Note to Netflix: Don’t do it

Published by Brian | Filed under dvd, movies

Dear Reed Hastings,

I’ve been a customer for nearly six years. I’ve liked your service. I stayed with you even though I suspect you of throttling my account when I turnaround my discs too quickly. I realize your earnings are down, but your plan to penalize Blu-Ray customers by charging us “a modest premium” is short-sighted and stupid. The rationale that “consumers are used to paying more for high-definition content” is wrongheaded. You’re killing this format before it even starts by turning it into a niche market. Do you want to drive me into using Amazon Unbox, XBox Live, or Sony’s upcoming VOD service? You can’t buy a TV these days that isn’t hi-def, so why charge us more to take advantage of it???

Movie review: Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Published by Brian | Filed under Uncategorized

Alan Sepinwall reviews “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” - I saw this over the weekend and I liked it a lot. I’ve enjoyed Segel’s work since “Undeclared” and his slaptastic work on “How I Met Your Mother” is fantastic too. I never saw Freaks & Geeks, though I’m working my way through it now.

I had never heard of Russell Brand before seeing this movie, but he had me laughing as his otherwise one-note character was much more memorable than it would have been. It was good seeing Mila Kunis in a non “That 70’s Show” role. I always found her grating, but she did great here. She and Kristen Bell didn’t have enough to do in the movie.

Segel flashes his uh, stuff in the film. As in “Walk Hard”, it’s amusing but it must have been uncomfortable for the parents I watched who brought kids in to this R-rated film. Seriously, I see almost as many kids brought by parents in R-rated movies as I would in a Disney film. Idiots.

Do you Hulu?

Published by Brian | Filed under tv

Medialoper reviews Hulu today and I must agree … it is pretty terrific. Recently, I ditched DirecTV after bemoaning the suckage that is Direcpath. Hulu has seriously cut down my reliance on things like tvrss.net since I can have the episode the day after it airs without a serious drain on my bandwidth.  Out of the shows I make a point to watch, most are on Hulu: Family Guy, The Office, My Name is Earl, 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica, Monk, Psych, Terminator … if ABC and CBS would quit streaming off their own site and get with Hulu, I’d be set. Medialoper’s criticism’s are well-founded though. I think in time, they’d be foolish not to follow the suggestions in the article. I hope. They have the potential to make me want to give up on cable/satellite altogether if they’d go day-and-date with the broadcast schedule, offer all seasons of a series (not just the most recent), and add more content.

That being said, I’ll likely pick back up with DirecTV when Wendie and I get a house in the next six weeks.

New monitor, new PS3 firmware, new vision

Published by Brian | Filed under computers, dvd, misc

Bigger is better

I just ordered a 24″ monitor from Newegg and I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my old one just yet. Do I keep it at home and have a dual head setup with greatly disproportional visual real estate or do I take it to work so it can live with my work issued 17″ monitor where the dual head setup would work out much better? Part of me hates to use my own equipment at work but on the other hand it’d make my work day a lot easier on my eyes.

I want to see!

Speaking of eyes, back in January I had Lasik (IntraLase to be precise) and my results weren’t so good. The doc tells me that after surgery, your eyes tend back toward the behavior they had before so they tend to push your vision in the opposite direction. For example, I was farsighted in my left-eye before the surgery so they made me slightly nearsighted knowing that my vision would tend back toward that. In a small number of cases, the eyes don’t move back toward their old tendencies and they “stay” right where the surgery put them. Guess what percentage I’m in. It won’t cost me anything to get it corrected again it’s just mildly irritating that I went from farsighted in one eye, nearsighted in the other to totally nearsighted. At least I won’t have any trouble seeing my monitor.

Hi-Def goodness 2.0

Still wondering which Blu-Ray player to get? Go with the PS3. The 2.20 firmware is out today which turns your PS3 into a profile 2.0 player. Mine was a 1.0 player when I bought it and I updated to 1.1 within a month of its release and as of about 20 minutes ago I made it a 2.0 player. Yes it’s stupid that the spec wasn’t finalized and keeps evolving and yes it sucks that most players haven’t been upgradeable and yes it sucks that Blu-Ray players prices went up after the demise of HD-DVD, but what can you do? This update also remembers where you were in a DVD or Blu-Ray even if you pop it out of the unit. Finally! Most recently I rented No Country for Old Men on Blu-Ray through Netflix and it looked great. My next Blu-Ray release will be Walk Hard on April 8th which is one of the discs with content specifically for profile 2.0 players.

The King would be proud

Published by Brian | Filed under dining

I went to The Vortex in Little Five Points tonight with one coworker and one former coworker who’s now at Microsoft and while there, I ate the most unhealthy thing I’ve ever had in my entire life. It is known as the Elvis Burger and is a burger with peanut butter, bacon, and fried bananas.

Actually, it was pretty good. I’m sure Elvis himself would’ve had one. Yes, I apparently have a death wish but at least it wasn’t as bad as their Double Bypass burger which is a huge sirloin patty topped with a fried egg, three slices of cheese, four slices of bacon, a side of mayo and the buns replaced with two grilled cheese sandwiches.

 

Over at the AV Club: Hard Target and the ghosts of Katrina

Published by Brian | Filed under movies

An interesting article over at the AV Club says the 1993 Jean Claude Van Damme movie Hard Target is indicative of the problems that plagued New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Yes, someone is actually using this movie to point out differences in social classes in New Orleans.

Amazon Lovefest: Music store and S3

Published by Brian | Filed under computers, linux

Yet another reason to dig Amazon …

A few months back when Amazon debuted the DRM-free MP3’s, they also released software to download the MP3’s from their site. This downloader wasn’t essential for individual tracks, but was necessary to download entire albums. Guess what happened when I wasn’t looking? They made good on their promise to release a Linux version. I just happened to learn this from reading Stephen O’Grady’s site where he mentioned it though it isn’t working well for him. For me, It works great. Thanks Amazon … you’ve just ensured I’ll be spending more money. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day here’s me buying a Dropkick Murphys album:

Welcome to the Jungle … Disk!

Your hard drive is going to die one day. Your house could burn down. Someone could steal your computer. Only the first statement is an inevitability. The other two are reasons why you can’t totally rely on local external storage like a NAS or the redundancy provided by a RAID array.

So what are you going to do about it? You have several options. You can use Mozy (recently acquired by EMC), Carbonite, or one of the front-ends for Amazon’s S3. I’d kicked around duplicity and s3sync but I wasn’t pleased. To get the benefits of encryption, I’d have to use the version of duplicity in the not-yet-released version of Ubuntu and I’d heard rumor that s3sync wasn’t always reliable for some users. I’d heard good things about Jungle Disk, so I figured I’d give it a shot. First, it supports Linux, Mac, and Windows, upgrades are free forever, and one license can be used on any number of computers in my household. For $20, that’s not a bad deal.

You can connect over SSL and all files uploaded to S3 are encrypted before they are transmitted. You can keep copies of changed and/or deleted files. You can map a virtual volume that is treated like a normal filesystem; copy files in and they’re automatically backed up. I’ve been encrypting and backing up system configurations and am about to start backing up more and more.

High Speed Goodness and other nerdy things

Published by Brian | Filed under computers, humor, linux

 I, for one, welcome my new AT&T overlords …

Ahhh … that’s more like it! Tomorrow, it’s goodbye DirecPath. Sure I’ll miss DirecTV, but I’ll be a customer again when I’m in my house. I had a slight wiring problem that AT&T had to fix, but now I’m on the Net at a respectable speed. I ditched my Linksys WRTG54L for the 2Wire 2701 that came from AT&T. I was hesitant at first, but after I enabled WPA with a 64 character key, disabled on-board DHCP (my Linux DHCP server only hands out IP’s based on MAC’s), set an admin password, made the SSID unique, enabled MAC filtering, and allowed inbound SSH to my server I knew I’d be just fine.

This just in: I, for one, welcome my new Google overlords …

I love Sonoma Creative. They’re simply great and I really didn’t want to leave them as their Zimbra service is top-notch, but I have moved my email to Google Apps for Domains. The deciding factor for me is that the whole Microsoft / Yahoo! dance could jeopardize Zimbra’s future and now is as good a time as any to make a new start. GMail supporting IMAP made the prospect of going Google very tantalizing. I already loved GMail’s web interface, but their mobile support is also very good as I can receive my mail over IMAP on the BlackBerry, through the full-fledged client on the BlackBerry, and can even sync my GCalendar with my BlackBerry. Plus, I can still have a Zimbra experience by using the Zimbra Desktop with GMail. Add the Linux Checkgmail applet and the Better GMail2 Firefox extension to keep my sessions encrypted and I’m a happy camper.

It’s sad because it’s true

The Onion offers up two articles that hit me where I live: The knights who say “nerd”: 20 pop-cultural obsessions even geekier than Monty Python and Local Girlfriend Always Wants To Do Stuff.

DirecPath: “Because being a crappy cable company just wasn’t enough”

Published by Brian | Filed under tv

For all the years I’ve had high-speed Internet access, I’ve never had DSL*. I’ve had ISDN, dial-up, and cable modem (Time Warner, DirecPath, and Time Warner Comcast), but my biggest impediments to DSL were that it was either it was unavailable where I lived or that BellSouth AT&T wouldn’t sell it unbundled from phone service. Now that they have to, I’ve decided to get the 6 Mbps down / 512k up DSL Xtreme service they offer. This was motivated by my desire to rid myself of my TV/Internet provider DirecPath.

