Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica got up nice and early this morning – well before eight. She has this “teeth whitening” treatment from the dentist that she uses at night. It is one of those prescription treatments that you have to have tooth molds made so that they can make a tray that goes into your mouth and everything. She is supposed to where the thing for two hours each night while the high powered chemicals do their thing. (Bleach, I imagine.) But last night she went to bed while still wearing it and, of course, fell asleep and wore it all night. So she burned her teeth and gums and has a bit of discomfort.

It is another bright and sunny morning here in Newark. Oreo has been having a great time the last few days laying about lazily in the sunlight. He loves lounging on his pillow in the living room toasting himself until it makes him too warm and then laying in the shade on the hardwood to cool off.

Today is homework day for Dominica. I need to do a bit as well. But mine isn’t due until later in the week.  It wasn’t long before I got paged and had to work.  It has been a long weekend of work.

We did lunch out at the local diner with some friends but I got paged again partway through lunch so we had to hurry back to Eleven 80 so that I could get back to work.  I ended up having to work for several hours.  It was a very busy afternoon.

Once I was finally done working we watched quite a bit of AppleTV.  Now that we have it set up and really working and have several subscriptions working in iTunes (working sometimes, anyway) it is much more enjoyable.  We have several “real” television shows downloaded and tons of video podcasts.  Dominica really enjoys being able to watch YouTube videos.

We ordered in pizza from Dominos and called it an early night.  Oreo loves us having AppleTV in the bedroom.  He just snuggles while we watch television.

Next weekend we will be going back home to drop off the extra car and to get supplies that we need before traveling to the UK.

Media Today: Watching AppleTV

I was stuck sleeping in later than I wanted this morning because Oreo was being massively snuggly and was sleeping with his head on my pillow and with his back to mine so any movement from me would cause him to wake up. And we couldn’t have that. So I was stuck just laying there waiting for Oreo to decide to get up.

After Oreo got up we got up and got ready to head back to Best Buy to exchange the AppleTV that we got yesterday to try out a different unit but before we could make it out of the apartment I got paged and had to work. I got stuck working for about two hours. So Dominica ran over to Food for Life and got us lunch so that we could at least eat while being stuck in the apartment. We had been planning on going to the diner for breakfast.

Around one in the afternoon we were able to escape the apartment and ran to Best Buy and exchanged the AppleTV. We also hit the A&P to get some much needed supplies – like water. We were as quick as possible and got right back to Newark.

The new AppleTV works well. Not perfectly. It still has some issues with its image with blue lines on occassion but for the most part it manages to work and it definitely doesn’t do the total loss of image thing anymore. So this is basically working and we are going to give it a serious try. We hooked it up and watched tons and tons of stuff on it. We tried downloading some television shows from iTunes, checked out some shows like Jet Set and Rocketboom and watched loads of YouTube videos. Good stuff. So far, AppleTV is pretty cool. Far from perfect but quite an interesting idea. We are excited.

The reason for buying the AppleTV is mostly to allow me to continue to explore current and emerging Internet culture and new media which is a hobby of mine. AppleTV itself may not be groundbreaking but it is a significant move for new media towards the mainstream. The AppleTV is a great showcase for how technology like this can be enabled with a simple device that can take great Internet based content and turn it into a transparent experience for “traditional television-like viewing.” It isn’t there yet but the AppleTV makes great strides in this direction.

The AppleTV is both interesting and crippled because of its backend use of iTunes to provide its media store. iTunes is one of the worst pieces of software ever made. It is buggy and unstable – using it today required at least three restarts of a computer that usually can go a month without having any piece of software cause that much of an issue.

But much worse than being buggy, believe it or not, is just how hard iTunes is to use. Context driven menus that are simple and straightforward simply don’t exist. It is totally unintuitive and pointlessly complex. And it is full of a mix of new media terminology and legacy media references that make it difficult to decifer. For example both “Good Night Burbank” and “Back to You” are television shows. One airs originally online and one airs originally on network television and online. But are available to iTunes online. One is classified a podcast – which is incorrect since podcast means audio. And the other is classified as television – even though it too is online. But “What the Buck?” which is available both online and on satellite television is only available through the “YouTube” interface and not through iTunes at all.

