Monica

I interrupt preparations for the class I'm teaching next week at the music and dance collegium (gosh, I hope I have this calibrated right...) to pass along some random short bits.

Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to treat an entire TV series as one unit in the streaming queue, instead of one season at a time like before. However, in doing so you have taken away the ability to rate individual seasons of shows, which is valuable data. It also makes me wonder, when you recommend things to me based on my ratings, if you are giving all ratings the same weight -- 200 hours of a long-running TV show should maybe count differently than a two-hour movie. Just sayin'.

These photos by Doug Welch are stunning. Link from thnidu.

How Pixar fosters collective creativity was an interesting read on fostering a good workplace. Link from nancylebov.

Speaking of the workplace, I enjoyed reading how to run your career like a gentlewoman and several other articles I found there by following links. Link from _subdivisions_.

Rube Goldberg meets J.S. Bach, from several people. Probably fake, but it amused me anyway. (This is a three-minute Japanese commercial. Do commercials that long run on TV, or would this have been theatrical, or what?)

Speaking of ads, in advance of our SCA group's election for a new baron and baroness today, the current baron sent around a pointer to this video about an upcoming British referendum on voting systems. Well-done! (Of course, I agree with both the system and the species they advocate. :-) ) I wish we had preference ballots in the US.

A while back a coworker pointed me to how to make a hamentashen Sierpinski triangle. Ok ok, some of my browser tabs have established roots; Purim was a while ago. But it's still funny, and I may have to make that next year.

Speaking of geeky Jewish food, a fellow congregant pointed me to The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. which looks like fun. I've certainly found myself in that kind of conversation at times (e.g. is unicorn kosher? well, is it a goat (medieval) or a horse (Disney)?). Some of you have too, I know. :-)

dr_zrfq passed on this article about a dispute between a church and a bar. Nothing special about that, you say? In this case the church members prayed to block it, the bar was struck by lightning, the bar owner sued, and the church denied responsibility. I love the judge's comment on the case: “I don't know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

47 seconds of cuteness: elk calf playing in water, from shalmestere.

I don't remember where I found the link to these t-shirts, but there are some cute ones there.

My TiVo is reporting that it's not seeing any input. This happens from time to time with the Series 1 TiVo, but this time rebooting it didn't fix the problem. I checked all the connections and power-cycled the DTV box (just in case), but no luck. (Also changed channels "blind" using the remote; no effect.) Next up was to test whether TiVo is the problem; connecting the input to first a VCR and then the TV did not make the bits flow. Swapping cables did not make a difference either.

The only things I can't isolate for testing are the antenna and the DTV box; I only have one of each. Apparently one of these is failing, but how do I tell which? My guess is that it's the DTV box; Google has served up some complaints about reliability there. But it's just a guess. Have any of you seen that happen?

Before I go buy a new DTV box, let me tap into the collective wisdom of the LJ brain trust. My goal is to watch, via time-shifting and on my TV (not computer), occasional TV shows, inexpensively. "Occasional" means one or two current-run shows at any given time. I am not interested in cable or satellite services.

I currently have the following ingredients: (1) an amplified antenna that had been serving my reception needs (and may still be for all I know). (2) That DTV box. (3) A Series 1 TiVo, which does not have a digital tuner card in it (hence the DTV box). (4) A VCR (ditto). (5) A 10-year-old TV (does not speak DTV, HD, or the newest connectors). (6) Wireless internet, but running ethernet cable to the TV room would be hard. (7) A Roku box.

Options:

• I could replace the DTV box or, if that's not it, the antenna. Short-term this is the cheapest (if it's the DTV box, anyway); is it the wisest longer-term?
  
• I could get a new DVR with digital tuner card (eliminating the need for the DTV box). TiVo + lifetime subscription is too expensive (new, anyway); word on the net is that I can't use the TiVo for recording without the service plan. I don't mind recording manually; I don't need the smarts that the TiVo software comes with. "Record channel 3 at 8PM on Thursdays" is fine. There are, of course, other DVRs; most seem to come bundled with cable service. Pointers to DVRs that I can just plug an antenna into and use would be most welcome.
  
• I could buy individual episodes from somebody using the Roku box and forget about getting live TV, relying on the internet for breaking news that I might actually want to follow. Feels sub-optimal, and my test run (Big Bang Theory) didn't turn up anybody selling the current season (including Hulu Plus).
  
• I could do something with a laptop, some new connector, and wireless internet. I think my iBook is probably not up to that.

Opinions? Other options?

I just finished watching Day Break, which is kind of like a cross between a crime/conspiracy drama and Groundhog Day (in the science-fiction sense, not the romantic-comedy sense). The main character, Detective Brett Hopper, wakes up one morning to find he's been framed for murder, so he sets out to clear his name, uncover the truth, and protect his family (who are getting some attention because of the first two). The twist is that he keeps reliving the same day over and over again, with his memories (and injuries) intact. Changes he makes in one iteration affect the next (and can be reverted by subsequent actions).

