Last week, for a moment, in the morning, I wondered if it was Wednesday or Friday. I wasn’t sure. Turns out it was Saturday. I like to check from time to time. Often I know the day of the week, but rarely the day of the month. After all, people’s moods and behaviors are influenced heavily by the day of the week, and that is good to consider when dealing with them. Never trust a person on a weekend. They may have the best intentions, but they are reeling in some bizarre fantasy existence. Or maybe it’s the other way around. That’s more up to them, than to me. All I know is you must target the right person of the person. That is, if you must.

My last written piece here was about an abdicating Pope, the textures of our personalities coming through the ringer of the Church, and mechanical organs. It took someone like the Pope, way back in the day, with power enough to decree that all the world has lost a calendar day. To fix things. I wonder who could get away with something like that now? Would it be the purview of astronomers or physicists? Do politicians decide the day, or perhaps some government agency? The monkey with the most money?

There is nothing really anything about a Tuesday, or a Sunday. Or 4pm for that matter. In one hour, or next year. I imagine around two weeks ago I decided to “go dark”. No messages. No calls. I imagine it was around two weeks ago, because it feels like… what I remember two weeks feels like in my memory. You know, week-ends are a fairly new invention – the last hundred years or so. And yet here we are now, everyone taking them for granted. I think it had something to do with industrialization and the labor movement.

Of course, weekends and days of the week, and the calendar, are illusions: pretty tick marks on a scale that measures something we didn’t always realize was the Earth’s rotation around the sun. An illusion much like money – which we give power through our collective belief and adherence.

Outside so many buried bulbs are sprouting up so beautifully unique within their bounds. Two yards of fresh manure compost still steams, nearly ready, being turned.

I wonder if we might inevitably embrace a metric system of time measurement if we manage to venture out into space, losing the baroque nature of an Earth-centric scale. Like so much has been lost and gained as we evolve into the creatures that we are.

I have been missing from friends for this time, and missing from those who rely on me to answer their questions and do things for them. There have been people who pay me each month to be always available to them. The last of these is gone. Perhaps it is like children growing up to move out of the house, both sweet and sad. There are others who have not paid me, but I’ve always been there for them. This will remain true, but on time scales that arise from my own organic flow. It will take a while to respond.

Being someone who creates, you are presented with interesting challenges. These challenges depend upon the landscape in which you create. Some people are most comfortable creating add-on bits to mostly already-existing structures, with already-existing tools. These are the craftsmen. It’s a different type who ventures into the dark void to create something utterly new. Here is your blank white page, with little or no context. Go!

These are the rare and courageous lunatics who make all new things possible. And they fail, or they fly. But always they are met with opposition, from others and especially themselves. This can’t be done. This has already been done. This is impractical. And the worst of all: nobody will care. It is a matter of constraints, those constraints that others place upon you, those you place upon yourself, and constraints we all experience as a natural course of being an being who exists within a social context, filled with collective ideas and beliefs.

That last piece I mentioned also spoke about transcendence. Moving beyond. Finding perspectives and vistas. Sewing seeds for next year. And sometimes to really do, you must first un-do. You know your pen. You see the paths. And here you are.

Radicalism is almost never right, because it is reactionary. Reactionary against something. This is fundamentally different from transcendence. Transcendence does not seek to destroy, though some things may fall away. Transcendence embraces more, beyond our current context. Even software developers can do it. Even with accountants and marketing people keeping their pen. Their world is fear, control and manipulation. Yours is truth. And no one will progress anywhere without you.

The common thread is order, and in that you are common brothers struggling against the always-present universal nature of entropy. To address the common fears, almost everything can be done, if you can imagine it realistically. The harder part is starting down the path, and bringing help along if you need it. And nothing has been done before, if you didn’t do it. So many times I have been asked to study what’s out there so I know what to do. That’s more limiting than a calendar, or clock. You know what needs to happen, and if you don’t know the full picture, find it out. Then create, and will never have been created before. And as for people not caring… well, I suppose it depends on what they care about.

What they care about on a weekday, I should say. But this is the weekend. Or rather, the day of transition, Friday – the portal into your weekend world. Where you can entertain such ideas as might become you. At least, in a sense.

Lunatics all, really. With your clocks and broken hearts. Something to keep you going. To keep you focused on. Til the weekend always comes. And the alteration of data represents more money to live. And the environment we choose and make, conducive to this long maintenance, or as an alternative, an acknowledgement: that void of the un-done whose shreds serve only fertilize the ground. For all that grows.

I am a cable and satellite cord-cutter. All the content I view on televisions comes from free over-the-air broadcast stations or the Internet. Getting Internet video sources to play conveniently on televisions takes a little digging, but it’s well worth the effort. I find now that watching television, when I do, is more of an active experience than a passive one and it takes up a considerably less quantity of time.

For scheduling and recording over-the-air broadcast television I use MythTV. In fact, if you’re interested in using it for yourself, I have a little guide for building it from source code. Most Linux distributions come with it pre-packaged, though, and you’re probably better off with that.

