Rubber Chicken

About a month or so ago, I subscribed to Blockbuster Online. Basically, it is the same idea as Netflix - you create a list of DVDs on a website and they send them to you in the order you specify. When you are done, you put the disc into a prepaid envelope and they send you the next one on your list. At Blockbuster, you can have up to 3 discs out at any one time. Plus, you get two free game/movie rentals at your local Blockbuster per month, which is handy.

I'm not a super movie-buff, but their catalog is deep enough for me. A few things I would like to see are on very long delay, which is annoying, but for the most part they have all of the movies that I want to see. For the stuff on delay, I just add it to my list and I get it when I get it.

Even though I live in the sticks, the roundtrip from me putting a disc in the mail and receiving a new one is about 3-4 days. I wish it were quicker, but it is not bad.

Overall, I like the service and it is worth the $15 or so a month we pay for it. Mostly we get kids movies and mainstream stuff. One thing that I've found myself doing is getting more documentaries just because there is no marginal cost to me for trying something new. If I don't like them, I hit stop and put it in the mail. Very little time wasted. So far, so good.

Posted by Rob at 05:24 PM | Permalink

I just watched New Order 511 on DVD. This is a live outdoor show filmed in London a few years back (2002). It was entertaining, if you are a New Order or Joy Division fan. The staging was minimal and the focus was on the music - as it should be. The sound was very good and they performed with passion and interest. There were a few rough edges, but that's what makes live recordings interesting.

I saw New Order a few times back in the day (late 80s, early 90s) and I don't remember much about the shows, good or bad. I defintely noticed two thing about this shows: they played a number of Joy Division songs and they definitely look middle aged now. I do not recall them playing Joy Division songs when I saw them live and those songs are some of the strongest in the DVD - very powerfully performed. Also, not surprisingly, the band looked their age - not bad, just like normal middle aged guys.

Posted by Rob at 05:11 PM | Permalink

If it is Friday, it must be time to buy another software company. One thing I will definitely give to Larry, if he says there is going to be consolidation in the industry - there will be consolidation in the industry, even if he has to do it all himself!

Posted by Rob at 03:17 PM | Permalink

Microsoft has released a spec for Metro, which looks to me like a competitor to PDF.

Prediction: this doesn't go very far. PDF is just too entrenched to budge right now.

Posted by Rob at 01:34 PM | Permalink

Looks like there is a project behind the SAP + MSFT link-up. The confluence of ERP data and desktop data sounds like a great plan for information workers. Just in case you were wondering, they are still competitors and any plans for a merger are off. It will definitely be interesting to see how this integration works out.

Posted by Rob at 01:17 PM | Permalink

The closer relationship between SAP and Microsoft is interesting to contemplate. It really makes sense because of the way people work - they spend their whole day in Office and it is the defacto desktop of the enterprise. Probably the real loser in the alliance they are talking about here is Adobe - SAP already emphasizes integration with Adobe forms. Although they have a slightly different target (e.g. Adobe for self-service human resources apps vs. Excel for data collection and analysis), both of these integration paths overlap to a certain extent and customers don't like to do the same work twice.

Posted by Rob at 07:34 AM | Permalink

Windows XP is available in 64-bit as of today. The interesting thing of it is that you can upgrade to it free if you are already running the 32-bit version on a 64-bit processor. The downside is that the number of drivers available is limited. I'm a little surprise that Microsoft made the upgrade free, but I guess it does help drive adoption of the 64-bit platform a bit and they probably wouldn't have been able to charge much anyway.

Posted by Rob at 01:54 PM | Permalink

Once again, I ran in the Charlottesville Marathon last weekend. Again, it was an absolutely beautiful day but this time I ran the full marathon instead of the half. I ran into a friend from Boston at the start and we ran together. I have to give Bob a shout-out for helping me finish with him in 3:49 - a time I'm really happy with, considering the terrain of the run.

No events on the current horizon, but I'm thinking about trying a tri...

Posted by Rob at 09:52 AM | Permalink

I bought an Archos Gmini 400 about a month or so ago from Newegg.

Before I talk about the product, let me throw in some props for Newegg. They have very good prices, not the rock-bottom lowest , but close. Plus, they list the shipping prices right there on the product pages, so you know what you are going to pay. Also, in my experience, they ship very quickly and I've never waited on a something I ordered longer that I thought I should.

Although I've had flash MP3 players for a long time, I was skeptical about the whole HDD based player thing. Why would I want to have 20GB of music with me all the time? I can just reload my player when I get sick of the stuff I have on there. But, I find that I listen to the thing all of the time because of the variety available to me. This inspired me to digitize all of my music a few weeks ago - I'd been intending to do this someday, but the Gmini inspired me to make it happen. I can't fit my entire collection on the Gmini, but I do have a good chunk. Definitely changes the way I listen to music.

The Gmini is a very nice unit. The music player works as you would expect. It can play WMA and MP3 and the sound is as good as you would expect. I've noticed a few glitches here and there when the hard drive wakes up, but they are few and far between (and some of them could be MP3 artifacts, I'm not sure). When you plug it into your computer via USB, it just works like another disk which is nice because you don't have to have any special drivers and can use it on a number of different computers.

What made me purchase it over an iPod in the same price range ($330) is the video and support for WMA. WMA first. I've got a ton of stuff that has been encoded with WMA over the years. The thought of going back and converting it to another format was not very appealing. If the iPod was head and antlers better than everything else, sure, but it really isn't. It is a nice product, but certainly not that much better than the competition.

Although the color display on the Gmini is tiny, it is surprisingly easy to watch video while you are sitting on a plane. I wouldn't recommend it for cinematographic tour de force kind of movies, but for dialog and character intensive stuff like "Curb Your Enthusiasm", it is fine. The only drawback to the video playback is that you have to jump thorough a few hoops to get the MPEGs into the correct format, but once you figure it out, it isn't difficult to do.

Posted by Rob at 08:10 AM | Permalink

A pretty decent article on web logs in BW this week.

The takeaway I got was that blogging is here to stay and companies need to adapt their PR and other strategies to account for the brave new world. Nothing earth shattering, but it is a good read.

I can't believe I've been writing a web log for almost two years. It is interesting to see how much things have changed in that time period. I wonder what is coming next?

Posted by Rob at 07:50 AM | Permalink