Blasphemous Rumours by Blasphemous Garden
Needle Through a Bug by Repo! The Genetic Opera Cast
Seventeen Repo! by The Genetic Opera Cast
I Didn’t Know I’d Love You So Much by Repo! The Genetic Opera Cast
Let the Monster Rise by Repo! The Genetic Opera Cast
Genetic Repo Man by Repo! The Genetic Opera Cast
The Thorian by Richard Jaques, Jack Wall
Things You See In a Graveyard by Repo! The Genetic Opera Cast
Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex
Lightin’ Hopkins by R.E.M.
Fireplace by R.E.M.
Legal Assassin by Repo! The Genetic Opera Cast
In Space by Royksopp
21st Century Cure by Repo! The Genetic Opera Cast
Jericho by Prodigy
Alcohol by Barenaked Ladies
Try Me (Puts Inst.) by J. Boogie
Straight to Video (The Birthday Massacre Remix) by Mindless Self Indulgence
Just Like Heaven by The Cure
Happy Now by No Doubt
What Sound by Lamb
Love Song For My Mom by Moby
Witch The Ditch by Erasure
Straight to Video by Mindless Self Indulgence
Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground) by The Jacksons
Human Nature Michael Jackson
Run On by Moby
Off the Wall (Single Version) by Michael Jackson
Crazy For You by Madonna
Its My Life by No Doubt
End It On This by No Doubt
Something To Do by Depeche Mode
Dreaming Of Me by Depeche Mode
Come On Closer by Jem
Watch the World Burn by Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard
Voyager by Daft Punk
La Isla Bonita by Madonna
Pulsewidth by Aphex Twin
When Doves Cry by Prince
It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back) by Eurythmics
Pump Gag by Negativland
The End (Reprise) by Sam Hulick, Jack Wall
It’s Only A Game by Psyki
Functional by Psyki
Junkyard Sounds Disc 1 by Radio Is Happy Noises
Junkyard Sounds Disc 2 by Radio Is Happy Noises
Uplink by Sam Hulick
Sovereign’s Theme by Sam Hulick
Battle At Eden Prime by Sam Hulick
Tristesse Globale by Royksopp
30 Century Man by Scott Walker
The Normandy by Sam Hulick
In Pursuit of Saren by Sam Hulick, Jack Wall

While their earbuds are amazingly comfortable and sound great they have severe build quality issues which results in frequent failure. After repairing the headphone sheath as described in the review and then replacing them entirely when they stopped working I have had to replace them two more times directly through the V-Moda warranty program for a total of three replacements in under 9 months.

The first time I replaced them through RMA I was a little irked that the process took almost two weeks. This time around V-Moda has gone silent once I shipped the defective earbuds back to them. UPS has proof that they were delivered and signed for, however V-Moda initially couldn’t find them (and wanted the tracking number again), and now refuses to even respond to emails regarding the warranty program.

It’s sad really – the Vibe Duo’s are the most comfortable, and among the best sounding headphones I’ve ever used. When they work I sing praises to my fellow man about the glory that is the Vibe Duo, but since in the last 9 months since I bought my first pair I’ve been through 3 pairs, and without their delicious sound for more than 6 weeks I can’t honestly recommend anyone purchase them if they in the slightest value reliability or customer service.

I’ve filed an official complaint with the Better Business Bureau to see if that might get me traction on getting my promised replacement pair. The full text of the complaint is below for public record.

Complainant Information
About 3 weeks ago my Vibe Duo earbuds stopped working and I contacted the company asking for a replacement pair. They sent a form letter with a ticket number (Ticket ID: ZWL-207849) and asked that I mail the broken earbuds to their mailing address. (V-Moda, 6464 sunset blvd. suite 500, hollywood ca 90028)

I sent the earbuds back via UPS (tracking number: -tracking number redacted-) and then didn’t hear anything back for 2 weeks. UPS confirms that the package was delivered 2 weeks prior, 2 days after shipment.

I re-contacted them asking for status and they took 3 days to respond and their response was that they needed the tracking number. I sent an email providing the tracking number and have not heard back from them. I have sent them two additional emails asking for status updates and to complete the RMA with no response. Each of my last 3 emails has included all of my contact information as well as the tracking number.

