Tuesday, March 30, 2010
true customer tales
lady on phone fishing for pricing information:
lady: So, would you be interested in a copy of My Life by Bill Clinton?
me: No.
lady: Why not?
me: It isn't that saleable and there are copies all over the place- it's not the kind of book we need to pay for.
lady: But if you WERE going to buy it, what would you pay?
me: I wouldn't. It's a book we could get from a thrift store for a quarter, so I wouldn't pay anything for it.
lady: But suppose it was a book you wanted to buy, that cost $35, then what would you pay for it?
me, laughing: Then it would be a different book, and I'd have to take a look at it. Cover price has nothing to do with what we pay for a title, we work off what we can sell it for.
lady: So, you'd pay half the cover price for it?
me, with more laughing: No. No we wouldn't. Have a nice day!
lady: So, would you be interested in a copy of My Life by Bill Clinton?
me: No.
lady: Why not?
me: It isn't that saleable and there are copies all over the place- it's not the kind of book we need to pay for.
lady: But if you WERE going to buy it, what would you pay?
me: I wouldn't. It's a book we could get from a thrift store for a quarter, so I wouldn't pay anything for it.
lady: But suppose it was a book you wanted to buy, that cost $35, then what would you pay for it?
me, laughing: Then it would be a different book, and I'd have to take a look at it. Cover price has nothing to do with what we pay for a title, we work off what we can sell it for.
lady: So, you'd pay half the cover price for it?
me, with more laughing: No. No we wouldn't. Have a nice day!
Monday, March 29, 2010
We will, we will.....ROKU.
So, we've been entirely free of broadcast teevee since moving to the El Oh after mom died. Being a malformed Creature of the Internet I barely noticed, but television formed one layer of the Wife's psychic armor growing up and going cold turkey was tough, even with the sweet, sweet methadone of Netflix.
We had a grand total of three channels at our old place, two more than in my pre-cable childhood, but living within walking distance of The Insomniac (where, during a short stint behind the counter, The Wife accumulated a stock of True Customer Tales that make my meager offerings sound tamer than the official minutes of a Junior League conference) meant we never lacked for visual stimulation.
When the internet finally ended Bob's run we signed up with The Great Oppressor, an ethically distasteful necessity- transitioning from the cinematic oasis of The Insomniac to a cultural abattoir like Blockbuster would've been like replacing the Musée d'Orsay with a Thomas Kincaide gallery.
Like most modern retailers, Netflix substitutes shelf space for discernment- who needs taste when you can just stock one of everything? Which works fine in this context since the 'movie as object' lacks emotional weight- tapes and DVDs are naked solutions to engineering problems, not objects d'art garlanded with cultural mythology.
Which brings me, via back roads and detours, to my point:
Roku is the best thing ever.
It's like teevee without the endless, screeching advertising and scheduling problems. It's like DVDs without the moronic accusatory FBI warnings (which amuse the pirates and annoy the honest), endless boring previews and irritating, badly designed menus. In short, it's a dream, a Utopian idyll in a digital oasis where invisible, many limbed underlings attending to your every casual whim almost before you're aware they exist.
So, you ask (cynical child of Capitalism that you are), where's the catch?
The catch is the magic box which inflates this gossamer pavilion of wonderment runs $80-130, requires a network for sustenance and lives on 'instant' content from Netflix, so you want the 'unlimited streaming' account (3 DVDs out, $16.99 a month).
I picked up a basic wireless router from Netgear and was amazed and relieved by how painless the install was.
Hooked up the router, plugged in the Roku, configured my Netflix account, started watching stuff. As an unexpected bonus, it also works with Pandora, so now we can pump our favorite stations through the main stereo instead of my crummy computer speakers.
It isn't perfect, which early adopters have to expect. I usually wait on these things until they've been out for years and other poor suckers have worked out all the kinks for me.
The selection is comparatively piebald- Netflix has catalog of 100,000-ish DVDs, but only 17,000 streaming titles.
"Only" is enough to keep me busy for the next 20 years, assuming zero growth...and since streaming is THE FUTURE, at some point the big studios will adjust to reality and stop pressuring them to restrict availability. And then...what larks, Pip, what larks!
My only other complaint is the somewhat clunky selection menu.
Right now I've got 85 items in my Netflix 'instant' queue and scrolling through them in a line is somewhat tedious. I'm sure its fine for folk who use it as a supplement to their regular teevee diet and have a couple of things loaded up at any given time.
For the rest of us, some sort of a thumbnail grid system would be fantastic.
Load times are minimal, certainly less than the rigmarole imposed by current DVDs (the aforementioned ads, moral admonishments not to pirate, longwinded menues). Picture quality is excellent, which surprised me given the paucity of my internet connection. We switch to DSL from cable when we moved and it pretty much sucks, but Roku doesn't seem to mind. And I can download stuff or play games or whatever while The Wife immerses herself season 1 of LA Ink with no performance hit, so bandwidth isn't a problem.
