Posts Tagged ‘Articles’
Let me start off by saying I love NBC. It is by far the station I watch the most during the year. They have a vast majority of my favorite shows and are generally pretty relevant with their news programs. That is why I was so surprised they dropped the ball like they did with their Olympic coverage.
Last night Megan and I rushed home from dinner with friends to make sure we caught the Women’s Gymnastic Finals, Megan’s favorite event in the Olympics. We got home, turned on the TV, and luckily it hadn’t started yet. We then went on to check our email and work on some projects on our computers while we waited for the event. I had just stepped into the office when Megan shouted, “I’m seeing results online, why aren’t they showing it on TV?”
I checked it out, and sure enough, NBC was posting live scores to their website, but we were seeing Men’s Beach Volleyball on the TV. The local coverage was being delayed to adjust for the time zone. I looked around NBC.com for a live feed, but nothing. They offered no live feeds online of their primetime events. I looked around the internet for other live feeds. CBC was clever enough to block their internet feed to users outside of Canada. I tried a YouTube hack Jesse shared from Valleywag, but YouTube had since patched the hole. Frustrated, I finally went back to NBC.com to send them an email and in doing so, I saw the results of the very event I was trying to watch posted on their main page! Ridiculous.
Luckily, Megan hadn’t seen the results (although the swimming results were spoiled for her by the CNN feed on her home page), so we stayed up to watch the delayed coverage, but every time I saw that “Live” bug in the top right corner of the screen, my blood boiled.
I took this picture at 10:40pm Pacific time. At this point, the US is warming up for their first event, but in reality, the event has long been completed, and I have already seen the results. Notice the “Live” bug floating prominently next to the NBC Olympic logo. There’s no indication anywhere that this “Live” feed has been delayed to compensate for time differences.
This is unacceptable. No other live sports coverage is handled this way. They would never dream of doing this with Football. Why did they decide to delay the mother of all international sporting events? It doesn’t make any sense.
I was okay with the delayed Opening Ceremonies, I am okay with the small amount of events available to watch on NBC. I am okay with them spreading the coverage over their partner stations and the internet. I am even okay with them breaking for commercials. I understand that they are still trying to make money. What I am not okay with is delaying a live feed just to put the coverage in line with the local primetime slot. No other sporting event is handled this way, not even Nascar.
I did not check to see if this problem just affected Las Vegas or if it stretched across the entire Pacific Time Zone, so please, leave a comment if you’ve noticed the delay in your area too. If it has, send an email over to NBC to complain along with me.
Update: Gizmodo has some workarounds that might help you get a live stream online. Let me know if any of these work. I’ve lost all faith in NBC.
Tags: Articles, las-vegas, Live, media, NBC, Olympics, tv
I don’t consider myself a lucky man, but I’m not altogether unlucky either. Some people are lucky at cards; others are lucky with women; I’m lucky with soda.
I don’t know when it started, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve had the uncanny ability to pick out the 20oz soda that will earn me a free soda. I used to go to the gas station with my friends relying on this ability. We’d pool our money together for one soda, I’d pick it out, and sure enough, I’d win another soda for my friend. I can’t even begin to count the amount of 20oz beverages I’ve won over the years. Lately though, I feel like my gift is starting to fade.
Last weekend, Megan and I went up to Utah to do some shooting for a video assignment. On the way back, we stop at a gas station and I pick up a Dr. Pepper. I unscrew the cap and check the inside as I always do and I see a message a lot like the one in the picture above. “Sweet!” I think to myself, “It happened again!”
Now, usually when there’s a winning message like that on the inside of a bottle cap, it means I’ve won a free soda. But this time, I see no indication anywhere on the cap or bottle to tell me what exactly I’ve won.
I get home and get online as I usually do, and eventually remember the cap I left sitting somewhere. I find it and head over to DrPepper.com to enter the code, all the while thinking I’ll be able to print out some sort of coupon for a free soda. I fill out the registration form and punch in the numbers when this screen pops up:
Computer Wallpaper. That’s my prize. No free soda, just some ugly, fabricated, over-produced piece of promotional filth to stick on my computer and give them free advertising. I don’t think Shia LeBouf even carries a sword at any point in that movie. He just flips around that knife all movie long. I was so upset, I didn’t even bother saving the actual image.
