With one single application, you can consolidate IM, e-mail, and social networking. That one app, is Digsby. In the past, I have used Pidgin on Windows, and Adium on the Mac for all my instant messaging needs. I’ve been happy with how they handle all the protocols I use (or rather all my buddies use) pretty well. Along came Digsby late last month with a piece of software that does all that and more. Not only does it include just about every instant messaging protocol out there (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Chat, ICQ, Jabber), but it also notifies you when you receive new e-mail (from just about every popular webmail client + pop and IMAP). On top of that, it hooks into several social networks as well (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace) and lets you know when folks contact you via those protocols. Don’t get me wrong, I love Pidgin, and Adium, but Digsby adds those little extras that take it a step further. Plus, I like the skinning and theming that Digsby allows, making it a little nicer environment when compared to Pidgin.

It is missing a few things though. I’d like to be able to hook up to Skype with it, but there aren’t that many IM apps that do that now, so it isn’t that big of a deal. It is also missing message encryption which is built in for Adium, and available as a plugin for Pidgin. Digsby is still in beta though and at the frantic speed they’re adding features, I can only hope that those aren’t too far away. I haven’t totally uninstalled Pidgin or
Adium, but I find myself using Digsby for longer periods at a time. If those few extra features get thrown in, there isn’t much holding me back from going 100% Digsby.

This post has been sitting in my drafts for about a month now. I was lucky enough to get in on the private beta of Hulu.com not too long after they started testing. Waiting so long to write this has actually been somewhat helpful. I’ve talked with a few people about their use of Hulu (now that it is open to the public) and got some interesting insights. What exactly is Hulu.com? It is a site created by News Corp. and NBC as an answer to internet video. This past winter, NBC left iTunes as a digital distributor of its TV content, and their alternative was Hulu. At the time, Hulu hadn’t launched yet and there was a lot of skepticism on whether this non-existent internet video site put together by companies that really don’t seem to know technology was going to work out, or just fail miserably. From what I read, signs were pointing to the latter. I had my doubts as well. How were broadcast companies going surpass the likes of Apple’s iTunes or YouTube when every time you look at them, they’re flailing blindly when it comes to technology. Well, now that Hulu is open to the world, it looks like what they put together isn’t that shabby.

The first thing you notice when you pull up Hulu.com is the slick clean interface. It is easy to navigate and easy to find shows to watch. Content is the next thing you notice. They’ve got a lot of stuff up there. Not only do you have content from NBC and News Corp. (Fox), also included is Sony, MGM, and many of their sub-brands like Sci-Fi, Bravo, USA, etc. There is definitely not a lack of things to watch. I do have some questions on why they chop up seasons or chose what shows and seasons get posted. Like for the show 24 (which I don’t watch), they start with Season 1 Episodes 1-5, then they jump to season 6. From what I know about that show, you need to follow it pretty closely from episode to episode, so jumping over 5 seasons doesn’t really make sense to me. Another example of this is the show Chuck, why are you starting with episode 5? How tough would it be to start at the beginning? That show hasn’t even been on that long! Maybe this is something they’re working on. I don’t know how things work inside the TV biz, but if I get hooked on 24 and don’t have the shows in between, where do you think I might get them (*cough* P2P *cough*)? Another thing that is somewhat random about the content selection in Hulu is when exactly a new show comes to the site. From what I have seen it is kind of random when a show that aired last night on NBC can be watched on Hulu. That, along with having irregular partial seasons makes it kind of tough to get into a TV series. Maybe that’s what they’re going for with Hulu. Doing that doesn’t make it that much different from standard TV, but maybe that’s what they’re going for. “We’ll hook ‘em with Hulu and then they’ll have to come back to NBC to watch the next show in the series… mwah ha ha ha ha!”

So, content selection aside, the player interface is pretty nice. It is a flash video player so it should be cross platform. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve read it even works on Linux. The interface is intuitive and has some nice features. It does full-screen, pop-up, or in-browser viewing modes and has a little “lower lights” button that dims the rest of the page if you decided to watch it in the standard window. They even allow embedding of the video into your own website ala YouTube. In fact before the private beta was over, you could access pretty much ever video on the site from openhulu.com which was a collection of every video embedded. The video quality is pretty good. It’s better than your typical YouTube video. There is a little fuzziness or graininess at full-screen, but all in all, the quality is pretty high.

There are commercials in Hulu videos (you knew there would be). There is typically an intro “brought to you by” commercial for a few seconds when you start a video, and depending on the show, there are a couple commercials dropped throughout the video. You can skip around the show, but cannot skip a commercial break. They tell you how long a break will be with a counter at the top of the video window (letting you know how long you have to visit the kitchen). I think it definitely less obtrusive than a regular TV commercial. It sure takes up less time in a typical TV episode vs. watching it on broadcast TV.

Overall, Hulu is much better than I expected. There are still some things that get me though. The content isn’t portable. It is essentially streaming to me over the internet as I watch it. With iTunes, I could take the shows with me on an iPod or on a laptop if I didn’t have an internet connection. Hulu ties me to my internet connected computer screen. I think that is probably the biggest thing that prevents this from really taking off right now. It’s a paradigm switch to go from comfy living room setup to sitting at a computer desk, or even huddling around a laptop. I’m one of the rare people who have a computer controlling my TV, and I still haven’t pulled up Hulu on the big screen yet. I think that the reason I haven’t done that yet is there isn’t a slick remote-controllable interface for it yet. Navigating the web on a TV is tough. For this to become really on-demand TV it needs to be easy. We need some sort of Hulu set-top-box or something. So, Hulu is good… but there is definitely room for improvement. At the very least, the networks are finally seeing that people want their shows on their schedule, online, and in a convenient way. Hulu does fit that need. But how far does it go? I think most people download content illegally because it is available and easier to do it that way. Once getting legitimate content becomes easier, the need to download it illegally disappears. I think people would even be willing to pay for that content (the way iTunes does it). So I think Hulu does some of these things, but also fails at some of them, and convenience is a fine line. This effort by NBC and News Corp. is definitely a step in the right direction, and is way better than what I (and many) were expecting, but they still have a little further to go.

iTunes Library Updater has become my handy program of the last few months. Getting married last summer meant merging two collections of music in one place. It also meant getting two separate installations of iTunes to work with this merged collection (we both have ipods). If any of you have attempted this, you know that getting iTunes to play nice with a central (networked) music location isn’t easy. Enter iTLU. This little app will rebuild your iTunes library based on a resource that you point it to. In our case, I open iTLU and tell it to look for music on our network drive. I then have options to select what I want it to do with the music it finds. It can add new media, remove missing files, update track info and several other things. It fires up iTunes and then does its thing based on the options I’ve given. This is really handy when each of us happens to add music (either purchased or ripped) to our independent libraries. We just run iTLU every now and then and everything is synced up. Plus if we pull music out of iTunes (Christmas songs for instance) it will see they are gone and remove them from the library.

This is a continuation of a few older posts on the entertaiment PC.

• Adding HD to the Entertaiment PC
• Building an Entertainment PC: The Guts

Much of what I’ve done with software on this computer is based loosely on Jon’s system. The core to both of our systems is a little piece of software called Meedio Essentials… that unfortunately is no longer supported. They sold out to Yahoo back in 2006. Yahoo took the software and created Yahoo TV, which at this point in its development is an interior product. The community left over at Meedio have since spun off a new product/community called MeediOS. MeedioOS now houses many of the plugins and forums from the now defunct Meedio Essentials. So given that little history lesson on Meedio, I still use the final version of the software that was released before Yahoo got hold of it. If you really wanted to, you could still probably get your hands on a copy of it (cough p2p cough). The collection of entertainment PC software available now is actually much better than it used to be. There are quite a few options out there to chose from. There might even be something better than Meedio Essentials available now, but what I’ve got just works, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

OK, so what exactly does Meedio Essentials do? It is essentially the control to the entire entertainment pc. It hold the menus that you navigate using your remote and launches you into everything you want to do with the computer. There are serveral built in modules that I use on this system, and a lot of external programs that get launched via a command from Meedio. That’s the beauty of Meedio, it can call up just about anything on the computer and is endlessly customizable (with a little tweaking).

Photos
For photos, we use the built-in photo module in Meedio. It works like just about any photo viewer out there. You can browse photo by photo, or by collections. It includes a slideshow option and works with the remote to pull up your entire photo collection on the TV. I have Meedio pointing to a shared drive on our media server with all of our photos on it, but Meedio could just as easily point to a directory on the hard drive full of photos.

Music
As with the photo viewer, we use the built-in music player in Meedio. It is a pretty standard software music player. Also similar to the photos module, it is hooked to the media server where all of the MP3’s are hosted. It reads ID3 tags for file information, and will even take advantage of album art pulled from iTunes. You can sort by just about everything (artist, title, genre). There is also a nice full-screen visualization to throw up on the screen when you want to play a bunch of music and see something a little nicer than a list of songs running by.

DVD Playback
This is one of the areas where I have Meedio pointing to an external program. I’m currently using Zoom Player as the DVD player for the system. Meedio does have its own DVD module, but it isn’t that great. When a DVD is loaded or DVD is selected in the interface, Meedio just launches Zoom Player, and off it goes. The reason I use Zoom Player over the standard DVD module is that it has a lot more control over video settings and video acceleration. I have a video card that can handle much of the processing of playing a DVD, and handing that over to the card saves the CPU for other tasks. Plus when/if I end up getting a drive that can play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, it will most likely need to be tweaked even more to handle the load that those formats put on the computer. It will also most likely take another software player. I believe PowerDVD Ultra is the only software HD/Blu-Ray player out there at the moment, but we’ll cross that bridge when/if we come to it.

TV/DVR
The Digital Video Recorder functionality for the entertainment PC isn’t handled by Meedio (even though Meedio does include a DVR module). I used to use SageTV for this function, but have recently switched over to BeyondTV. They both work really well in their core features (recording/playing back tv), but BeyondTV is just a cleaner interface, and has a few more bells and whistles built in where you would have to install a plugin for Sage. You can check out the features of BeyondTV at their site, or see what Jon had to say about it in his description. The things I like about BeyondTV is that it can handle HD (after the recent hardware upgrade). It also automatically creates chapter marks to skip commercials (Sage didn’t do this out of the box). I really like a new feature that was added with the most recent upgrade to version 4.7. You can set it to create an iPod compatible version of a show and it will set up an RSS feed to go with it. This allows you to point iTunes at the entertainment pc and automatically pull down video files for whatever tv series you’re currently watching (it can be all of them or just individual shows). We also have a handy plugin called BTV Podcatcher that pulls down video podcasts we subscribe to and drops them right in with our recorded TV shows. Again, the DVR area is a space where there are a lot of contenders making products, but so far BeyondTV has topped the list of products I’ve tried.

Others
There are a bunch of little odds and ends that Meedio also does well (and some things we do that aren’t part of Meedio). One of them is a weather module that gives quick access to forecasts and weather maps. Another piece of software that we’ve tied to Meedio is the Sling Box software. We use this to get our Iowa Hawkeyes football fix from AZ. Meedio just fires up the SlingPlayer software which launches full-screen and is controllable via remote control. The last “other” thing we do with the entertainment PC isn’t really worked into Meedio at this time. This could be a future project, but I’d like to be able to connect it to the Netflix “Watch Now” movies allowing us to watch streaming movies from Netflix. We do this now by firing up IE (only works with WMP and IE unfortunately) and navigating the Netflix site with our wireless mouse. It would be idea if there were some sort of remote controllable site to get to the watch now movies. I know there is a Meedio browser plugin that uses IE, but haven’t really had a chance to play with it on the Netflix site. We’ll see what happens on that front. Otherwise, that just about covers everything we use Meedio and the entertainment PC for. So far things have been working pretty well.

Cherry Chocolate (rain) Diet Dr. Pepper viral marketing campaign = Great!

(based on the internet video Chocolate Rain)

Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper (the drink) = Yucky!

As sort of a New Year’s resolution (which I rarely do), I decided I wanted to track all the books I read in 2007, and maybe longer. I thought to myself, “there’s got to be some sort of software or website that does this kind of thing,” After doing a lot of digging, I didn’t come up with a whole lot. I found a few pieces of software that would keep track of media (CD’s, DVD’s, books, etc.), but they were more for a home library, and geared toward checking out pieces of your own media to your friends. I just wanted something that would keep a limited amount of information about what books I’ve read, and when I’ve read them. Anything else on top of that would be a plus. There were a few online apps that one could install on a server that kind of did this, but they were either way to simplified (just storing title and author), or they were like an online version of the media tracker, being more like check out management software. I was beginning to wonder if anything like this existed out there, or if I would need to write something myself, when I ran across a cool site called LibraryThing. The best way to describe it is that it’s like Last.FM for books. It does the few things that I wanted, and a lot more. I can track my books by all of the information I was looking for, and it allows me to rate them, and review them as well. It also has a nice social aspect to it as well. It compares my books to other people’s books and makes recommendations based on what other people with similar tastes liked.

LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 60 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, “tag” books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection.

If you want it, LibraryThing is also an amazing social space, often described as “MySpace for books” or “Facebook for books.” You can check out other people’s libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, swap reading suggestions and so forth. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.

So it turns out LibraryThing is just what I was looking for. I think it will be interesting to see how many books I get through in a year’s time.

This past fall, I finally made the jump to Netflix (yah, I know… what took so long?!?) after paying something like $6 for a new release at the local video store. I had eyed the service for a while, but paying for that video was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Anyway, I’ve been very happy with the service for the past 6 months. Delivery is very quick, the website is very intuitive and works very well (they’ve got all kinds of cool AJAX stuff going on). All in all, Netflix has been great, and there isn’t a DVD that goes by where I regret making the move away from the local video store at all.

Sometime around the middle of January, Netflix launched a trial of a new “Watch Now” service that allows you to instantly watch movies online via the Netflix site. Being the happy Netflix user that I am, I jumped at the chance to try their cool new addition. Well, turns out I wasn’t special enough to get to use it. I kept getting a message that the “Watch Now” feature would be rolled out on a limited basis and would be fully launched in June. You can image how disappointed I was. Then when listening to the Buzz Out Loud Podcast, I learned of a little trick to get myself into the limited release of the new “Watch Now” feature. If you log into the site and type “downloads” into the search bar, you’ll get a message (Looking for our instant watching feature?) that takes you to a page where you can activate your account for this new feature. Well, I did this, and kept getting the same “coming in June” message that I’d been able to find before… hmmm! Then after a little digging, I found another tip that said the new feature only worked in Internet Explorer, which I try to stay as far away from as possible. So I fired up IE and low and behold, it worked… almost. I had the new “Watch Now” tab in my menu, but trying to actually watch a video gave me several crazy Media error messages. Well, after a little digging and an e-mail to Netflix they got me straightened out. Turns out Netflix uses Windows Media DRM (IE & Windows only!) for this service and there were a few hiccups, but I seem to be straightened out now.

Now that I’ve got the service up and running, things are working pretty well. The pricing is nice. Since you are obviously a Netflix subscriber if you’re trying this, the pricing is pretty much free. The new instant watching service is tacked onto your account as a feature. You get however many hours of video watching as dollars per month in your subscription. So if you have the 2 at a time unlimited subscription for $14.99/month, you get 15 hours of instant streaming movies per month. The movie selection is a little lacking. I’m hoping this is just due to the service still being in limited release. There are still a good number of movies available though. As for actually using the service, after the initial hiccups everything has been working smoothly. You pick the movie you want to watch and simply click the “play” button. It pulls up a new viewing screen with your typical video playback toolbar (also includes a full-screen mode) and after a few seconds to buffer, the movie streams to your computer. The quality is what you’d expect from streaming video. It’s not super great, but it’s really not that bad either. I’m sure much of the quality is dependent on your Internet connection speed. I’d like to try this out on an HTPC, and see how it looks on a TV screen, mainly because I don’t have a couch in front of my computer monitor.

So far I’ve been happy with this nice new Netflix feature, minus the fact that I have to use IE for it. It’s a nice add-on for a service that I already enjoy. I don’t think I would think as highly of it if there was an additional charge for viewing online. The fact that it starts streaming quickly (no waiting for a long download), and is available on just about any (windows) net connected computer is a really handy feature for Netflix. I could see taking advantage of this when I’m between mailed DVD’s or even on vacation, or at a friends house when we want to watch a movie, but don’t want to go out and get one. Netflix has definitely positioned instant watching well to making it very useful, and to get people to subscribe to their bread-and-butter online rental service. It easily blows the current collection of online streaming rental services (don’t get me started on Unbox again!) out of the water.

Hacking Netflix has put together a nice screencast of the entire “watch now” process.

Since I’m currently in the process of planning a wedding, I’m constantly looking for for technology that will make that job easier. For instance, we’re using a Wiki (that I loving call our WedWiki) to keep track of wedding information (links to decorations, food, tux/dress, to-do lists, etc). Last month I stumbled across a nice little web app called SimpleSeating.com that I thought would be very helpful when we get to the daunting task of creating a reception seating chart.

