The Middleman - Complete Series

The Closed Caption Conundrum

or

Middleman Middlereview Middlemaddness

My copy of the Middleman DVD box set from Shout! Factor finally arrived yesterday, and after much anticipation (and drooling over the intricate packaging) Nadia and I watched the first episode (“The Pilot Episode Sanction”), and it was greatly enjoyed… By me. She also liked it, but not quite as much as I did. Not because she didn’t enjoy it, or think it funny or a great show (she compared it, favorably, to Firefly, which is bot a major plus and some major nerd cred right there), but because of the language barrier.

Which brings me to the point of this posting: Why is it so damn hard to get Closed Captioning working while playing back a DVD? Shout!, for whatever reason, decided it would be better to have the captions on this set as Closed Captions, instead of subtitles. I’m not sure why this is – subtitles are simple to use from a consumer standpoint, and universally supported from a player standpoint. But CC? Not so much.

The PS3 will not pass CC through HDMI – in fact, a quick bit of google-fu shows that this is a pretty standard, known problem. So, my $400 media monster won’t allow my girlfriend to know everything that’s said on this show.

You Microsoft fanboys can just shut the hell up now too – it also will not pass the CC information through. Or, if it does, it does so in a very odd, unintuitive way – which is basically the same thing. So that’s another $300 well spent.

Thankfully, my Mac mini, which I use for a media center anyway – not only has DVD playback baked into the OS (why any modern OS wouldn’t have this feature I’ll never understand), but it does fully support CC. Which is why we’ll be watching Middleman on a computer via DVD…

The box set is great – the package is great, with lots of neat touches, the picture quality is freat, the sound quality is wonderful… But the fact that so much work had to be done just to get the damn CC working (Total time spent dicking around: half an hour… on over a $1000 worth of equipment) makes Shout!’s choice of captioning a fail in my eyes.

I would still reccomend this set to anyone who likes fun, unless they were deaf. In which case, it’s just too much of a hassle.

Seriously, Shout! – Get your act together soon.

Parker Lewis Can't Lose - First Season

The Middleman - Complete Series

No actual post – just wanted to share my Amazon pre-orders.

Maybe it’s time I got rid of the Entry ### as the titles?

library.dunny0.net is up and available for browsing. Created using Delicious Library for the Mac, this is the majority of my DVD collection, and a few of my games.

My hope is that, with this being available now on my iPhone, I’ll be better able to avoid buying any duplicates – something I haven’t, yet, had happen. Normally I error on the side of caution, and if I think that I might own a particular movie, I won’t pick it up until I get home and check. Several times I’ve been wrong, and have missed out on owning a few of the harder to find discs because of this.

The games thing I’m doing just because I can, and the gadgets bit I may pull… or may keep for insurance purposes. Not totally sure on that front yet.

Follow me below the jump for happy fun image, and a breakdown!

The Livingroom

As you can see, the living room is filled with pricey electronic toys. There are also some stuffed toys, and – now – a picture to go along with them!

Some notes:

• The Kobayashi Maru is supposed to be an un-winnable situation – the whole point is to see how you deal with pressure and impending doom.
• The Picture of Nadia and me was taken at Minus 5 Ice Lounge
• The autograph is not to me – I picked the book up second hand. It’s in great shape though.
• Yes, that is an HD-DVD drive on top of the 360. I thought it would be a good idea.
  I was wrong.
• The Mario Bros arcade machine used to belong to my parents neighbors. They were just going to throw it away one day, and I quickly claimed it, fixed it up, and put it to good use.
• The mouse is for the Mac Mini. I’ve been considering replacing it with the Logitech DiNovo Mini. Any thoughts?
• The Hitch-hikers plushies are from the movie – One of the few good bits of additional material in that film.

There you are – a peek into my living room.
Hope you enjoyed it!

Next week – My computer desk!

Sort of.

See, money has gotten to be a bit on the tight side lately, what with my actually attempting to pay off my credit cards within a reasonable amount of time and all that, so I’ve decided to take up some extra work on the side. Extra tech support work, stuff I’m already good at, stuff there’s already a market for.

