a.k.a. Shawn Honnick specializing in wonderful since 1968
*also Chipotle pictures, NYC adventures, and little known safety tactics like fake hand washing.
**If you're a disgruntled employee, do something about it (no, it's not a pyramid... THIS is the PYRAMID) or just sit around and grumble like everyone over at the disgruntled employee forums.
Posts tagged: DVD
My Dad hooked me up!
Safeway sans Redbox?
You scan the game’s barcode, and the machine tells you its trade-in value. If you decide to sell the game, you have to put the disc into the hardware directly. “Once a disc is inserted into the kiosk, the disc is spun up, identified and evaluated for damage,” Rudy explained. “The kiosk is also able to tell if the disc is burned, is a CD or is an old AOL advertising disc and would reject it. If the disc is unidentifiable or does not match what the user stated, there will be a screen that advises the user that the disc did not match and the disc will be returned.(via) OK, that’s pretty cool.
I am interested to know what people’s average cost per movie “rental” is? For example, since January 1, 2008, I have watched 41 movies via Netflix and I have the $13.99 per 2-movies-at-a-time plan. So I’ve paid about $2.10 per movie including tax. I wonder what $$ per movie most people come in around? Any takers?
I was watching all of The Wire and now, all of LOST on the three per week unlimited plan since April but I’m going to either quit or cut back to one at a time unlimited soon. It’s not that I don’t like LOST or the occasional movie I order.
I’ve been sitting on Battle Royale for almost a week and LOST is OK… I just don’t have much time to watch because I’m finally starting Plate Show (first show segment this week) and I have so many tasks to take care of in preparation (finishing the web site, planning shows, booking guests, etc.) that there is little time to watch a DVD—or even to SLEEP for that matter!
My cost per “rental” from Netflix is 94¢ per DVD since April when I decided to max out on watching these shows and switched to that plan. I’ve watched 54 DVDs (almost all Wired and LOST series discs, usually a whole disk at a time and sometimes two in one night) in these three months. It’s no wonder I’m burned out and needed to start doing something else, right?
Reruns of WKRP in Cincinnati pretty much got me through my teenage years. As geeky as this sounds, I can answer nearly any WRKP trivia question. Want to test me? Leave a comment or call into my podcast (206 666 2242). No matter if it is Fever, Flytrap, Tarlek or Quarters (huge crush on her when I was a lad) or the Big Guy, I know all and am all knowing with WKRP. 
Anyhow, for fans of the show (and I know there are many) you will be happy to know (or pehaps not) that the DVD of Season One was just released. However, there is a catch ??? they are not the definitive full episodes. I caught a piece in the new and improved Globe & Mail that stated:
Hard-core fans of the program have described the release as a ???travesty??? and an ???abomination???. And those are the good reviews.
The article explains further:
According to a source who worked at MTM Enterprises (now owned by News Corp.) when WKRP was being remastered for syndication, it was too difficult and / or expensive to get the digital media rights to the music that was used in the show , so the majority of it was replaced with Muzak-style background tunes.
In some cases, that removes a big part of what made certain scenes so classic, including the one in which sad-sack news director Les Nessman tries on a new toupee to the strains of Foreigner???s Hot Blooded. Some scenes were removed all together
What a shame. A crying shame. Here is an explanation from WIRED a while back on the issue of music in TV shows, although it does not help me come to grips with this matter. As much as I would love to buy this DVD set, I likely won???t. I can???t fathom how the entertainment companies are so wrapped up in the DRM kafuffle that they would short change themselves and fans in this way. For me, it comes down to the ideal that if you are going to bother to do something at all, do it right. Walls Andy, I need walls. And, one of my all time favorite news lines “.. But the Senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not explain his nudity.” Technorati Tags: WKRP in Cincinnati Televison DVD 80’s
Hungarian medical student and blogger Bertalan Meskó usually works to inform the masses about how Web 2.0 can help/change/improve the practice of medicine. Recently he gave his readers a glimpse into the future of the internet’s influence on science and medicine with Wiki-Proteins, the first Web 3.0 project. Web 3.0 is marketed as the development of the “semantic web”, which is claimed to be orders of magnitude more powerful and intuitive than today’s technology.
An excerpt from the Wikipedia article summarizes what exactly the “semantic web” will be:
Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for “car”, to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD and buy it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedium involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.
The mission of Wiki-Protein is to connect the scientific world’s protein resources like Medline, IntAct, the National Library of Congress, UniPort, and the GO Consortium to expedite the exploration and exchange of knowledge. Their web site is still in the developmental stages, but any scientists whose research is even remotely involved with proteins should absolutely check out the site and watch the demo.
