"You can watch movies online, for free!" exclaimed a colleague over lunch.

At first, I thought she referred to downloading copies of DivX rips over BitTorrent from The Pirate Bay. I mean, if you're going to watch a movie, it might as well be DVD quality with full 5.1 surround sound right?

Wrong.

As it turned out, she watches movies from Movies On Demand--a quick and dirty hack that aggregates illegally uploaded movies from public video hosting sites including Stage6, Google video, DailyMotion, Veoh, MySpace, Bolt, Guba, OUOU, and YouTube.

I tried it out and some of the movies such as Juno come in full-length hosted on YouKu.com, while others come in parts such as Brokeback Mountain hosted on Tudou.com.

What I'm beginning to realise with the popularity of free online videos is that people are getting less fussy about quality for the quick fix. I also hear of many who can follow a whole season of Japanese anime on YouTube where each episode is broken up into nine separate videos!

What's going on here? The box office queues are not getting any shorter and more and more folks are jumping on Blu-ray and HDTV too. Do we want quality or not?

The answer I believe is: Accessibility.

Apparently this is not the same as a passenger moving from first class to economy and back without a complain. This is about people getting what they want, when they want it.

What is interesting is that what already exists organically is an example of where services such as Hulu should be. Hulu uses the same method of streaming small screens, but doesn't have all the episodes available so it's only half accessible (new content only) and not completely accessible as we'd like it to be.

In 2004 I had a preview of this phenomenon. That year I flew long haul at least once a month. I remember watching 80% of my movies in the air on tiny screens--and I didn't mind at all. Little did I know it applied to the laptop in the bedroom too.

Next up: All of the above on the mobile phone. Wireless.

I've always told myself that I never needed those terribly ugly laptop cooling pads until I found this ...

... and until I got a laptop that heated up as badly as my MacBook Pro.

I found that I had to constantly keep my table top fan on or have the room's air-conditioning on to keep my MacBook Pro from becoming molten aluminum.

This is how it looks under my inferno of a Mac.

It's a simple device powered by USB, the fan's pretty quite making it good for those overnight *ahem* downloading *ahem* sessions while I sleep. The white plastic is pretty good quality and the grey rubber portions are a good grip for the laptop.

The only thing I feel it lacks is more fans. Some of the alternatives to this Belkin cooling pad have two or more fans which might be more effective. But I'm happy with this one simply because of its good looks (if I'm gonna be geek, might as well be chic).

The height and tilt is something I got to get used to since I usually use it flat, but it hasn't come between me and this blog post so I'm cool with it.

It cost me S$49 which is quite expensive but since I never turn my machine off even when the mid-day sun warms the room so I'm more than happy to spend on this device.

I'm right now on a weekend break from my army reservist training which is two work weeks long. The Singapore army doesn't let me bring a mobile phone with a camera into the training camp so I have to live with a 3G-less, camera-less, java app-less Samsung SGH-C160.

Days before having to pack my bags for my in-camp training, I tried to get my contacts over to this temporary phone when I realised the "Copy contacts to SIM card" function didn't work as planned. Technical details and frustrations aside, this having to input numbers manually made me realise how dependent I was on my mobile phone for numbers.

Believe it it or not I have no recollection or memory of any phone number except my own and Singapore emergency numbers.

I've become a cyborg with my capacity for number memory almost completely dependent on my mobile device! I'm not kidding, I can't call my mum, the office, or any friend without thumbing through my phone. Without my phone, I won't even know how to order pizza or call a cab.

This is actually puzzling as I actually memorise many URLs and email addresses, but not phone numbers. Maybe it's because I carry my mobile phone so close to me all day long that I've taken to depending on it to such a great extent.

I also believe that when a service starts acting like a repository, we tend to depend on it more than we do our own brains. I see this phenomenon happening with del.icio.us as well. Sometimes I don't remember what I bookmarked. I have a browser shortcut that bookmarks the page I want on a click and that's that.

I don't know if I should be scared or happy about this situation. Already without pervasive wireless access and ubiquitous computing I'm so dependent on digital services, what happens when everything is just an instant click away?