Dr. Pepper, you broke my heart.
Tags: Articles, bottle cap, dr pepper, free, soda, uwin
Apparently I just became internet famous. This is a little weird. My friend, Nate was stumbling and came across the picture above on this website. After a little Googling, I found it again here. The weird thing is that the only place I have this picture posted is on Facebook.
Someone must have ripped it from there, added a little text, and submitted it to the fail blog. I wonder who it was. I figured I’d repost it here so that I get a little credit for the picture. Here’s what happened:
So there we were, driving through the middle of nowhere, Wyoming, when out of nowhere we got ambushed by a rogue wind. The back end started to slide right, I calmly said, “Here we go,” and turned the wheel to correct, it slid back left, and I suddenly remembered the 18-wheeler we passed not too long ago that was sure to be barreling toward us. I saw the edge of the road and decided that’s where I wanted to be. Off we slid, I pumped the brake once, the back end swung right, off the road, and behind us, and next thing I knew, we were perched 5 feet in the air.
We were going maybe 25 mph, more likely less when it happened, no tickets were issued, and there was absolutely no damage whatsoever to the car. We followed the tow truck towing the trailer to the nearest Uhaul, stayed the night, and swapped out the trailer the next day. It was relatively painless since I bought the insurance on the trailer, although I did have to completely repack it. The only major damage done was to a Wal-Mart particle board entertainment center, but the entire contents was covered by the insurance.
It took 2 tow trucks to un-perch us from the trailer. Luckily, I had my video camera with me.
It was crazy, after getting un-stuck, we sat on the freeway for like 5 hours waiting for them to clear all the toppled semis and wrecked cars off the freeway. Apparently they closed the freeway right after we passed the last closing point. Just too much wind on a snowy day. Hooray for failing!
Tags: Articles, fail, Shameless Self-Promotion, StumbleUpon, Stumbling, trailer, u-fail, u-haul
Last December, I had just gotten home from a gig when my business partner, Scott called me. One of our clients had just been selected as a McDonalds All-American Basketball player and wanted more copies of his promo DVD.
“That’s great! No sweat. I’ll get those right out!”
I fire up the computer and open up Avid Xpress Pro to export the necessary video to burn a few new copies (unfortunately, I didn’t keep a copy of the most recent DVD that I could just duplicate and my 500 GB external is nearly maxed out, so I had no room to save the exported video from the original creation). I begin my export, wait a few minutes, and realize my computer is frozen
… Restart … Frozen startup screen … Another hard restart … Click … Click … Click … Nothing. The hard drive is dead.
Now I start to panic. My computer is my livelihood. Good thing I back up … wait … I just disabled and deleted my backup system to give myself more space on my external. Luckily, most of my important documents are backed up through various emails and really old backups, all my music is on my Ipod, and my raw video data is stored on the external (which is what trumped my backup in the first place), but all the files that reference the raw video are stored locally. In other words, I have video, but would have to re-edit all of it if the files cannot be recovered. Plus, I only have a hard copy of the most recent edition of my feature-length screenplay. It would have to be re-typed. All this a week before I have to fly from New York City to Los Angeles to get married.
Thanks to my amazing then fiance, now wife, Megan, I get my hard drive replaced before we leave so I can at least use my computer while I search for the time and money to send out the bad drive and the next few months are spent getting married, going on a honeymoon, then finding out all the programs I forgot to install before packing everything up. Finally, my amazing wife finds the time to send the drive out right before we move to Las Vegas. I begin to feel better.
It is now 12:12am PST on February 27. Scott called yesterday to tell me our client really needs more DVDs now as he has just made it to the State Finals and is starting to get scouts from high profile division 1 colleges. We have a copy of the most recent DVD we made, but the client wants to swap out one of the games shown. My failed hard drive is currently in Chicago being assessed for a repair recovery estimate.