The show was canceled after 6 episodes aired; 13 had been made and eventually came out on DVD (which I've been watching via Netflix). The final episode reaches a satisfying ending while leaving doors open; I presume it was intended to be the finale of a short season when it was made. So it fared better than many shows that get canceled early in that it tells a story rather than just the first few chapters of a story. It had potential, though, and it would have been interesting to see a second season.

The episodes that were made do not, however, provide any insight into what is causing the time loop. I wonder if we were ever going to learn about that or if it was just meant to be one of the givens of the show.

Via _subdivisions_:

1. What’s one thing that made you happy today?

After spending hours on porting item #1 to our new software version, item #2 took about 15 minutes. Yay for learning curves! (Ok, also bug fixes -- it's a pre-release version. :-) )

2. What’s one thing that drove you crazy today?

Having my Mac seize an audio CD and refuse to eject. 45 minutes and half a dozen reboots later it finally coughed up. Sheesh! For future reference, the trick is to hold down the left mouse button while booting, but it has to be a wired mouse. Um, what?

(Number 3 was redacted for complete irrelevance.)

4. Is there a TV show you never miss? What is it?

Historically, Babylon 5 and, later, LOST (the last 10 minutes of which does not exist in my world, thankyouverymuch). Of shows currently on the air, The Big Bang Theory. Though an important distinction: B5 always got watched on broadcast night; the others get/got watched within the week.

5. How do you get to work?

I drive via local roads (no parkway, yay).

6. Rake in the fall, or leave ‘em ‘til after the thaw?

Rake in the fall. I left them till spring once, thinking they would just turn into mulch and cease to be a problem. That didn't work so well.

7. What’s your favorite cheese?

I like rich, soft cheeses of the Brie/Camembert/etc family. I've had some excellent specimens that I can never find again (nor remember the names of) after the encounter. Oh well.

8. Who’s your favorite muppet?

I haven't watched any muppets since I was a kid, but I remember thinking that Oscar the Grouch got a bum rap and was clearly misunderstood. :-)

It's been two days, but I'll still insert a spoiler warning here.

( Read more... )

Time will tell whether this is correct or utterly silly, but... I think I know what's going on with the apparent alternate timeline on LOST.

( spoilers, you betcha )

We went to my parents' house this evening. (Their holiday, not mine, but the gift thing is a strong family tradition.) During dinner someone mentioned a gift gone wrong from yesterday: my sister, not understanding the technologies involved, had bought my mother (a dedicated Elvis fan) an SD card with photos and some MP3s. She had thought that she was buying a means to play them, but no -- and since she doesn't know this space, the pricing didn't tip her off. They were talking at dinner about hooking this up to my father's new iMac somehow so she could view/listen, which is more work than anyone intended. (I assume the iMac doesn't have a direct interface and they were going to go through a camera via USB to copy files to disk, or something.)

The digital photo frame we gave my father an hour later made that much easier. :-)

I am now in possession of a Roku box for streaming Netflix to the TV -- yay! There's a bit of delayed gratification, however; due to a bug [*] and connection-type limitations in our TV, I need to go buy some component-video cables. So tomorrow I will be able to set it up (and finish rewiring the TV cluster because, hey, if you have to wade in anyway...). I promised Dani a wiring diagram in exchange for setup help. (This is help of the "hold this" and "plug that in there" variety; actually figuring it out is my job.)

[*] If an s-video cable is plugged in to the TV, all devices using composite video lose their video. Neither the documentation nor Google has been able to help me figure out why. I sure hope component video has no such complications. (Currently the Tivo (series 1) and DVD player are both connected via composite; I'd like to upgrade the DVD player to component and move that composite connection to the Roku box.) The TV does not support three composite connections, only two -- so the third has to be component or s-video.

I have book lust that I can't immediately satisfy. Imrei Madrich is a copy of the torah text that shows the root of every word. Because it's not always obvious, and it would be a big help. Google found me someone who wrote about it on a mailing list, but I haven't found anyone who's selling it yet. I guess I'll call the local Jewish bookstore and see what they can do for me. (Do any of you know this book? Should I be looking for it under a different name?)

Apropos of that, I love studying with both of my rabbis. It is so cool that I get to do this. With one (known as "my rabbi") I'm studying talmud (and occasional other stuff), and with the other I'm reading midrash in Hebrew and not completely sucking at translation. :-) (Though I still have a long way to go.)

Speaking of my congregation (sort of), we are having a talent show in January, and the song I'm writing/arranging for it seems to be going well. kayre rocks for giving me some really great feedback on the piano part. I was also trying to get a quartet together for a Salamone Rossi piece (the organizer encouraged me even though I'm doing the other thing), but altos (among congregants) seem to be particularly elusive at the moment, so that might not work out.