What is SimpleSeating.com?

• SimpleSeating.com is the fastest and easiest way to make seating charts online.
• SimpleSeating.com brings the power of expensive desktop seating chart applications to the web minus the learning curve.
• With SimpleSeating.com you’ll be able to create, preview, and print your seating charts in just a few simple steps.

Well, I signed up for the beta account and jumped right in. For the most part, this little web app is pretty slick. It does everything they claim it does, and makes putting together a seating chart as easy as dragging and dropping. I’ll preface this review with the fact that this is beta software and there is room to grow. They’ve put together a blog listing future features and bug fixes as they happen. It looks like they’re really dedicated to making a great product and taking suggestions seriously. Many of the items I suggested have made their “coming soon” list. I’m really excited to watch this app work its way to a solid version 1 release.

You start out by creating an event, giving it a name/descriptions and selecting the number of guests for your event. From my trials, smaller events seem work a little better than larger events mainly because of space constraints on your banquet room layout. I started with a 200 person event (wedding?) and laying out the tables into a “room” was a bit cramped (though they did all fit).

Once you’ve placed your event tables (and there are a lot of table sizes to chose from), it’s time to start adding guests to the event. The interface for adding guests provides individual guests and also guest grouping options. Right now you can only add guests one at a time, but they say they’ll be coming out with some sort of bulk add in the near future, which I’m looking forward to (don’t really want to type 200+ names). There is also another nice guest feature where you can chose if a guest has RSVP’s yet or not and also a select a meal choice. The RSVP option changes the color of a guest’s icon on the seating chart so you can visually tell if they’re going to be there or not and move people around accordingly.

Now that you’ve got a room/table layout and some guests, it’s time too place them into their seats. This is the easiest part of the process. All you need to do is drag and drop little (RSVP color coded) people icons to the chairs around a table. If you’ve grouped someone, or created a party of say 3 people, it places all three little people icons when you drag that group/party to a table which is nice when you need to keep families or couples together.

Once you’ve created your seating chart, you are then able to print it out. I’m not sure how this works yet since they’re still working some bugs out of that portion. I’m hoping that there are a good number of print options to provide documentation for a banquet hall’s layout and seating.

All in all, this is a great little app, and I’m really excited to see it progress. Even with it still being beta software, I’ll be using it to create a seating chart for my wedding. According to their site, they’re planning a release in “October-ish.” I look forward to see where it will go between now and then.

Last week Google came out with a new service called Picasa Web Albums. It is the online photo album for Picasa users that has been rumored to be coming out for some time now. It is still in “Test,” which is odd since everything else google puts out there is in “beta,” so there are probably some features that are still coming. Digital Inspiration does a nice job comparing the new service to flickr (and how if falls short) in several key areas. But again, more features could still be on their way.

I got a test account with the new Web Albums and it gives you a new beta version of the Picasa application to download with some nice new features. The about screen shows this as version 2.5. So, while the web albums may be lacking, the new features that they’ve put into Picasa are actually pretty useful.

The first new item that jumps out right away are the new buttons along the bottom, where an appropriately named “web album” button has been added for your to upload your photos to the web. This button prompts you for your web album login/pass and then asks you for an album name, or allows you to put the photos in an existing web album. You’ve also got options to resize the photos for the upload, which is something you’d probably want to do based on the size limits in place for web albums.

Another nice organization feature is in the upper left corner of the program where they’ve added a couple new buttons and categories. First, you can organize your image folders and collections much easier by moving through them, or by clicking the new button to create a new one. There has also been and addition to the top of the album and thubmnail columns. There are now two new categories called Screensaver and Starred Photos. The Screensaver category will add any photos in that category to a screensaver that shows up in the Windows display properties. You can chose what photos you want to rotate through the screensaver. The other new category is the Starred Photos. Starring photos has always been an option in Picasa. You can add a star to the photos that you like the best or want to set apart from the others. In this new version, you can easily view all the photos that you’ve marked with a star in one place instead of digging through hundreds of thumbnails trying to find the ones you’ve marked.

