I hope Qwikster Survives

I have friends that think the Netflix/Quikster split has sounded the death knell for discs, but I don't believe DVD or Blu-Ray is going away any time soon. When Netflix decided to add a fee for streaming, the decision was easy: I canceled streaming and am now paying a dollar less per month than I was before. I'm on the two-DVD per month, with Blu-Ray, plan and that's all I need.

These are the reasons why I prefer DVD/Blu-Ray

• I have a 56" HDTV, a Blu-Ray player and a nice sound system with DTS decoding. At best, HD streaming video looks about the same as a DVD, but can't come close to Blu-Ray picture quality. Streaming audio is much worse than DVD and is nothing compared to Blu-Ray; streaming audio is usually two channels, while even DVD is 5.1 in most cases.
• DVDs and Blu-Rays don't pause or stop if there is a network problem, something that happens quite often with streaming.
• The selection. I've watched thousands of movies, which means that I have a hard enough time finding something good to watch on DVD or Blu-Ray, and the selection of streaming video doesn't even come close to the selection I can get on DVD or Blu-Ray.
• Subtitles/Closed-Captioning. Unless it's a foreign movie, in which case you have no choice, I've never seen an option for closed-captioning or subtitles with streaming. When I have to turn down the sound because the wife is sleeping or if the accents of the actors are difficult to understand, I rely heavily on the subtitles and captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing that are almost standard on DVD or Blu-Ray.
• Extras. Even ignoring BD-Live, which is pretty much a joke, I like to watch deleted scenes, making-of features, alternate endings and all those other "extra features" that you find on DVDs and Blu-Rays. You don't get any of that with streaming video.

So, for me, the choice to go with physical disks over streaming is an easy one. I get better quality video, audio, selection, and extras than with streaming.

But, beyond all the reasons above that work for me, there are several reasons why DVD/Blu-Ray is not going to die any time soon:

• There is a large percentage of the population that either does not have the high-speed internet required or has it but has no idea how to or any inclination to hook their internet up to their TV. For those people, they're either going to watch regular TV or they're going to rent, borrow or buy a DVD.
• Sadly, people (and, less sad, kids) watch movies in their cars and, for most people, the only way to do that is to pop a DVD in the car DVD player. Most people do not have streaming movies in their car.
• DVDs and Blu-Rays are still impulse buys and many stores still stock them near their cashiers because people still like to own a movie that they can hold in their hand.

I vote

I voted today.

I'm registered Green, but I voted mostly for the Democratic candidates out of fear that Republicans would win.

I voted for Prop 19 even though I've never smoked marijuana in my life, because I think the "war on drugs" has done more harm than good.

I voted to raise my own taxes to help fund schools, even though I will never have any children and will, therefore, never directly benefit from those schools.

I'm heartened by the early returns that show some of the tea party candidates lost, but I'm very disappointed that so many Americans have forgotten that it was the Republicans during the Bush years that caused our current depression and have seen fit to put the Republicans back in charge of the House, even though their "change" is just "business as usual".

I'm saddened that so many people believe the lies of corporations and their lobbyists. (And, although I was thinking about the propositions on the ballot when I first typed this, I realize it also applies to Fox News and their own lobbying masquerading as news.)

I am an atheist, so I have a healthy fear of all religious groups, but I have to admit that Christians in America scare me more than any other religious group.

My first 24 hours (or so) on Droid X

I got my Droid X yesterday and, although I started researching the implications of a move from BlackBerry to Android over a week ago, I've figured out a lot in the last 24 hours and I want to share with everybody what I've done.

My old setup:

• I used Outlook 2007 for all my work mail, contacts, calendar and notes.
• My work email uses generic web hosting (BlueHost.com, no Exchange server involved) and I accessed it via IMAP using Outlook on my laptop and using the built-in email client on my BlackBerry
• I used BlackBerry Desktop Manager 6.0 to sync Outlook contacts and calendar to my BlackBerry Storm

My new setup is a little more complicated....

Calendar: I’m using Google Calendar Sync to keep my Outlook 2007 and Google Calendars in sync and then I use the standard Calendar app on the Droid X, which reads the Google Calendar. As an additional precaution, I publish my Outlook calendar to iCal Exchange (it’s a free WebDAV server) and I’ve also subscribed to that calendar in Google Calendar.

