Feeling Blu

Posted on | August 6, 2008 at 6:45 pm | Comments Off

Random Pet Peeves Of The Day that may eventually gel into some kind of theme:

NetFlix is talking about charging extra for HiDef movies. Though I suppose it’s inevitable, I’m not happy about it. I came really close to canceling my NetFlix subscription awhile back because I wasn’t watching DVDs fast enough and so was losing money on the monthly subscription. What convinced me to stay with them was the fact they carried Blu-Ray discs at no extra cost. I knew I was going to be getting a PS3, with its built-in BR player, and I also knew that I was not going to go hog-wild crazy buying discs this time like I did with DVDs. I was going to concentrate on renting, and NetFlix made that easy. If you add a movie to your queue and say you have a Blu-ray player, then it sends you the BR edition of the movie if there is one, the DVD version otherwise. No muss or fuss, no decisions to make. I did end up getting a PS3 and sticking with NetFlix, and that’s worked out well. What we’ll usually do is get the movie from the library if it’s on DVD only, and rent from NetFlix if it’s available on Blu-ray or if the library hold list is too long. I’ve been a very good boy and have only bought a few BR discs – ones I know I will watch more than once or twice. If NetFlix is going to raise the price for BR discs, I’ll probably just complain but stick with them. The library doesn’t carry BR discs (yet), so I suppose I don’t have much choice. I certainly don’t want to start purchasing a lot of discs again. I don’t got the money or the room. Someday they may not even carry DVDs at all, though I’m sure that’s a long way off. Blu-ray is not going to replace DVD any time soon. But when it does happen, they’ll probably raise the price on DVDs, since those will be “rare”.
I saw a commercial that says Comcast is giving away Nintendo Wii’s to new customers who sign up for their “Triple Play” deal. Tempting, but not even that can get me to sign up with The Devil. I’m happy enough for now with my DSL for Internet and my Dish Network for TV. What amazes me is that Wii’s are still pretty hard to come by, aren’t they? Nintendo has a big problem keeping up with demand in the US. And yet they’ve allocated some huge number of them to Comcast to give away in a promotion? Feh. That sucks.
Spellchecker agendas. I was sending an e-mail to my co-workers the other day about Barack Obama. The spellchecker in Microsoft Outlook said that “Obama” was misspelled and it suggested an alternative. Can you guess what that alternative was? Hint: Microsoft is a tool of the right wing. I guess this explains the frequent faux pas on Fox News – they must use Microsoft products for spellchecking in their crawls and such.
Bird poop. Forgot to mention that after the reunion dinner on Saturday night, we got to my car in the hotel parking lot to find the front of it covered in mounds of thick bird dung. I actually didn’t see how bad it was until the next morning. I was parked under a tree, so maybe there was a nest of very big birds up there. It looked like I had driven the car into a pile of manure. Took me awhile to clean it all of. That’s never happened to me before.
Cars that decide to take control when they think you’re in danger. That’s just all kinds of wrong. How am I going to weave in and out of traffic on a busy highway if the car keeps putting the kibosh on it? I have enough trouble just getting the car to accelerate properly when I’m making a mad dash left or right turn into traffic. I don’t need artificial governors on my aggressive driving.

Okay, I guess there’s no theme after all.

Latre.

Jogged Today: Yes (@ 63°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging: