I can never be a politician; I’m way too good at verbal gaffes.  In an attempt to be funny or witty, I frequently manage to blurt out something wildly inappropriate, embarrassing myself and everyone around me.  But there’s no a tape or video recorder to memorialize the moment.

The Internet is a different story:  every blog post you write, picture you post, Facebook wall you write on — it’s all there “forever”.  As time goes on, we’re all sharing more, building a “comet tail” of our content behind us.  And some have learned the hard way that drunken party pictures may not help your career.

As the “blogging generation” grows up and enters politics, it’s going to get really interesting.  Even with an entirely professional on-line persona, you can have expressions and opinions from the past that you regret.

It’s starting with the Obama administration questionnaire — what about that blog post from a few years back?

There is some big news buried under Obama’s election win:  the FCC has adopted rules allowing for unlicensed use of some TV spectrum.

This is HUGE news.

Spectrum is a finite resource, and it’s availability (or lack of) is a limiting factor in satisfying growing demand for new services.  Most spectrum use requires a license, and incumbent license holders are quite adept at forming barriers against new competitors (good luck trying to start a new cellphone provider, for example).  The FCC occasionally auctions off spectrum, but that policy is fundamentally flawed (IMHO) if the goal is maximum benefit to the people.

Historically, the most disruptive and pervasive  applications have been unlicensed (e.g. Part 15), where, like the Internet, you don’t need someone’s permission to innovate.  Think of CB radio, cordless phones, the Family Radio Service, remote control of all kinds, low power FM, wireless headsets, Bluetooth and Wifi.

More unlicensed spectrum means more good stuff.

We’ve had a Netflix Player/Roku set top box now for a few months, and we’ve used it quite a bit.

The short review:  a decent product execution, but with very limited video content. Netflix’s “watch instantly” offerings mostly consists of TV content and older movies.  It’s rare that you find recent, top-quality movies.  Our kids quickly ran out of new things to watch.

The physical product is very nice and compact (roughly the size of a 1″ stack of CD cases).  It has no buttons, and only a power indicator on the front.  The remote control is very straightforward with a small number of buttons, and the on-screen menus are simple and easy to understand.  Setup and configuration was very easy, and the box has Wifi so you don’t need a wired connection.

We do wish fast forward worked differently.  It’s not like a Tivo — instead, it scrolls through a set of small video still frames.  When you hit “play”, the box takes a few seconds to rebuffer and resume from the new point.  Fortunately, Netflix’s video content doesn’t have ads that need to be skipped.

Also, videos can only be added to your viewing queue through Netflix’s Web interface — you can’t choose new videos through the box itself.  This is much more useful than our cable company’s on-screen interface for selecting an on-demand movie, and we’ve found it helpful to limit what our kids can watch (while still letting them choose from a list of options).  However, if you sit down at your TV to watch something new, you’ll need to go find your PC to add the movie to your queue.

Bottom line:  for $100, we’d probably get one again, but we’re really hoping that Netflix brings more (and better) content on-line.