tv
- I finally realized that the actor playing Lord John Marbury is the same guy (Roger Rees) who plays Robin Colcord on Cheers. That’s hilarious.
- The long scene where Abbey, CJ, Donna, and guest star Mary-Louise Parker’s Amy sit on the couch and drink wine and talk is simply brilliant - a stand out scene in a series of fantastic scenes.
Belatedly catching up on Star Trek Discovery Season 5. What am I watching again?
We’re way behind on TV watching, but last night Becky and I started in on Star Trek: Discovery, Season 5. We’ve enjoyed Discovery thus far, so of course we’re gonna watch it through the final season. And while I still love the characters and want to see another season of story with them, I’m not sure I love this format for a Star Trek series.
Maybe it’s because I’ve recently been watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9 for the first time and enjoying the long seasons full of individual episode stories, but the first two episodes of Discovery make clear that it’s about a single story arc over the season. And the story and directing moves feel clunky and obvious. There’s the need to re-introduce each of the characters while they narrate a little bit that you need to remember about their backstory. There’s the whole “get the band back together again” trope that brings Tilly back to the Discovery crew. There’s the “one last job” trope for Saru. (Also, I love Doug Jones, but feels like his makeup crew slipped here - I don’t remember his teeth and lower lip being visible underneath the facial prosthetics in earlier seasons.) Episode 1 sets up the quest and gives us the lovable rogues who are ever so briefly positioned as villains before one of them is immediately revealed as Book’s family… it’s just too much.
Historically, Star Trek has kept most of its drama on ship or in very limited location shots because big cinematic production is expensive. With computer animation getting cheap, Discovery has moved a huge amount of the action onto planetary surfaces. Episode 2 has Burnham and two other characters riding high-speed speeders (a mash-up of a snowmobile, a jet ski, and a Return of the Jedi-style speeder bike) across a desert planet to escape an avalanche. It’s really more Star Wars than Star Trek at that point. The desert village and market could just as easily be Mos Eisley as anywhere in a Star Trek universe.
And then there are the musical cues. I don’t remember any previous Star Trek shows leaning so hard into orchestral scores. This is much more movie scoring than traditional TV scoring. And while composer Jeff Russo weaves hints of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme motif in wherever possible to make clear that this is Star Trek, all the things he has the strings and horns doing make it clear he’s been listening to John Williams' Star Wars sound tracks quite a lot.
In the end I’m gonna watch it because dang it, it’s Star Trek, but I’m ready to go back and finish up DS9, where I can be sure that I’m watching Trek and not some Star Wars universe show on Disney+.
On Watching the Tonys for the First Time
Last Sunday night I sat down with my family and watched the Tony Awards ceremony. (The Tonys are given out yearly to award the best in musical and stage theater, similar to the Oscars for film or the Grammys for music.)
I’d never watched the Tonys before. I’m usually an Oscars guy, and every once in a while I’ll watch the Grammys (or at least that year when Arcade Fire was up for a bunch of awards), but the Tonys? Nope.
Then Hamilton came along, and we had an excuse. It’s been a bit of an obsession in our house, so an opportunity to see a performance from the show, and to see if it would win all the awards? Gotta watch it. (How much of an obsession, you ask? In our house, now, if the girls want to know the time, they will precisely ask “what is the time?”, because they know if they ask “what time is it?”, at least one member of the household will reply “showtime!”, which is invariably followed by “like I said…”. Every time.)
In retrospect I’m not sure why I follow the Oscars every year. I follow film (via podcast far more than I watch it. I guess I get a kick out of seeing the celebrities off the big screen, hearing the speeches, being able to discuss the ceremony the next day, whatever. But the Oscars ceremony has a history of being pretty awful. It runs long. The hosts are lame, or wooden, or both. The patter between presenters is forced. Depending on the year you might get a good musical number or two - the song from Selma brought down the house last year - but otherwise… it’s more an event than a great show.
Enter the Tonys. What a fantastic awards show! Host James Corden was funny (and very talented!) without dragging any jokes out too long or being obnoxious. The show moved along at a good clip, full of musical numbers from the nominated musicals. Leading up to commercial breaks, a cast from one of the nominated shows would move to a little outside stage on the street to perform a quick bit from some other classic Broadway show. (This led, charmingly enough, to Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber playing the tambourine to accompany Steve Martin on the banjo for one song. Not bad, Sir Andrew. Not bad.)
