Just as the baseball season is coming to a close, a new season is upon us - that of the Fall television season. After months of mundane TiVo near-ignorance, and dabbling in the BBC America network, primetime television roared back to life in our home earlier this week with the 1-2-3 combo of Bones, House, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. After a brief Wednesday's vacation, the TiVo whirred up again tonight, taking in Ugly Betty, CSI and ER.

(I'll let you guess which two of the shows are slugged "wife only")

In the summer months away from the standard idiot box fare, we spent a significant amount of time enjoying our Nintendo Wii, reading 200+ RSS feeds in Google Reader, blogging a bit ourselves, picking winners on Ballhype, catching up on our Netflix queue, and attending a ton of A's games. Now, as we've regained yet another distraction from all the real work we need to do, some of those other items just might go down in the number of hours spent daily - or, in the cases of blogging or reading RSS feeds, they'll have to be done in parallel. There's nothing like sitting cross-legged on the bed with the laptop open while occasionally glancing up at the TV set to make sure you haven't lost track of the plot, after all.

To be honest, there weren't any real cliff-hangers from Spring that had us waiting with anticipation. In fact, we were disappointed, as we are every year, to see some of our favorite shows disappear, as Fox's hilarious War At Home was axed without fanfare and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was similarly canned, though a lot more noisily.

Now, our time with the TV becomes a balancing act. How do we make sure we train the Series One TiVo to get our BBC shows (Coupling and Hotel Babylon) without missing some season premieres? Is it possible to play the Nintendo Wii while watching CSI? (I think not...) And will our Saturdays be spent watching the two, three or four shows we missed during the week?

All I know is regardless of how many shows we take in, and whether we can possibly catch our fill of crime dramas, medical emergencies and jury trials, we'll have our TiVo remote in hand to zap through the commercials and save precious minutes with each episode. Hopefully, we won't find any more new shows to add to our own fall schedule, or I'll have to start calling in sick to the office.

At last week's PlugandPlay Expo, one of the highlights, in addition to Spokeo, was meeting the CEO of PhotoCrank, and being introduced to a playful, if not yet particularly useful, tool to mock up Web photos, adding pictures and comments throughout the Internet. Much like the ANtics comics have been powered by ComicLife to add thought bubbles to the A's players heads via software, PhotoCrank lets users tweak and "crank" any photos they bump into on the Web.

The service, currently in beta, encourages users to "unleash your blah-blah-blah on photos...everywhere," and to "make the entire web your playground". With a quick download of the PhotoCrank browser extension, available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox (sorry - no Safari version yet), you can begin "cranking" photos, and adding them to a list on the site, called the "crank list".

I installed the PhotoCrank extension to my Firefox browser on Mac OS X, and after a quick restart of Firefox, I had a new PhotoCrank toolbar, and in the corner of each photo I ran into, there is now a blue PhotoCrank image. Clicking on the button opens the PhotoCrank toolbox. Click on the "Crank It" button, and you're given a whole array of preloaded sayings, ranging from "Your Mom!" to "Them's fighting words." as well as a host of preloaded images and clip art. When you select the desired note, you can expand or contract the size, and make your own pithy saying, as you wish. Below, you can see the steps I took to modify my colored iPhone image from Monday.




(You can see not only the "Woot!" thought bubble, but the addition of a radioactive label to my blue and gold iPhone.)

Assuming I keep the browser toolbar installed, and assuming I keep using Firefox, instead of Safari, I can see myself doodling with PhotoCrank on some sites, and adding my mischief to the crank list. After all, somebody already posted their own "worm in the apple" cranked version of my iPhone for the world to see.

When in picture cranking mode, the toolbox window contains a small ad. In the above screenshot, you can see an ad for the T-Mobile Sidekick. While the role of Internet advertising can always be up for debate, I doubt users will stop mid-crank to click on anything. I'd be more useful to get the advertisement at the conclusion of the photocrank, or just after, or even as an interstitial between making the edits and submitting to the site. If the goal to make money is to show as many ads as possible, then they're all set. If it's to get high click-through rates, changes would likely have to be made.

I added a link in my sidebar to PhotoCrank, as the only way the service will thrive is through viral adoption and sharing of user's creative edits of photos. Through massive use and sharing, the service could be fun to watch develop over time, whether they try to stay independent, or if they are purchased and folded into a bigger offering from some social network out there. Until then, I'll leave the badge up and keep adding my own Web graffiti to the world at large.

After claiming our seventh Ballhype Golden Picks contest victory last week, achieving a controversial record score in the process, for the second time, we offered our t-shirt trophy to another member, who registered on the blog.

This time, we had eight entries, from "Reasonable Doubt for a Reasonable Price", "Zorgon", "VicTimes", "Redsauce", "Chone", "Patrick", "GREGSKY" and "Jason", the site's co-founder.

As with our last t-shirt give-away, we cooked up a quasi-elaborate scheme that featured Molly, our 18-year-old beagle, her love of food, and our camera. The conquest is laid out below.

Step 1: Create one Master "Bingo" Card

I listed out the eight entrants' names in equally-sized boxes and printed them out. The center square in the 3x3 table was "Molly's Free Kibble Spot".


The Eight Entrants: Click for Larger Image

Step 2: Introduce Molly to the Square

Molly asked to be shown the card before selecting the winner. Upon her approval, we could continue.


Molly Finds the Card to Her Liking

Step 3: The Judge Gains Incentive

Molly was escorted into the other room, and a piece of kibble was placed on each of the nine squares. The winner would be selected by being the LAST piece of kibble eaten. There were no doubts Molly would eat all nine.


The Card With Prizes for the Judge

Step 4: Molly Picks a Winner

With the card full of kibble, Molly first wrongly raced to the kitchen only to return to the card and started wolfing down the pieces, one by one. The very last to go was that of Redsauce, and due to that delay, Redsauce is our winner! You can see Molly in action below.


Molly making her selection

Congratulations to Redsauce! Erin should be in touch with you shortly to claim your prize!

If you're not yet a Ballhype member, you certainly should be. Join the site now!

If you consider we've got our 42-inch plasma TV, a TiVo, a Nintendo Wii and the Apple TV humming along, sucking down our share of electricity, it's clear that only one real TV device is missing - a Slingbox. Though I've considered buying a Slingbox from Sling Media on more than one occasion, so I could catch up on the home TV while away, I've never made the jump - and if the breaking news from PaidContent.org is true, I won't be a customer before they jump from being a scrappy tech startup to part of a big corporate monolith. News from PaidContent.org says Sling Media is being picked up by EchoStar, manufacturers of the Dish Network, for all of $380 million.

This could be good or bad for current or prospective customers of Slingbox. While it's sure EchoStar has plenty of capital to expand distribution and continue manufacturing the next generation of TV streaming gear, I always have a tendency to want to root for the underdog, and have something resembling distrust for the mega-monolith, as it often seems the bigger you are, the less likely you are to pull off something amazing - instead, being beholden to the quarter by quarter financials and supporting an existing customer base on prior revisions of hardware or code.

I've optimistically had the Slingbox on my Amazon wish list for the better part of two years now, stupid commercials aside, and maybe, just maybe, I'll take it off for the short term and see how this purchase shakes out.