More on TiVo + Amazon Unbox

Last week, I tried out Amazon Unbox downloading to the TiVo for the first time. The experience went pretty smoothly, though I'm pretty certain it won't replace Netflix or OnDemand in my usage.

I finally had a chance to actually watch the movie, and I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. The quality wasn't too bad, and I was able to even stretch it out to fill my 16:9 TV. The quality was about what you'd see on digital cable, which is better than what I normally get on TiVo, but obviously worse than DVD. But, for a movie like Idiocracy, it was perfectly acceptable.

Given that I've still got some money left on the initial $15  credit, I'll probably keep grabbing cheap movies where visuals aren't important. There's still slow download times (I've got an older TiVo and an older wireless adapter, so I don't get great transfer rates) that mean this isn't instant gratification. But, it's not a bad thing to grab a movie every now and then to watch when I have some free time.

Honestly, the worst part about the service is probably the Amazon end, where the search and navigation is nauseatingly bad. It's impossible to quickly browse and easily distinguish TiVo-compatible movies from those that aren't available for the TiVo. That's going to be something that needs some refining if this is going to catch on with more than the early adopter crowd. The iTunes Movie Store interface is far easier and significantly more attractive.

iTunes + Apple TV are probably going to defeat Amazon + TiVo in the long run, as the Apple combo has better quality, faster downloads, and a nicer interface. But, since I'm not shelling out another $300 for Apple TV, I'll probably stick with Netflix and BitTorrent, which, for me, is the best of all options.

Phew! VT Pulls It Out

My Hokies played a horrible 32 minutes, followed by a pretty solid 8 minutes, to pull out a 54-52 victory over Illinois. I hope to hell they work on free throw shooting all evening.

The good news (besides the victory) is that they got a game under their belts and got a bad game out of their system. They'll need to bring it when they play the second round game against either Southern Illinois or Holy Cross.

Champs!

EA calls it! Virginia Tech to win the NCAA Title during March Madness. Go Hokies!

TiVo + Amazon Unbox

One last thing tonight: I'd been reading about the integration between TiVo and Amazon's Unbox service, where you can download a movie or TV show from Unbox and have it delivered to your TiVo. TiVo has sort of lost me as a user, as their HD DVR is way too expensive, and as bad as the Comcast/Motorola DVR software is, I can record HD and do pretty much everything I need to do. The TiVo has been relegated to backup recordings and occasionally streaming some music.

However, TiVo and Amazon are offering a $15 credit, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I signed up for it today--it was very easy, you just sign into Amazon, then type in your TiVo account info, and you're done--and scanned through for something to download. I didn't want to get a TV show, so I grabbed a rental of the recent Mike Judge movie Idiocracy. It cost about $4, which leaves me a good amount of credit to rent a few more movies or TV shows. The rental last a few days after download.

Now, after about an hour, it's only downloaded about 1/3rd of the movie (I've got an older wireless adapter), which means this isn't going to replace On Demand for instant gratification. On top of that, it's not in HD, so I'll probably never use it when I could use On Demand or Netflix.

But, for stuff that I'm not worried about being timely or high quality video, it'll be worth playing around with. Frankly, I doubt that this will take off. I just don't have much of a desire anymore to watch stuff in crappy TiVo quality. I've got a laptop that I can download movies/shows in high quality, or watch them online in high quality, and I can access them faster than the TiVo can get them from Amazon.

So, it's sorta cool technology, but I think it's a little bit of "too little/too late" from the TiVo camp. I don't think this will compete with Apple TV; I don't think this will compete with BitTorrent and a laptop; I don't think this will compete with On Demand. It doesn't win on price, quality, or convenience.

Well, at least I don't think it does, since I haven't had a chance to watch it, and it won't let me start watching it until it's fully downloaded.

My Small Impact on the World

I went to check out my Evite To Google Calendar script page at Userscripts, since I like to poke in every once in a while and see if anyone is actually using my script.  Last I had checked I had about 4 downloads.

Today: 64! 64 people have installed it. That's pretty cool. Granted, that's not a ton, but it's a lot more than before! I left a comment, since I'm hoping someone will follow up and let me know if anyone really finds it useful.

Tecmo Bowl! More Mii!

Today is a good day. Tecmo Bowl was released on the Wii Virtual Console. Seriously. It's awesome. Most of the player names were removed, but it's the same game as I played 1000 hours of as a kid. I'd forgotten how simple and addictive the game was. So awesome. So, so awesome.

Speaking of the Wii, thanks to a couple of cool tools called Mii Transfer and the Mii Editor, I was able to transfer my Mii character to my computer and output a couple of decent images. Hopefully, that'll let me eventually finish the overhaul of my main page that I'm working on. Maybe this weekend, if I get some time.

If I'm not playing Tecmo Bowl. Lawrence Taylor is a beast.

Busy Busy Busy

The last week has been extremely hectic. I'd thought I'd kind of caught up on life in general last weekend and early last week: getting a bunch of laundry done, paying bills, getting the brakes in my car fixed, grabbing some cheapish plane tickets out for my friend's bachelor party.

The looming proverbial monkey wrench, however, was my Tuesday visit to Cambridge for jury duty. I've been called once before, ended up sitting in a room in Fitchburg for a few hours before getting sent home. I was hoping that Tuesday would be similar--grab the T over to Kendall, hang out for a few hours, get sent home and have a quiet day.

All pretenses that I might have a quiet day were scuttled when, within an hour of being there, I was in a courtroom being asked if I was fit to serve on a double-murder trial that would last approximately a month (if you've been paying any attention to the news, you know which trial it is). I didn't get impaneled on that jury, but an hour later, I was in another courtroom, and sitting in the jury box for a trial expected to last a week long.

