small things that annoy me 1: the hulu rant

i got all excited when i discovered that hulu has a bunch of simpsons clips that are embeddable. the internets shined a little less bright ever since youtube pulled most of the simpsons stuff.

this weekend i've been playing with the hulu site and i've decided that i hate its search function. it completely sucks. i have most of the first nine seasons memorized. there are a ton of perfect bits i'd love to inflict on share with my readers. the search function only seems to work if you happen to guess whatever name they gave the clip. even if you know the official name of the episode or if all of the lines, it's still extremely hard to find the bit you have in mind. plus the search results also end up with a bunch of crap that doesn't include all of the words of the search criteria (apparently a string of words in the search field seem to be treated as "or" not "and")

plus, hulu doesn't the production codes to identify each episode. that's how they are identified throughout the hallowed halls of online simpsons geekdom (see e.g. 2F02). instead they use the season and episode number, which is based on the order they aired, not the order they were made. how am i supposed to know the order they originally aired when everything since then has been based on the date they were produced? as far as i can tell, the easiest way to convert from production code to season/episode number is to wiki the episode name.

grrrrr.