The Stew

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is a funny film. At least I think it is. I only managed to get about 45 minutes into it before my Blu-ray player sounded like it was grinding corn for the day’s tortillas.

Lo and  behold, upon inspecting the disc, a crack near the edge. So I used the handy “Report a Problem” link on the Netflix site, and they’re sending me out a new one tomorrow. End of story, right?

Well, it would be, except that this happened to me two weeks ago with a copy of “Hancock.” The replacement Netflix sent out worked fine, so I managed to finish watching that one. (It was about half of really good movie, but that’s a story for a different blog post.) I didn’t think anything of it at the time — but now that it’s happened to me twice, I had to use the Google to find out if something is amiss.

Sure enough, there are plenty of annecdotes about cracked Blu-rays from Netflix. When pressed, Netflix apparently blames the Post Office for mishandling the discs. The Post Office apparently blames Netflix for using crappy paper envelopes for shipping the discs. They’re probably both right. All I know is that it’s enough of an inconvenience that the missus thinks I should drop Blu-rays and only order regular DVDs from Netflix. Cooler heads prevailed, but Netflix should take note: Since you’re charging extra for these things, you should probably find a way to have them delivered properly.

Edit (04/21/09): Replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked.

Edit (04/24/09): Replacement of replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked. Netflix customer service gave me a Post Office number and basically told me to bitch to them.

Edit (04/28/09): Replacement of replacement copy of replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked. I’ve switched to DVD-only. If anyone knows how to contact Netflix executives to express displeasure, please let me know.

Edit (04/29/09): I thought I was going to get a DVD, but my Blu-ray subscription runs through the end of the month. So they sent me another cracked Blu-ray.

Edit (05/02/09): Another day, another cracked copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal.” This time, I didn’t ask for a replacement.

Okay, in the great contest of 2008, I picked a loser that should have — by all rights — won outright. I’m of course talking about HD DVD’s loss to Blu-ray. Proof: “Casablanca” is on HD DVD but not Blu-ray; “Meet the Spartans” is on Blu-ray but not HD DVD.

In that other contest, I picked the winner. Obama was in town yesterday to declare, in a great speech, that he’s the Democratic candidate for president. In a not-so-great speech in New York, Hillary Clinton failed to acknowledge that she’d lost her bid to be the candidate, and asked that people visit her Web site and send her a message to let her know what to do next. Go to her site (I’ll save you the trouble) and you’re greeted by a pre-written note that you can send her that says the following: “I’m with you Hillary, and I’m proud of everything we are fighting for.” There’s room for an optional message, which some folks have used to tell her to go away. Politely, I’m sure.

News reports say that she’ll drop out in two days. Of course, news reports were saying yesterday that she’d drop out yesterday, and that didn’t happen. I’m not holding my breath, even if she’s acting like a kid who’s holding hers.

I did something I swore I wouldn’t do. I’m not particularly proud of it.

I bought a Blu-ray player.

Put down the pitchforks — it’s not totally evil. It’s an HD-DVD player as well.

Actually, in many ways the Samsung BD-UP5000 is a better HD-DVD player than my first-generation Toshiba HD-A1 is. It’s faster to load DVDs and HD-DVDs, the upconversion of DVDs is clearly superior, and… um… it also plays Blu-ray discs.

It’s not perfect. Dolby TrueHD is limited to 2-channel sound for the time being (Samsung promises a firmware update to correct this by May), and HD-DVD menus are a little slow. I’ll live with the slow menus, and while I’d be happier if I were getting lossless 5.1 sound on discs with TrueHD, I’m — on the whole — pretty pleased with the unit.

As for the Blu-ray discs, finally having a player has confirmed in my mind that the wrong format lost the war. The picture on my three (so far) BDs is fine and dandy, and the sound is pretty good to boot. But the menus and extras are, for lack of a better word, “primitive” compared to those on most HD-DVDs. I’m one of those crazy people who likes extras, and being limited to having a really stupid trivia track on The Fifth Element makes me a little sad. Here’s hoping that the Blu-ray folks get their cool Java-based stuff working sooner rather than later.

As unbaked as it is, Blu-ray is clearly the wave of the future. I’m on board — at least until downloads rule the HD world.

