Fly By Night

October 3rd, 2005 by ironsoap

  • Speaking of TiVo, you know how I was all on your case a few weeks ago like, “Hey buy a TiVo and if you don’t like it I’ll give you money?” Well, nevermind. It’s not that TiVo isn’t good. It is. But TiVo is also struggling. Struggling companies do dumb stuff. In this case TiVo has now managed to deliver an underwhelming feature improvement (TiVo2Go, which still doesn’t work with Macs), promise to slap ads all over the screen while you’re fast forwarding through commercials (wrap your head around that one, I dare ya!) and now their new thing is they have content flags which could allow copyright holders to prevent shows from being marked as “Keep Until I Delete.” So far they aren’t doing it that I can tell (a few mistaken instances notwithstanding), but the fact that they’re bending to pressure from the entertainment industry to cripple key features in their product shows that they don’t have the spine or intestinal fortitude to do what’s right for their customers because they think their best bet for staying alive right now is to do whatever they have to such that they might avoid ticking off the TV moguls. Also, they’re so worried about losing money that their new service agreement doesn’t let you do less than one year’s worth of service. Dumb, dumb and more dumb. So put it this way, TiVos are $50 now. That’s a good price. At $12.95/month for one year, you get the whole package for a little more than $200. I think it’s worth it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend something that is this consumer-unfriendly, at least not at personal cost to myself.

  • What I can recommend without reservation is Serenity. I con(vinc)ed Nik to see the Firefly movie with me on Friday morning, and was not disappointed in the least. Having watched and very much enjoyed the TV series, I was afraid that it might be hard to follow the plot for people like Nik who hadn’t seen even one Firefly episode. Not so, she said she had no problem picking everything up (even if her assumptions about certain characters such as Shepherd were off because of his movie portrayal). They did a rather masterful job of getting the sometimes complex relationships between the characters to shine through in only two hours (Nik even picked up on some of the nuance between Mal and Inara that took me many episodes to grasp) and while they had to push some of the events into hyperdrive (the revelations to fans of the show about River, the Federation and the Reavers come fast and furious) for the sake of the plot, but it worked extremely well. Someone else sagely said that this movie makes the Star Wars prequels look like Amateur Hour and that is a very fine way of looking at it. While I would have preferred the show remain on the air (Joss Whedon does episodic television better than 99.99% of all other humans), having some kind of continuation/closure sure was nice as an alternative to the premature death and gradual memory fade at the hands of the idiots at Fox. If you have any inclination towards SF flicks, trust me this once and go check it out. Maybe we can help show studio execs that people really like well done SF adventures and we will pay to see well executed, well written stuff.

  • You know what’s not cool? Cleaning a cat litter box. Like, dumping the litter, getting in there with paper towels and hot soapy water and disinfectant cleaning. Yeah, that’s pants.

  • As a side effect of my losing lots and lots of stuff from my laptop, I’ve once again killed my Amazon account. I don’t know what it is about that site and my accounts, but we don’t get along. Anyway, the only reason I still use the stupid site is because of the Wish List which, as others such as Bosslady have pointed out, is a real help to people like me who love to wait until the last possible nanosecond to do any kind of shopping. But I’m sick of re-doing it at Amazon so I switched mine to a different site (which, conveniently, also allows me to include stuff that Amazon doesn’t carry). So for those doing some early shopping (94 days until my birthday, FYI) my new list is now and forever more at Confusticate’s Wishlist.

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