Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Link: http://www.netflix.com

I was writing a comment on the NetFlix blog (about when captions won't appear in Instant....and that one of the reasons I prefer DVDs to watching in a theater is that I can have english subtitles to follow along with all the dialog. I also often turn on closed captions on my TV.....)

Anyways...I then realized I've been a NetFlix subscriber for more than 10 years now.

I rented my first DVD's on in January 1999 (shortly after the purchase of my first DVD player -- a post Xmas clearance). This was back when it was pretty expensive to rent a DVD by mail by the week, there was reasonable grace time around the rental period to allow for the post office to misplace the DVD for a week (a problem to continues to happen). Though NetFlix offered value packs to bring the average cost down. Used to be that you told Netflix when you had mailed it back, and you didn't have to wait so long before reporting a problem had happened somewhere in the return trip...or occasionally on getting the selection.

Only once did I get the wrong selection in the mail from them. Which was bad, because I didn't get the usual confirmation that I had returned that wrong selection and had to declare the correct selection as being lost. Even though I emailed them explaining what had happened. I think they have the ability to report that online now though.

Anyways, after my first two trial selections, for $7....I got a 30 pack for $141 and then a 40 pack for $162.55. During the 40 pack, NetFlix switched to its Marquee program. Which I transitioned to in November of 1999. Back then it wasn't unlimited, so I did have to pay overage fees for the first few months.

I've stayed with the same plan all this time....it did become an unlimited plan and allows instant (something I didn't get to trying until the feature appeared on my TiVo HD's

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I screwed up. Somehow I thought I already had a season's pass for Law & Order: Criminal Intent. But, I was looking around on my TiVo HD's...and found no recordings. Not sure why I didn't notice sooner, perhaps because I did have a season's pass for In Plain Sight and my check list for the day was for both these shows....

Anyways...I sadly missed the first 3 episodes of the season. After some thought, and not seeing it on Hulu...I decided to just go for it and order the episodes up using Amazon's Video on Demand service. I also got the HD versions.

I put the order in on my TiVo HD and there were there waiting for me this morning. Kind of sad that the episode information wasn't part of the info of the on demand download....but since I ordered them in order, I guess the bottom-up would be the right order.

Now I'm caught up. Haven't seen the 4th episode yet....but that'll be on my TiVo for later...

Link: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Rumor_Has_It/70039168?trkid=226871

I rated this 3 stars.

At first I was gonna watching it on my DSL connected TiVo HD, but saw that it was trying to stream in HD quality....but dropped down to not. So, I switched to my Cox HSI connected TiVo HD where I could get an HD stream.

Last night, in the #k-slug channel I heard that a movie was playing on AMC. So, I popped over to my TiVo HD to see if I could record it, but it had already started (and no other airings in the immediate future)...so I tried to watch it live instead (more or less).

AMC-HD is available on Cox, but I couldn't watch it....just a black screen. There was a recording in progress, but I checked to see what the other cablecard was doing...and it was getting the HD show. So, I had to settle for watching the moving on the analog AMC channel.

After the recording finished, I rebooted the TiVo HD...but that didn't cure the problem. Checking around it seems just basic HD channels were working the rest weren't. (Later noticed that it had failed a while back...but only missed one other show....the latest HD episode of South Park.)

So, it would probably require them to hit the cards with a reset...so I called Cox. Working through the automated system, I eventually reached technical support for cable tv....and it immediately offered the option to send a reset to my cable boxes.

I had the TiVo HD tuned to TNT-HD....and almost instantly...video appeared on my TV.

Didn't need to talk to a person

Maybe I'll dread calling Cox less when this problem happens....though it does make me wonder why the option was immediately presented...is it the simple fix or is it a common problem...or both....

For some reason NBC was on the fritz on Wednesday.....so all my TiVo HD recordings were bad/incomplete. So, I had to seek out alternative ways to get Knight Rider, Life and Law & Order.

The first two I tracked down using Boxee and Hulu, on my AppleTV. Things went okay, the only gripe is that if you hit the Menu button while watching a Hulu program, it goes back...but there's no button the on AppleTV remote to get back to the program (which is continuing to play in the background). Pressing play starts it all over again.

Menu is the button on the AppleTV remote that selects its input on my Zektor HDVI5 switcher. The other annoying problemhabit, of course, is that I keep picking up my TiVo remote and pressing the skip button and others while watching programming not on the TiVo. And, then had to pop over to the TiVo to make sure I didn't mess anything up.

Law & Order on the other hand wasn't available via Hulu (or on NBC's site). For this I resorted to using Amazon's Video on Demand service to download the show to my TiVo HD. After doing some fiddling to figure out why it wouldn't let me using my second TiVo HD, when it says I'm allowed up to 2 TiVo's to be associated with my account. But, it turned out that there was a sync problem between Amazon.com and TiVo.com, TiVo said both my TiVo's were enabled for Video on Demand, but Amazon.com was only seeing my first TiVo.....