The new Picasa also has a few new menu items added. Under the Tools menu, there are a few new items. The first is an option called “configure buttons” that lets you add, remove and rearrange buttons in the bottom menu. Right now there aren’t any buttons that don’t display by default. I hoping that down the road Google might open up this area for other developers to create buttons that will allow Picasa to be plugged into other applications. Another new menu under tools is the “Geotag” option. It pulls up Google Earth with a little cross-hair letting you find and mark where the photo was taken. Right now it seems to be a bit limited, but I can see this taking off more down the road as Picasa Web Albums become more widespread. Similar to what you used to be able to do with Flickr, you’d be able to see all photos geotagged in the area you’re viewing in Google Earth. The last new item in the Tools menu is the “Experimental” menu, which includes several options. Publish via FTP, should actually be called “Export as html page” since that’s what comes up when you select that option. At least in this version of the software (from what I can find) it doesn’t really do anything via FTP. Show Duplicate Files finds duplicate photos you have in your collection. Search for, brings up a list of colors and finds all the photos that have a large portion of the color selected in them. The last item in experimental is upload to google video, which again does what you’d expect it to do.

I’m sure I missed some of the new features in the special beta version of Picasa, but the ones that I noticed were definite improvements. There are a lot of little things that just seem to work smoother too. I’ve been using Picasa for organizing my photos about a year now (after Adobe Album corrupted its database one too many times) and like the direction things seem to be moving. It’s definitely my photo program of choice and will continue to be.

I just got my beta account for Farecast yesterday and was able to take it for a spin. Farecast is a different type of travel site than your typical dime-a-dozen Expedias and Travelocities. Those sites search the airlines for the lowest price right now. What Fareast does is try to predict how the airline fares are going to change. Since airline pricing is such a screwy thing, based on a million different variables, it’s hard to find good prices for airfare. Your seat could cost you $100 less than the exact same seat of guy sitting right beside you only because he bought it a day later than you. Farecast tracks prices over history to determine whether a price is going to go up or down (and whether you should buy now or wait).

The patent pending Fare History shows what the lowest fare was for your trip each day up to 90 days ago. We monitor price changes multiple times a day and store more than 50 billion observations and counting. We make a significant investment in data, hardware and storage costs to provide you with real prices based on availability.

The site is still in beta, so there were some features that weren’t quite ready for prime time. One of the biggest missing pieces for me was that it will only show you outgoing flights from Boston and Seattle (which doesn’t really do me much good). As for the functionality of the site, it’s pretty nice, and I have no reason to doubt the buying recommendations Farecast gives since the whole airline pricing scheme is such a mystery. I think once they get the site filled out a bit more (more markets and more buying options), it’ll be a nice weapon in my arsenal of travel sites. I’m not ready to switch to it all at once quite yet.

As a beta tester, I’ve got a few invites if anyone would like to give it a spin. Leave me a comment (with a valid e-mail address) and I’ll send an invite your way.

Earlier this week, I went to the Bijou (The University of Iowa’s indie/art film theater) to see Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Bubble. I’ve been a fan of his movies for a while (Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s 12, Traffic, The Limey, and others) so I was expecting to enjoy this one as well. Outside of the film’s director, this is the first in a series of 6 that will be released simultaneously in theaters, on tv, and on DVD at the same time. That was probably the most intriguing part of this movie to me. Soderbergh and his team have decided to break the mold and try something a very different by doing this type of release. I don’t think I’m the only one, but I like the idea of being able to chose the medium and viewing atmosphere of a newly released film instead of having to wait months (years?) to catch a film I missed in the theaters on DVD. Many theaters have boycotted the release of this movie claiming that, “It’s the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today,” which is pretty crazy. I say anything that gives a viewer more choices is ultimately good. I can make a pretty good hamburger, but that sure doesn’t keep me from going to McDonald’s every now and then.

Anyway, back to the movie. Based on past Soderbergh movies and this special multi-format release, I was looking forward to seeing this film. Well… I was pretty disappointed. Let me preface this with: I have unique taste in movies (my friends will agree with that statement). I don’t think that my taste in movies is really too far outside the norm though. I didn’t really like this movie. Maybe I built up my expectations too much. One of the things Soderbergh said that he wanted to do with this series of films is use local talent, and makes them really place-specific. That’s evident with this movie; it takes place at doll factory in a small midwestern town. It was obvious to me that the “local talent” weren’t the best actors. They weren’t horrible (I’ve seen much worse), but there were several times when you felt like you were watching some amateur film, or poorly scripted home movie. I remember reading that much of the script for Bubble was improvised. At times that point is painfully obvious. Given that the acting in this film is a little below the mark, I can get by it. Like I said, I’ve seen much worse. That’s not the only area that this film falls short. The shooting also leaves a little bit to be desired. Again there were places where I wondered if I was watching a professionally produced film because it sure felt like I was watching a shaky shot that someone had made in their back yard with their wal-mart tripod. I like how Soderbergh shoots his films. He knows how to technically put a film together (quick shots in O11, the different use of colors in Traffic), but this movie just feels cheap. I can remember one shot in the front yard of the main character’s house that pans all the way around and has a little bump like someone accidently kicked the tripod as they were panning. Something like that just feels out of place in a professionally produced picture.

