Category: Miscellaneous

I know I picked on NBC in my previous post, but the truth is, I don’t think anyone has come up with a complete solution for online video. Not even Apple. I recently wanted to check out Juno, since I was told that I’d like it. It is available in iTunes, but for some reason not when I search on my Apple TV. I could download to iTunes, then sync to my Apple TV, but that’s just silly, and it wouldn’t be in HD anyway. Ok, I just checked as I was writing this… it’s available to buy in iTunes, but not to rent. Ugh. Why?

Maybe TiVo has some good stuff going, but I haven’t used one since living at home, because I don’t have cable now and I don’t think a TiVo would be worth it for the amount of TV I watch. I’m not interested in getting cable, since their HD is compressed to the point where it would annoy me too much. I’ve been impressed by the quality from FiOS, but my building isn’t wired for it. And I know Amazon has their Unbox thing, but I looked into it when it first came out and there was no Mac support.

So while I’m sure Apple and other services would point fingers at the studios, and the studios would have a short-sighted comment about piracy, I really don’t care whose fault it is. I just want to watch a movie.

I considered putting this in my “Idiot Marketing” category, but in this case I think they truly are just clueless.

I was busy tonight and didn’t catch The Office while it was on TV. A year ago, this wouldn’t have been a big deal. I could just download it on iTunes the next day. In fact, it would be even better now since I could sync it to my Apple TV and watch it on the same screen I would have normally. Unfortunately, NBC has stopped selling their content on iTunes, so that is not an option. The next best thing I can do is get it on my computer, and hook that up to my TV, although that requires getting off of the couch. NBC does offer the ability to watch the episodes right on their website, but even if I went through the trouble of hooking up my computer, the image still wouldn’t be full screen. This is what “full screen” mode looks like on NBC.com:

See the unnecessary border? Annoying. And why do they have to promote the name of the show in the upper left corner? Obviously I am aware of the show; wouldn’t their marketing people want to put the NBC logo or something else there instead? I could put it in that mode and then make creative use of a the “zoom” accessibility feature ins OS X, but it’s hard to get it aligned just right.

I thought for a brief moment that I might be able to get a better, fuller-screen option of the show when I noticed that NBC now has a download option. But before I even clicked, I remembered NBC.com’s historically poor treatment of Mac users, and guessed that they don’t offer Mac support. I was right. According to their site, “Support for Apple and Linux systems will be coming in early 2008.” That’s a somewhat positive sign, but I personally would only consider Q1 to be “early,” and we’re now approaching the end of April. I’m sadly used to it, but this lack of Mac support is ridiculous, especially today when Apple’s consumer market share may be at 21% in the U.S. Its market share of consumers who have computers that actually work and like to do things with them like watch TV shows may be even higher.

I’d gladly pay for an HD download of The Office, but nobody is selling. Oh, and did you notice that the screenshot isn’t from tonight’s episode? That’s because it’s not available their website yet. It’s times like this that I consider going to the dark side and finding a nice high-quality HD download on the Internet. The same thing happens when I try to watch a DVD and get frustrated by the piracy warnings that they disable the skip buttons for. You know, the piracy warnings that only people who purchased the DVD get to see.

I wish an executive from every network would just sit down and listen to someone like Alex Lindsay for 5 minutes and trust that he knows what people want. But that probably won’t happen until it’s too late.

Sometimes I just don’t understand people.

At the grocery store, I usually use a self checkout machine. Nothing against people; I just prefer machines in many cases. And I got freaked out at Trader Joe’s where the friendly cashier was commenting on everyone’s purchases. Machines don’t make me self-conscious.

Anyway, another thing I don’t do is cash. It’s clunky, dirty, and obsolete. I use a credit card. So when I check out, I have to sign one of those electronic signature pads with a stylus. But about a week ago, the styli disappeared from the pads. Someone (or some people) had yanked them from the cords and stolen them. What a ridiculous thing to steal. It’s nearly worthless beyond signing electronic pads. I guess that since thieves aren’t generally smart enough to get a job, it’s not surprising that they would end up stealing something useless. The funny thing is, if someone really did want a stylus, they could probably just ask someone at the front desk of Palm’s world headquarters, which is within walking distance of the store. But no matter the reason for the theft, I am now still terribly inconvenienced every time I check out. Nothing works besides the stylus… I’ve tried my finger and the metal clip on the end of the cord which used to hold the stylus. Nothing. This frustrating since I know that any little scribble will satisfy the machine. So, what I have to do is ask a human cashier to borrow the last remaining stylus, completely defeating the purpose of self-checkout.

With the amount of coverage the Olympics are getting recently, I assumed that the games were starting sometime in the next couple of weeks. However, I just saw a promo flash up on the screen that said something about August. So I looked it up, and confirmed that the 2008 Olympics don’t begin until August 8th.

This is almost as bad as the election that they’ve been covering for 4 years. I’m so numb to the buzz that if I didn’t vote by mail, I’d be afraid that Election Day would come and go before I noticed.

In case you haven’t heard, The Office, the only show I watch regularly, is back with new episodes. The second new episode since the end of the strike, “Chair Model,” aired tonight.

Two things I’m happy about:
1. The show is still awesome.
2. Someone got the memo that Pennsylvania license plates are only on the back.

I usually wear contacts, but recently I’ve started wearing glasses on a more regular basis. One of the reasons I like wearing them is that they are the kind that automatically turn into sunglasses when necessary. I’m a sucker for little tricks like that, especially since whenever it happens I remember that commercial from a few years ago that described the lenses as being from the future. My contacts don’t get darker, but it would be cool if they did. After contacts, the next step would be to go beyond laser correction and make it so a person’s own eyes automatically block UV rays. That would be so cool.

Speaking of laser correction, I think it’s a neat idea, but unfortunately I’ve been told that I have large pupils so I’m not a great candidate. Also, I’d want to have it done outside of California, because it would be scary if there was an earthquake during the procedure.

Glazed carrots at work today. They were good, but instead of satisfying my craving only stimulated it. Was going to take a picture but I ate them all before I got upstairs.

It’s now a bit after 3 AM and I’m trying to decide if I should go to work really early (and then get to bed early) or get some sleep and go to work really late. Usually when this happens, I go in late.

My plan right now is to take a short nap, then head in early. Use the comments below to guess what will really happen. No cheating if you’re reading this in the future and know the answer.

I know I’ve been blogging more than usual lately, but that’s only because I was recently reading my old blog, and was disappointed in how much I’ve slowed down compared to when I was in school. I’m not trying to match my old blogging intensity, but it would be nice to reach an average of one post per day. Oh, and since this is going out at a crazy hour of the morning, I’d also like to take this opportunity to point out that the time stamps on my old blog are 3 hours off — it looks like they all got converted to PST even though at the time I was blogging from EST. So if you see an entry that was published at 1 AM, it was actually worse… I was blogging at 4. Note that my old old blog shows the correct time.

Thanks to Koklynn, I don’t have to write my own blog entry about this. Props to everyone who donated.