The Aaron Dragoon

The Daring Dragoon has been festooning the dead Christmas trees in my front yard with toilet paper. I may have to toss out an old refrigerator or a couple of Trans-Ams on cinder blocks to make his path more crowded and harder to navigate while prancing around in a red cape and black paper mask if he does not stop soon. I blame hulu.com for this. I also blame hulu for my nine year old son announcing that he is “thankful for the Wonder Bra, miniskirts and those little donuts that you get 12 for a dollar.”

Unfortunately for me, changes in hulu’s streaming may soon put an end to embarrassing quotes from the boy-child. After lulling me in with more television shows and movies than I could possibly watch in a lifetime, hulu switched to encrypted streams. Not a big deal to people with high speed Internet connections, I suppose, but for those of us in the hinterlands connecting via a slow as crap (no, not talking a ferret with diarrhea here, more like a constipated rhino) WISP, it is an ugly change.

Prior to this, I could use Jaksta to record my streams, an online Tivo, as it were. I could then play them back while wandering on my treadmill, or on my television via my handy Western Digital WD TV device. Unfortunately, Jaksta cannot get me the encrypted (rtmpe) streams, and is not smart enough to pull down the rtmp equivalent.

Now it is back to straight streaming. And buffering. And buffering. And buffering. A 30 minute tv show often takes an hour or more. Happy days, the Jaksta/WDTV marriage. But now it is gone. I can tolerate sitting through commercials (or wandering off to pee in the sink or whatever it is you are supposed to do during the breaks). I cannot tolerate five minute frozen screens and 15 second commercial breaks that run for several minutes as the buffer slowly fills. So, no more Damages, no more Eureka and no more Buffy. I has a sad. Damn you, hulu!