While hard to use, one thing that I do really like is the ability to grab television shows (legacy television shows that is) through iTunes. The only problem is that they are way too expensive – $1.99 is a bit much for an old television rerun that is only half an hour long. So I am only willing to get the free ones which, because this is the season opening week, there are several of. So we downloaded a bunch of series pilots and season openers to check out some television shows. It works just like (both metaphorically and literally) on-demand cable television service and looks just as good.

We watched two series pilots. One, “Til Death”, was total crap. It is total sitcom fodder. All the worst and most bland elements of 90s sitcoms coming back to haunt us. Bad acting. Horrible writing. Ugh. Avoid avoid avoid.

The other show is the only thing on television that I am sorry that I cannot watch (as I don’t have television and won’t pay iTunes prices for their wacky proprietary format shows when later I could get them on DVD for cheaper) is “Back to You” which is the new, traditionally styled sitcom by Kelsey Grammer. The show was entertaining but we were both shocked to discover that the show is little more than a glossy reproduction of “Goodnight Burbank” – the Internet television show. The characters are roughly the same. The situation is roughly the same. And they even use one of Burbank’s stock recurring jokes in the very first episode. It is a bit shameless but there are only so many stories in the universe I guess and all that. But Burbank is still running and a fairly new show. It is a little early to be copying it. I guess they are assuming that their target audience is very literate in new media.

We also really like having movie trailers available through the AppleTV. Since we have no other access to current movie trailers we have been completely missing all knowledge of what is going to theatres. But the trailer selection looks to be extremely limited to just a few studios with one being the “B” movie manufacturing firm Lionsgate. So mainstream and quality films are mostly unrepresented in the trailer selection making it a bit weird.

We really like being able to grab YouTube videos to watch on the AppleTV. It would be better if it would use the YouTube subscription feature to queue them up, though, as it is tough to really get into watching things since it has to keep stopping and buffering a lot of the time. The one thing that is really surprising is how good YouTube looks when put up on a big screen. What it really shows is how awful traditional television is and just how little it takes to compete with it.

We ordered in from Nino’s and watched stuff on the AppleTV all evening. It is very addicting. Especially when you realize how much better video podcasts and YouTube are than regular television. And when you realize that you are in total control of what you are watching. It is great not being tied to timetables or anything else when watching television. Which Dominica and I are already so used to that it would never occur to us to think about the “time” that shows are on anymore. It has been so many years since we had to think about something like that.

We moved the television and the AppleTV into the bedroom and put it on a stand so that we could try it out for the evening and make sure that it is going to work for us when we mount it on the wall.  It seems to work fine – the AppleTV gets great signal in there so the wireless shouldn’t be any issue.  It is going to be really neat having a television with AppleTV in our bedroom.  It gives us music and stuff to watch.  I just discovered that you can get the “News from Lake Wobegon” via RSS now which is one of the best uses of the technology yet.

It was around midnight when we fell asleep.

Listening To: The Puppini Sisters – Betcha Bottom Dollar

Today is my first official day of being based off of Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. My office is officially mine at nine this morning. But since it is Friday and unlike the normal working population this is my critical, busy day and not my slack off and leave work early day I can’t even consider going into the office until someone there has verified that my workstation is set up and ready to go and that someone is there and definitely able to let me into the building because I do not believe that I have badge access yet to the building. On Wall Street, unlike in Warren, you need a badge to move about internally in the building. For example, to use the rest room you have to leave the area that you are in and without a working badge would be unable to return.

Dominica has recently gotten hooked on the infamous webtoon Questionable Content. Good stuff.

The Puppini Sisters singing “Wuthering Heights” might be the best 1940s styled female trio vocal tune ever. W00t!

I made myself a simple lunch – whole wheat bread with organic pure peanut peanut butter and gooseberry preserves. What a hipster I am.

Today during her lunch break Dominica ran out to Best Buy and did some shopping. She grabbed an LCD wall mount so that we can relocate our 32″ Westinghouse 720P LCD that has been in the living room up until now into the bedroom where it is going to be mounted above the main closets so that we can watch it from bed. And she also picked up the 40GB AppleTV that we are going to hook to the LCD to use as our television source. We are very excited to try it out. The AppleTV will work over the wireless in our apartment to get RSS feeds from the iTunes on Dominica’s desktop.

My work day was rather long which was mostly my own fault because I didn’t wait to kick it off until late like I usually do on Fridays but instead started working nice and early.  Since there is no escaping early on Fridays I was left working a long day.  Meh.