And the performances. Wow, the performances. Carmen Cusack belting it out in a number from Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s musical Bright Star. Audra McDonald singing and dancing (while 4 or 5 months pregnant!) in Shuffle Along. The big wedding dance number from the revival of Fiddler on the Roof. And The Color Purple. Goodness me, The Color Purple.
Having tuned in to see Hamilton, what I found along with it was a theater full of incredibly talented people who, to all appearances, really love the music and dance, and who even between show casts share a great camaraderie. In contrast to the cool, cynical detachment often seen at the Oscars, the Tonys were enthusiastic, joyous, and intense.
And then there were moments of brilliance like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s acceptance speech, which he provided in the form of a sonnet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAG_7qeiOZA
On the night after the horrific mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub, the Tony Awards show both acknowledged the loss and provided, if not some healing, at least a respite from the pain - an embrace saying we are in this together and we will get through it.
And when the Hamilton cast came back on stage for the closing number, and a good chunk of the audience stood up and sang along with them, the joy in their voices, faces, and dancing bodies shouted out that Miranda’s lyrics hold a timeless truth.
“Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”
Wherein I rag on Aaron Sorkin, do a little bit of my own research, and brag on my completely awesome friends.
Last night I briefly moaned on Facebook about a small inconsistency that bugged me whilst watching The West Wing Season 4 Episode 18 (“Angel Maintenance”). At the end of the episode, Air Force One’s pilot announces over the intercom that they are cleared to land on “runway three-niner”.
There’s just one problem with that announcement: there’s never any such thing as a runway 39. Runways are numbered based on the compass orientation of the runway’s direction, with the units digit lopped off. For example, a runway running directly East-West would be marked “09” on one end and “27” on the other end.
Having thus been minimally annoyed, I followed up by checking Google Earth to determine what runways Andrews Air Force Base (the intended landing site on the show) does have.
Well, it has two of them that run roughly parallel to each other:
And when you zoom in on one end of one of them you can see it’s marked “01 R”:
From this you can quite easily conclude that the other runway ends (with associated names) are “01 L”, “19 R”, and “19 L”.
But that’s not all
Aside: The plot of this episode is that AF1 is heading in from a long flight and they can’t get a green light on the nose gear. So, the president manages crises from the air for a few hours while they turn circles over West Virginia and try to solve the problem.
I continued on Facebook to comment that there were other nits I’d like to pick with the plot.
Another nit that I’m tempted to pick at is that the press attache makes up a story that the reason they’re not landing right away is that there’s a fuel spill on the runway that has to get cleaned up. And a reporter asks “don’t they have another runway?” and she replies that apparently it affected both of them. In point of fact, Andrews AFB has two runways that are parallel, so an incident shouldn’t affect both of them. But given that it was a made-up story, I guess we should expect factual inaccuracies.
I had a couple pilot friends “like” my comments and provide a few snarky remarks about “artistic license”… but then my friend Daniel chimed in.
Daniel is one of those people who’s uniquely qualified to comment on a plot involving a Boeing 747: he’s a 747 pilot. Here’s what he had to say:
Hmm, the runway 39 indicates that the writers and producers made not even a token attempt at any accuracy, as even a rookie pilot would have cringed in a quick scan over the script. Just to highlight how unlikely many aviation scripts are, the B747-200 (which AF1 is, although everyone in the military insists its not, its an E-4, which is also true) only has one green light for the gear. There are ten green lights back on the flight engineer’s panel, and the system is checked for continuity before each landing. In the event the primary (hydraulic) system does not work, any gear that cannot be lowered hydraulicly can be lowered by gravity (an extremely robust power source). This is accomplished by simply electrically removing the pin that holds the gear up, and, in the case of the nose gear, is actually faster than lowering it hydraulically (the hydraulics just slow down the nose gear when lowering). If that doesn’t work, and there is no record of the electrical back up failing, the engineer can go down into the forward cargo bay, and use a wrench (permanently attached) to physically remove the pin. If THAT doesn’t work, ten bolts can be removed covering the landing gear, and then the pin can be extracted. All of which, and the nose gear is not needed for a safe landing. The only use for the nose gear is to reduce the thrust needed to taxi, and facilitate steering. Ironically, there are a large number of real emergencies that can occur on large aircraft. Of course, it might take an hour or two of research to learn that….