Also the other day I had gotten my new Visa card, and going to various sites to update my information. Turns out you can only edit/update a credit card online, on numerous sites including Amazon.com, if the account number doesn't change...have to remove and then add new card. What then happens is that things that were associated with the card, just go away... IE: a subscription in my paypal account was canceled, instead of asking me to reassociate it or something. The "are you sure" dialog shouldn't count as the warning.

In Amazon.com's case it cleared my 1-click settings, which was minor....since I happened to have the issue where Amazon.com and TiVo.com were out of sync. I opted to associate my American Express card as my 1-click. Since, I had recently changed to associating my Visa card with Apple iTunes....

Later I saw that Law & Order is also available on iTunes...wonder if that would've been in HD? Evidently not.... L&O:SVU and L&O:CI are available as HD downloads, but not L&O....strange. Though I don't now if I would've spent the extra $1 for HD for L&O. L&O:CI yes, L&O probably not.

Link: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Ratatouille/70045269?trkid=226871

I rated this 4 stars.

Used the Netflix Instant on my TiVo HD (connected to Cox HSI Preferred). Initially the quality was 9 bars, but it degraded quickly to only 6 bars.

Maybe I should've used the TiVo HD on my DSL connection?

Speed testing seems to confirm that I should've.....

Link: http://www.boxee.tv/

Following the replacement of batteries in my SmartUPS 1250VA UPS, my TiVo HD failed to boot properly...and I didn't notice until CSI was more than half over, that it wasn't recording....

I thought to myself on how I might recover from this, and decided that Boxee would come to the rescue again.

So, I watched other shows last night and this evening I set out to watch the missed episode (19 Down).

Had some issues with the AppleTV. First the remote wasn't selecting the input on my Zektor DVI5. For some reason the remote changes its code now and then. This the second time this has happened. Then the AppleTV wasn't cooperating. Menu with no text. This has been happening on occasion since the update the 2.3 and the latest of the launcher & boxee.

I had to restart the AppleTV a few times, and I re-updated the software....even though the versions haven't changed.

That was enough to get into Boxee and make my way to watching CSI.

It went pretty good.

Now back to my TiVo HD for regular recordings....starting with Eleventh Hour

Link: http://www.jaman.com/movie/Highlander-Source/0hw_MvxM9T-g/

I rated this 2 stars

Link: http://www.hulu.com

Today I tried out Hulu.

Because last night, the schedule bumped Life to about 3:40am. My TiVo HD didn't get it, because it apparently needed to do some kind of maintenance reboot around 3am....only it got stuck, at the just a few more moments or something like that screen.

I had to reboot it hard during lunch when I found it that way. (I was home at lunch today, because I was still un-numbing from a dentist appointment)

I noticed the absence of shows recorded last night, and eventually concluded that only one show was actually missed. Life.

So, I was thinking where can I find the missed episode... I suppose with patience, I could get somebody to send it to me on my ReplayTV. Though it would only be SD. But, then I was reading my twitter feed of the impending new release of Boxee. (It is hard to write this blog post with twitter [TwitterFox] updates popping up and stealing focus, and not giving it back)

The NetFlix feature sounds nice, but it isn't available in the AppleTV version....so I'll stick to waiting for that from TiVo.

But, it did talk of improvements with its Hulu support...and I decided it was time to check that out. First I quickly popped over to the site to see whether it would be possible to get the missed episode of Life. Then it was off to work, with it as something to try when I get back home.

Well, it turned out to be a reasonable experience. It was 16x9, not as good as HD. And, the commercials were tolerable (and interesting and relevance). It only paused once (not including when I hit pause to answer the door and get my food delivery (I think she was cute, but I just took my food....)

Now I know what to do the next time my TiVo or cable company let's me down, eh?

Black Friday started early because of Amazon.com.

I had take Wednesday off from work, because I needed to. And, I had thought that I might need to use it to wait for UPS to show up. But, UPS hadn't showed up when I got home Tuesday night...and somewhere after 7pm they showed up with my delivery.

I took delivery of a Ricardo Beverly Hills Capistrano Lite Free Wheelers 29-inch Two Compartment Vertical Pullman, Iris Purple. Should complement the 21-inch version that I got for my trip to OLF. Plus I had tweeted that my old pullman was starting to look sad....

And, while I was waiting at home on Tuesday, I happened by Amazon.com, and saw that they were starting Black Friday already. They had the Leatherman Micra for $12.99. Don't know what its usual Amazon.com price, but it was lowered for a limited time (right now it shows up as $16.46).

It was very tempting, but at first I was going to resist. Even though I could use some new tool gadget in my pocket since I was missing. But, a quick look at my shopping cart and my wishlist, and my planned purchase list. I saw that I had down to get another Tea Wand as a present, but I hadn't actually ordered a new one yet. So, I added that to my cart and put that order through.

2-day Prime delivery would put that sometime on Friday. I didn't really want to venture out to the mall on Black Friday, so I went ahead and ordered it.

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