There are 143 posts filed in Reviews (this is page 11 of 15).
Our Netflix movie lats night was Double Indemnity, the 1944 film noir classic starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwick, and Edward G. Robinson.
Wow, what a brainy, clever movie. Sixty-five years after it was made, it still stands up. Well, aside from watching the main character stop at a drive-in for a bottle of beer, and the mention that a mansion with a commanding view of Los Angeles costs almost $30,000.
Last night Kelly and I watched Man on Wire, the documentary about wirewalker Philippe Petit‘s astounding high-wire stroll between the World Trade Center buildings in August 1974.
Though it was over thirty-five years ago, his feat is still astounding. Worth a watch!
So not only did I establish that my HDTV picture is far better than cable, I found out that Time Warner’s basic cable doesn’t carry WTVD2 (11.2), the secondary channel of Raleigh’s ABC affiliate. I’m a little ticked that if it weren’t for me checking out the non-cable offerings I would’ve never found this channel.
Thus we get more channels without basic cable than we do with basic cable. Yet another reason to jettison cable service in favor of pure HDTV.
I hooked up our new Channel Master CM-7000 digital TV converter last night and was I amazed. The picture is stunning! It makes the picture we got with analog cable look like total crap! In fact, it may even be better than digital cable as digital cable takes an already-compressed MPEG signal (the ATSC broadcast signal) and recompresses it with QAM. Compressing the same data with two different algorithms always diminishes the quality of the data.
Setup was a snap, too. I simply hooked up the antenna cable, the SVGA cable, and a patch cable for stereo audio. Then a few clicks on the on-screen display and it automatically searched for and added all the available digital channels. It was a total breeze. The antenna I used was an old “rabbit-ears” antenna, too. I haven’t even hooked up the big honking attic antenna to it yet.
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No matter which candidates you supported in yesterday’s elections, I think you’ll agree that the Wake County Board of Elections did an outstanding job managing the election. Early voting was super-easy and wildly successful, voting machines worked well, ballots were easy to understand and counted fairly, and poll workers knew their jobs and performed those jobs efficiently. Rarely did I see anyone waiting more than 5 to 10 minutes at the polling places I visited. Even the Board of Election’s post-election results webpages, farmed out to SOE Software, easily handled the load.
Managing a presidential election is a mammoth project but from what I can see Wake County pulled it off flawlessly. Kudos to all the poll workers who put in long hours to make voting so effortless!
I spent a moment this morning doing some research on which digital TV converter box to buy. We’ve got an HDTV but also have a standard-definition TV which is is very good condition.
Wikipedia made it easy with a handy comparison chart. It seems that very few of these converter boxes (a large group of which are known as Coupon-Eligible Converter Boxes or CECBs as they qualify for the $40 government subsidy) sport S-video outputs. The clearest input for my analog TV, a mid-90s model Sony, is its S-video input. To me it doesn’t make sense to have a box convert from a perfect digital signal to an analog output if that analog output isn’t going to be at least S-video quality.
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On my daily downtown walk, I popped into the Posta Tuscan Grille restaurant, located in the downtown Marriott at the south end of Fayetteville Street. I wanted to say hello to my neighbor, Gianni Betti, who is the chef there. Gianni greeted me with a smile as I walked in and then gave me a tour of his beautiful restaurant.
And an amazing restaurant it is: colorful, festive dining rooms; beautiful wood floors; and a large, well-stocked bar. The lunch menu at Posta’s is also affordable, making it a good spot for meetings. Not to mention the free wireless Internet available in the bar area.
Gianni laughed when he told me how he had to get used to the breakfast menus here as in Italy breakfast is a cappuccino and a pastry. Posta does serve a full Marriott-style breakfast buffet, however.
While one might think being at the end of Fayetteville Street might be lonely, Gianni says he gets a sizeable crowd from events at Memorial Auditorium: before and after plays, symphonies, ballets and the like. It seems like the perfect location for a classy Italian restaurant, with few nearby competitors (the Wilmington Street McDonald’s doesn’t count).
I love Italian food and Posta Tuscan Grille is certainly authentic. If you’re downtown and looking for a great Italian meal or simply looking to bide your time before a show, stop by the Posta Tuscan Grille. And tell ’em MT.Net sent ya!
I got a sneak peek today of Sitti by Neomonde, the new joint project between Neomonde and Greg Hatem’s Empire Eats opening at the corner of Hargett and Wilmington Streets. All I can say is wow! Sitti takes Neomonde’s great food and provides it with the atmosphere its always needed.
I have always delighted in introducing my friends and colleagues to Neomonde. Its like I’m letting them in on a secret; like they become members of the club. Word of mouth is what led the first tucked-away, Beryl Road restaurant to double in size. It also led to the opening of a Morrisville location. With popularity came the pains of growth: even with the expanded size, the Raleigh restaurant sometimes has more diners than available tables.
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Kelly and I had been so busy that we left our last Netflix film languishing for over a month. Last week we finally sat down to watch it and were so happy we did. The film, Everything is Illuminated, turned out to be one of the best we’ve seen in a while.
We didn’t know what to expect but the film sort of scooped us up and took us along for the ride. The character development is excellent, the cinematography is outstanding, and the plot is well-paced right up to the end. The soundtrack is woven nicely into the film, complimenting it rather than distracting from it.
While there are one or two scenes near the end which suffered from the editing, as they weren’t well-explained in the final cut, overall it was quite a journey.
If you haven’t seen it I recommend you do. Its a quirky little masterpiece you’re sure to enjoy. And if you do wind up renting it, invite us over. We’d like to see it again!
The Center for American Progress held an advance screening of Kevin Costner’s new movie, Swing Vote [self-playing Flash], in downtown DC last night (oh, yeah … we’ve been staying with Kelly’s parents this week). Kevin Costner himself and the star of the movie, Madeline Carroll, were at the screening and made some comments before the movie.
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