Do I have awesome friends or what?
It’s fun when somebody has a topic like this right in their wheelhouse. It reminds me of when I was in high school and my friends' dad was a submarine captain. Getting his opinions on The Hunt for Red October… hehehe.
Or when I watched an episode of Human Target a few years back and ripped the whole thing apart when their plot revolved around someone reprogramming avionics software while in the air on board an airplane THAT WAS FLYING UPSIDE DOWN THE WHOLE TIME.
OK, maybe I’m not over that one quite yet.
So, yeah, I have pretty awesome friends.
Random thoughts while watching The West Wing tonight
Tonight we watched “Dead Irish Writers”, from the middle of season three. A couple of thoughts:
Such a great show.
In which I gripe about my home media center travails
You regular readers (all three of you) know that this blog bounces back and forth between theology and nerd stuff with frightening regularity. This is going to be a nerdy post. You have been warned.
Nearly 5 years ago we got rid of our Dish Network satellite TV service and just went to watching what we could get over the air. We’ve evolved the setup slightly over the last 5 years, primarily by adding Netflix as a video source (our kids were 4, 3, and newborn back then, and have slightly more demands as 9, 8, and 5 now) and by adding a 27" iMac in our living room that gets used as a video-watching device on a regular basis.
The Basic Setup
Basement Family Room: Big LCD TV. HTPC running Windows 7. HDHomeRun networked tuner (still the 5-year-old original version) hooked up to it. 5 TB of hard drive space in that PC for storing recorded TV and other video. Running Plex Media Server to serve files to the rest of the house. Using Windows Media Center to record TV shows and playback video down there. Works like a charm. That’s the most stable, reliable bit of the system.
My bedroom: Ancient Mac Mini running some old version of OS X hooked up to a 20" monitor, running an older version of Plex’s Mac desktop app. Great for watching recorded TV shows. Not so great for everything else; the Plex Netflix plugin broke months ago, so if we want to watch Netflix most of the time we have to get up and open a browser and watch it that way. The Plex HDHomeRun plugin broke years ago, so if we want to watch live TV we open up the HDHomeRun app and play the video through VLC. Not integrated very well, but it works.
Living room: 27" iMac running OS X Mavericks. Here’s where the real frustration begins. Playback of HDHomeRun live video streams through VLC is broken in Mavericks. It’s a reported issue between VLC and Mavericks that hasn’t gotten fixed yet. I can get HDHomeRun to work acceptably through the older Plex app if I manually tune the HDHomeRun device first and then kick up Plex to play the video stream.
However, the old Plex app is now causing serious lockups on the iMac when I ping Plex Media Server to watch recorded shows. As in the only way to recover is to do a hard reboot on the iMac. The new version of Plex’s app (Plex Home Theater, they call it) seems to work OK. Which is great, however, as far as I can tell there’s no good way to view the HDHomeRun video in Plex Home Theater. Grrrr.
So at the moment it would appear that for the iMac I’m going to need to juggle multiple versions of the Plex app depending on what I want to watch. Annoying.
At least I’m saving money
When I remember that we were previously spending something like $60/month on satellite, and now we’re paying $8/mo for Netflix, we’ve been saving around $600 a year for 5 years… maybe we should invest a little bit of that savings on improving the infrastructure. (Do you think my wife will buy that argument? Heh.) But what should I do to improve things?
Where do I go from here?
The home media server solution is working really well, and Windows 7 recording the TV shows is reliable, pretty much seamless. Gonna keep it going as long as I can.
I know the HDHomeRun hardware has been upgraded 3 or 4 times since I bought my original device. Don’t know if I’d get any significant improvements from buying a new one, but it’s hard to be motivated to drop $100 on a new one when the old one still works so well.
I think in the living room I’ve basically locked myself into the iMac solution since we don’t have the room for (or the desire for) a big real TV in the living room. If we move to a new house in the next year or two, we’ll re-evaluate.
