Today is the day that my productivity goes straight downhill.

We have what might be my favorite show in the history of television shows on Joost.

Beverly Hills 90210. And yes, it’s the Brenda years.

Alternatively called, by my friends and me, 90210, BH nine-oh, Nine-oh, Beverly Hills – Nine-oh was the highlight of my young (and, let’s face it, post-college) life.

I am euphoric. The first season alone had EVERYTHING – teenage pregnancy, drunk driving, car theft, affairs, alcoholism, cliques and, of course, drama and romance.

I have so many fond memories about this show. Just to hear the theme song again brings a tear to my eye. My friends and I taped this episode (we used VCRs back in the early ‘90s) and watched it over and over again. In college, there were late night BH Nine-oh "trivia" games ... and sadly, the list goes on.

I don’t think there’s ever been a group of 20- and 30-year olds who have done as good of a job at playing high school students as the gang from West Beverly. Even know, I think of them by their character names: Brandon, Brenda, Dylan, Kelly, Donna, David, Steve and Andrea. Oh, plus Nat, Emily Valentine, Scott, Jim and Cindy, and on and on … I think it's indisputable that this show revolutionized teen dramas. The OC certainly wouldn't have happened without Nine-oh and, in my opinion, 90210 is also responsible for today’s best television show – Gossip Girl.

The episodes from the first three seasons are up now and the channel will be up soon – I’ll update this as soon as it is. Also, I am TRULY sorry, but this show is only available in the U.S. But summer’s coming and the dollar is still cheap – and now there's even more reason for you to come visit!

Updated: The channel is up!

Today we bring you a story that straddles the line between birth announcements and obituaries. Despite dying in 1985 while saving the universe, Barry Allen, a.k.a. The Flash, a.k.a. The Scarlet Speedster, a.k.a. The Fastest Man Alive, was resurrected today, perhaps because the universe still needs saving.

As opposed to real life, resurrections like Barry's happen relatively frequently in comic books. In the Justice League alone, Superman, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow and Hawkman have all come back from the dead. But this resurrection, 23 years later, is a bit of a surprise.

Though he lived only in our comic book memories and flashbacks for 23 years, The Flash lived on – on TV, that is. If you haven't run out to pick up your copy of DC Universe no. 0 yet, you can get your fix of The Flash on Joost. Outside the U.S., check out Pulp Secret for more comic news or another series inspired by a comic book character with a similar name – Flash Gordon.

Today is possibly the biggest day since last September’s release of Halo 3. Well, at least in the world of gaming – I guess there have been some other important days and events that have passed in the last six months.

For those of you who don’t know, (and really, if you read, watch or listen to any news, it’s impossible not to know this), today is the release day for Grand Theft Auto IV.

I’ve been desperately seeking out news and reviews of this game since my closest connection to a PS3, my brother, moved to Boston last week. A couple of the guys here ordered advanced copies, but we only have a Wii in the office, so it doesn’t look like I’m going to get to play today.

To feed my hunger for GTA IV news, I checked out some reports on ITN. Then I thought I would check out some of our gaming channels – Frag, GameTap TV, GameTrailers and TrueGameHeadz – to see if they had any sneak peeks, but it’s a little early for their video reviews.

So I searched for Grand Theft Auto on Joost.com, and found this handy MOJO show – Grand Theft Auto 101. It’s not just about how to steal a car, but about how to keep your car from being stolen. I don’t have a car anymore, (it just doesn’t make any sense in New York), but when I did, someone broke into it twice. They didn’t take the car, (and once, they didn’t find anything to take), but I still felt violated. Fortunately, years later, I’ve recovered.

Anyone who has trolled through the pages on the Joost website, (and, if you’re here, then you’ve probably trolled quite a bit), might have learned that our London office has a pet/mascot/Vice President of Office Harmony called Marley.

Not to be outdone by our London colleagues, yesterday afternoon, months – no, a year – after Marley first made his appearance in the London office, one of my fellow greenhouse sitters decided it was time for New York to get an office pet/mascot.

But we’re kind of limited on the kinds of pets we can have here. We share office space with about 50 other companies, so dogs and cats are out of the question. Animals from the rodent family- gerbils, hamsters, ferrets, guinea pigs – were also vetoed; New Yorkers spend a lot of time and money keeping rodents out of our lives. Also, we needed something hearty and cheap – something that can survive the weekend without being fed, or something that, if they didn’t make it through the weekend, we wouldn’t be too sad or broken over their loss.

What’s left? Goldfish. Thanks to Paulina, we now have two – a black one and an orange one. We’re not naming them because we don’t want to get too attached. My guess is that if this goes well (or even if it doesn’t) we’ll have a full-on tropical fish tank by the end of the year.

Today is Earth Day, and as if the Earth knew, we're being treated to an absolutely beautiful day here in New York.

One might think that I'd be less than enthused about being inside on a beautiful day, but I'm totally fine with it. Really. It is because I, along with six other colleagues or so (the number shifts depending on who's in town) sit in a room surrounded by four desk-to-ceiling windows. Every day that the sun shines, we experience a greenhouse-like effect in our own microcosm. Even in the dead of winter, you can walk into our "tank" and find us wearing tank tops and sunglasses (and it's not just because we're cool).

If I knew more about the science behind climate change and global warming I could probably make some sort of analogy – like we're Antarctica under the ozone hole, and the big room is a country with a big carbon footprint – but I'm not sure if that analogy holds.

In the names of "science" and "work," I've spent most of this beautiful day educating myself about the planet by watching the Earth Day is Everyday channel on Joost. So far, I've learned a lot about Earth Day, and I've "traveled" to different climates and all corners of the world. I've also picked up some new tips on how to live a greener life. Interestingly, unplugging your appliances (i.e. computers, monitors, docking stations, etc.) is one of the ways you can reduce your carbon footprint, so I might just go ahead and unplug right now. Not because it's a beautiful day and I want to go outside. Because it's good for the Earth.