Resolution Sought: I would like the RMA to be completed and to receive the replacement earbuds for the ones sent their way (at their instruction).
Date Problem Started: 05/28/2008
Date of Transaction: 05/28/2008
Amount in Dispute: $110.00
Invoice Number: ZWL-207849
Complaint Type: Refund Promised
Product or Service: V-Moda offers “high end” earbuds.

Update: Mere hours after the posting of this article V-Moda got back to me with status on the warranty replacement and the happy news that they would be shipping the replacement Duos right away. The communication did not mention if the Better Business Bureau or this article had any influence on their response but the timing certainly is suspicious. The note included an apology stating that they had moved offices which had caused delays. While finally getting contact is nice V-Moda’s inability to properly set expectations was inexcusable.

Good customer service does not always mean instant resolution on an issue, but it always means rapidly responding to contact and setting expectations properly. After 9 days of sending mails to V-Moda with no response any customer is going to be frustrated – a frustration which could have simply been avoided with a quick email on day one stating that they had received the communication and would have an official response within two weeks.

In conclusion I can no longer heartily recommend the Vibe Duos to iPhone owners seeking headsets. Don’t get me wrong – I love my Vibe Duos, they sound great and are super comfortable but after 3 failures and such abysmal customer service I’m left with both a sour taste in my mouth and a sadness in my heart that if history is any indication my replacement Duos won’t last longer than 3-4 months .

It’s so good I’m writing this post while I watch a second time!

While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).

While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder – what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?

I just got done blogging the rollout out their new Starbucks WiFi Music Store here in Seattle and I’m aquiver with coffee as a result. This morning I happened to stop into the Starbucks for a latte when I remembered that the new partnership for free iTunes access at Starbucks retail locations was lighting up in Seattle this morning so I whipped out my iPhone to check it out. The new Starbucks review is a good sister article to they soon to be posted in-depth review I did of the new iTunes WiFi Music Store.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me in the morning so I had to come back to review it over lunch about 90 minutes later. Between the quad shot earlier, and a triple over lunch I’m completely wired. *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzzzzt*

Luckily I don’t have anything left on my to-do list for today so I’m pretty much free to lay on my couch watching movies with Skype. Finally getting a long weekend is really helping me feel a lot more relaxed from all the activity at work recently. Now for the rest of The Matrix Revolutions and then perhaps a little Lord of the Rings to continue on with the epic feel.

Yesterday was media storage solution deployment day. As noted in the new media page on Futurist Now my DVD collection is starting to get out of hand. I went to Ikea with Brien and picked up a few black and white patterned Bennos to augment my DVD storage capabilities. I used to use this Billy bookshelf (also from Ikea – go figure), and as you can see from how many DVD’s got moved to the Bennos in the reorganization shuffle it was previously stuffed to the gills.

I really like the Benno because it’s smaller – it holds only 80 DVD’s. This small size allows me to slowly buy more of them as my collection expands and always have ‘just enough’ storage. They are brain dead simple to assemble to boot. The Bennos only need a screwdriver to assemble, and each one only take about 10 minutes to put together into a surprisingly solid construction with easy to adjust shelf height.

“benno” by sparktography

I’ve allowed my obsession with Smart Playlists in iTunes to get a little out of hand. After spending the last month combing through my media collection, tweaking ID3 tags, and rating as I go I’m learning how to create personalized radio experiences from my library that are easy to manage and sync/update automatically with my iPhone. By making a series of smart playlists with size limits limited by least recently played I can keep both my iPhone and my Apple TV stocked to the brim with a great music selection that gradually changes as I listen to it.

While the Smart Playlists feature is amazingly powerful I have unfortunately discovered a few pieces of highly useful metadata that are not exposed as options for the creation of iTunes Smart Playlists. These all seem like simple things to add, and would enable some really cool Smart Playlist scenarios. Here are the things I think iTunes is missing on this one:

• A purchased flag – a simple true/false bit to indicate if the track was purchased from the iTunes store or imported from media (CD or HDD).
• An iTunes Plus flag – again a true/false bit to indicate if the track is an iTunes Plus track or not. This flag could easily be combined with the purchased flag as a dropdown.
• A kind field – a field to select the kind of media from video; audio booklet, music, podcast, etc. Adding this field would make it much easier to keep iTunes TV shows and podcasts from leaking into music-only playlists.
• Ringtone flag – another true/false bit to indicate if the track is eligible for creating ringtones from.