Back in our bedroom I think the solution that would get us closest is to replace the Mac Mini and monitor with a real TV and some version of set-top box - maybe a Roku or the new Amazon FireTv. FireTV is new, but it looks like it would get us Netflix, Amazon Video, ESPN video, and even integrate with Plex. About the only thing it wouldn’t support is the HDHomeRun integration; but I suppose I could always split off a signal from the antenna in the attic and run a TV signal down to the TV and use its tuners natively.
That’s all great, but…
While a nerd can dream, in reality we’ll likely be trying to sell our current house and buy a larger one (3 daughters and only one upstairs bathroom!) in the next year or two. So in reality I suppose we’ll hang on with what we’ve got until we make a move, and then re-assess the entire setup at that point.
A little bit of perspective
Just so I don’t sound like a totally self-absorbed idiot for the entire post, let me note that I remember moving from a black-and-white TV to our first color TV back when I was a kid, and in going to a video rental store for the first time when you had to choose between VHS and Betamax versions of the videos. Compared to those days… I guess our expectations have gone up a bit in 30 years.
The Unruly Beginning of the Muppets
I’m currently reading a biography of Jim Henson, creator of all my beloved Muppets. I’m learning all sorts of stuff I didn’t know, including how Jim started out creating 10-second ads for instant coffee. It’s amazing how even within 10- second skits he’s able to display the same sort of unruly mayhem that would characterize the Muppet Show a couple of decades later.
Check out the Wilkins Coffee ads here. The Wilkins character is clearly an early version of the puppet and voice that would become Kermit the Frog. In each ad Wilkins finds some way to bash on Wontkins because Wontkins doesn’t drink the coffee. Edgy, but when it’s puppets it’s amazing what you can get away with.
Learning to spell a new word, or, how do you spell 'blerg'?
It’s fascinating to see how a new word evolves, especially in the case where a word is introduced not via written text, but rather via audible means. Twenty-one years ago Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!” appeared on the cultural scene, and quickly became a part of the American lexicon. Its addition to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2000 officially marked its transition from a cartoon interjection to an accepted part of the ever-evolving English language.
With “D’oh!”, a standard written form of the word was quickly propagated by means of episode titles of The Simpsons. The past few years, though, have introduced a new interjection with much less apparent standardization. I’m talking, of course, about Tina Fey’s portrayal of the character Liz Lemon on the popular NBC sitcom 30 Rock, and her exclamation of disgust that Wikipedia appears to have settled on spelling “blerg”.
Anyone surfing the web in the past couple of years will have encountered any number of variant spellings, all apparently based around the various authors' ideas of how it should be spelled. Google is of great help in honing in on the popular options.
‘Blergh’ - about 94,700 results.
Adding an ‘h’ to the end is a popular way to go - Blergh is quickly found on this budgeting website and as the name of the self-proclaimed “official boy band of the 21st century”, an Aussie group whose Facebook page, as of today, boasts 17 fans.
‘Blerg’ - about 47,500 results.
This comes as a bit of a surprise, given that this is the spelling that Wikipedia has settled on. The Liz Lemon page on Wikipedia provides some insight into usage: “Liz also has a tendency to say the words “blerg” and “nerds” as a replacement for swear words.”
‘Blurg’ - about 170,000 results
It is apparent that the English-speaking world thinks that the /ur/ spelling is more intuitive than the /er/. Additional popularity for this spelling is evidenced by blogs named with this spelling, for instance blurg.tumblr.com and blurg.wordpress.com, and the fact that my wife uses it in all of her instant message sessions. (No major blog links showed up for the first two spellings. Grab ‘em while you can!)
‘Blurgh’ - about 214,000 results
What is it with the added ‘h’? This hefty spelling appears to be the most popular, and has the added weight of being the spelling used by Tina Fey when she wrote about it on the 30 Rock blog.
A hint as to the fictional origin of the word can be seen in a shot from the Pilot episode of 30 Rock where this pile of unassembled Ikea-esque furniture is shown in Liz Lemon’s apartment:
Come to think of it, I might use the name of pesky assemble-it-yourself furniture as a swear word, too, if I were coining words. Using the ë, though, makes it a little bit tough to type. As for me, I’ll stick with ‘blerg’.
