Reviews

There are 143 posts filed in Reviews (this is page 9 of 15).

Netflix streaming with the Samsung BD-P1600

For Christmas, my parents gave us a gift card to apply towards a Blu-ray player that could stream Netflix. I did some research on models this morning and picked out what I wanted: the Samsung BD-P1600. I don’t own any Blu-ray discs and may not ever. All I wanted was a player that would excel at streaming Netflix movies. If it could play discs too, well, so much the better.

I spent the evening playing around with it. How does it perform? Fantastically. On the first power-up, it took several minutes for the system to download an apply a firmware update. After that, though, it’s worked very well. I was stunned at the picture quality when I tried streaming some movies: it’s amazingly good. So much so that I’m not at all surprised now that the big cable companies are shitting bricks over this technology. The writing is on the wall for cable TV: I have 12,000+ titles of movies and television shows available for watching anytime. Why would I want to saddle myself with a costly cable subscription?
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Avatar

We went to see Avatar tonight at the Manassas, Virginia Regal Theatres. There was a line to get in and then a line to get a seat in the theater room! I’d never seen anything quite like it.

The movie was spectacular. James Cameron is a genius. This movie really did raise the moviemaking bar. It was very easy to get lost in this other world, like the audience was controlling avatars in the film. It was definitely worth the money.

If you get a chance, you should see this movie at your local theater. And if you’re lucky enough to have it showing in 3D, pay the extra few bucks and see it that way. You won’t be disappointed.

The secrets of the Secret Service

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I just finished reading Ronald Kessler’s book In the President’s Secret Service. It’s an eye-opening look at our presidents and the men and women who protect them.

Kessler shares stories about these “protectees” that were once only traded among agents. In the words of one agent, if Americans knew what their presidents were really like “they would scream.” Among the many things we learn: Kennedy was a philanderer. Johnson was a horny old man and a thief who “would have belonged in an insane asylum” if he hadn’t become president. Carter was untrusting and micromanaged everything. Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 were kind to the agents. Clinton was, too, and was frequently late to his appointments because he wanted to speak to everyone who came to see him.

The book’s other theme is that the agency is being run into the ground. Morale is low and management doesn’t seem inclined to turn things around. This theme is woven around the tales of heroism but seems a bit pasted-on at times. So do other anecdotes, which are sometimes tacked on to places in the text only tangentally related. It seems that the book could’ve used another good reading by an editor before it went to print.

Overall, I enjoyed this book as I’m a political junkie. I recommend it to anyone who wants to know what our leaders are really like when the eye of the public isn’t on them. Then again, perhaps it’s better if you don’t know!

Update: National security expert James Bamford has a similar review.

Phone bill rises 25%

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Last summer I bragged about our cheap home phone bill of $8 per month. I did the math today and was alarmed to see our bill has risen a steep 25%. That’s right: it’s now $10 per month!

It seems the addition of e911 service is the main culprit. It added $1.50 per month per DID to our bill. It’s a small price to pay for the convenience of 911 service, though, so I’m not complaining!

French in Action

I actually had some free time last night so I decided to catch up on the TV shows I’ve been recording but haven’t watched. One of them was the PBS show French in Action, which teaches French at the college level. It’s an immersion-type series first show in 1987 which teaches the language through various scenarios. The three years of French I took in high school are as old as the TV show itself and yet I found that following the conversations was much easier than I expected!

I found the show’s way of dumping you into the dialogue and only afterward tying up the loose ends – after you’re forced to try to figure it out yourself – to be very effective in making the lessons stick. In fact, it seemed easier to pick things up using video than it did using textbooks and a French-speaking teacher in the classroom. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I could rewind the show if there was dialogue I didn’t understand.

Looks like I’ll now be brushing up on my French in the evenings. If that goes well, I may also start watching all the episodes of Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish that I’ve also been recording!

(P.S. All the episodes of French in Action can be streamed online for free as can episodes of Destinos).

I’ve fired my doctor

This morning I fired my doctor. There have been too many instances where I left a message for someone to do a simple thing such as refill a prescription and either the request has been ignored or done incorrectly. In both cases I was never notified that any action had been taken – it was up to me to follow up. Unacceptable. And I’ve heard this same thing from my friends who also were his patients.

It was also hard to actually see my doctor when I needed it. Frequently his schedule was only open weeks in advance and I would wind up seeing another doctor. Not cool. Then there’s the location: my doctor’s office is in Cary while I’m in Raleigh. I don’t want to spend more time driving to and from his office than I do actually being seen by the doctor.
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N&O still not web-savvy

So the News and Observer recently revamped their website yet again and I think I preferred the previous version. Seemed much cleaner to me, and also seemed to load faster.

One thing bit the N&O the last time they upgraded and they didn’t seem to learn the lesson because they made the same mistake again. They didn’t maintain links to their stories, a big webmaster no no! Any favorable ranking Google gave their stories just got shot all to hell because the web team failed to provide forwarding links from their old stories to the versions on their new site. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

And the newspaper industry wonders why it can’t seem to succeed on the Internet.

There Will Be Blood

I saw the Daniel Day-Lewis movie There Will Be Blood (based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!) last night and it did not disappoint. Day-Lewis once again slipped completely into his role, getting into the skin of conniving oilman Daniel Plainview.

While it’s always fun to watch Day-Lewis act, Dillon Freasier, the actor playing Plainview’s son H.W., was fantastic! Put the wrong kid into this role and the whole movie falls apart. Freasier was completely believable from start to finish. No wonder Day-Lewis wanted to share his Oscar with him.

It’s not always an easy movie to watch but I happen to like films that challenge. Put it on your Netflix list if you haven’t yet seen it.

Net10 fails me

Looks like my love affair with Net10 has taken a turn for the worse.

I decided to upgrade my Motorola V171 Net10 phone to a newer Motorola W377g. I’ve entered quite a few numbers into the ancient V171 and rather than punching in all of these numbers into my new phone I was looking forward to uploading my contacts into it using the phone’s USB port.

Imagine my disappointment when I found mention on various Internet forums that Net10 has deliberately crippled this functionality. I found it to be the case myself when my connection software timed out when connecting to the phone.
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Netflix “Watch Instantly”

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I’ve heard good reports of Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” streaming movies but hadn’t experienced it until yesterday. I came home from work to find Kelly and the kids crowded around her laptop, watching Disney’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Color me impressed! It looked like they were watching a DVD, the picture quality was so good. And this was over our home wireless network. There were no skips or any visible glitches.

We’d had the ability to stream these movies courtesy of our Netflix subscription for quite some time now but hadn’t gotten to installing the Microsoft Silverlight software onto Kelly’s Mac until now.

Next up, a dedicated Roku player so we can stream movies to our big TV!