At first, I was a little annoyed, but I sort of realized that if I was all that upset, I was no better than all of the people I scoffed at as they repeated lame excuse after lame excuse to get out of sitting. Somehow their time is more valuable than mine. That's just generally douchebaggy.

So I don't mind sitting so much. The only tough part is that I'm working half-days so that I don't have to burn any vacation time (though that might change this week, since I'm getting run down). Mornings in Cambridge, back on the T, drive to Burlington for work. It makes for long, somewhat stressful days, but it also means I haven't had a whole lot of time to work on some of the projects I've wanted to.

I have started playing around with the layout of the blog a bit. If you notice, the right sidebar is reorg'd a little bit, with a little widget that lets you see my shared items from Google Reader. I've slowly started formulating the layout for the new and improved ryantoohil.com (I'm playing with CSS as a bit of an experiment). I also revamped my little basketball statistics tool with a nicer layout and look.

The MacBook Pro has come in handy recently, as I can sit comfortably, get inspired, and quickly whip something up, rather than having to overcome the inertia and walk into my somewhat cold office. It's also going to come in handy for jury duty, should I end up as an alternate, because I'll have a bunch of time to kill while my fellow jurors deliberate.

Hopefully, I'll have some more time in the next week or so to play around with some of my ideas (the home page, maybe another podcast, some posts here). The trial is expected to wrap up mid-week, so hopefully I've only got a couple more days of back and forth.

There's some fun news: Ben Folds is playing with the Pops orchestra on May 9th. Tickets go onsale tomorrow, which means I'm going to have find someone to buy me tickets since I'll be listening to testimony and not near a computer to get a couple of seats. Since I missed on The Arcade Fire (who are playing the next night at the Orpheum), I'd like to get a seat. I'll have to work my mojo tomorrow.

Linkbaiting is Annoying

I've been reading a lot of search engine stuff in my feed reader recently. I used to be deep into the search engine optimization knowledge, but at some point, I realized that it was, at some level, just scummy. Not the idea that you'd understand how engines work and do the little things to make your site rank appropriately. No, it was the other stuff, like link exchanges and link buying and the general dishonesty that comes along with that. When I go to a search engine, I want to actually find what I'm looking for, not have to dig through a bunch of crappy sites that think they deserve my traffic.

It got worse when AdSense came along, and it got even worse as Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and the other social networking-type sites got big. Now, not only were people gaming the engines, they were throwing up lame articles and gaming other systems to get both the search juice and the traffic. Their spammy site gets the best of both worlds, and the rest of us deal with more spam--just not of the email variety.

This week was a big to-do about one of these SEO/SMO guys who got banned from now-Yahoo! owned blog widget because he was posting how to hack it (and, quite frankly, being an all-around douche). So, a guy who games the system for a living was bitching about being banned from a free tool that he'd been posting how to hack. Topping it off, a whole bunch of other SEO folks (many of whom I've been reading for a few years now) hopped on and defended the guy.

I just don't get it.

I understand that the whole idea behind this widget (MyBlogLog) and behind other sites (like Digg, Flickr, etc.) is community. You build a community and you get more than just the functionality of the widget, you get the benefit/fun of the community. It's all so Webtwopointohy.

Finally, a voice of reason came through my feed reader. I'm hoping we're reaching a tipping point. I'm hoping we're reaching the point where every sales and marketing guy out there looking to score some quick money doesn't look at every new site and widget as something to game and make money. Now, I'm not against making money. I'd love to create a site that has some value to people and figure out a way (ads or not) to make some money. But the group of folks who exist solely to put up a site with ads, get it on Digg, and get enough sheep to click on it need to go away. They used to be called spammers, and it's about time we go back to calling them that.

Lost is Lost

Lost is nearing the midpoint of its third season, and I'm nearing the endpoint of caring. After a phenomenal first season, and a second season that meandered but eventually built up steam to an interesting season finale, the third season has been disappointment after disappointment. While the Others are interesting, the pieces of the story, the revelations, the so-called answers have been so incongruous and so minor that it seems rather obvious the writers and network are stretching the story out to ridiculous lenghts.

Every article during the first two seasons talked about not wanting to be The X-Files and never answer major questions. Well, at least The X-Files answered something each season. Each mythology episode of The X-Files at least furthered the overall story. I just don't feel like Lost is moving in that direction. The backstory device is running thin the 3rd, 4th, 5th time they revisit a characters backstory, revealing such intriguing story items as "the meaning of Jack's tattoos" and "how Locke lived on a drug farm."

There's a chance that Lost's uninterrupted run will lead to the show hitting its stride again, but I've got less faith this time, given that at least the "bad" episodes in season two were fun to watch. There's just not been anything particularly great this season.

Lost is still ok. It's not as good as Veronica Mars. It might even be worse than the exposition-heavy Heroes. Where those shows differ from Lost is that they're at least advancing their stories in ways that make you want to turn in each week. Lost, to me, is falling to 24 territory: a show where I could just read a recap of an episode and how it fits and be happy enough to have not spent the hour wondering why the show isn't better.

I do think, though, that like The OC, if the show doesn't pick up by the end of its third season, I'm not sure I'll be there for the start of the fourth.

PTBNL Episode 3

Finally, Episode 3 of the Podcast To Be Named Later. The sound quality is craptastic since I used the mic built into my MacBook.

However, you'll hear some awesome music by:
Hallelujah the Hills

Taxpayer

and ...

Dear Leader.

Mostly Dear Leader. Like a lot of Dear Leader.

I'll put up a full track listing later.

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