I recently got a Blackberry 8830 for work. There are some things I like about it — the full keyboard, the multimedia features (enhanced by a cheap 4-gig MicroSD card), and the voice dialing software, to name a few. There are some things I don’t like about it — the battery life, the Web browsing experience (which is both slow and clumsy… buying some stuff on Amazon today was a painful experience), and the button that activates the voice dialing feature. I can’t help but hit that stupid button nearly every time I put the Blackberry back in my pocket. It’s embarrassing during a meeting for your phone to loudly demand, “Say a command!”

But the thing that truly chaps my behind is the phrase in the title of this post. “You are not currently in an area that can handle data communication.” I get that warning screen all the time when I’m surfing the Web. “Oh really,” I say, incredulously, to my PDA. “Well goddamn it, I WAS in an area that could handle data communication three seconds ago, and I didn’t move!”

There are times when I get that warning that I can see, from the little arrows in the upper right corner of the display, that my Blackberry is sending and receiving data. How can I be in an area that can’t handle data communication when I’m clearly communicating data?

Earlier this month, Johan Bergendahl, the CMO of Ericsson, said that Wi-Fi hot spots will one day be like phone booths of yore — because, you see, wireless broadband is where it’s going to be at. I want what he’s smoking. Today, I can sit in any of a variety of coffee shops and surf the Web very quickly and pleasantly on my iPod Touch via Wi-Fi. That experience is light years ahead of surfing the Web on my Blackberry, even when I’m not staring at the “you are not currently” warning.

Those of you with other PDAs or service companies that aren’t Sprint can let me know whether I’d have a better experience with another device or another carrier. If I didn’t have to have the Blackberry for work, I’d probably never have bought one.

I’m employed again. Well, I will be next month, anyway. In the meantime, now that I know there’s going to be steady money coming in again, I replaced the wife’s defunct iPod Mini with a new Nano, and I picked myself up a Touch while I was at it.

I haven’t been this pleased with a piece of technology since my Xbox 360. It’s a true marvel, and I know I screwed myself over by buying version 1.0 of this thing — but I don’t care. I’m getting plenty of use out of its WiFi connection and YouTube module, I’ve loaded it up with pictures of the baby and I’ve found a host of useful mobile-friendly Web sites. Oh yeah, and it plays music, too.

The interface on this thing is incredibly elegant. Being able to select and move items by touch is completely natural. So natural, in fact, that when my not-quite-2-year-old daughter saw me moving pictures around with a flick of a finger, she came over to investigate and was able to move the pictures as well. The funny thing is that when she then saw pictures on either my wife’s Nano or on my computer monitor, she made no effort to touch the screens to select new pictures. She somehow knows that the Touch is something special, and the rest of the world doesn’t work that way. It probably should.

If you’re not watching The Venture Bros, you of course should be. It takes the unintentional laughs from Jonny Quest and makes them fully intentional, along with a heaping helping of WTF. But that’s not really what this post is about.

Turns out, there’s a lot of crazy Depeche Mode fans in the world, and my wife is friends with a good lot of them. They trade videos of the band and make highly sexualized comments about the members of the group in discussions on YouTube. I’ve got no problem with this, and I thought those folks might appreciate the video above.

My wife has been a fan of Radiohead for years. I like them just fine, though I haven’t given all their stuff a listen. Regardless, I’ve got to give them credit for this gutsy move with their latest album, In Rainbows.

In case you hadn’t heard, the band doesn’t currently have a contract with a major record label, so they’re releasing In Rainbows on their Web site as a digital download. Obviously, they’re not the first band to do this — however, there are two very interesting things about this digital download:

• The songs are 160kbps DRM-free MP3s. You can play them on any device you want, or burn as many copies to CD as you want.
• You can pay whatever you want for the songs, or nothing at all.

That’s right — if you don’t feel like paying for the music, you don’t have to. If you think it’s worth a few bucks, go ahead and pay a few bucks. (I paid 5 British pounds for it — with processing, that’s about $10.50 or so in U.S. dollars.) Every cent, should you decide to send some, goes directly to the artists.

Hopefully, this sparks some kind of trend. The recording industry for decades has been one of the more blatant examples of middle-man excess, and anything that makes them more irrelevant is a good thing.

While this sort of distribution model wouldn’t work for every artist, there are plenty who could gain major goodwill with their fans if they tried something like this. Are you listening, Britney?