Also speaking of my congregation, we sell Giant Eagle gift cards at face value and get a cut. (I know other congregations do this too.) If you're local and inclined to help us out in this, and we see each other frequently enough for it to work out, I would be happy to turn your check made out to the congregation into gift cards. Just ask.

Speaking not at all about my congregation now, a question for the "Stargate: SG-1" fans out there: do we eventually get an explanation for why almost everyone on various distant worlds speaks English, or am I supposed to just ignore that? The conceit is that many of these folks are humans who were taken from Earth, but that was thousands of years ago. Just wondering, since this show doesn't bother with the conceit of a universal translator. (Which is fine, since the show that did didn't always use it correctly. :-) )

A recent mailing from my employer's department of reducing health-insurance costs (that's probably not their real name) offered some advice that seemed questionable to me. They suggested splitting pills -- not, they hastened to point out, that we should take half the dosage we need, but rather, we should get pills that are twice as strong as they need to be and then split them. They suggested that a stronger drug doesn't necessarily cost any (or much) more to fill, so you can fill your prescription half as often, saving you half the copay and them a lot on the balance. (Aside: what bright person decided that your cost, if insured, should be per month rather than per some volume? If I take a medicine twice as often as you do, why shouldn't I pay twice as much for it?)

I wonder how the pill-splitting scheme could actually be implemented legally and what doctor or pharmacist would go along with it. I find it hard to believe that a large company would advise its employees to commit insurance fraud (in a manner that's traceable), so there must be a way to do it, but I'm puzzled. (The company self-insures; maybe that's why it's ok?)

I was telling this to Dani last night, and commented that even if it's kosher I can't benefit from it for my prescriptions -- the medicine I take for glaucoma is in the form of eyedrops, and I don't know how to get double-sized drops. (Nor am I going to ask my ophthamologist to write a bogus prescription.) This, combined with some recent TV viewing, led us to wonder how big a drop is, anyway. We didn't have an internet connection to hand; Dani tried to work it out theoretically while I tried to work it out empirically. (Things often fall out that way with us.) A medicine that I take once a day (two drops) comes in a 2.5ml bottle and lasts about a month (maybe a little more). Viscosity matters, of course; this stuff is closer to water than to syrup. So I posited about 25 drops/ml for my medicine. (Google later suggested 20 drops/ml of water as an approximation.)

And that's when we turned our attention to the amount by which a character in the True Blood episode we'd just watched overdosed. The character had a quarter-ounce vial of an illegal substance (vampire blood) that he was supposed to take one drop of at a time. Wikipedia tells me that the viscosity of normal blood is about three times that of water. It has no data on vampire blood. Assuming (and I don't know if that's valid) that drop size is directly correlated with viscosity, this suggests that the character overdosed by a factor of approximately 46. Ouch. :-) (Yes, it did hurt.)

Ok, fine -- what have you done with your science education lately? :-)

I've been watching a new show, Merlin, which started a few weeks ago. I've seen four episodes so far (one more is waiting for me on the Tivo) and have been enjoying it.

This is a very loose adaptation of the Arthurian legend with Merlin as the focal character. Not the old, powerful, wise Merlin, mind -- this is Merlin's early days, when he hasn't necessarily learned subtlety or good sense yet. Uther Pendragon is king and has a real problem with magic; Merlin comes to Camelot to apprentice to (be fostered by?) Gaius, the royal physician, and in the process meets Prince Arthur, with whom he seems to have something of a love-hate relationship. Because of the ban on magic Merlin has to hide his budding powers, though they slip out from time to time. Nimueh is an evil sorceress who has it in for Camelot, though we haven't yet been told why.

The show is well-written and generally well-acted. Effects are mixed but get the job done. This is an import of a BBC show (on network TV, who'd've thought?); the BBC has already broadcast 13 episodes and signed up for a second run, so even if this tanks here it should be possible to watch the BBC version directly eventually. (The first series is already out on DVD.) I hope it doesn't tank here; the show has promise. (These things are hard to predict, between a summer premiere and US audiences.)

There is a Tivo box sitting in my TV room, taunting me.

A coworker gave me his old Tivo (he upgraded). Tonight I hooked it up, sort of. If I use the S-video connection, it works but trumps my DVD player -- weird. (The DVD player is connected via component video, the red/white/yellow trio of plugs. I'm not sure why, other than its predecessor was.) If the Tivo's cable is connected I see the Tivo on "video 2"; if it's not I see the DVD player there.

