Living Without the TV

By Tommy Leung on 08/26/2009 in Life

Image via CrunchBase

It has been almost two years since I’ve had any type of television programming fed to me through an actual television set. This doesn’t mean that I’ve watched any less television programming. I think I may be watching even more TV shows than I did before.

However, I am still getting more done and doing more productive things even though I may be watching more TV shows. Before Hulu had mountains of shows available, I was watching TV shows from the network’s websites. Any shows that I used to watch on TV and are not online, I have simply stopped watching them. I was a fan of SmallVille but, it is no where to be found online.

If it can be found, it is more work than it’s worth. I can live without the show. The networks that have decided to put their shows online have been able to reach me and sell advertising at the same time. There is little drawback for them. Either they were not going to have as an audience at all or have me as an audience online.

Being able to watch shows when I wanted to really helps with being productive. I don’t have to schedule my time around when a show is on. I can do the work I need to do and when I want downtime, watch all the episodes I missed. Sounds like a great deal for everyone!

I think it is fantastic and Hulu and YouTube are offering shows of all kinds. I feel the TV and cable model is a thing of the past. I don’t want to plan my time around the network’s schedule and I don’t want to pay for channels that I’ll never watch.

I would much rather pay HBO directly to watch their shows over the internet, on my time, than to pay for cable.

TV is so yesterday.

Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom

By Tommy Leung on 08/21/2009 in Games

I recently finished this Dora the Explorer game for Nickelodeon. It was quite a few months of work as the only programmer on the project. The game has about seven mini-games separated by three side-scrollers.

I don’t normally do games for such a young audience so it was interesting. The game mechanics were quite dumbed down. The games themselves were pretty simple: counting, pattern matching, etc. There should be a desktop game coming out for PC and Mac–that is where the bulk of the work is.

I think the game turned out pretty good. It was games like this one that has had me so busy the past several months.