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Last year (or maybe longer?) I had a Netflix subscription. I got it because I wanted to watch Battlestar Galactica and a couple of other shows, and I don’t pay for cable, so it seemed a reasonable compromise. I dropped it when my TV watching started to peter out.

In the interim, they launched an internet based video viewing system. Essentially you could play stuff, but a limited number of hours. Something like x hours per $ you spent on the service. So if you spent $17 on the service, you’d get 17 hours of view time per month. Not bad!

Well I’m thinking to myself “I need to see this next season of Battlestar Galactica” and I figure maybe I’ll get Netflix for a while again. Then I see that their internet based video distribution is now unlimited. That’s right – a subset of their content can be viewed on demand online. And with an HTPC, this is totally sweet.

I was speaking with my friend Nat about the ski conditions and prices in NH, and he mentioned that in Utah they can do half day tickets in the morning. I was like “Do they give different colors or something?” and he told me that they have a RFID ticket system that lets you through a turnstile and on to the lift, and the tickets stop working half way through.

Wouldn't it be great if they did the same thing, only you were like “Hey, here's 200 bucks” and they charged your pass up. It'd be like 3–5 bucks a run. So you could do a few runs for 10 bucks, and feel like you didn't get screwed. The downside for this on the mountain is that they'd want to be efficient with their lift operations and get people through the lines as quickly as possible, so they didn't spend their time in lines. Exacerbating that problem is the fact that even more people will start skiing, because they're getting a decent deal. The flipside of this is that you'll likely have less people skiing all day long because they feel like they have to get their money's worth; they're already getting their money's worth!