So, I’ve started compiling a list of prices that currently existing support places charge, just as a baseline so I know what would be fair and what I should shoot for in order to undercut them, yet still remain profitable in the long run. I’ve also started looking into getting bonded so that I don’t have to worry as much about lawsuits or the like.

There are a few things I’m not fully comfortable with, but I’ve got the support of my parents backing me on this, so it’s not like I’m doing it entirely on my own. I hope to be up and running fairly soon, and once that happens, well… Who knows?

Side note: Have you seen what Geek Squad charges for stuff? $170 for a single application install! $150 to burn a DVD! I’m really not getting paid enough at work, that’s for damn sure…

Thought this was interesting – Someone asked how much I’ve put towards gaming, and so I attempted to the math… The results were a bit shocking.

250 for Wii
+ $20 x 2 (Classic Controllers) = $40
+ $20 x 2 (Extra Wiimote + Nunchuck) = $40
= $330 (roughly)
$400 for XBox
+ $50 x 3 (Controllers) = $150
+ $50 (Wireless headset)
+ $50 x 3 (XBL for three years?)
+ $40 (Charge Kit)
+ $100 (HD-DVD)
- $200 (Sale price of refurbished XBox when I got it back)
+ $400 (Costs of Halo 3 XBox when I bought it to replaced RROD XBox)
== $1,090 (roughly)
$600 for PS3
+ 50 x 2 (Extra Controller + DS3) = $100
== $700 (roughly)
Grand Total:
$2,120 (Roughly, Not including taxes)

So:

I’ve spent more money on my 360 than I have on the Wii and PS3 combined.

Fuck.

Welcome to the second live blog of a linux installation on my Playstation 3. This time I’ll be attempting to install Yellow Dog Linux 6.0 on the PS3.

Let’s get dangerous!

2:05 AM
Booted up the PS3 and put in the DVD.
Did the “Install Other OS” jive, restarted PS3

2:08 AM
Booted into the installer – can’t find mouse, hopefully I won’t need it.

2:14 AM
Playing with a few options in the installer. Adding FTP and SMB support – probably will use neither, but still might come in handy. So far this is going much smoother than the other install.

2:18 AM
At a new install screen. The “big” one. Wow, fast install. YDL > Ubuntu?

2:28 AM
Still installing. Abut 33% done. Yay?
Still wondering why I might be doing this – probably because I kind of want to check out this other distro, but mostly because I just don’t want to go to sleep right now. Too much going on, and sleeping is not something that will be good for me. Mind wandering and all that. Can’t have that, might wander too far and get lost.

2:43 AM
Well over 75% done. No funky hanging, no weirdness at all.
Really digging how well this is going. If the distro works as well as it installs, I’ll be fairly surprised.

3:05 AM
Well, that went much better than I expected. After logging in for the first time, things work how the probably should. Has crude Flash support – not enough for YouTube though, so that still sucks. Also can’t seem to figure out how to get bluetooth keyboard and mouse added, might have to troll some forums.

All said, so much better than the Ubuntu installation.

Well, for those who read this – I’m really digging the old school CLI interface. I have to say, this is probably my favorite theme for WordPress. At one point I was considering using it for a different project – Project Tax Dollars – but since I epic failed at getting that off the ground, I decided this would be a good place for it.

I like how it causes a good number of people to forget that the mouse still works when using this site. Yes, I know it’s all scary and DOS like, but it doesn’t magically disable the mouse.

I hear that’s a feature in the next version though.

One of the things the potential move has caused me to realize is I have a bunch of stuff. In my living room alone I have a ton of things that I’m not looking forward to moving, most importantly the Mario Bros. That thing took two of us to get up the stairs to this apartment, and takes two people to move from one room to another.

I’m thinking it’ll be the last thing out of this place, an the last thing into the new place.

Other than that, just a bunch of DVDs and books. I do have a wad of games and systems, and more little toys than is healthy… and that has got me considering getting rid of the majority of them. I’ll keep some stuff, like my Doctor Who stuff and my H2G2 stuff, but other than that? Not a lot staying.

Well, okay a *few* Star Trek toys too, but other than that? All gone.