DirecPath, a DirecTV provider for apartments, condos, etc., provides horrible service at high prices. My $40 a month cable modem through DirecPath gets me 2783 kbps (347.9 KB/sec transfer rate) down and an upload Speed of 445 kbps (55.6 KB/sec transfer rate). Obviously, this isn’t great.

Despite this, I never really considered ditching them until the TV service began to suck. Over the last few months, I’ve been mistakenly disconnected for stealing television service despite not stealing anything, paying ~$100 a month, and never missing a payment and still it took them days to reconnect it. They sell me an HD receiver and charge me $10 extra month for HD service with the promise of all of DirecTV’s HD channels but neglect to mention that the outdated 3-LNB dish they installed on the property can’t get them and their 5-LNB dish upgrade will happen “soon”. TNT in high-def isn’t worth $10 a month … which is pretty much all I can get now that HDnet Movies and the Universal HD channels are “premium” channels. They can’t even put an antenna on-site for me to get my locals in HD. I also get a bill from DirecPath that’s inconsistent and they cause DirecTV to change my channel lineup to a lower tier without telling me just about every month. To be fair, every cable provider sucks but DirecPath sucked when it was MediaWorks and it sucks now too. I just don’t watch enough TV to justify the $60+ a month I’m spending on this. Despite this, if MediaWorks had simply put the 5-LNB dish on the property, I would’ve grudgingly given them this money indefinitely. I can watch movies (and many TV shows) through my Netflix subscription and I can watch TV shows legally on network websites or quasi-legally through things like OpenHULU or illegally via Miro + tvrss.net.

My install kit is supposed to arrive by Friday, so let’s hope this goes off without a hitch and I can give them the boot. I wouldn’t be opposed to getting DirecTV again when Wendie and I get our house, though who knows? Maybe I won’t even miss it.

*I’ve had DSL in corporate apartments, but I’ve never personally paid for it.

More Microsoft + Yahoo!

Published by Brian | Filed under web

Techcrunch has a write-up on why Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo! might not be bad. I disagree with the article as well as the comments. Wow, the comments.

Most of the commenters who spew anti-Google venom and who are embracing the deal scare me. The argument is centered around the fact that Google is so big and they want to catalog so much info that they’re inherently “evil”. I can’t recall the last time Google did something to annoy me, but I do know that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist that uses funds acquired by its OS and Office divisions to try and dominate nascent technologies at any cost. Google on the other hand has plenty of competitors and has well-documented API’s. Google has said on more than one occassion:

“When you trust your personal data to Google, it’s still your data. You’re free to edit it, to share it with others, or to download it and take it somewhere else entirely. The principle is simple: we won’t lock you away from your data. In practice, we work hard to be sure that you and the software you use have the access that makes the principle really meaningful.”

Another common complaint has been “Do you really want Google collecting all this info about you?” Honestly, I don’t care because there’s nothing in my Gmail, GCal, or GReader I’m that secretive about. Having had a government clearance, the federal government already knows more about me than any employer legally could. Once you have had federal agents question your friends about you, then what could possibly be scary about Google learning that I buy and sell Star Wars Legos on eBay and apparently love getting unsolicited pharmaceutical emails to fight a condition I don’t have. If it means that Google can provide ads or other services that are tailored to my needs and wants, I don’t see how this is a bad thing for me. It’s also worth pointing out that Google actually stood up for user privacy when the government subpoenaed it for user info while companies like Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN buckled immediately. Google actually prevailed in protecting customer data in that instance. Google may one day abuse its power, but I’ve not seen evidence of it yet. The same can’t be said for Microsoft.

I don’t consider myself anti-Microsoft and the amount of time I spend on XBox Live should attest to that. I simply don’t want to see Yahoo! abandon Flash for Silverlight. I don’t want all of my Yahoo! apps to suddenly stop working in Firefox (or by extension, Linux). I don’t want to see Yahoo! abandon OpenID for Passport. If I wanted to use the Microsoft Live technologies, I already would be. I also feel that the merger would be bad for Microsoft in the way the AOL / Time-Warner merger was bad for Time-Warner; a sentiment shared by other folks in the comments of the article. If MSN with its place as the default start page for IE for years is still a money loser, how can Microsoft truly shake things up on the web? I wonder: What is the benefit to the end user? What is Microsoft going to bring to Yahoo! that isn’t there today with either Yahoo! or MSN / Windows Live that will want to make me use Yahoo! more than I do today or more than I use Google?My favorite quote in the comments was this one:

“The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.”