Min got home around seven and we tore into the AppleTV so that we could check it out.  So, first impression: the unit itself is gorgeous and there is nothing to it.  It is a tiny, attractive “half height Mac Mini wanna-be” which is very cool.  It is almost exactly a half height Mac Mini.  It has a power cord and a tiny remote.  That’s it.  Just add HDMI cable and plug in.

Our AppleTV failed immediately.  It had all kinds of issues with blue lines appearing on the display almost constantly, occassional screens full of red and blue garbage and about half the time the image went out completely leaving us with nothing but an “invalid signal” message on the monitor.  Great.  We tried everything including different cables, placement, configurations, settings, etc.  Nothing worked.  But turning the HDMI Brightness down to low blew away the image completely.  So that didn’t work.  I guess we have to take it back tomorrow.  What a pain.  Just like the Wii.

I at least took the time to get iTunes set up so that I could start getting material ready for the AppleTV if and when we get it working tomorrow.  That was a chore in and of itself as the iTunes installer wouldn’t function for the longest time and once it was working getting through its amateur interface was a job in itself.  But I think that I have it figured out now and can actually get it to be useful if we get the AppleTV working.

Min bought Knocked Up the other day and she really, really wanted to watch that tonight so once the AppleTV wasn’t working we put that in.  She really only got it because it was a Katherine Heigl movie (KH RULZ!)  But the movie turned out to be a total disappoitment.  Bad characters.  Bad acting.  Horrible storyline.  It was just sad.  I stopped watching it after about half an hour.  It wasn’t worth sitting through.  Bleh.

We were off to bed a little before midnight.  More AppleTV goodness tomorrow.

Today is a relaxing day. It just is. For some reason I was really tired this morning and didn’t even realize that Dominica had gotten up and gotten ready for work until she woke me up to kiss me goodbye! I am working from home today so Oreo and I had the luxury of sleeping in late (late is a relative term based on the fact that I normally get up at five.)

There isn’t much sun today but the weather is decent. Warm but not oppressive. (Sounds like a good description of a third world dictator.)

Dominica sent me this email. This is so funny that I had to share it. So a seagull walks into a store…

I had a very productive morning and for lunch I decided that I didn’t feel like going out anywhere so I just microwaved myself some Simply Asian noodles. In creating today’s post I discovered that Amazon now has an online grocery. That is amazing. Since the Peapod service doesn’t service Newark we didn’t know how to get groceries delivered. Now we do. Awesome. I bet that we will be using this soon.

Today I decided that it was finally time for me to both join the “music download revolution” as well as try out Amazon’s new DRM Free MP3 download service. The reason that I have been hesitant to get my music via source like iTunes is because of their useless proprietary formats and DRM. But Amazon has a ton of music available at great prices available as super high quality (256Kb/s vbr – nominally below CD quality) standard MP3s without DRM. You can’t go wrong. So I bought thirteen songs to try out the service. That is just under twelve dollars for thirteen songs. Awesome. So far I am extremely impressed. I am looking for more artists and songs to be added. I will be buying the bulk of my music this way from now on. This saves time and money but my music is still an investment for the rest of my life like the CDs that I started buying nineteen years ago. Every CD that I ever bought still plays perfectly exactly as it did the day that I bought it. Not like that music with DRM that people have been buying that is already starting to fail and be lost forever. What a waste.

I got a bunch of work done around the house today. Lots of cleaning and organizing. We had a shipment come in from Amazon today too which included several books that I have been looking forward to, a CD and some DVDs of the 1980’s classic The Cosby Show. I got all of the packing material cleaned up and recycled before Dominica got home so that there was no evidence. Everything was neatly put away. Today is a day with great strides forward in the overall state of our apartment.  I even managed to hang some artwork in the kitchen that Dominica bought a week or two ago.

After work Dominica had a dentist appointment in Kearny so she didn’t get home until late.  She made really good time, though, and was home just before seven.  Long before I had expected her.  It was late and she was tired so we ordered in from Golden City and popped in the first disc of the first season of The Cosby Show.  We spent our short evening watching that while I worked on setting up and learning about my new Netgear SC101 Storage Central SAN device.

While Min was out shopping earlier today she picked up Knocked Up on DVD.