Email: I don’t try to sync my email. Instead, I kept my work email where it was and I use Outlook on my laptop and the K-9 Mail app on my phone. I also set up GMAIL to pull in my email from my web host using POP3 (but keeping a copy on the server) as a backup option. I’m using K-9 since it has better IMAP support than the native email client on the Droid X (technically, I could use either).

Contacts: I've not found a sync option that works yet. I exported my contacts from Outlook (don’t pay attention to the Google instructions: you’ll want to use the "Comma Separated Values (DOS)" option, not the "Windows" option to get all the contact fields) and then I imported them into GMAIL using their standard import function. The Droid contact list syncs with GMAIL, so any future contact changes will need to be manually synced between Outlook and Gmail until I find an application that I know works (there are no free ones that do this reliably, as far as I can tell).

Tasks: I was rarely using this in Outlook, so I won’t use it any longer.

Notes: I exported my Outlook notes to a CSV file and then I imported them into ResophNotes, a fee Windows application. ResophNotes syncs with SimpleNote, a free, secure web application and there are several Android apps that sync with SimpleNote. I (almost) randomly chose AndroNoter and it seems to work fine.

The biggest hiccup in this process was when the Google Calendar Sync application got stuck synchronizing for many hours and I had to kill it, uninstall it and then re-install it. It seems to be working OK now, but I will probably exit it before I hibernate my computer and try to remember to turn it back on when I wake my computer back up.

On a non-office note, I've also tried out a few different apps...

For Twitter, I first added my Twitter account to "My Accounts" on my Droid X, but I don't really understand what that does and I wanted a real Twitter client. (I used ÜberTwitter on my BlackBerry and it was awesome, but they don't have an Android version.) I tried out "Twitter for Android" and Tweetcaster, before settling on Touiteur, which seems to work pretty well.

For Facebook, I'm using the official Facebook app and it's better than the BlackBerry version.

The other notable apps I've installed through the Market are:

• Yelp
• Battery Widget
• FlickrFree for Android
• IMDb Movies & TV
• Google Translate
• Google Earth
• Poynt
• WorldMate (yay! although, it's not yet as cool as the BlackBerry version)
• Barcode Scanner (love it)
• Google Sky Map
• Pandora Radio

I've played with some of the above very little, so I'm not yet prepared to review them.

Droid

I've suffered with the first generation BlackBerry Storm since last year, so it wasn't that hard of a decision for me to leave BB behind and switch to Android. I ordered the Droid X last week, and though it's been on backorder, I received notification that it shipped today and I should have it in my hands by Wednesday. It'll be a vast improvement over my old phone, but I am dismayed at the lack of a utility to keep my new phone in sync with Outlook. If my company used Exchange or Google Apps, this wouldn't be an issue, but we don't use either.

My research has led me to one conclusion. I must stop using Outlook and move everything (mail, contacts, calendar and notes) to Google. I've been an Outlook user since before it was Outlook (when it was the mail client that came with Windows 95) and I have almost 1300 contacts, over 1700 appointments on my calendar and over 4GB of mail in PST files (although about half of that is offline copies of my IMAP mail), so choosing to abandon Outlook was not an easy decision, but I don't see any other good solution. Android phones were designed to work with Google and Google and MS do not like to play together.

Of course, I don't have this all worked out yet. Since there is no "Google Notes", I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my Outlook notes yet. And since half of my archived mail is in PST files, I'll have to figure out how I'll get those archives into gmail. I'll probably be happier in the long run, but it all looks pretty daunting to me right now.

If anyone has any suggestions, please comment here and let me know.

Gracie Church: 1998-2010

Today, Kara and I said goodbye to our beloved Gracie. Gracie was a great, loving dog, who loved and protected her family. She enjoyed long walks and barking at the UPS guy, but most of all, she loved to swim. As a matter of fact, the only time she would ever play fetch was in the water at dog beach.

Gracie was adopted by Kara from the Escondido Humane Society (as was her younger adopted brother, Buster) and it was love at first paw for Kara and Gracie. I met Gracie a few months later when Kara and I started dating and Gracie turned me from someone who didn't like dogs into someone who loves dogs.

Although Gracie suffered from separation anxiety (and left a trail of destruction, in some cases, when she was left alone), she handled separation from Kara and me much better after "we" adopted Buster. And when I say we, I mean all of us, as Gracie also adopted Buster, always keeping a watchful eye on him at the park, scolding him if he got out of line, and grooming him whenever he would sit still long enough to take it.

