Category — TV & Movies

The new (and final) season of Battlestar Galactica premiered last Friday.  It was fracking incredible.  If you’re not watching, then you’re missing one of the best shows on television right now.

With my Tivo, I’ve always been able to stream music and photos from my computer to the TV. Now with the help of a Macintosh program called VisualHub, I can stream movies and video from my Mac to our Tivo-connected televisions. VisualHub unlocks a hidden feature of Tivo’s desktop manager which adds an additional tab to include not only music and photos but video also.

With my wireless-N configuration, I can start watching the video immediately after selecting it and the quality is pretty good. So now I don’t have to buy an Apple TV or Slingbox and can save the money for some other gadget that comes along.

It won’t be very long when we’ll be able to dump Comcast and rely totally on the Internet to provide our entertainment. The huge amount of money we spend each month for their service is outrageous. They do offer some good programming options but costs are not worth the hefty monthly price tag.

Here are some alternatives I’ve been using:

• Joost - from the makers of Skype, it has 400+ channels of music, TV and movies. I’ve been using it for about a year now and the programming choices get better each week. The best part is its all free.
• Hulu - now in beta, this is a very cool site that also has tons of programming with HD options coming soon. The streaming content comes up quickly and the picture quality is excellent. Since it’s ad-based the site is free.
• Tivo’s Unbox - you can download and watch movies right through your Tivo box. It’s a service from Amazon. I haven’t tried this one in a while but its like Comcast’s onDemand option.
• Torrent sites - no the legal ones. They are everywhere and give you free options to download media to your computer.
• Netflix - a per month subscription allows you to sign-out multiple movies at a time via the mail. I stopped using this a while back but if I ever ditch Comcast, this will be a good way to keep up with movies out on DVD.

Now I just need to find a better, and cheaper alternative to Comcast’s high-speed internet. AT&T’s U-verse DSL may be a good option.

Here are my top movies of 2005, in no particular order:

King Kong - a wonderful remake of the classic story, with great special effects that was lots of fun to watch - for over 3 hours.

Crash - a divergent group of people in L.A. collide one night. You’ll rethink your prejudices after watching this film.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - the second highest grossing film of the year. Not as good as Azkaban but still good. And we finally got to see you know who.

Batman Begins - the best of the series. Dark and edgier than the others.

Star Wars Revenge of the Sith - not the best acting, not the best of the series but I still enjoyed it.

Sin City - my favorite movie of 2005. The Pulp Fiction-like narrative, music and comic book quality of the film was outstanding.

My worst movie was Bewitched.

As you may know, I work in the Marketing department of a major automotive company. As a perk, I get dozens of free magazines that are left over from the media managers on the floor. I collect so many magazines each month, I find it hard to keep up. Pam has her favorites that I bring home regularly and between us my bag is usually weighed down with one magazine or another every day.

The problem is I’m using so much time reading magazines, that I haven’t read a book in a long while. I should start limiting these magazines and do some real book reading.

I’m also overloaded with music. I have my 40 GB iPod filled to capacity and only listen to a small fraction of the songs. I scan online sources regularly and find lots of new music to download. Podcasting is also demanding more of listening time and it’s hard to keep up with the many “radio” shows on a regular basis. Since iTunes integrated podcasting, subscribing to interesting p-casts is easy than ever.

Then there’s television. With the means to record four shows simultaneously at home (2 Tivo units + Comcast dual tuner DVR), we often have too much stored to keep up with it.

Cellphones, voicemail, email, radio, television, magazines. It’s a media overload for me.

And this is bad. For all the time I “waste” watching TV or reading magazines, I could be outside exercising.

I’m going to develop a plan where I can read, watch TV and listen to music while I’m outside riding on my mountain bike. I’ll be doing all the things I love at the same time.

The Fall TV season is in full swing, here’s what I’m watching:

Rome.
Great story, acting and visuals. It’s almost like being back in ancient times.

Surface.
Sea monsters, government cover-up, good characters. A formula for a good show.

The Amazing Race - Family Edition.
I thought adding family members to the mix would mess up this great reality show. I was wrong. It’s still filled with the whining, yelling and arguing among the team members and I love it.