Setting aside the acting and shooting of this film. Yes, there were quite a few instances where both were lackluster, but both could be ignored. The story just wasn’t that great. I kept wondering to myself, when’s something going to happen? When is it going to start getting exciting? I knew (via the movie synopsis I’d read) that someone was going to get murdered, and knowing that it was only a 73 min. movie, I was getting anxious for it to happen (because I was getting bored with the poor improv acting?). Well, somebody finally died, and guess what, the movie didn’t get much more exciting. In wondering why this movie is like this, I’ve wondered if maybe Soderbergh did all of this (poor acting, poor shooting, poor story/plot???) on purpose to really hit home the slow simple life of the smaller midwestern town where this movie is set. But why would he? If that really was his intention, it really doesn’t add anything to the movie. It takes quite a bit away from it.

So… an interesting (and overdue?) distribution concept. I just hope the next film in this series has better actors/story/filming! I don’t think I’ll be able to sit through 6 Bubbles! I like being able to watch a newly released movie in whatever format I chose, but If had been watching this on TV, I think I would have changed the channel.

The Mentos gods have been smiling down on me the past couple weeks. Not only did Mentos update their website recently, but I have finally discovered the holy grail of Mentos… peach flavor! I don’t remember when I first caught wind of the mystical peach flavored Mentos, but it was some time ago. I think I ran across a photo of a peach wrapper from Japan while doing an early image search on the internet. Since then, I’ve been searching high and low trying to find that elusive roll of peach. My Mentos ambassadors (yes, I really have Mentos ambassadors!) have been searching the globe trying to find new flavors, but none of them have ever been able to come back with peach. I’ve been mining the search engines for Peach mentos regularly trying to find a way to actually get myself a roll. I knew they existed, and I knew it was in some Asian country, but how could I get my hands on a roll? I hoped it wouldn’t come to me taking a trip to Japan, but I was prepared for anything. I posted to Metafilter asking for some help. Low an behold I received a link to Candy Direct which had just recently started selling the peach flavor. The funny thing is, I had been checking Candy Direct on a regular basis hoping that I’d finally be able to get myself some peach, but they never had peach. Sometime between the last time I checked Candy Direct, and asked my question at metafilter, they began offering peach for sale. I quickly followed the link to the site. “Why was the internet going so slow?!?” I scanned the room for hidden cameras. Was this a joke? Was I on TV? Was I finally able to order peach mentos? I fumbled with my wallet trying to get to my credit card to place my order. With my shaking hands, I clicked the “Order” button… finally peach Mentos would soon be mine!

I raced home today to find a package in front of my door. The moment of truth had finally arrived. I quickly cut open the box, and discovered two cases of 20 rolls. I had in my possession 40 rolls of peach Mentos. My years of searching were finally over! I carefully cut away the cellophane from the box and removed one of the rolls. They looked a little different than the rolls available in the US. The paper roll is a lot more glossy and there is peach colored foil on both ends, not like the silver foil on American Mentos. I slowly raised the roll to my mouth, closed my eyes, and popped my first peach Mentos. In-Freekin-Credible! My previous favorite flavor Mentos was grape (also from Japan). Today that changed. Peach has totally blown grape out of the water… no contest! Besides tasting like you’re eating a little piece of heaven, they have a very strong peachy flavor. It’s very sweet, just to the point of being too sweet, but not quite. Mentos knows where that too sweet line is and the peach Mentos toy with your taste buds taking you just barely to that point. I popped another one out of the package and held onto it instead of going straight into my mouth. The color is very light. It could easily be mistaken for white, but has a slight yellow tint to it if you hold it in the light. The texture is the same as any other Mentos, but in your mouth, it almost feels a little different because the of incredible flavor… it fools you, or maybe overwhelms your entire mouth so that it gets confused and starts feeling things that aren’t really there. I ended up popping an entire roll and a half tonight. I’m going to have to lock these away in the archive and only bring them out for special occasions. Naw… maybe I should eat this whole case and buy another one to lock away in the archives. I think I’d be much happier with that second option. So if you can’t tell, there is a new king of the Mentos jungle. Peach Mentos have easily claimed that title. If you can get your hands on some (you’re not getting any of mine!) eat away… and stay fresh!