TL;DR, it's fantastic, I have nothing bad to say about it, everyone should get one tomorrow. The limited streaming options still deliver riches beyond the dreams of avarice and the inevitable death of broadcast television means those options will only expand with time.
We had a grand total of three channels at our old place, two more than in my pre-cable childhood, but living within walking distance of The Insomniac (where, during a short stint behind the counter, The Wife accumulated a stock of True Customer Tales that make my meager offerings sound tamer than the official minutes of a Junior League conference) meant we never lacked for visual stimulation.
When the internet finally ended Bob's run we signed up with The Great Oppressor, an ethically distasteful necessity- transitioning from the cinematic oasis of The Insomniac to a cultural abattoir like Blockbuster would've been like replacing the Musée d'Orsay with a Thomas Kincaide gallery.
Like most modern retailers, Netflix substitutes shelf space for discernment- who needs taste when you can just stock one of everything? Which works fine in this context since the 'movie as object' lacks emotional weight- tapes and DVDs are naked solutions to engineering problems, not objects d'art garlanded with cultural mythology.
Which brings me, via back roads and detours, to my point:
Roku is the best thing ever.
It's like teevee without the endless, screeching advertising and scheduling problems. It's like DVDs without the moronic accusatory FBI warnings (which amuse the pirates and annoy the honest), endless boring previews and irritating, badly designed menus. In short, it's a dream, a Utopian idyll in a digital oasis where invisible, many limbed underlings attending to your every casual whim almost before you're aware they exist.
So, you ask (cynical child of Capitalism that you are), where's the catch?
The catch is the magic box which inflates this gossamer pavilion of wonderment runs $80-130, requires a network for sustenance and lives on 'instant' content from Netflix, so you want the 'unlimited streaming' account (3 DVDs out, $16.99 a month).
I picked up a basic wireless router from Netgear and was amazed and relieved by how painless the install was.
Hooked up the router, plugged in the Roku, configured my Netflix account, started watching stuff. As an unexpected bonus, it also works with Pandora, so now we can pump our favorite stations through the main stereo instead of my crummy computer speakers.
It isn't perfect, which early adopters have to expect. I usually wait on these things until they've been out for years and other poor suckers have worked out all the kinks for me.
The selection is comparatively piebald- Netflix has catalog of 100,000-ish DVDs, but only 17,000 streaming titles.
"Only" is enough to keep me busy for the next 20 years, assuming zero growth...and since streaming is THE FUTURE, at some point the big studios will adjust to reality and stop pressuring them to restrict availability. And then...what larks, Pip, what larks!
My only other complaint is the somewhat clunky selection menu.
Right now I've got 85 items in my Netflix 'instant' queue and scrolling through them in a line is somewhat tedious. I'm sure its fine for folk who use it as a supplement to their regular teevee diet and have a couple of things loaded up at any given time.
For the rest of us, some sort of a thumbnail grid system would be fantastic.
Load times are minimal, certainly less than the rigmarole imposed by current DVDs (the aforementioned ads, moral admonishments not to pirate, longwinded menues). Picture quality is excellent, which surprised me given the paucity of my internet connection. We switch to DSL from cable when we moved and it pretty much sucks, but Roku doesn't seem to mind. And I can download stuff or play games or whatever while The Wife immerses herself season 1 of LA Ink with no performance hit, so bandwidth isn't a problem.
TL;DR, it's fantastic, I have nothing bad to say about it, everyone should get one tomorrow. The limited streaming options still deliver riches beyond the dreams of avarice and the inevitable death of broadcast television means those options will only expand with time.
Friday, March 26, 2010
wordy rappinghood
Fuss has busted out with his first two sentences (two words counts, right?)
Yesterday while he was roaming the craft store with mama he spotted a giant stuffed ape, pointed and exclaimed
"Big Ooooh-OOoooh!"
Which is Fuss lingo for monkey.
This morning, after I responded in the affirmative to his Godfather-style message (stomping into the bedroom, shouting "MO!" and then hurling the box for his new Curious George dvd at our heads), he sat on the couch chortling happily, pointing at the teevee and exclaiming
"Eeeeeaye Oooh-ooooh!"
Eeeeeeaye is Fuss lingo for there it is.
I fully expect to be awakened by declamations of the Bard's deathless prose any morning now...
Yesterday while he was roaming the craft store with mama he spotted a giant stuffed ape, pointed and exclaimed
"Big Ooooh-OOoooh!"
Which is Fuss lingo for monkey.