Gracie loved people and got along with most other dogs. She was a protector of her "pack", though, so she was suspicious of any dog or person that she felt was acting "inappropriately", which included being a little too rowdy with Buster. She would bark or snap at other dogs when this happened, but mostly, they were warnings to "keep your distance". With suspicious people (and the UPS guy), she would bark, but never bite.

Gracie had mostly good health over her lifetime, but she had started suffering from arthritis over the last year or so. Her health, however, really started going downhill in the last month of her life, when she stopped eating almost completely. After a few weeks and a few visits to the vet, we discovered that she had cancerous tumors in her liver, lymph nodes and on her back. For the last few weeks until she died, we just tried our best to make her comfortable. Probably her happiest time during this tragic period was when we took her for one last visit to the beach. Even though it was an impromptu visit and we hadn't brought her throw toy for water fetch, she still headed straight into the ocean for a short swim.

Gracie is gone, but she will never be forgotten. And, her family will miss her terribly.

Gracie, we love you.

Go go gadgets

I am what you might call, technology-savvy. But, at the same time, I'm not someone that wants or needs to be on the leading edge or that wants to be particularly "connected" in all ways possible. Even though I took my first computer class in high school in the early 80s, my major in college was computer science, my first job was doing data entry, I've worked in the credit union software industry since 1992 and I've been on the internet since 1996, I didn't own my very own PC until the 2000s. I was also late to music CDs, staying on cassettes until the early 90s. I also went straight from VHS cassettes to DVDs in 1999, skipping laser disks entirely and I was never a PC gamer. (If I have to be completely honest, I had a pong game in the late 70s, a color TRS-80 MC-10 sometime in the 80s - I actually still have it in storage - that I could hook up to my TV set, but that wasn't much more than a toy. I also did have an Atari 2600 and I even remember playing E.T., the game that nearly killed the gaming industry, on it.) I also never had a beeper or a pager and didn't have a cell phone until about 5 or 6 years ago.

Basically, I've always avoided being the owner of the newest gadgets because I had enough gadgets in my work life. I've been on the internet since 1996 because work gave me a laptop to use back then.


Times, they are a-changing. About two months ago, my employer told me that they wanted me to get a Blackberry so that they could always reach me and I could always get my work email. I understood the reason they wanted this, but I was in no hurry to be that much more connected. Well, after several weeks of delays due to misplaced equipment, scheduling difficulties and ineptitude on the part of a Verizon Wireless store employee, I finally got my Blackberry up and running. It's the iPhone-alternative for those of us not on AT&T, the Blackberry Storm and, for the most part, it's actually pretty cool. Sure, it's buggy as hell, it crashes for no apparent reason and the touch/press typing and mistyping can be tedious, but there's no beating having full access to my address book (over 1,000 entries), calendar, my email, gmail, IM, and internet. I even got a Bluetooth earphone for this thing, something else I've avoided until now, and it actually works great.

But, since the post says gadgets, I wanted to just quickly mention that I seem to be on an inadvertent buying spree of technology since November, starting with a new car (I had no choice, my old car was destroyed by a drunk driver) with a very nice climate control system and XM radio (love First Wave and Cinemagic, although I would cancel XM in a minute if I had to pay more than the $5/month deal I got). After the car, my old PC started dying, so I have a new PC with a widescreen 24" 108op monitor. I also bought a Blu-Ray player, networked it and my DVR, bought a wireless inkjet printer (the old printer was not compatible with Vista x64, the OS of my new PC) and, just yesterday, purchased an iRobot Roomba.

Right now, most of my spare attention has been given to trying to figure out this Blackberry, so I've not yet even opened up the box for the Roomba. Hopefully, I'll open up that box and get that going sometime this week, which is a far cry from the time it took me to get around to hooking up a brand new AV receiver a few years ago - about a year and a half after I bought that, I opened the box and hooked it up.

A blog in search of a new identity

Now that Dweedle Dum and his evil administration are about to be replaced by a man that I consider a personal hero of mine, my views will no longer be considered "aid and comfort to the enemy" by the executive branch. Thus, I am retiring the "Comfort for the Enemy" name and my blog, for the time being, is untitled.