Sometimes knowing too much is a bad thing
Last night Becky and I sat down to watch the second episode ( titled “Rewind”) of the Fox show Human Target. The first episode was fun in a cheesy action-thriller sort of way, so we decided to give it a continued try.
Back in high school, I had some friends whose dad was a submarine officer in the US Navy. They said it was unbearable to watch The Hunt for Red October around him because he spent the whole moving groaning at the inaccuracies it portrayed in the submarine. After watching this episode of Human Target, I think I now know how he felt. As an avionics systems engineer, the details of this in-air plot just drove me batty. Allow me to elaborate.
First, the plane is going down for no apparent reason. Yes, there’s a fire down in the fuselage, but that shouldn’t cause complete loss of control.
Second, they’ve gotta put the fire out, and apparently there is more wind flow over the top of the aircraft than the bottom (???? Totally bogus) so the solution is to fly upside down until the increased airflow puts the fire out. Are you kidding me?!? We’re not talking a fighter jet here, we’re talking a large airliner. While there is this rather famous video of Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston doing a barrel roll in a 707, look at how much altitude he loses just turning the thing over! There’s no way the airplane could stay airborne and upside down for long, much less the fifteen minutes or so that it does in this episode.
Third, while they’re flying along upside down, suddenly they can’t flip it back around to right-side-up because the on-board computer locked up. We’ll ignore the detail that they say the “flight management” computer locked up when, in reality, it’s the flight control computer that would help them fly the plane. Once the pilot diagnoses that it’s locked up, somebody asks if they can’t just reboot it. And of course the answer is no, they can’t. By this point I’m yelling at the tv screen. “OF COURSE YOU CAN REBOOT IT YOU IDIOTS! POP THE FREAKING BREAKER AND RESET IT AND YOU’LL REBOOT IN JUST A FEW SECONDS!!!” (Becky is not appreciating me too much at this point.) But apparently NONE OF THEM REALIZE THAT, since they then have to go on to…
Fourth, the amazing computer hacker on board decides she can somehow download the flight management software onto her laptop, patch the laptop into the aircraft system, and use it to control the plane. About the only thing that whole sequence gets right is that there are ethernet-based networks on modern aircraft. But it would be next thing to impossible to hack into the system to download the software, and COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE to then patch that laptop into the system. And why was she able to download the software right there in the (upside-down) cabin, but to patch it into the aircraft system, they had to go down to the avionics bay?
Fifth, once they got down to the amazingly-spacious avionics bay, they apparently were able to just unplug a standard RJ45 ethernet jack (and normal-looking ethernet cable) from the aircraft wiring and plug it into the laptop, and SHAZAM! it worked! What they ignore is that standard ethernet wiring and a plastic RJ45 jack would never pass aircraft environmental and vibration testing. All ethernet connections in an avionics system are routed through stout metal screw-on connectors, not secured with wimpy plastic clips.
Well, it’s the world of TV, which means that yes, everything worked out fine inside of an hour, the bad guys were caught, the good guys survived to fight another day, and the hero got in his wisecracks just before the credits rolled. (Oh, and fun side-note: two episodes of Human Target, two appearances by actors who had major roles in Battlestar Galactica. For whatever that’s worth in your geek scoring system.) Next time, I hope they just stay off the airplanes so I don’t have to deal with knowing too much about reality for my hour of entertainment.
Getting rid of the Dish: the Philosophical Post
So a couple of weeks ago I talked about the nerd side of getting rid of the dish. I’m still playing around with the configuration some, but I think I’m getting close to having a good usable solution. Becky keeps telling me “just teach me how to use it once it’s all working”, so I guess I should try to get to that point sooner rather than later.
But the other side of this is the why - why get rid of the Dish? Was it really just the $60/month we were spending? (We bought enough new hardware it’ll take us several months to break even.) Or is there more to it?