This morning, after I responded in the affirmative to his Godfather-style message (stomping into the bedroom, shouting "MO!" and then hurling the box for his new Curious George dvd at our heads), he sat on the couch chortling happily, pointing at the teevee and exclaiming
"Eeeeeaye Oooh-ooooh!"
Eeeeeeaye is Fuss lingo for there it is.
I fully expect to be awakened by declamations of the Bard's deathless prose any morning now...
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Answer to Life's Mysteries
Teething.
At least according to the nurse lady who visits Fuss every couple of weeks.
She ascribed his recent uptick in fussiness to a conga line of approaching teeth.
Which makes sense, because he's acting exactly like he did a while back when a bunch of teeth were coming in. You think we'd notice that, but parenting the little man often has more in common with trench warfare than traditional visions of childrearing. When navigating stacked catastrophes moment by moment, perspective is a luxury. The nurse swinging by every few weeks to give us the long view has been really helpful.
This morning's disaster crept up under cover of another shocking event- Fuss sleeping in until 8:30. I'm so programmed by his schedule I usually wake up a bit before he does for my early morning bathroom break. This morning I thought I was being really crafty by eschewing a return to the bed and lying down on the couch.
What I expected to be a ten minute nap ended up stretching for several hours- I eventually woke to the sounds of Fuss chortling and cooing while he played with his train table in the bedroom. The clock read a quarter to 9, which is completely unprecedented.
I sat up and, hearing movement, Fuss came a-running, his blankie in tow (he calls it "Boowen-eee", with an almost but not quite silent W). The next 20 minutes or so spooled out like one of those slow motion nightmares where a seemingly tranquil domestic scene unravels beginning with the discovery of one incongruous minor detail. This morning it was finding several damp brown spots on Boowen-ee.
"Is that....." I sniffed suspiciously and received a snoot-full of ordure.
"OH no!"
I sprang from the couch, scooping him up and hoisting him gingerly down the hall to the changing table, which he took about as well as you'd expect.
So another side effect of teething is, ah, less than solid bowel movements. In this case I was confronted with an epic blowout resulting from comprehensive & absolute diaper failure.
With Fuss yowling and lashing out like a cat espying the approach of a soapy washtub I wrestled him out of his now-camo patterened pyjamas, sheepishly useless diaper and waded in with handfuls of disposable wipes.
Triumph, while inevitable, was far from pleasant and called loudly for a shower.
Then it was off to work, down the stairs and out into the still air in my white shirt, unlocking the car while the birds sang counterpoint.
At least according to the nurse lady who visits Fuss every couple of weeks.
She ascribed his recent uptick in fussiness to a conga line of approaching teeth.
Which makes sense, because he's acting exactly like he did a while back when a bunch of teeth were coming in. You think we'd notice that, but parenting the little man often has more in common with trench warfare than traditional visions of childrearing. When navigating stacked catastrophes moment by moment, perspective is a luxury. The nurse swinging by every few weeks to give us the long view has been really helpful.
This morning's disaster crept up under cover of another shocking event- Fuss sleeping in until 8:30. I'm so programmed by his schedule I usually wake up a bit before he does for my early morning bathroom break. This morning I thought I was being really crafty by eschewing a return to the bed and lying down on the couch.
What I expected to be a ten minute nap ended up stretching for several hours- I eventually woke to the sounds of Fuss chortling and cooing while he played with his train table in the bedroom. The clock read a quarter to 9, which is completely unprecedented.
I sat up and, hearing movement, Fuss came a-running, his blankie in tow (he calls it "Boowen-eee", with an almost but not quite silent W). The next 20 minutes or so spooled out like one of those slow motion nightmares where a seemingly tranquil domestic scene unravels beginning with the discovery of one incongruous minor detail. This morning it was finding several damp brown spots on Boowen-ee.
"Is that....." I sniffed suspiciously and received a snoot-full of ordure.
"OH no!"
I sprang from the couch, scooping him up and hoisting him gingerly down the hall to the changing table, which he took about as well as you'd expect.
So another side effect of teething is, ah, less than solid bowel movements. In this case I was confronted with an epic blowout resulting from comprehensive & absolute diaper failure.
With Fuss yowling and lashing out like a cat espying the approach of a soapy washtub I wrestled him out of his now-camo patterened pyjamas, sheepishly useless diaper and waded in with handfuls of disposable wipes.
Triumph, while inevitable, was far from pleasant and called loudly for a shower.
Then it was off to work, down the stairs and out into the still air in my white shirt, unlocking the car while the birds sang counterpoint.
Monday, March 22, 2010
true customer tales
older gal, to her husband standing outside:
gal: What are you doing?
guy: *mumble mumble*
gal, exasperated: How can you be done, there's a whole BOOKSTORE here!
gal: What are you doing?
guy: *mumble mumble*
gal, exasperated: How can you be done, there's a whole BOOKSTORE here!
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