Luckily, I am able to find the other game in the raw footage on my external, but everything else will have to be extracted from the DVD to make a new DVD with the new game added. In other words, I have to completely deconstruct one DVD before I can construct a new one. It’s like remodeling a house by demolishing it, then building it again using all original parts except in the kitchen.
As Megan watches American Idol and we discuss the state of rock in the 70s …
Megan: There was no good rock in the 70s.
Me: ??? Rock was born in the 70s!
Megan: No, rock was born in the 60s, or even the 50s.
Me: Okay, but rock’s balls dropped in the 70s.
… while I attempt to use Handbrake to extract each video separately from the DVD. Of course, Handbrake doesn’t like me tonight and after about an hour of fiddling, I finally figure out I have to disable the update check before it will work (there is a new update out, which it wanted me to use, but it’s only for Leopard and I’m running Tiger). Finally, Handbrake cooperates and I quickly find out Megan’s computer will do everything much faster (I’m running on a 3-year-old Powerbook. She’s got a first-gen MacBook Pro), so I move the entire project to her computer.
So what should have taken an hour or two, tops, last December is now taking 5 hours and counting (I have at least another hour of encoding before the DVDs even start burning) two months later. On top of that, I have to get up early to package, label, and overnight the DVDs before I head to my gig at 1:00pm. All of this because I wanted to save a few bucks and stretch my external hard drive as far as I could.
As soon as things settle down, I’m buying this and downloading this. With these gems, I could’ve used Megan’s computer to boot my computer on her computer from the external hard drive right after the hard drive failed and saved myself hours and hours of extra work and headache.
Man, I’m a geek.
Tags: Articles, Avid-Xpress-Pro, backup, Chandler-Rhoads, DVD-burning, Handbrake, hard-drive-failure, Mac, Powerbook, Recovery, Tripod-Productions
During the summer of 2004, I worked at the local Blockbuster store in South Riding, VA. I loved that job. The pay was only marginally above minimum wage, but I got 5 free movies per week and discounts on all purchases, including new and used DVDs. My DVD collection nearly tripled while I was there. When I left, they were just kicking off there online service. I was eligible for an employee discount to the service, so I promptly signed up. I had pretty much rented everything I could from the store and wanted to get more obscure movies through their more extensive online catalog.
Fast-forward to January 2008, when Blockbuster Total Rewards sent me yet another email notifying me of yet another price increase. This after waiting about 6 months to finally receive Umbrellas of Cherbourg, while they sent me whatever movie they felt like from my queue, regardless of my ranking. It was time to reconsider my online rental options.
Reasons for Staying with Blockbuster:
Ability to swap mail-ins with in-store rentals.
Reasons for Leaving Blockbuster:
My choice was clear and I decided to cancel. When asked for additional explanation, I replied,
I have been a blockbuster online customer from the very beginning of the service. The price has gone up for the same service at least 5 times since then. Why? Rarely do I ever get the movies I put at the top of my list and the other movies randomly change from available to not available. What is the purpose of ranking movies in a queue if you’re not going to follow it. I’m sick of it. I used to tell all my friends to switch from Netflix to Blockbuster, but after you jacked up the price yet again for what has become horrible service, I am switching from Blockbuster to Netflix. It’s a shame you wasted all my money getting Alec Baldwin to do your voice-overs instead of maintaining the service I came to expect years ago when you first started. How about a little loyalty to your long-time customers?
This explanation, however, was rejected because apparently I was supposed to keep my explanation limited to a meager 255 characters. I happily obliged.
Apparently your web programmers didn’t think to limit this text box to only allow me 255 characters as I type. This is a sort of microcosm of the ineptitude that I have become so accustomed to from Blockbuster Online.
Goodbye Blockbuster, you will not be missed.
Netflix, I’ll see you soon.
Tags: Articles, blockbuster, blockbuster-online, blockbuster-total-access, dvds, Movies, netflix, quitting, Rental, umbrellas-of-cherbourg
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