Hey, I Know What's Wrong With It!

It's not expensive enough.

In a year when rootkits were doled out, batteries exploded, and a console has been launched to dubious acclaim indeed, the way to fix it, surely, is to revamp the product so as to remove its only virtue, add silly features that only the geekiest of audiophiles give a rat's ass about, and then jack up the price on the thing and throw it into the marketplace as well.

WTF is going on at Sony Electronics? I really used to be in their corner but they've managed to run me off most doggedly.

Oh, and Happy New Year to all.

Christmas Gift Joy

The B really likes her Christmas presents, but she seems to have taken a particular shine to her play piano. Take a look:

Love, Actu—Huh?

So, I mentioned before that our last TiVo bit it in the power outages from the last ice storm, and that we'd done a replacement with the company and were set up to TiVo again.

However, we did lose everything that had been on our old TiVo, some of which was quite old and was sort of a bonus to have there if one of us woke in the middle of the night and had trouble going back to sleep. On that list of stuff on "keep until I delete" for months (or in some cases, well over a year) were several episodes of Good Eats, a couple of Futuramas, three episodes of the first season of the new Doctor Who, and the movie Love, Actually. It was Love, Actually that was the go-to program for me most of the time, being pressed into service whenever I needed something reassuring on in the background to allow me to go back to sleep.

While I have the movie on DVD, we don't have a DVD player in the bedroom and who wants to get up at 2 am to put on a DVD anyway? I set up a keyword search on Love, Actually, assuming one premium channel or another would dust it off and program it for the Christmas season.

Instead, USA network put on a "basic cable safe" version of it. As a curiosity, as I am probably the closest thing on the planet to someone who would gleefully collect Love, Actually curiosities, it is interesting to watch. Billy Mack's tirade of swearing in the recording studio is replaced with an emphatic "Ohhhhhhh!" When Natalie meets the Prime Minister, instead of swearing several times in front of him, she instead impulsively kisses him. Jack and Judy, the body doubles, basically seem to have had to film their entire appearances in the movie twice...once with rampant nudity and once without.

It's just so odd that there's enough stuff in the movie that it wouldn't have made sense in a purely censored version, and the makers of the film actually saw it coming far enough in advance to film entirely different versions of scenes that would make the storylines nonsensical by their omission.

I actually might keep this version, just because it seems like some sort of weird ultra-rare, like a foil Charizard or something. It does suck with the commercials in, though.

Merry Christmas

To those of you who celebrate it, Merry Christmas from the mister, me, and the B.

Real Food

After her one year well-baby visit to the doctor, I was given the green light to basically start feeding her adult food. Well, with some exceptions for things she can't have, but she now eats a smaller amount of a subset of the same stuff you and I would eat in a day.

Well, she eats healthier than me, a trend I hope fervently will continue.

For the curious, she has one tablespoon (or thereabouts) from each food group at each of her three meals, and then she has two small snacks.

She's very selective, though. She'll mix all the food together on the tray, but then she'll pick one specific food out until it's gone (a combination of ending up in her stomach, on her lap, and on the floor) and then start on her next most favorite.

Usually the carrots, if offered, come in dead last. Sigh. I don't like carrots either, so I can't really fault her. They're just so orange. Ugh.

Suckitude in Ice Storm Land

There was one electronic casualty of the ice storm. The TiVo bit the dust after repeated power on/power off cycles. Yes, I should have remembered to unplug it. No, I didn't remember. I was trying to get the baby's things packed up for our flight to the MIL and FIL's and I didn't unplug everything I wanted to unplug before we left.

After calling the company, for a fee, we could trade in our old box and get a refurbished unit of the same ilk, then send back our old and busted box. They'd then transfer our lifetime service to the "new" (to us) box and we'd be good to go.

It took some time to get it shipped (just arrived today, we've been TiVoless for about a week and I appreciate the service more now, I think) but there was one real bitch of a problem to work out...although all of our config data was pre-loaded onto our new box so that we didn't have to re-authorize the new box or any of that unpleasantness, we lost all of our season pass information.

Those of you who have TiVos may have taken a gasp of horror at that point, and the rest of you were thinking, "So the $**()#*$ what?" A season pass list, with its quirks and hierarchies and "this program runs one minute over" subtleties, is cultivated over time, like a fine cheese or wine. It's constantly tweaked. Programs fall out of favor. New ones come into vogue. It takes forever to get it to "just that lovely place" where it catches things that you would have missed (like our wishlist search for Lewis Black that gets his appearances on talk shows and on Comedy Central, though not his appearances on The Daily Show, regrettably) and doesn't record the wrong thing because your hierarchical list was in the wrong order.

"So sit down and fix it," you may be saying. Ah, but I can only search for programs that the TiVo knows about, and it has limited guide information at this time (though I forced it to update about fifteen minutes ago, and we'll see if that helps a bit). Plus, things like 24 that won't premiere for weeks yet wouldn't appear in the guide anyway, so I can't really put it in my list.

I've done a bit of sneaky scheduling via the Yahoo TV website, where I already had our box information configured (here's hoping the hoo-hah that TiVo did when it switched the boxes on our account will keep that Yahoo->TiVo box link working, which I think it will, as our "new" box knew what the old box's name was) and I hope that will be part of what this forced reload will update on my box.

Now I'm off to do some real work around the house, before I look into boxing up the old TiVo to ship back to them either later tonight or tomorrow.

Hideously Out of Date Reviews: Stranger Than Fiction

If you've ever felt detached and lonely, or if you've ever counted writing fiction among your hobbies (or vocation), then you'd probably like Stranger Than Fiction.

I can't tell you how many times we've tried to engineer a trip out without the baby to see this movie, but we finally got the job done on Saturday, in the early evening. I've known I wanted to see it since I saw the first commercials for it.

Dr. Heimlich had the best analysis of Will Farrell in this movie. He was definitely "clothed" in this movie, and not mired in Naked Will Ferrell Syndrome. I thought he was great and very likable.

Dustin Hoffman was good, as was Queen Latifah. But really, Emma Thompson did an amazing job. She did a lot of voice over narration, which is much harder than many people think. For one thing, VO annoys a lot of people, so you have that to contend with. Then, you have a lot to get across without being able to use facial expressions or body language. I think she did such a good job with it that even people who don't like VO would probably rate this movie's use of it as an exception to the rule.

But more importantly, she does what a lot of actresses, especially actresses who are no longer in their 20's, would be reluctant to do. Playing the reclusive, quirky, twitchy author, she had the stringy hair, the goofy clothes, the (apparent) lack of makeup. She embraced who this woman would be exactly this way if she really existed and just sort of fearlessly brought her to life. She had to bring comedic moments in with a lot more dramatic stuff, and I'm hard pressed to think of someone else who could have brought it off so well. It really was absolutely fearless.

If people are balking at the ending (which I won't reveal, obviously, in case any of you were waiting for video for this one) then I'm not sure how they would have thought the more "obvious" ending would have been more satisfying. Emma Thompson's character explains it better than I could, but I wouldn't have been as uplifted by the movie had it ended with things working out the way that seemed inevitable for most of the third act.

I would especially recommend this movie, like I said above, if you do enjoy or have enjoyed in the past, writing fiction. I've written things with characters that seemed so real to me at the time that I wouldn't have been shocked if one of the characters strolled up to my doorbell and rang it, probably to complain roundly to me of their treatment in my hands. From that perspective, this movie is particularly interesting. But the performances really make it something a cut above.

You Make It, I Break It

Everything I have tried to get done online in the last week or so, in the very moment when I really needed to get it done, has broken while I was trying to use it.

I had stuff to do at Shutterfly, it goes to pieces when I finally had time before I was tired and after the B went to sleep, and it was slow and bits of it wouldn't load. That doesn't happen that often, but it was on a new product of theirs and it was biting me in the ass until the problems fixed themselves after I'd stayed up way too late and I was able to finish up.

Now, I need to quickie order a couple of pictures to get my hands on tomorrow, and the Walgreens photo site has shut down on me. Two different browsers, and it's just throwing up its hands and staring at me. Won't even load the login page.

I was going to order a couple of other presents earlier today, but I didn't just in case I got a better idea later for the people I was about to buy for. You can thank me for not doing it if you later went to that website and used it, since I didn't touch it and break it so no one could have any fun.

Sheesh. Don't these people get that I have a very limited amount of time to tap this keyboard where it doesn't make the baby want to eat (or at least drool on) my laptop?

Trees of Glass

On the drive home this past Monday, we saw a rather stunning side-effect still lingering in the aftermath of the ice storm. Tree after tree seemed to be sculpted from glass. Any tree that didn't have any leaves left was basically encased in a thin layer of ice. Even the dead grasses on the ground were individually frozen.

The picture above doesn't do it justice, as I was taking it from a moving car and trying to track along with the forward motion of the car to keep it focused. This was probably my most effective attempt.

Hurtling Toward Toddlerhood

Wearing more cake than she ate
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

Didn't have a chance to post this yesterday, but yesterday was the B's first birthday.

She absolutely massacred her slice of birthday cake. Miraculously, she didn't get it on her jammies or in her hair. Don't ask me how.