If anyone at Apple is listening please, PLEASE get these added to the next version of iTunes! They all look reasonably simple to implement and would make me one happy iTunes geek!

The WiFi music store lets users purchase songs on-the-go using any WiFi hotspot which essentially puts the entire multi-million track library of iTunes in your pocket – perfect for a quick impulse buy from time to time. It would be perfect for the impulse-heavy consumer like me – if it worked on my iPhone!

I’m having store authorization problems so I can’t actually buy anything right now. It’s rejecting my credentials to the point of locking my account, when I know I’m entering them correctly. I even verified my credentials on a desktop just to make sure I wasn’t having a senior moment.

I wrote up up a more detailed report of my WiFi Music Store experience for Gear Live if you want to know more. For now I’ll have to sulk about with my existing library while on-the-go and be content with the other features released today.

The re-launch of my Gear Live writing career starts with an in-depth review of the V-Moda Vibe Duos. There are a lot more exciting things coming to the site (including a fantastic new site design launching soon) so bookmark Gear Live and stay tuned for more announcements! If you just want to see the posts I’ve written you can always look at the filtered view of my posts on Gear Live.

After buying my Vibe Duos on Friday I enjoyed them through the weekend until they broke Monday morning while at work. The faulty glue (or perhaps a faulty glue job in the factory) caused the the sheath protecting the connection between the headphone jack and the cable leading to the earbuds to come undone and travel freely up the cable.

I immediately took them back to the Apple store who apologized for the problem and promptly replaced them without even asking to see my receipt. I was willing to chalk it up to a single faulty pair of earbuds until the replacement pair suffered the same fate the very next day. Either the Apple store in the University Village had a bad batch, or the Vibe Duos suffer a design or manufacturing flaw leading to this unfortunate condition. If the Vibe Duos were a bit cheaper I wouldn’t mind having to DIY repair them myself, but at $100 a pop and considering how high the build quality is otherwise I’m a little disappointed with V-Moda.

Luckily there is an easy fix for this problem. This evening at home after quickly whittling away some of the old adhesive with an exacto knife I re-glued it myself with seemly better results. A few drops of super-glue spread evenly over the plug with a synthetic Q-tip (the cotton ones would have left fibers) and quickly dropping the sheath back into place have locked it into place quite tightly.

Any other Vibe Duo owners out there suffering from this problem?

As I mentioned in my last post I just picked up a pair of V-Moda Vibe Duos at the Apple Store with my $100 iPhone store credit. The Vibe Duo’s sound great (almost as good as my Etymotic ER-6’s), are the most comfortable earbuds I’ve ever used, and feature a microphone for making hands-free calls on the iPhone. The Vibe Duos come with three pairs eargels (small, medium, and large) in both white and black for a perfect fit for almost any ear and your choice in colors to accessorize with your outfit should you be so inclined.

The cloth-wrapped cords, metal construction, and extended plug (for easy use with the iPhone’s recessed headphone jack) all add up to a stunning package. The build quality on the Vibe Duos is great and unlike some previous earbuds I’ve owned I’m not in the slightest concerned about breaking them or tearing the cord if they get caught on something.

Sadly they lack the microphone button on the official iPhone earbuds for answering calls and pausing the music, but that’s a small sacrifice for the vastly increased comfort and sound quality. Now that I’ve tried them out I realize it’s well worth the $99 price tag and wish I had bought them earlier!

After clicking through an obnoxiously long EULA I was able to click “Create Ringtone” to begin the process.Once clicked the main ringtone authoring pops up. The ringtone authoring interface allows you to select how long you want your ringtone to be (up to a maximum of 30 seconds), and position where you want the start and stop of the ringtone to be within the track. There are also fade-in and fade-out options to help the ringtone sound smoother as it comes to life on your precious, shiny iPhone.

After previewing my ringtone to my hearts content I clicked the “Buy” button and was charged the ass-raping $0.99 for a track I “already owned”. It’s a pity that Apple decided to cash in on the multi-billion dollar a year ringtone market – offering them for free on any track you own would have been a great differentiating feature for the iPhone.

It’s as easy as Steve made it sound in his keynote address – making my ringtone took less than 4 minutes including a fair amount of fussing around with the preview to get it just the way I wanted it. A quick sync later and now my phone erupts into a glorious chorus that’s far more unique and “me” than any of the included by default iPhone ringtone. Hazaa!

Going in I knew it was by a Spanish Director (Guillermo Del Toro), but had no idea the audio was in Spanish as well. Normally I’m not a huge fan of subtitled films, but in this case it added a sense of charm and the fact that I couldn’t understand the vocals and thus was more able to let the poetic sounds of the script brought me deeper into Del Toro’s fantasy world.

It’s very much a dark fairy tale – it’s certainly not for kids with the amount of blood and violence, but it’s not gratuitous – used instead to show what horrors the ‘real world’ had to offer the heroine Ofelia. As dark and horrific as the real world is the fantasy world balances it out entirely with bright and visually mesmerizing visuals and a fanciful look and feel brought to life with the sublime art direction.

The hardship faced by Ofelia and the classic themes in fairy tales (three tasks, three bad guys, three good guys) work well with the style of directors style. In watching the movie for a second time I picked up on a number of subtle nods to both other fairy tables and common fables.

Between Del Toro’s Pans Labyrinth and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men I see what all the fuss was about over Spanish directors at the Oscars. They might not be “proper American filmmakers”, but their vivid and well thought out style mixed with their excellent storytelling leaves audiences world wide immersed in new worlds, sprung up from film and into reality. Both movies leave the audience with a series of thoughts spinning about in their heads, and with a need for more answers.

The movie is currently only available on DVD so no high-definition viewing yet, but the DVD transfer is decent and the audio is available in DTS EX 6.1 as well as Dolby Digital. The sound is well done, and the simple but catching music works well with the subject matter. Javier Navarrete pulls from subtle melodies that echo through the worlds ears, regardless of if performance by a full symphony, or hummed quietly by the heroine at several key points in the film.

If you haven’t seen it yet pick up a copy – you will be glad you did!

As I’ve previously mentioned I’m pleased with my purchase of an Apple TV. Now that I’ve spent a little over a week with it I have more formal opinions on the little white wonder. First off a couple of things that the Apple TV got right:

1. Fantastic out of box experience. As always the Apple TV provides an experience when opened. It’s neatly laid out in it’s packaging and practically begs to be unwrapped. Setting it up was a breeze – I had ordered an HDMI cable in advance, so all I had to do was plug in HDMI and the power cable and I was up and running. Right away it asked me for my language preference, and then let me select my wireless access point and enter my WPA password. Within a minute of plugging the thing in I was at the main interface and ready to sync with iTunes. Setting up a sync partnership is almost as easy as with an iPod – you type in a 6 digit code from the Apple TV and then your files start to sync over right away. I was watching TV shows from the iTunes music store within 2 minutes of plugging the Apple TV in.
2. Movie trailers! Having 720p streaming trailers from the internet is a major feature in my book. You can scroll through new and upcoming movies and select any trailer to have it start within seconds. You can do the same thing from any computer with Quicktime installed but having HD movie trailers on the big screen and sound system really does change the game. The Xbox 360 has had this feature for a while, but not nearly as polished requiring more clicks and a full download to display HD trailers. The inclusion of 720p streaming also hits at possible on-demand hi-definition services from Apple in the near future.
3. iPod like simplicity in the on-screen user interface. The AppleTV comes with a standard Apple remote which offers a 5 way direction pad and a back button (technically ‘menu’). Regardless of if you are an iPod user or not figuring out how to watch TV, listen to music, or browse your photos is brain dead simple and all wrapped in the usual layer of Apple interface bling.
4. Simple syncing and streaming. Having content local to the Apple TV is handy for anyone who turns off their computer on a regular basis and setting up syncing is as easy as setting up syncing for an iPod. The default settings are good enough for most users, and for power users very granular control is possible. For me I’m just putting unwatched Podcasts and TV shows on mine and streaming everything else, but having the opportunity to do both will make a much wider audience of users find both features useful.
5. Sleek design – with a form factor like that of the Mac Mini, but less than a third the height it’s hard to beat the Apple TV’s form factor. They get bonus points for it being nearly silent while in use, an internal AC adapter (no power brick needed – just a cord), and it’s the smallest component in my AV system. Check out some of the photos I took for a size comparison of the Apple TV to the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or take a gander at the below image.
6. An attractive screen saver. While playing music or idle the Apple TV presents you with either your photos or album covers slowly flying up the screen. Every once in a while the pictures rotate around the screen to add a bit of visual flair. Having old photos from my library streaming by is a great way to use the Apple TV as an a nearly infinite picture stream evoking memories of fun times past. Given how advanced some of the transitions in the slideshows are I would expect a much flashier screen saver – more on that in the next section.

Size comparisom between the Apple TV, the Wii, and the Xbox 360

Next come a couple of things Apple missed the ball on:

1. Why can’t my Mac automatically open iTunes when I try to browse it from my Apple TV? Having local content on the 40gb HDD is very handy, but I have over a terabyte of media in iTunes on my main desktop machine. I don’t always keep iTunes open so when I am in the living room and want to watch something streamed from my main computer I need to get up and go open iTunes on my desktop. Either moving the streaming functionality into a system daemon or setting up a launchd trigger for opening iTunes would be ways for Apple and greatly increase the usability of the streaming functionality.
2. I want a better screen saver! Don’t get me wrong – I’m in love with the memories brought up by old pictures scrolling past, but with so many cool effects in slide show mode when I’m browsing images I would love it if the screen saver pictures did something a little fancier than spin around every few seconds. That kind of sizzle sells and makes for great eye-candy to showcase on the HDTV in the living room. With Core Animation just around the corner let’s see some flashy effects for what is now the default idle state of my TV.
3. Enable plug in support out of the box. Websites have reported that by opening up your Apple TV and connecting it’s internal HDD to another Mac you can install the Perian plugin set to greatly increase codec support. Since the Apple TV is basically running a stripped down version of OS X this kind of thing is easy to do. I can understand Apple not wanting to provide customer support for 3rd party plugins, but at least put a feature into iTunes to allow me to manually copy over codecs at my own risk
4. Why can I browse top movies and TV shows on the iTunes Store and watch trailers, but not purchase the media from the Apple TV. I could understand if they required iTunes to be open on the syncing computer, but at least let me initiate the transaction/sync from the Apple TV directly.

While it’s easy to point fingers at Apple for these ‘bugs’ they are all things that should be quite possible to fix. Given the OS X like architecture and inclusion of Software Update functionality I’m hoping to see future software versions for the Apple TV and iTunes address some of these issues.

All in all I give the Apple TV an enthusiastic thumbs up – I love mine and use it every day as a clean and simple to use bridge from my iTunes media collection to the HDTV and stereo equipment in my living room. Apple has a major competitor on the line with the Xbox 360 Live experience: plain and simple the Xbox 360 with the Live online service does more (gaming, hi-def movie and TV downloads, works with portable hard drives via USB), but in typical Apple fashion their reduced feature set is extremely well implemented, marketed, and aimed at a targeted market. Seeing how the two services evolve in the coming year is going to be an interesting experience, and hopefully one that is highly rewarding for the consumer market!

I also spent quite a bit of time futzing with iPhoto and cleaning/organizing some of my 65,000 photos. I’ve come to love my AppleTV for a number of reasons – not only does it get all of my iTunes content into the living room, but the smallest of features has ended up being my favorite: the screen saver. While idle or playing music the AppleTV shows photos from your computer in an attractive flyby slideshow. I’ve become addicted to this as it brings up fond memories to see photos from my past flying by at idle moments.

I spent a good 8 hours organizing my existing collection so as to archive really bad photos (for instance anything completely out of focus or unrecoverable under/over exposed) and driving cool photos from years back into albums that I can sync out to the AppleTV. I now find myself leaving the TV on and tuned to the AppleTV whenever I’m home, even when it’s not doing anything specific – it’s turned my TV into an interactive photo frame and done a damn fine job of it.

Bravo Apple for making such a great device. While it’s does far less than it’s biggest competitor (the Xbox 360) it manages to do what it sets out do very well. It’s got a high level of polish and really stands alone as a simple to use set to box.

P.S. BSG Season 3 is amazing. I had dismissed it when the crew landed at the end of Season 2.5, but now realize the err of my ways and am catching up fast!

If you like media you are well familiar with the iconic Tower Records. Sadly they have filed for bankruptcy and are having their final going out of sale-sale. Check it out for 25% or more off CD’s, DVD’s, and games + free shipping – I just bought a bundle and so should you!

Brien, Chris, and myself all went to Costco this afternoon. They had a great deal on the Logitech Harmony 720 – the ultimate (6 months ago) home theater remote. It has a color screen on it that enables really advanced features and highly customizable buttons.

Setting the remote up is simple – you hook it up to your computer via USB and tell the little wizard what equipment you have. You can then tweak any settings and set up macros to your hearts content from their interface, then move the settings over to the remote. Logitech has an online service that keeps the remote codes up to date, and has support for more than 17,000 devices.

The remote itself has rechargeable batteries and comes with a little cradle to charge it when you are not using it. The remote also features a tilt sensor so it lights up when you pick it up, and goes to sleep after you put it back down again.

I’m still getting the hang of it, but so far I’m pretty impressed. I’ve gone from needing 3 remotes to tame my home theater to a single easy to use remote. Now I just need to get IR-compatible light-switches for in the living room and I can even macro dimming the lights when I run my “DVD activities” script.

I just found the coolest bridge between my Apple iMac and Microsoft Xbox 360. I found some software called Connect360 from Nullriver Software. It’s a simple preference pane that allows any Mac to share it’s photos in iPhoto and music from iTunes with a 360 seamlessly. It’s now possible for both Windows and Mac’s to communicate with the 360 for living room entertainment.

Installation was a breeze: after opening the zip demo from Nullriver’s website I double clicked on the Connect360.prefpane to install the preference pane. After starting the service I was able to select what I want shared and configure transcoding options for any files that the 360 won’t be able to play natively.

I walked into the living room and used my Media Center remote to browse to the media tab on my Xbox 360. My imac showed up and after clicking through an authorization screen I was able to browse my music library and playlists as well as browse through all my photos and albums in iPhoto.

The interface is snappy, and browsing the photo libraries were response. It even increments play counts and last played dates in iTunes when you play music. I have to say that Microsoft keeping media interaction open to developers is a big win. Connect360 supports MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF and AAC Lossless for audio files, and JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF for photos.

Update: With a photo update Connect360 now supports video as well. Check out the Connect360 website for more information.

If you have both a Mac and an Xbox 360 I suggest checking out the free demo. If you like it it’s $20 to unlock the ability to browse your full library rather than 1,000 items that the demo restricts you to.

Sadly for now Connect360 does not support transferring movies or iTunes store purchased content but hopefully that will be released in a future version. While waiting to check out Apple’s upcoming iTV it’s nice to have a good solution for getting my media from my Mac to my living room.

Technorati Tags: Connect360, Intel iMac, iPhoto, iTunes, Mactel, Media transfer, Xbox 360

The end of a long week usually brings peace – this week a haircut showed up too! I just got back from Scream where I got my snazzy new haircut, and had a chance to pick up The Life Aquatic soundtrack.

As movie soundtracks go I have to say it’s one of my favorites – Life on Mars and Queen Bitch by David Bowie mixed with the electro that was the background to the Ping Island sequence is simply flawless! Seriously, go pick up a copy!

After a long week of work what better way to celebrate than to go celebrate with a little consumerism. In the last 24 hours I have managed to obtain both a 2nd generation iPod Nano as well as a new Core 2 Duo 24″ iMac.

I’m extremely happy with both (with a few minor exceptions) and find both to be pure engineering marvels. The Nano is small, sleek, and more responsive than it’s predecessor.

The iMac is simply stunning. The 64 bit Core 2 Duo chip keeps things brisk and the gorgeous 24″ 16:9 screen is easily replacing the ancient 27″ SDTV that I had in the bedroom. It’s a great media solution for the room, and provides the Mac desktop I’ve been missing so I can have an always on unix machine in the house for dev/network stuff.

I’m really impressed so far with every single feature of the new iMac save one: Frontrow has a fat ass and needs some work. It’s a great idea, and by far the best ipTV solution out there, but it’s sluggish, and forces you to import items into iTunes in order to properly browse or play them.

I’ll get some photos up of the iMac soon. For now here is some Nano Vs. Nano photo action!

Technorati Tags: Intel iMac, Intel iMac, iPod Nano, Mactel

Technorati Tags: Cory Doctorow, Interview, Podcast

I just got the DVD in the mail and popped it in to watch it. The story seems too built on top of Final Fantasy VII (the video game) and without having played it I found the movie difficult to get into. There are some cute cliches, and a lot of throwbacks to the game as a series, but Advent Children lacks the intelligent story and true artistry that the The Spirits Within was so rich with.

To top it off the DVD is a very poorly encoded. For such a cutting edge computer generated movie I would have expected much higher video quality. Other CG content (The Incredibles for instance) looks so fantastic, and given that the production company does not even need to worry about a film transfer so it’s really a shame.

I’m suddenly inspired to go get another copy of Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within for my collection. It’s a much better movie, and from what I remember is an order of magnitude better of a transfer.

It’s actually a bit more than that because I have watched a few of the HD-DVD’s more than once, and have watched V for Vendetta four times. Once you throw that into the calculation it actually works out to about two movies a day.

To continue this trend I’m watching a movie right now – The Dark Crystal in all it’s Jim Henson goodness! To see a full a full list of the movies I have watched in the last three weeks (in chronological order no less) click through to the full post.

Technorati Tags: Cancer, Cinema, DVD, Movies, Obsessive, stat, statistics, Technology

Amélie
Koyaanisqatsi
Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow [HD DVD]
Pitch Black (Unrated) [HD DVD]
The Chronicles of Riddick [HD DVD]
Doom [HD DVD]
Serenity [HD DVD]
Mirrormask
Baraka
V for Vendetta
Apollo 13 [HD DVD]
Spaceballs
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
Underworld – Evolution
Hardware Wars
The Brak Show, Vol. 1
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
Labyrinth
The Fifth Element
Zoolander
Resident Evil
Resident Evil
Dark City
American Beauty
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Spider-Man 2
Spider-Man
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Aeon Flux
House of Flying Daggers
Equilibrium

Of note regarding the home theater I was able to add a HD-DVD player to my personal digital entertainment ecosystem. Thanks to the many great friends to each pitched in a bit for my birthday the amazon gift certificates added up to let me get the Toshiba HD-A1 player, and a few discs. I’m very impressed with the quality of the picture (MPEG-4 makes such a difference over MPEG-2 for HD compression) but agree with most other reviewers that the HD-A1 has some usability and performance quirks that will hopefully be ironed out once HD-DVD players are no longer gen-0 products.

Of note in the new project space I’m working with some cool new people in the blogosphere and aiming to start a few new concepts in personal and business blogging. More on that later – I promise, but I have a couple of weeks of work to do on the project before it’s ready to share with the world at large.

Outside of those projects my professional work life is going well. This week I got invited to interview for a full time Program Manager position at Microsoft, and will be following up on that next week. If all goes well I should be a “real employee” rather soon rather than being the dash trash I currently am.

Now I’m enjoying the bliss of blogging, watching The Return of the King in all it’s upscaled goodness, and waiting for some friends to show up for an afternoon matinee of A Scanner Darkly – sounds fun huh?

A pair of Bowers and Wilkins 600 series DM602 S3’s and a LCR600 S3 paired with a Sony 34″ WEGA all powered by my Pioneer Elite VSX-82TSX and wired with Kimber Kable.

Could I be more obsessive about my media experience? I guess the next step is getting a larger TV, and adding soundproofing to my walls so I can crank those babies a bit louder.