AppleTV as an alternative to cable

Last month when my cable bill went up again to about $55 a month (thanks Comcast), it occurred to me that it might actually be cheaper for me to just buy TV shows from iTunes... today I decided to see if this was true. It turns out that the shows Kathy and I watch would cost either $35 or $45 per season, for a grand total of $220 for seven shows for one season. As compared to $660 for standard cable for a year that's only a third of the cost... there's enough savings to pay for an AppleTV in the first year.

Also, I could just copy the video files to my iPod to watch, and there would be no commercials to skip through like I have now with the TiVo.

Unfortunately, this isn't all the TV we watch... iTunes doesn't yet have Smallville or House, and doesn't have much content from Discovery Channel or much variety of sports content, so for the immediate future we're stuck with Comcast. Still, it's an interesting option.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I'm visiting my family in San Antonio, Texas for the holidays. Kathy is coming to visit tomorrow and will stay until we return to California on January 2. I'm looking forward to showing her around where I grew up and went to school before I came to California eight years ago.

I hope the holidays are treating everyone well!

Stanford vs. Oregon State

I decided to go to a Stanford game this year with Kathy and a couple of her old friends, Katie and Matt. Unfortunately, Stanford's train wreck of a season continued with a 30-7 loss. On the bright side, we had pretty good seats (about 5 rows up from the field on one of the goal lines). I was watching the recording of the game on my TiVo to check some controversial plays (one where an apparent interception by Stanford was called an incomplete pass). Turns out that the refs were right because the left foot clearly landed out of bounds from the video replay which we didn't get to see during the game. The other surprising thing is that we actually were on TV in a quick pan of the crowd after that.

Pumpkin patch

Kathy and I went to the pumpkin patch at Ardenwood Historic Farm in Fremont last weekend and I uploaded some of the photos to flickr.

Geotagging on flickr

Maybe I've been sleeping under a rock for a while or something, but I just noticed a new feature on flickr when going through my old photos to add some tags and descriptions. Apparently it is now possible to tag each photo with a latitude and longitude (either you could record this from your GPS, or just use the obviously Google Maps inspired UI to find the location after the fact). This is pretty cool because you can then look at a map of all your photos and see where they all are throughout the world.

So far I just tagged a couple photos from my recent Angel Island trip... the main problem I see with this is that it's a bit labor intensive to go back through a thousand photos and try to reconstruct where they were all taken... perhaps we need some way for a camera and GPS to communicate over BlueTooth and store this data in the image file. Or, better yet, have some sort of combined device that was both a GPS and a camera that could automatically geotag your photos for you.

Five months

My girlfriend Kathy and I have been together five months as of today... I'm a pretty lucky guy. Here's a shot of us with the Columbia River Gorge in the background from our trip to Oregon this month.

More photos posted

I've posted the photos from Dublin Day 4, Leaving Dublin, and London Day 1 to my flickr page. Enjoy!

Dublin Day 1 and 2 highlights

I've posted some photos on my flickr page of days 1 and 2 in Dublin, Ireland. Check them out!

ttyl

I saw a weird book on my San Jose to Dallas flight... a young girl (maybe 13 or 14) was reading called "ttyl" by lauren myracle. It is a story about three girls which is told entirely through their IM conversations... they have screen names of SnowAngel (Angela), mad maddie (Madison?) and zoegirl (Zoe). It looks almost like a screenshot of an AIM window or something with different fonts for each person and they use all the usual chat abbreviations like lol, ppl, ttyl, etc.

It's a strange world we live in when there are kids that grew up with instant messaging and make it so much a part of their daily lives... stuff like this makes me feel old.

Bad Luck

I can't believe my luck lately with technology stuff... it appears my 12 inch powerbook hard disk has failed again (second time in less than 3 months I've had the new version). I ended up splurging on a 15 inch MacBook Pro for the Ireland/England/Scotland trip... I'll decide which of the two I want to keep when I get back.

My LinkSys router appears to have given up the goat as well so I replaced it yesterday. Luckily I was able to figure out how to configure the DSL modem (can't believe these have web interfaces now too) to stay connected always instead of on demand since somehow the router doesn't appear to be the same as a computer to the DSL modem and it disconnects from the Internet after a few minutes.