I’ll admit I didn’t come to it in quite this direction; my push to switch things up was driven a lot by the desire to have an HD DVR option. But as I sat with my Dish remote in hand and flipped through the channels, I came to the realization that out of the 150 channels available for our viewing, we’d never watched most of them. Most of them had programming that we couldn’t care about in the least. For the most part we spent our tv-watching time tuned to one of our local network stations. The exceptions: ESPN for sports, Nick and Disney for some kids programming. Oh, and a backlog of Food Channel shows on the DVR that never really went away. So we talked about it, and we agreed there were other ways we could access the sorts of programming we really wanted to watch, and that we’d be OK with missing the rest of it. So we cut the cord.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit there are things I’m gonna miss. Monday Night Football on ESPN, for example. And the Cubs games on WGN. (OK, maybe it’s good for my mental health to miss those…) But on the whole it’s been a positive thing. What we’ve eliminated is the mindless noise at night. We had a bad habit of just turning the TV on as we headed towards bed, watching the Cubs if they were on, but often just pulling up Sportscenter on ESPN and ignoring it while we read books and such before going to sleep. Without ESPN available, we’ve either had to decide to watch something we specifically wanted to enjoy (we’re catching up on 30 Rock) - or we just leave it off. And that’s been a very good thing.
Back before we first got a Tivo, I wondered (a lot) whether the Tivo would be a good thing, or whether it would just cause us to watch more TV. It ended up being the former; the Tivo allowed us to watch the shows we wanted, when we wanted, without having to schedule our lives around the start times. (Oh, and we got 20% of our TV-watching lives back in skipped commercials.)
Before we got rid of the Dish, I wondered if we’d just hate it and miss the programming. But I’m pretty much believing now that we will make do just fine, and it will be an improvement overall in how we spend our time and allow ourselves to be entertained distracted.
Now, believe me, there are a couple of internet-based options that I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on. If MLB.tv can ever get rid of their silly blackout restrictions (there are six teams that Iowans can’t watch. most blacked-out state in the country!), I’d subscribe in a heartbeat, and that’d let me watch Cubs games again. And I’d really love to get ESPN360.com, but that’d require me to switch internet service providers… and I’m not real keen on that idea, either. Ah well. I should just take the sage advice given by Bob the Tomato after he catches Larry the Cucumber overly engrossed in a TV show: “maybe you should read a book.” Yeah.
Getting rid of the Dish: The Nerd Post
So we’re getting rid of our Dish. We’ve had cable or satellite TV pretty much ever since we moved into town seven years ago, but now we’re cutting the cable. Now, we’re not giving up television altogether; we’re just switching to a setup that will let us record and playback over-the-air TV, and giving up the paid stuff. There are a couple of sides to this, so I’ll make it a couple of posts. This is the nerd post. You have been forewarned.
The Goal The Dish DVR we are replacing allowed us to record shows and watch them on either of our two TV locations, one downstairs in the family room, the other our little 13" standard-def TV in our bedroom. We don’t watch the upstairs one that much, but it is very handy to keep around for times when the girls want to watch a show, and for in the mornings when they’re awake but we want to sleep in some. :-) We didn’t have HD through Dish Network; I really wanted HD. Oh, and I’d really like to still be able to watch some Cubs games. That’s about it.
What We Ended Up With: Downstairs
To go with the 42" Vizio LCD TV downstairs we invested in a relatively-inexpensive tower PC. It’s got a dual-core Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM (I know, I know, the 32-bit OS won’t use all 4, but that was the stock configuration), a 1TB hard drive, and lots of room to expand. It came with Windows Vista Basic (ick); I upgraded it to Windows 7 RC, and have preordered a regular Win 7 license for it. Add a Windows Media Center remote, and it works pretty smoothly. A little noisier than I’d like, but tolerable. This machine is our primary recording unit.
For an OTA tuner, I got a HDHomeRun networked tuner. If there’s one piece of this system that I’m most happy with, it’s the HDHomeRun. It’s got dual tuners in it. Basically, you plug in your OTA antenna and your ethernet to the back of the tuner, and you’re done. There’s a small piece of software to install, but then Windows Media Center (and EyeTV on the Mac) pick it up with no trouble whatsoever. (Supposedly XBMC in Windows will handle the HDHomeRun, too, but I haven’t been able to get it to work.)
The final component downstairs is an old tower (I forget the specs) running Ubuntu. I mostly use it as a place to save backups; there is just north of 1TB of disk space in it. I’ve also got some recorded TV stored on it which gets served up to the other computers on the network.