Lost.
Last season was great, this season it’s excellent. This is the show you shouldn’t be missing. 4 8 15 16 23 42

We’re also watching, Supernatural, Commander-in-chief (Pam), Apprentice(s) and Survivor.

Lord of the Rings is coming to DVD next week. But there is another version, the extended version with 30 minutes of extra footage, coming November 12th. You may consider waiting for the longer version. That’s what I’m going to do.

If you are broke, don’t give me financial advice. If you are overweight, don’t advise me how to diet. If you’ve been involved in multiple car accidents and have received numerous tickets, don’t tell me how to drive. But here’s my advice: shut up.

Close your mouth while you are sitting there. It makes you look stupid, you mouthbreather.

Mailwasher manages your mail BEFORE it arrives in your inbox. If spam does get through, you have the option of bouncing back to the sender. I like it. It doesn’t work with any web-based mail like Yahoo! or Hotmail.

I don’t know anyone who likes spam. Then why are these scumbags permitted to clog our inboxes with this garbage. It should be a federal crime to be a spammer.

With the reinstall of my system, I decided to stop using Yahoo! Instant Messenger and instead use Trillian. It allows you to connect to all the major IM services in one window. If you have friends on AOL, ICQ, MSN or Yahoo! Trillian is an excellent choice.

I also wanted to spruce up my wallpaper files with some new images so naturally I thought of Xanthic. They have some of the coolest wallpaper and icons on the net. They even tell you how they made some of the images so you can create them yourself.

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner. We got a coupon for Mountain Jacks so we’re going there tonight. It’s been years since we’ve dined there. The last time I got irritated because they stopped giving you their portable salad bar on the table for you to serve yourself. Now you have to tell the waiter what you want and they serve you. I didn’t like that so we stopped going.

We’re watching the Trading Spaces weekend marathon on The Learning Channel. Two couples “swap spaces” and redecorate a room. They have $1000 and 48 hours to do it. With the help of a carpenter and a decorator, they really come up with some interesting rooms. The best part comes at the end when you see their reactions to their new room.

NEW QUOTES ADDED TODAY. BE SURE TO CHECK THEM OUT.

Flashcan is tons of fun. Using Flash, you can create greeting cards to send to other people. Then use the chat feature, configure a cool avatar and interact with others visiting the site. But the best thing there is the animator area. You choose a scene and actually create small flash movies using the tools and clipart available. It’s awesome.

You know that Stargate was one of my favorite movies and the TV series on Showtime is one of my top 3 shows. Now the series has moved from Showtime to the SciFi channel. Even with commercials, the show continues to be great. One of the main characters left the show and was replaced by Corin Nemec, a pretty good actor. So if its Friday night and you want to call me after 9pm, leave voicemail because Stargate is on. It’s followed by the new season of Farscape so I’m pretty booked up for the evening.

Governor Engler of Michigan announced last week a new online resource called “Michigan’s e-Library.” It’s advertises itself as having archives of over 1600 popular, business and health periodicals. There is also access to over 10,000 ebooks. Sign in using your Michigan drivers license number. If you want to see one way your tax dollars are working, here’s a good example. Outside of this site, you would have to pay for a lot of the resources provided here for free.

Site news: Network 23 (my message board) has been terminated. I added new Quotes and e-Grams. I also need to fix the error messages appearing inside the Gallery.

We just rented and watched “A Beautiful Mind” for the first time. It was an academy award winner last year. Pam and I thought it was OK, with good acting but hardly worthy of an academy award.

There are several sites on the web where you can see at-a-glance reviews for films at one time from various critics. Check The Grid is one of my favorites. Another good one is Metacritic. This one also has game and music reviews. But if you want a simple yet vast database of movie reviews, you have to try the Movie Review Query Engine to see reviews from its vast database. MRQE has over 230,000 reviews of 26,000 movies.

Other movies this past weekend: The Mothman Prophecies (yawn) and Donnie Darko. Darko was pretty good. At the theatres this weekend, Men in Black 2, The Borne Identity and Minority Report. We have a little movie-viewing catching up to do.