Being at a startup, we all spend too much time at our uncomfortable desks and chairs and not enough time exercising. For some of my colleagues, this has led to some back pain issues – one has even made himself a makeshift standing up desk. The truth is I’m included in this group – there was about a month when I traded my desk chair for an exercise ball, only to become convinced that I was only making the problem worse.

I was browsing around Joost.com today looking for anything that had to do with the word play (long story) – and I found a show called How to Play Anaconda. I pride myself on the fact that I’ve played just about every card game, but I’d never heard of this Anaconda game. So I thought maybe it was a joke – something from The Onion News Network or CHTV, perhaps.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but now you can find out which channel a show is in directly from the Joost Link page, so I figured out that “How to Play Anaconda” is on the Howcast channel. I checked out this channel and to my pleasant surprise found three shows about how to deal with back pain. So I started watching.

And I kept watching – there was just so much for me to learn (and lessons that would have been useful months ago). But the learning wasn't only for me – I quite passive-aggressively played the How to Quit Smoking episode on my speakers, for the benefit of my smoker colleagues. I think they only pretended not to notice.

(By the way – check out the How to Play Anaconda show. Then share it with four friends so you can actually play it.)

Most people have sayings that they use too much. In my case, one of my overused expressions is “are you kidding me” – usually uttered with exclamation points (as in: are you kidding me!!!) rather than question marks. I tend to use this phrase when something is so far fetched (or so stupid) that I can’t begin to believe it, or in very rare, wonderful instances — like when my fiancé proposed — which is a story for another time.

Recent occasions for my overuse of this phrase include:

• Britney’s mom writing a parenting book
  
• Societe-General trader Jérôme Kerviel “single-handedly” losing $7 billion
  
• Hillary claiming to “misspeak”
  
• Rumors that Joost will focus only on the U.S.

Now I’m as jingoist as the next American … much less as an American living outside of the United States … but even I said, “Are you kidding me!!”

As the head of communications for Joost, people inside and outside of the company assume that I know what’s going on. And they’re right. I do know what is going on.

For example, I know that:

• More than 50% of our viewers are outside of the U.S.
  
• We have than 200+ content partners (with more than 4,000 hours of video) that use Joost to distribute their programming to viewers outside of the U.S.
  
• We just signed a 10-year lease in our new office space in London … England
  
• And lastly, I dragged myself and all of my earthly possessions to London so that I could do my job as “GLOBAL communications director” more effectively

As usual, I can’t tell you the best news yet. But, I can tell you it’s totally worth the wait … wherever you live, anywhere around the world.

xoxox kate

(Another of my overused expressions)

One of the great things about writing the company blog is that I get indulge my exhibitionist tendencies and share all of my idiosyncrasies with anyone who cares to read them. With that in mind, here’s another.

I am an agnostic music enthusiast – whatever the genre, I’ll give it a listen. However, I have a special fondness for electronic music. I find it extremely motivational. You can’t sit and watch the world pass idly by when you’re listening to electronic music.

And so, I was thrilled with the launch of the R.fm channel on Joost, and its unobtrusive music that provides a soothing soundtrack to my daily activities.

What I have found, however, is that it IS possible to be distracted by electronic music videos. They are artistic and hypnotic. Like this one - I sit there, with Joost in windows mode, and my cursor blinking in whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing, and can’t tear my eyes away ... which is why I’m having so much trouble finishing this post.

We played a lot of board games in the Vance household growing up. Parchesi, Life, Monopoly, Chinese Checkers, Sorry, regular checkers, Connect 4, Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Hungry Hungry Hippos – if the game existed, we played it.

Unless that game was backgammon – or, as we called it, “the other side of the checkerboard.” We probably didn’t play because my parents didn’t know how and it wasn’t self-explanatory enough to play without reading the instructions.

So when I saw the new World Series of Backgammon channel on Joost, I thought I might finally learn how to play. And learn I did! First of all, you can use backgammon as a verb – like “the worst thing that could happen in a game is that you could get backgammoned.” You can also use backgammon without the "back" – like “if he moves there, he can get gammon.” “Pigeons” are players who think they’re better than they are. I don’t understand what a “beaver” is, but it’s a legitimate backgammon term.

Aside from that, there are a lot of similarities to poker. You play in casinos or you can play online. There’s also an entire professional circuit – with money to be won. And it’s a game of luck and skill.

You’ll have to decide, though, if backgammon tournaments are as scintillating to watch as poker.

I was on vacation last week. Needless to say, I missed a lot. Davidson’s run to the Elite 8, Angelina and Brad’s non-wedding, the fact that Dick Cheney is still alive … as well as many other things that were probably more significant.

Despite the fact that I was on a remote Caribbean island, and despite the fact that most of the important news of the week completely passed me by, people were talking about Britney’s guest appearance on How I Met Your Mother. Let’s be honest: the girl has not exactly been good at keeping herself out of the news lately – even the intellectual The Atlantic Monthly devoted a cover story to her.

This episode certainly was hyped, and I don’t like to miss out on a pop culture event. So what was the first thing I did when I got back to the land of (stolen) Internet access? It was a Saturday, so I didn’t check my week’s worth of email; instead, I fired up Britney’s HIMYM episode on Joost.

The episode didn’t have quite enough Britney for me. Her role was kind of tame, but she did a fine job. Scrubs alumna Sarah Chalke also guest-starred in what was maybe supposed to be Alicia Silverstone’s role?

If you missed it and live in the U.S., check it out now. Otherwise, here’s more about her cameo.