I'm starting to wonder if this was the exact same problem I was having with the cable modem and it actually would have worked if I plugged the computer directly into the modem.

Go Spurs Go

It's looking like it might be a tough road to the NBA finals for the Spurs this year (Kings first round, Mavs second round, Suns third round and then Pistons in finals). Those are just my predictions of course but it's a pretty strong team they're facing in each series if it turns out that way.

That being said, I watched most of game 1 with the Kings today and it was a pretty resounding victory. The final score was 122-88 after they had a 73-39 halftime lead. It's pretty clear that adding Van Exel and Finley has improved the Spurs' depth over last year.

Rain Rain Rain

I heard the other day that we had 29 days of rain out of 31 in March this year which is a record for the bay area. And now that we're into April it still feels like someone played a mean trick and teleported us to Portland or Seattle. I really wish the rain would stop and the clouds would clear... I'm ready for spring and blue skies.

The Big 3-0

Well, I guess my days as a twentysomething are over. Today is my 30th birthday.

It's also the 170th anniversary of Texas independence.

Update: Here's a picture from my "Over the Hill" party at El Burro.

Trying out Flickr

I've been looking for a good way to share photos online so I'm trying out Flickr. So far I've posted some photos from my skiing trip to Tahoe with Kathy last weekend. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

Environmentalism going mainstream?

I was pleasantly surprised to see GM's commercial for ethanol from the Superbowl... in addition to the Toyota Camry Hybrid and Ford Escape Hybrid commercials.

It's almost like being environmentally responsible is becoming mainstream or something. Next thing you know they will be advertising compressed natural gas vehicles like the Honda Civic GX or something.

Merry Christmas!

Here's a recent picture of the nice Christmas tree in front of my condo building. Hope everyone is having a good holiday!

The Art of Selling Stuff on Craigslist

So, believe it or not, I've never yet used eBay to buy or sell anything. Somehow dealing with shipping and faraway people that you don't know is a bit intimidating. So recently I got inspired to sell off some of my old electronics/computer stuff and decided to try using craigslist to do it.

This has a few nice benefits:

- posting an ad is free
- there is an email anonymizer which protects you from getting your information harvested by spammers
- many people are open to doing a face to face transaction for cash, and some will even come to me to do it

So far I sold my old Samsung i500 cell phone and a D-Link 802.11b card I was using in my old TiVo. I'm on the verge of selling my old DVD player and my old G4 tower.

A few tips for anyone that wants to try this out... put "cash only, local pickup" in the ad if that's what you want to do. Some people actually read the ad. Also, I started asking for a contact phone number in the ad which is another way of filtering out spammers.

Anyone that doesn't give a phone number or asks the condition of the item when it is stated in the ad can be safely ignored as a spammer. Anyone whose area code I don't recognize can be easily located using a Google search. I've gotten a few responses from places in New York, for example.

Rock climbing

By popular request, here's some "action shots" from my most recent indoor rock climbing session last weekend at Planet Granite.

TiVo overlap protection

Yesterday when I sat down to check out the TiVo I got a message about a new feature that was just enabled in a TiVo software update called "Overlap Protection". It seems they finally listened to the customer feedback and allowed for shows which conflict by a minute or two to both be recorded. The conflicting part is recorded for the higher priority season pass.

This is pretty cool, although right now the only case which has this problem on my schedule is Everwood vs. ER. Everwood is 9-10pm and ER is 9:59pm-11pm.

WB does it again

OK, those of you who know me know that I watch a bit of WB. So much that I could almost be confused with a teenage girl I guess, at least judging by the commercials they run.

Anyway, in this brave new world of TiVo and Bittorrent and downloading TV shows from the iTunes Music Store, WB has once again come up with a neat way of merging content and marketing. Podcasting. Yes, there is now a podcast which is done by one of the characters on One Tree Hill, which is an extension of the story within the show. It is also an opportunity for that character to talk about her latest favorite music which also just happens to be the featured Warner Brothers music they also advertise on the show.

While this may not be quite the masterstroke that Pepsi Smash was, it is still pretty creative.