Work has been busy busy busy. But here’s a kitten.

I love NetFlix.

I’ve been using NetFlix for years, ever since my early college days. I had seen their ads for their Watch Now service, but I had ignored it until a few days ago. I launched one of their movies on my laptop, and was fairly impressed. I wouldn’t say that their streaming movies are perfect, by any means. In fact, the video quality is less than perfect, the movies are DRM protected, and you need MS Windows XP/Vista and Windows Media Player 10 in order to watch them. That being said, it’s awesome to have a huge library of on-demand movies for no additional charge.

I hooked up my laptop to our entertainment center via the S-Video out and headphone jack. The video loss was less apparent on the TV than on the laptop. The audio quality was rather good.

Vahl and I watched a couple of animes, then came across something from the creators of MST3K entitled Film Crew: Hollywood After Dark. I love MST3K, but the movies they review are painful. This one was no exception. Everyone remember Rue McClanahan from the Golden Girls? Well, in this movie, she is a desperate actress stripping to make ends meet. That’s right, this Rue McClanahan.

You would think that since this film was released in 1969 that her youth would have some saving grace. Unfortunately, the Golden Girls image has been burned in my mind, and during the strip scenes, I just wanted to vomit.

In summary:

NetFlix Watch Now + Laptop + lots of wires + TV = awesome on a spoon, or possibly a fork. Heathens.
A young Rue McClanahan stripping for money = smash my eyeballs to a pulp with a ball peen hammer. You’d be doing me a favor.

A few months back, when Vahl and I first bought our Wii, we were playing around with the built in browser and came across the “Will it Blend” videos on YouTube. We were transfixed and went through at least a dozen videos, hedging our bets on whether or not it would, in fact blend. If you want to check it out, just go to YouTube.com and search for “Will it Blend”.

During my news browsing this morning, I came across their latest video for whether or not an iPhone will blend. It hurts me a bit to see this happen to such expensive equipment. ><

While I do love my job, I get a lot of downtime. This really helps for crunchtime with school, but when I have all of that done, and I’m done playing Street Fighter 2 for the day, I need something else to do.

I’ve therefore taken it upon myself to learn some AJAX. I’ve been doing PHP and MySQL for a long time, but I’ve intentionally avoided Javascript as I don’t like to rely on the users’ browsers. However, now I need to learn it. W3Schools has a pretty good tutorial on AJAX. Hell, they have good tutorials on many subjects. I read over it a few times, and am starting to run from there. Heronimo!

Linux

I’ve dabbled with Linux on and off for years, but I’m finally getting settled in with the latest version of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn). It’s pretty nifty. I wouldn’t say it’s more difficult to use, just different. It reminds me of when I first started using DOS/Windows 3.1.

I was 14, and our neighbor was building his house while living in it. Now, this wouldn’t have been an issue, if it weren’t the middle of winter. He needed a place to stash his computer, so my mom volunteered my room. This is where I really started learning how to use a computer, and boasted about my “hacking” abilities by using the DIR command. Yup, I was leet.

I really screwed up his computer after my brother and I were putting in dirty names on the high scoreboard, and I thought to get rid of them I could just delete the .exe’s. All of them.

It’s a good thing he had a backup at home.

I’m going to get this out of the way so I don’t rave about it later on. I LOVE MY JOB.

While the pay is a couple grand less than normal, I get so many benefits. Arcade machines, ping pong tables, foosball tables, on-site gym, gift give-aways, yearly bonuses, etc.

I regularly spend 30 minutes to 3 hours playing Street Fighter at work, depending on how much work I have to do. This is so much better than working for the courts.