I know everybody already appreciates just how fragmented
teevee service has become, but here is my experience...
As far as Hulu goes, there are very few series I feel
compelled to watch, so I haven't used it yet. But I
remember those great ads. Strange that I haven't had
need for it yet, but I'll check it out.
I do rent from Netflix--a year or two delay is worth
the quality of DVD for a good series (Deadwood, Rome).
I went through the first couple years of the American
version of The Office that way, as well as the remake
of Battlestar Galactica.
My wife is crazy for House MD and The Office--she is
one who wants them as soon as she can get them, but
seems to find them easily enough on the network websites.
Maybe half the time she watches the show at the
normal network time slot.
There are a few things I can get from my XBOX 360
service, they have an archive of the Olympics in HD,
so I bought a few hours of skating and some ski
jumping. They have Planet Earth in HD on there, and
since I don't have a blue ray player that seems to
be a good way to get HD, a couple bucks per episode,
it is stuck under the Zune section and my xbox
installed something the first time.
The Netflix service through XBOX Live is a notch
better than through my PC, at least in terms of
ease of use because the controller is easier when
I watch the TV.
I don't use my Comcast service much--I flip channels
in the middle of the night, insomniac that I am.
Over the air or cable teevee streaming garbage all
night seems like a huge waste of bandwidth--before
dawn this morning I was amused and then sickened
by an advert for a 'girls gone wild' dvd, there
were a few ads for bizzare looking vacuum cleaners,
plenty of evangelists on the air, and I spent
30 seconds on CNBC (a timer counting down to
jobless claims measuring down to hundredths
of a second, ha!) and then settled on a guest lecture
at the Tulane Freeman School of Business on one
of our University/public access type channels.
Now this actually was worth watching--this was
some big fund private equity guy who completely
understood where things stood in 2008, very good
lecture, and I forgot his name darn it.
----------------------
My dual boot saga continues...
So I've finally booted up linux, Mint 8, Helena,
which is a distro of Ubuntu--Karmic Koala, ha, you
have to like all the names.
Now...even though I deactivated in bios my second
storage HDD, the installation still sees it and
does not report my partitions correctly! Oh well,
nothing is perfect--so I had to actually pull out
that drive. Now the installation sees everything
on the first drive correctly. It even reports what
is on each partition--XP MCE, Dell utilities, the
empty partition I peeled off with Easeus, and a
small swap partition. I intend to do this manually
as the automatic choice "install side by side" does
not seem to want to share exactly what it will do
which is unsettling. Although I am backed up, so
I suppose I can take the chance.
I just typed this up using Firefox, just off the
Mint boot CD, with the installation just sitting there
waiting for me to flinch, heh.
Since I don't know which "mount point" to choose,
I'm probably going to have to do some reading.
Nice to have firefox and internet access from just
a CD! |
