Trials and tribulations in a busy world..

Living without cable tv

A little over a month ago we canceled our cable-tv. I can already hear the scream of Anne, our house guest in October.

It wasn't so much to save the money - although that's nice - but because we thought it wasn't worth what we were paying. Time Warner Cable are experts in that fantastic ability to nickel-and-dime you with "fees" on top of the actual cable bill. Pisses me off.

So what do you do with a 40" flat-screen TV when you no longer have those beautiful HD channels to show on it? First off, we've started subscribing to Netflix. Awesome way to rent movies: you put the movies you want in an online queue and they show up in the mail within two business days. And not just movies, also tv-series and pretty much everything else that's been put out on dvd. I've already seen almost three seasons of The Sopranos, which I never saw while it was being sent on TV.

Besides that, I've moved the media center pc into the living room and hooked it up to the TV. In Denmark we had it setup with Windows XP Media Center and a dual-tuner TV card, but here's it's a plain Windows XP and no tuner card. So what can you do with it? A surprising amount!

Netflix Watch Instantly: "Get movies streamed instantly to your TV"
- free when you already subscribe to Netflix. Among the things you can stream - in full-screen format - is the great tv-series Heroes and also the quirky comedy 30 Rock.

Hulu.com: "Watch your favorites. Anytime. For free"
- "videos from more than 50 content providers, including        FOX, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros. and more". Includes The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Family Guy, The Office, The A-Team, Airwolf (80's retro FTW!) and much more.

Joost.com: "Free online TV. 28,000+ TV shows, 480+ Channels"
- in their own words: "It's video – more than 20,000 shows, with more added daily". Includes everything from CNN to Bewitched to Star Trek to Comedy Central to CBS Evening News.

NBCOlympics.com: "2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing"
- live coverage and highlights from the 2008 Olympics. Major downside: no full-screen option (big issue when you're running 1080p and the clips are 480i max.)

The downside: most of these are only available in the U.S. The upside: I'm in the U.S.

I was pretty sceptical about live streaming. I honestly thought it needed a couple more years before it became a viable alternative to 'live' TV. Not so- it works right now. For the non-techies (i.e. someone who's not comfortable hooking up a computer to their TV and not just handling a remote control) it's still a while off, but if you're willing to put up with some tech fiddling it's almost on par with TV and better in several respects.

End of a busy week

Here I am, sitting in Balboa Park waiting for Siw to finish the Georgia O'Keefe exhibition. I have the day off after a busy three days in San Diego working at ESRI's User Conference 2008.

The conference went well and was fun just like last year. A lot of people were out partying all three days, whereas I limited myself to last night. I'm feeling the effects today and I figure not having a hangover while at the conference was a pretty good call.

Tomorrow and Sunday I'll be showing a couple of the girls from Colombia around L.A. which will be fun. After they were so nice when I was in Bogotá last year it seems only fitting to return the favor now that they're in California.

Comic-Con 2008, part 2

[continued from part 1]

I was just about to get dizzy from the audio-visual assault when I spotted something I hadn't counted on: LeVar Burton, Jonathan Frakes, and Marina Sirtis who all played different characters on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I've already uploaded one picture in a previous blog post and a few more are on Flickr as usual. Like Jesper says, I freaked a little bit when I spotted them. Guess I'm not immune to being star-struck!

After soaking up the impressions from the convention floor, we continued on to another session. In the program the title and description of the session Starship Smackdown XI had caught my attention:

Ever wonder if the USS Enterprise could take out the ID4 mothership (hint: Kirk's can!)? Can the Galactica find Earth and destroy the Yamato (of course, it's a cartoon)? Can the Serenity outplay, outwit, and outlast the fully functional firepower of an Imperial Super Star Destroyer? You'll find out the answers to all of these questions and many more from the panel of expert spaceship-ologists.

If that doesn't sound like fun, you're probably not a sci-fi geek :) What came from that description was an hour and a half of pure fun. The basic premise is simple: make a list of starships - USS Enterprise from Star Trek, Serenity from Firefly, etc. - and pit them semi-randomly against each other in ficticious battles. The panel members then discuss which one would win and the ship with the most votes continues to the next round. Of course it's not so much a "discussion" as a series of wisecracks and trading insults with the other panel members and those members of the audience whose sympathies lie with the opposing ship.

This description of Starship Smackdown doesn't remotely do it justice. Very, very funny and entertaining. Pretty much a discussion panel with 200 people in the audience reenacting the type of argument I had with a friend in middle school (he was pro-Star Wars, I was pro-Star Trek; naturally I argued the Enterprise NCC-1701-D could kick the Death Star's ass.. he didn't agree).

After Starship Smackdown the con was coming to an end. As the finale we joined a packed Ballroom 20 for a special screening of the awesome Once More With Feeling musical episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.

Latest box office stats

Weight: 15 lbs (6.8 kg) (25-50 percentile)
Height: 26.5" (68 cm) (50-75 percentile)
Head circumference: 17" (44 cm) (50-75 percentile)

Fun fact: the measurements are actually done in metric, which the nurses then promptly convert to U.S. customary units to tell us.

