Tag: video

Almost got pissed at Amazon

· Leave a comment ·

So I signed up for Amazon Prime a few weeks ago. So tonight I noticed there were some videos I might want to watch. Clicked on one and got the odious message that I had to install Microsoft Silverlight. No I don’t have to do that.

If you read this blog enough you KNOW I dislike Silverlight. It ranks up there was one of the biggest flaming pieces of excrement that Microsoft has ever produced. It’s a system resource hog for one – you can watch it consume every bit of a quad core system if you just pull up task manager.

Now I had railed against Netflix about this for some time and they finally, if you’re running Google Chrome allowed you to watch videos without having to install Silverlight.

So I called Amazon support. Got right through and asked if there was any way to not have to use Silverlight to view videos. They walked me through setting it to use Flash instead. I mean that’s acceptable but really Amazon, h.264 would be better especially with HTML5 compliant browsers.

But alas it works. That is how I almost got pissed at Amazon.

On Headphones

· Leave a comment ·

I’m a headphone freak. I have them on a lot. I like to be able to listen to music, watch movies etc. without the outside noise filtering in.

I had been using the Subjekt headphones – they were plastic and suffered from wear to the point where the swivel head on them would break.

Image

Subjekt has since updated the design – the phones no longer swivel and rotate. But the phones do have flexibility so they seal to the ear.

New Subjekt On Ear headphones

They sound pretty damned good. I think these might work for some time. Total cost was $30.

I had been using these:

cheapie headphones

Those cheap headphones sucked and not in the good way. Granted for < $10 they did the trick but the SERIOUSLY attenuated the signal. Put it this way, listening to music on these I’d have to crank the volume to almost 50%. With the new Subjekts it’s around 15% and perfectly audible.

Since my track record with the destruction of headphones is pretty consistent I cannot justify spending more than $50 on any given set.

I class them as wear items – as in they wear out. Just like keyboards, sneakers, shoes, and clothing.

Things that cross in the mail

· 1 Comment ·

I had neglected to pay my Cox bill last month. But this week I went on the web site and paid the bill. Today I get a notice in the mail that says I owed them but the date tells me this was generated prior to my making the payment online.

But the notice had other interesting information. I’m paying $146 a month for cable, net and phone.

The notice actually broke it down:

Each month I pay:
$93.02 For Advanced TV

$23.47 For Net Service (50mpbs)

$30.42 for Phone Service

First off the net service. Prior to getting the full raft I had only net service and was paying $60 a month for that. So tell me, how does it drop to roughly 1/3 the cost for the same service?

The phone – $30.42 a month for a plain old telephone line with no voicemail is a bit on the pricey side.

But the video – $93.02 per month – are they fucking kidding me? Can you guess which services are going to get kicked to the curb sooner than later?