What We Ended Up With: Upstairs
Our little friend the Mac Mini moved upstairs. To go with it, I found a Dell 22" 1920x1080 LCD display on sale cheap. While we do have EyeTV installed, and could record from upstairs, the limited HDD space on the Mini (100GB) has me recording downstairs instead. (Yeah, I could do some fun AppleScripting to move files to a different machine once they are done recording… but that’s more work than I wanted right now.) The Mini is running XBMC for playback, and in the event we want to watch something live upstairs, we switch over to EyeTV. Not as elegant as I’d like, but it works pretty well.
What We Ended Up With: The Headaches
The biggest challenge in this setup is that I’m the idiot who’s running three different OSs among my three computers. Oh, and also running a beta OS on the Windows box. So Windows 7 Media Center records OTA TV into a new file format (.wtv). WTV files aren’t yet supported by the FFmpeg codec, which means XBMC won’t play them. Fortunately, W7 provides a WTV-to-DVRMS converter, and FFmpeg does support DVRMS. So, I’ve got a little nightly batch file that runs to convert all of the day’s WTV recordings to DVRMS and file them off in appropriate directories in the shared library area.
Sooner or later the available toolset will catch up with the Windows 7 WTV format, at which point things like commercial skipping and direct playback in XBMC will be available, smoothing things out a bit. For now, though, we’ve got a workable solution that records the shows we want to watch and lets us watch them in either of our two desired locations, and the ability to get rid of a monthly bill from Dish for a bunch of channels we never watch.
The Doctor says: Don't Blink
I haven’t enjoyed a single episode of TV quite so much in a while. I’m a couple weeks behind on Dr. Who, but finally watched the episode called “Blink” tonight. A very, very good episode. [Spoilers ahead, so if you’re going to watch it and want to be surprised, don’t read on.]
First of all, the idea of weeping stone angels as quantum-locked beings who are only alive when no one is looking at them? Awesome. Now, the whole time-travel plot device of having someone send messages to themself in the past is far from new - Phillip K. Dick wrote a short story with that premise, which got adapted into a so-so movie called Paycheck a few years back. But it was really well done here. And the whole final scene where the human has one-up on the Doctor, because she knows what’s gonna happen, and he doesn’t yet? Brilliant. And so well done.
Dr. Who can be really cheesy at times, but this season has done well. And Blink is definitely the best episode to date.
Taking the Plunge to Dish
It’s been a couple of months since I did the math and realized that Mediacom was no longer a good deal for our household. Let’s review. Mediacom provides us digital cable and high-speed internet. They have repeatedly raised prices over the last two years (including a $10/month upper over the past 3 months). They had a real pain-in-the-backside dispute with Sinclair that caused us to lose one of our local channels for a month. We chose to go to Mediacom two years ago now when we dropped our home landline and went to cell phones-only; at that point, Qwest didn’t have the option of getting DSL without having a land line, which priced their service out of our range.
Fast forward to today. Qwest now has the option of getting DSL even if you don’t have regular phone service. Dish Network has an option that will give me pretty much all the same channels I have now. I’ll get a few added benefits from Dish like a dual-DVR system. (The one downer about Dish? I don’t get Versus in the top-200 channel pack, which means I won’t get to see much NHL next year. But heck, for what I’m saving per month, I could order NHL Center Ice next season and still save money.) When all is said and done, we’ll save $35/month for the first year, then when the Dish discount expires, we’ll be saving $25/month. That is, as Bullwinkle J. Moose says, antihistimine money. (“Antihistimine money?” “Not to be sneezed at.")
So for Qwest DSL, you can either buy the DSL modem for $50, or you can lease it for $5/month ad infinitum, or you can get one from Best Buy. Normally I’d assume Best Buy would be the worst deal of them all. But Best Buy has this deal where if you sign up for Qwest DSL while you’re at the store, you get the DSL modem for free. That’s right, free. No mail-in rebate; they just walk you through the online signup, then they take the modem, throw it in a bag, and hand it to you. I was amazed. The signup went smoothly, appears to have made it to Qwest OK (I got a confirmation email last night), and it’s definitely the same DSL package I would’ve signed up for if I signed up directly from Qwest. So good on you, Best Buy. Now if I get my refurbished iPod yet this week and it’s satisfactory, Best Buy will be on my “very good” list for the week.
