I really wasn’t aware that yesterday’s cult attire became this winter’s statement of practicality and comfort. Nothing says “comfort” to me quite as much as sitting in a room with a bunch of folks wearing these Slankets:

These also go under the brand name “Snuggies”, which just seems even more disquieting of a name than the horrifying “Slanket” portmanteau when placed in a certain context:

Join the Cult of Comfort while supplies last!

You know times are getting tough when a league that has growing appeal decides to shut down for an entire season to completely restructure the league’s business fundamentals. How they’re managing to keep the afl2—which is expected to play in ’09—up and running at the same time I have no idea.

Leagues have come and gone over the years, from the USFL to NFL Europe and countless others in between, but it’s surprising to see the AFL take a bow, albeit temporarily.

While researching the rash of credit line decreases (CLD) hitting consumers holding credit cards tonight—something I’ve been thankful to avoid so far—I came across a thread discussing something a little more interesting: collection agencies seem to be hitting their own skids in this economy. Well, at least some of the smaller ones:

[…] Elite Recovery suddenly shut down, 70 people were told to leave the premises. No warning, no notice. Collections have been thin, but this was unexpected.

Earlier this week, CSGA in Columbus folded, Bronson & Migliaccio are ready to file for bankruptcy. Redline Recovery and LHR are laying off large numbers.

The reason seems to be an (ironic) inability to finance new paper from which to collect:

[…] six months ago I was hitting bonus and walking the floor part time instead of having to spend 8 hours on the phone – it was great. The paper got awful thin around October and management started “suggesting” stronger tactics on the phone. I wouldn’t have given some of these accounts to my worst enemy […]

I think our situation at RLC had to do with inability to finance new paper, but who knows for sure.

You’d think that, with more accounts finding themselves in collections, the industry would be booming right now. But perhaps with the economy slumping as far as it has lately, the old adage “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip” is taking on unprecdented meaning. Of course, users at Creditboards.com have their theories…

Thanks to an invite from Tom Sella of Boxee and Boxee’s recent support of Tiger (which I shouldn’t need for too much longer, as I’ll be coming up to speed with Leopard soon), I was able to conduct some tests using the stream pack and the alpha version of Boxee.

Some of the feeds—such as RTR Planeta, displayed above—tended to bomb out and crash the application from time to time. I need to submit a bug report for when I get a chance, and it’s something that didn’t seem to happen with the Atlantis beta of XBMC for OSX. Overall, though, the pack seemed to work quite well.

One slight annoyance I discovered between all OSX variants of XBMC (and XBMC itself) was the extremely slow buffering of each stream before finally displaying. Granted, XBMC on the Xbox did take its time, but not nearly as much as it seems to on the OSX varieties.

Yes, indeed, XBMC-TV should in fact work with Plex for OS X. In fact, it should work with any XBMC port that retains STRM functionality.

Unfortunately, due to a fire which destroyed the apartment above ours in late June—and left ours an almost total loss due to the water, mold, and smoke—my own XBMC-modded Xbox was destroyed, and until further notice no updates will be made to XBMC-TV. (Once I get 10.5 on my Macbook, I’ll likely install Plex and resume compiling and testing XBMC-TV using that instead.)

You can get the latest pack here.

I’ve been playing a little bit^* with this expired and expiring domain script in my after-hours free time to get a good workout using SimplePie now that I’m pretty much ditching another parser at work. It’s pretty nifty, even though it isn’t 100% perfect.

Check it out and see if you can’t find something better for yourself than thisismydomainitreallyrockshellyeah.com.

* Ok, I totally rewrote it.

The WX Station reporting to Weather Underground for Wicker Park, along with its respective camera, will be going down in the next 24 hours to prepare for relocation.

There is currently no ETA for either to return.