Comic-Con 2008, part 1

This Sunday I went to Comic-Con as previously mentioned. Jesper and I drove off from Redlands towards San Diego slightly past 8 am and arrived down there just before 10 am. Very good time, but then again we didn't have much traffic, and with Jesper's nice BMW 330i convertible on the freeway I would expect nothing less than stellar driving times.

Arriving at the convention center, it was fun to see the sheer number of people and the incredible variety. Very different from ESRI's International User Conference last year (and this year's conference is - incidentally - next week). All types of people were there: all ages, sizes, and nationalities.

Inside was overwhelming from the very beginning. Even the registration area was huge. It was efficient though; we got our badges in less than five minutes once inside.

Our first stop of the day was a Harry Potter session. More for fun than anything else, we went to see a panel talk about Harry Potter fandom. Good lord. And I thought Trekkies and sci-fi nerds were strange! Very entertaining in that 'watching something incredibly goofy' kind of way. They spent the first half hour of the panel discussing how awesome and great all Harry Potter fans are, so after going to questions from the floor, I found Jesper and we quickly snuck out. (I do realize the absurdity of thinking another kind of geekiness to be stranger than my own.. ;-)

From the Harry Potter session we moved on to the main floor.. without being there, it's hard to fully describe how big the convention center floor is and just how many booths and people were there. You could find anything remotely related to comics/sci-fi/fantasy pop culture in the San Diego Convention Center for Comic-Con. We spent the next couple of hours just walking around seeing the different booths, getting something to eat, and taking in all the impressions.

[to be continued..]

M5.4 earthquake in SoCal

Well, I'll be.. We just had a 5.4 earthquake centered in Chino Hills about 45 miles from Redlands.

View Larger Map

A friend of mine keeps sending me an e-mail or text message asking "did you feel that one?" for the minor earthquakes we have on a regular basis. I've never felt a single one of those.. This one? Oh believe me, I felt it.

[Updated]

The very first estimate was that the earthquake was magnitude 5.6, which was later revised up to 5.8 and has (for now) been revised down to 5.4.

While it doesn't sound like much happened out here in Redlands, downtown Los Angeles did get shook up a bit with stuff falling off store shelves.

The Los Angeles Times was down for about 20-30 minutes because of server overload right after the quake. They are now back online with full coverage. All other major news media also has coverage:

U.S. coverage
L.A. Times
L.A. Times photo gallery
CNN.com
New York Times

Danish coverage
Berlingske Tidende
Politiken
Jyllands-Posten

Meeting childhood heroes

Comic Con was fun and quite an experience and deserves a full post in itself. However, this picture (which I uploaded while at the con from the new iPhone, woohoo) shows LeVar Burton and Jonathan Frakes from Star Trek: The Next Generation (Marina Sirtis is just outside the picture).

Funny thing to stumble upon actors that played some of my favorite childhood heroes on TV.

I had no idea they were going to be at the convention- in fact I was already a bit bummed that Wil Wheaton had been at the con Thursday-Saturday but wasn't there for Sunday. I think I freaked out a little bit and didn't quite know what to do with myself. I didn't have my actual camera with me - d'oh! - but the semi-usable iPhone 2 megapixel camera made do in a pinch.

Today: iPhone, Tomorrow: the world!

I did it- I finally did it! I caved to the Cult of Jobs and bought an iPhone 3G. Believe it or not, this is my first iPod device ever and first non-Nokia mobile phone since 1999 (ignoring an unfortunate one month incident with a Samsung sometime in 2005).

First impressions: sweet ass sweet (but the pricing blows no matter how Steve tries to sell it.. and leaving out a dock and charging $30 for that small piece of plastic is just tacky).

Second impression: damn this thing sucks power fast.

Third impression: GPS: fun, but besides the occasional Google Maps pinpoint somewhat useless with the current apps.. maybe it'll all become clear to me in time. AT&T 3G network: sucks donkey balls. Reason for upgrading from first generaton iPhone if you have one: slim to none.

Fourth impression: they need to work on firmware v2.0 a bit.. weird pauses that I don't remember seeing on first generation iPhones. Rumors are already out about firmware v2.01 and v2.1, so I wonder if things won't get sorted out soon enough.

Final impressions: still the most awesome mobile phone I've ever had. w00t!

Tomorrow: Comic Con with the rest of the geeks. With me flashing my new toy. Because that's how you've gotta roll with an iPhone.. right?

No toys this weekend

No toys for me this weekend like I'd planned:

A tooth

The past week or so, Josephine has been waking up a lot more during the night than she used to. Not only that, but she also woke up a lot more loudly than before: more of a yelp rather than just making some small noises and squirming around.

We'd discussed what might be causing it, and further, how to alleviate it.. waking up every 60-90 minutes doesn't do any good for your sanity the next morning. One of the things we talked about was whether she might be teething. It's about the time where that could/should occur.

Sure enough. Yesterday, Siw had a Eureka moment discovering the very first budding little tooth in Josephine's lower mouth. Her next thought was that now it won't be long before Josephine is all grown up, goes off to college and disappears out of our lives forever.. Somehow I don't think that'll happen quite just yet.