For watching videos and television shows from the Internet I use the Boxee Box and have given my 80-year old father a Roku device, which he loves and has no problem operating. The Boxee Box is far more feature-full than the Roku, and I greatly prefer it. You can even link in your Twitter and Facebook feeds, and watch videos people post, which are all nicely organized for you. Also, you can subscribe to many television shows that are also made available for streaming on the Internet, and their app selection is huge and varied. The Roku is great for simplicity. The only downside of the Boxee Box is that it doesn’t support Amazon Video. You can even send your Boxee Box videos you see while browsing on your desktop or laptop computers.

I am, however, a big Google Android user and love the interoperability between their software services and just about any device you have. So I’ve been curious about Google TV. I haven’t heard the best reviews about it, so I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. A little while ago I ran across a device called the Vizio Co-Star which was incredibly inexpensive for a network-attached HD video box, rivaling the Roku in price and exceeding its hardware features. So I bought it, to give it a try.

The first thing the Vizio Co-Star did was connect to my Google account, which makes sense, since it’s an Android device, or rather Google TV device. Actually, I’m not sure why you’d want to call it a Google TV – it’s very much like any other Android device, except you navigate through organized menus instead of clicking big screens of icons. It even gives you access to the Google Play store, though with far fewer apps.

After I signed in, the Co-Star found an update, downloaded it, and installed. Navigating the menus and selecting things was slower than the Boxee Box, and even slower than the Roku. Since that time, the Co-Star has updated again, and now the navigation is even faster than the Roku.

It has Netflix, and it works wonderfully. It also has several other video sources, including Amazon. The big remote control (which has a great little keyboard on the back of it) has big shortcut buttons for Netflix and Amazon, too. Irritatingly, the Amazon application is really just a bookmark to the Amazon Video website. It works great, but I don’t like navigating a web page to watch a video. The Netflix app is great, though. Thankfully, the remote control has a trackpad that lets you move the mouse cursor around on the screen, and even scroll pages by moving up and down on the right-side of the pad, just like most laptops. The scrolling is a little wild, though – overly sensitive. I sure hope they come out with a proper Amazon Video app soon.

Of course, you get all your Google Play stuff – all your music that you’ve bought from Google Music or have synced to Google from other sources, is all available in your normal, and well-done Android music app. The same with videos and even your pictures. It’s very nice how integrated it is. I particularly love how they’ve integrated your YouTube account. You can literally just set it running on your subscriptions, and it will play them all on your TV one after the other, the newest additions in all your subscriptions, to the oldest. And it’s very easy to skip forward and back, too.

And in that same light, I love how you can be watching a YouTube video on your phone or tablet, and just shoot it off to your Google TV (Vizio Co-Star in this case). It’s a one key press operation, and you can pause or skip, all on your phone or tablet after that, like it’s a remote control.

Also, if you install an app called Able Remote, you can send any video at all, or even web pages to your Vizio Co-Star (Google TV). It’s a great little app that acts as a remote and a means to send stuff to the TV that goes beyond just YouTube.

Video and audio playback is great on the Co-Star. HD video is perfectly smooth, and it’s sharp and vibrant. It has wireless capability, but I plug it in – stuff always seems to work more reliably when it’s hard-wired. The Roku we have here doesn’t have an ethernet jack, though, and even though this Roku is 1080p capable, it doesn’t look as nice as the Vizo Co-Star, at least to my eyes.

Another nice thing about the Vizio Co-Star is that you can watch regular TV without having to change the TV input or AV equipment input. Google TV in the Co-Star will overlay right on top of your TV, cable or satellite picture, when you want it. This is accomplished by having both a HDMI input and HDMI output connector on back. Plug your normal TV, satellite or cable box into the Co-Star, and then plug your Co-Star into your television set, and you no longer have to change inputs. It even gives you PiP capability (Picture in Picture), so that you can watch your tv/cable/satellite show up in a corner of the Google TV screen while you’re using another Andoid app on the larger bit of the screen. Personally, I don’t use this feature much, but I imagine some people really might.

It’s not all love and glory, though. I’ve had the HDMI pass-through stop working a couple times. Just a couple times. It just won’t show video from the tv/satellite/cable source. Power cycling fixes this, though. Seriously, just a couple times out of a lot of use. Also, the app selection available to you in the Google Play store isn’t that great. There are a good number, but not a ton like I would love. There is so much potential in these devices. Popular ones like Twit.tv and Revision 3 are there, and Pandora. And they work beautifully. CNBC is great. Wall Street Journal. Lots of things, but not like the main Android app store. One of my favorites is a police/emergency scanner that lets you listen to local emergency channels. It’s kinda freaky. There was a guy they found passed out in a ditch near my house. I would have never known!

Anyway, I just wanted to get this little description and opinion piece written and posted. Because when I was searching for a Google TV device, and found the Co-Star, there were no reviews that addressed just the common concerns an Android and Google ecosystem user might have. The Co-Star is a great, great piece of hardware, and wonderfully implemented in software. And for the price, it’s a no-brainer. I love it. I use it every day. My Boxee is sitting unplugged and unused. I may plug it in again, though, because it was much better at finding free TV show sources on the Internet.

I hope this helps someone, and let me know if you have any questions at all, and I’ll try to answer them. I’ve probably left out a lot. Here’s a picture of the remote and my dirty box. The Vizio logo really is a bit sinister-looking – every time I boot the thing I’m reminded of Cylons.