Update: It looks like the Mentos Store is now selling peach mentos along with black licorice.

I have followed Netscape, and the browser as we know it since NCSA released the very first version of Mosaic in 1993. I watched as Netscape was born from some of the original Mosaic developers. I can honestly say that I have downloaded every version of the Netscape browser since its birth in 1994. I’ve followed Netscape through the browser wars with Microsoft and its eventual victory with Internet Explorer. I watched in 1998 as Netscape was sold to AOL and wondered if that was the best thing. Would AOL finally have the money and power to unseat IE as the browser champ? That didn’t quite end up happening. In January of 1998 Netscape decided to open source their browser code. This was the beginning of the Mozilla project. I kept an eye on Mozilla and would download test builds here and there. Ultimately this project would create the Mozilla browser suite, which Netscape would build their version 6.x (extremely buggy) & 7.x browsers from. In June of 2002 the Mozilla Project released version 1.0 which was a clean standards compliant browser that ran on all platforms. Throughout this entire run, which included the dot-com bubble burst AOL took some hits, and in July of 2003, they shut down their browser division. This gave birth to the Mozilla Foundation, a self-contained non-profit organization that continued to carry the Mozilla torch since there was no longer any funding coming from AOL (after a $2 million seeding donation). The Foundation has continued to develop the Mozilla platform which includes the suite, and Firefox, which I have mentioned here several times.

Well, enough with the Netscape history lesson. Given the above, Netscape is no longer a browser. It is no longer a browser company. Netscape is simply a brand owned by AOL. Yesterday, a new Netscape browser was released by AOL, which is odd since they closed their browser division last July. This new browser is based on the Mozilla Firefox, but as you’ll see if far from it. I was able to download a prototype release of this browser and have to tell you that it looks to me like AOL took Firefox and then threw up on it. The clean Firefox user interface, which in my opinion is where it shines, is utterly filled to the brim with junk. It looks like they took the entire Netscape homepage (which is pretty busy by itself) and stuffed it into control bar of the browser. The first thing you notice outside of the 20 things blinking at you competing for your attention, is the green color and texture which makes text very hard to read. If I were to sit down and try to purposely make the poorest user interface possible, I would be hard pressed to come up with something worse than this. The standard drop-down menus (file, edit, etc.) which are in practically ever program (at least that I use) were moved to the right side of the window. I have NEVER seen a Windows program (this product is only available for Windows) where they were not in the standard top left. This is just poor UI design. I should have turned back when I was installing it, and it asked me for my zip code so that it can display the weather. By default the browser has two news scrollers, weather information, AIM, your standard Netscape links, the kitchen sink, and a partridge and a pear tree all in the top navigation area of the browser in addition to the urlbar and forward/back/reload/home buttons. The interface is an absolute mess.

Taking a look at the large picture, I guess it’s a good thing that there will be more people out there using an alternative to the buggy pop-up ridden, virus-prone Internet Explorer, but get this, you can have pages open using the IE engine inside this browser. So, if you miss the security vulnerabilities and pop-up from IE (which is one of the reasons you’d switch in the first place) now you can have them in an utterly disgusting green package. Why are you using an alternative browser in the first place? If you can’t tell, I won’t be using this browser. I think I’ll stick with Firefox. As usual, AOL’s antics are fun to watch.

As of last Tuesday, I’m the proud owner of a Timbuk2 Commute bag. I anxiously waited for the UPS man to bring me my new bag. I can definitely say that after a few of days of carrying it around, I’m very happy with it.

Timbuk2 is a San Francisco company has been making messenger bags since 1989. They started by making bags for urban bike messengers. All of their bags are built tough. The stitching is solid, it’s made out of quality ballistic vinyl with a water-proof liner, a thick rubberized bottom, and it has a thick comfortable strap.
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