Ok, fine, I figured -- I can use component video to connect the Tivo. I swapped out a VCR that was doing just that, so I expected to see the Tivo on "video 1" where the VCR had been. I half-do -- it's a black-and-white picture. Yes, I've swapped cables. Yes, I've checked that connections are tight. Right now it is connected via both component video and S-video, on "video 1" and "video 2", one black-and-white and one color.

Setting that aside, I figured I could at least try to set it up, and see if the IR connection to the digital converter box works. (A programmable device is considerably less useful if you can't change channels.) I told it I had cable, which is wrong but I thought that would be closest to "I have a box you have to deal with". It spent a while churning (most of that in phoning home), and then displayed a toll-free number and told me to call for support. Whee. :-) After 10 minutes on hold I gave up; I'll try again tomorrow.

Nothing is ever simple. :-)

Last year I bought an amplified antenna and a digital converter box in anticipation of the national switch to digital TV in February. Then Congress delayed it to June, which means my antenna warranty will expire a week before the switch. WQED switched on April 1 and I've been getting zilch on channel 13 since then, but maybe I've been looking in the wrong place. According to this list they might be on 38 now, but I'm not getting signal there either. (WQED's web site does not actually appear to have channel information.) I live 2 miles from WQED, but Pittsburgh is a hilly place.

I'm not sure if any other local station has made the switch. (Google is inconclusive.) I just checked signals tonight, and currently I am only getting 2 (CBS), 4 (ABC), 11 (NBC), 47 (Christian), and (weakly) a couple other UHF channels. (There were more signals the last time I did a survey.) So it's not clear whether the equipment I bought specifically for the DTV transition even works. (The antenna claims to be digital-capable.)

If you're in Pittsburgh and are receiving any stations digitally, which ones (station and channel number)?

If anyone has any debugging advice beyond waiting to see if everything goes dark in mid-June, I'm interested in hearing that.

(No, I'm not interested in subscribing to cable.)

Edit: Scanning is not dynamic; you need to explicitly have the converter box re-scan when channels are added/moved. Thanks, all.

Tonight/tomorrow is Shavuot, which is one of my favorite holidays thematically. I understand that both of our rabbis will be at the tikkun leil shavuot, late-night torah study, this year, which should be loads of fun. Tonight's dinner will be blintzes, and tomorrow's lunch will be cheesy noodles (featured cheeses this time are havarti, cheddar, and swiss, with others too). Mmm, dairy. :-) Chag sameach to those who celebrate, and happy Monday to the rest of you.

I recently bought an amplified indoor TV antenna, and I gave it a spin today. With some fiddling, I can get very good reception on most channels I care about and acceptable reception on the rest. (Some channels with less-than-acceptable reception are ones I don't care about. WPCB, I'm looking at you.) I'm also picking up some channels not on the list of Pittsburgh stations at Wikipedia. (Don't know what they are yet. My local newspaper doesn't list them either.) Currently the antenna is hooked up to one VCR; when I cancel the cable service I'll plug it into the splitter currently fed by the cable instead, but that's harder to get to so not optimal for testing.

Yesterday we ended up in a spontaneous game of Runebound with three other people. The game nominally supports up to six players, but with five I felt we were too resource-constrained, both in stat-boost chits (which you get for accumulating experience) and lower-level encounters (which you must defeat to gain the experience). I dropped out of the game when all the green (1-point) and yellow (2-point) encounters were gone, I had no money with which to buy equipment, and I could not yet survive a purple (3-point) encounter. No bootstrapping was possible unless a rare event were to occur, and in the meantime I'd just be twiddling my thumbs. I've played this game two or three times before without that happening to any player, but I can't remember if I've played with this many players before. (Oh, and this was not the four-hour game promised by the box. After I dropped out near the four-hour mark, the others played for another hour, maybe more.)

The weather has been uncharacteristically (for June) sweltering for the last couple days. We have central air on the second floor; we caved and turned it on on Friday. We have a huge window unit in the living room that we sometimes use to supplement, particularly if people are coming over or we're generating lots of heat (e.g. from cooking). Yesterday Dani turned it on for the gamers and it started making that noise appliances make when they're unhappy and want you to know from anywhere in the house. It was blowing air, but the air wasn't cool. I'm unclear on whether this means it's hungry and needs a freon refill (I'm guessing there's freon involved), or if it's something else. This unit came with the house, so it's not exactly new, but the window might be too big for the deprecated AC we took out of our bedroom when we bought the central unit. (We still have the window unit in the attic.) Well, nothing I can do about it for the next couple days, so no sense worrying about it.

Found by Dani: mykleenextissue.com, for vanity Kleenex boxes. Err, yeah. At least it's not for vanity Kleenex. Even so, I'm not sure "let out your creative juices" was the best choice of a slogan. I also note that -- as often happens -- their FAQ does not address my most-frequent questions, which in this case include "do you have customers?". :-)

Bill Walsh posted this and I now share: