Terrible Analogies

The wife and I recently made the commitment and jumped from standard DVD over to Blu-ray.  This transition has had the unfortunate downside of turning me into a drooling, blithering idiot incapable of suppressing the involuntary tick in my left eye whenever I overhear the mere whisper of the word “blue” or “ray”, or any combination thereof.  

But I’ll be darned if I’m not completely in love with this technology.  The amazing picture that Blu-ray provides on our 1080p flat screen.  The uncompressed HD sound.  When you pop in a Blu-ray version of a movie like The Transformers it’s like seeing that movie for the first time.  You know that feeling of reeling in a twelve-foot hammerhead on a 50lb test line, or finally topping out on that 5.14 freeclimb in Joshua Tree that you’ve been working on all summer?  Well….if not, trust me, that’s how you’ll feel when watching your first demo-quality Blu-ray movie.  It’s like finding religion, obtaining nirvana, or discovering a really bitchin’ Chinese restaurant that doesn’t serve that crappy, rancid-tasting beef.  Your heart races, you tremble and sweat, and your pants suddenly seem to fit just a little bit tighter…

Seriously, if you haven’t made the jump to Blu-ray you only have yourself to blame.  It’s a huge leap from standard DVD, and once you experience Blu on a decent system you’ll be a slave to it just like me.

One of us…One of us…One of us…

A friend at work knows I’m a huge DVD fanatic, and with a single e-mail sent me into a self destructive downward spiral of extreme wanting.  Ya see, the wife and I have been shopping around for a PS3 for its Blu-ray capability, wireless connection to the internet, and the automatic firmware updates it performs as they’re released.  We were unable to find one for less than $400.  The e-mail this particular friend sent me was for a 15% discounted price on a new 80Gig Playstation 3 being offered by Dell.  

This discount is still available, so if you want to take advantage of it, please act quickly.  After the 27th of December 2008 the offer disappears.  Click on this link, then input CTV2$2HX963145 into the coupon code.  I managed to snag an 80Gig PS3 for $350.  

Woot!  It’s shipped!  I’m finally diving into the world of Blu-ray, and I couldn’t be happier.  I’ve already ordered a few titles for Christmas, so Santa should be getting us started with upgrading our DVD collection to the Blu-ray format.  I *think* the big guy is hooking us up with copies of:

• The Ultimate Matrix Collection
• 300
• Batman Begins
• The Incredible Hulk (2008)
• Starship Troopers
• Hellboy 1 & 2
• Iron Man
• Wanted
• Pirates Of The Caribbean box set
• Hell Ride
• Transformers

Monday: We need to change all local administrator accounts company wide.  This, of course, falls to me.  I’m not a programmer, but I know enough to get by.  Upon investigation I find that there’s a total of 1253 servers that need the local admin password changed.  I’m beginning to dread this week already.

Tuesday: Begin writing a program that will crawl the network and change the password.

Wednesday:  Testing is successful.  I think this project is in the bag…uh, my manager now wants the developer account password changed, and now I’ll need to reset the password expiration countdown to zero, and expire in 90 days.  Coding resumes. 

….and a hard drive goes south in a blade….and the sharepoint server has run out of HD space…and a VP is asking for a server to be built in VM….argh!

Thursday:  Yay for me!  I’ve managed to lock out the admin account on nearly 100 machines while testing my program.  Code in a quick fix.  …heck with this, I’m going to the gym.

Friday:  Manager says, “Oh, by the way, we’ll need to change the rmadmin account at the same time we change the administrator account, and we need this done asap.  And can you unrack the Whale rack and send the equipment to S&H?”.  Unrack the equipment and then continue coding.  I’m worn out, feeling like Wilford Brimley on Valium.

Manager then says to me, “Can you come in on Saturday?  We need the passwords changed before Monday.  This is project critical.”  I begin wishing I packed a flask on my person.

Saturday (6am): Program successfully crawls the network, making changes to the administrator, developer, and rmadmin accounts, setting the countdowns to the required dates.  For a variety of reasons, only 102 servers fail to change.  Complete these failures by hand.  As I’m about to walk out the door another blade server begins to have issues with hardware.  I take the easy way out of this and convert the server to a VM and finally walk out the door exhausted, vowing not to pick up the phone on Sunday.

What can I say…I live for this shit.

And so it begins anew…

We’re been contemplating upgrading to a Blu-ray player for Christmas, and this week we finally committed to the idea by purchasing a Play Station 3. Unfortunately by doing so, we’re setting ourselves up to be taken advantage of by the movie industry (yet again). Always trying to squeeze more money out of collectors, the typical DVD buying pattern goes something like this:

• First DVD release on Tuesday
• Special extended editions DVD
• Collected box sets with even more extras

…and now, it’s going to be Blu-ray that’s going to be getting my money.

For the record, here’s what our DVD collection looks like today:

I’ve been collecting DVDs since 1998. A couple DVDs every week for 10 years and this is what you end up with. We rarely watch television, opting instead to watch a movie just about every night. We’re running out of shelf space but the way I figure it, purchasing Blu-ray DVDs will free up room due to their slim packaging.

On the negative side, Blu-ray disks are more expensive than their conventional brethern, which means we’ll have to be more selective in our Blu-ray purchases.  Instead of buying our movies at Best Buy where new releases cost anywhere from $25 to $30 (who’s plunking down that much for a movie anyway?!), we’ll be ordering them online where they’re much cheaper, or waiting a few months for the new releases to go down in price.

Also, from what I hear, the older movies that are “remastered” for Blu-ray don’t look much better than their regular DVD counterparts.  For my money I’ll be sticking to newer movies on Blu-ray, especially if the newer releases take advantage of modern high definition film standards.  I can’t see Casablanca looking any better on Blu-ray than it does on DVD.

In case you’ve been living in a cave, chained to a wall with not but a fire and shadow puppets for entertainment, there’s a new Star Trek trailer available online.  Check it out at here.