Tonight I’ll stop by the satellite TV place on the way home and put in my order for Dish. When I checked with them a few weeks back, the lead time on installs was only a couple of days. I’m guessing I’ll get an install Friday afternoon or Saturday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it all goes smoothly.
ain't it just like Mediacom...
It’s not unusual, in my experience, to receive calendars as gifts around Christmas-time from companies you do business with. We always get a desk calendar from our insurance agent which fits nicely on the desk downstairs. We receive a pretty one with Bible verses and inspirational sayings from a missions agency that we support. We got one from the Christian radio station this year that had pictures taken by listeners. Kinda cool. I’m sure we got a couple of others as well, I know we gave a Norman Rockwell one away to my Dad.
This year we also got one from our cable provider, Mediacom. It was rather audaciously titled “12 months of You”, but it appeared to be more like 12 months of them. There were a few coupons inside for free pay-per-view movies (which we never watch), and then the artwork for each month featured one of their cable channels. Color me less than excited.
But that wasn’t the best part. You see, most gift calendars come in late November or early December. Mediacom’s came on January 27th. January 27th! Apparently their 12 months of me is really only about 11 months… Unbelievable.
The Mediacom calendar is sitting in the recycle bin on my curb this morning, waiting to be picked up by the garbage man. Good riddance.
being productive
Last night Becky was gone to a baby shower at the church, and so after I put Laura to bed around 7 I had a couple of hours to myself. As tempting as it was to sit down and watch Month Python & the Holy Grail (which Becky hates and I haven’t watched in a long time), I decided to get some useful stuff done.
Who’d believe how much you can get done in 90 minutes? I got the dishes done, got most of our income tax stuff figured out (thanks to TurboTax… now we’re just waiting for my W2 and we can file), and got stuff coordinated for worship team this weekend. And I still had time to turn on a movie that was on the Tivo that I thought I might like. It ended up being kinda boring, so I ignored it.
Tonight I have free again. I think I’ll do some playing with Photoshop and maybe we’ll watch some movie we can agree upon. Either that or we’ll start watching the American Idol auditions… that should be good for a laugh or two.
Oh, I should also add a comment about a new TV show we watched last night - it’s called Hustle and it airs on AMC. It’s produced by the BBC, and the best way to describe it is as Ocean’s 11 in a one-hour show. I’m looking forward to seeing a few more episodes… the first one was pretty good.
OLN Hockey Blackout
Yesterday night I sat down in front of the TV, looking forward to watching a hockey game. The Dallas Stars were playing the Phoenix Coyotes, and according to the TV schedule, it was slated to be broadcast on OLN (cable channel 69 in our area) at 7:30 PM central time. I was bewildered to find that rather than the NHL, OLN was showing some cheesy show about the “25 scariest animals” or the “10 worst jobs” or something like that. Where was my hockey?
A quick check of the OLN website confirmed that they were showing the NHL. They even have a cool graphic that says “NHL on OLN: We believe in hockey.” I double-checked the TV listings at Excite. Yep, it was supposed to be on. I checked nhl.com. Yep, they agreed that the game was supposed to be on OLN, and even gave an in-progress score. So what the heck was going on?
Next I did a Google search, and I found this article from Newsday. It ends up that OLN is in a wrestling match with several major cable companies, apparently including my local provider, Mediacom. They want OLN to be a first-tier channel, i.e. have it included in the “standard” cable package that the company offers, rather than have it as part of a second-tier, pay-extra package. And so they are using blackouts of NHL games to try to blackmail the cable companies into switching around their cable packages.
The end result of all this: a whole bunch of really mad fans. Check out the OLN forum, for one. The funny part (OK, it’s not so funny, maybe ironic?) is that the people that paid extra to get that second-tier so they could watch hockey are the exact ones that are getting screwed. No hockey for you! If I were Gary Bettman, I’d be getting pretty upset with OLN - why, after already almost killing your league with a cancelled season, would you want to further alienate your fan base by blacking out TV coverage and not explaining why?
I will be contacting all three parties to express my frustration. I doubt it’ll accomplish anything, though. I should check… does some other network have TV rights for the Stanley Cup playoffs? If not, I may miss another whole season. Arrrrgh.