it was there.

A few months after the official launch of www.ibm.com, I decided it was time to pull the plug on index.almaden.ibm.com. But the name was so well known (and baked into the Gopher client for OS/2), that I insisted the name be transferred to the official OS/2 site in Austin. After all, I wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint any of the hundreds of people visiting the site a week!

Eventually, the name vanished (along with the OS/2 site, I suspect). Gopher and OS/2 are footnotes to computing history. But www.ibm.com is still alive and well (Ed Costello has more to say about its first few years) — and you can buy things there, or so I’ve been told.