The greatest change to hit our living room since HDTV arrived came last month in the form of the November Xbox 360 system update — known as the New Xbox Experience — which included the much-anticipated Netflix Watch Instantly feature. The whole idea of this on-demand streaming service is that you don’t have to wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail — you just pick the movies on the web site, then fire up your Watch Instantly device. Throughout 2008, Netflix has been rolling out Watch Instantly to various platforms — first to PCs, then through a $99 dedicated box you attach to your TV, and then to the Xbox. The past two weeks have seen the service added to two more devices — Samsung Blu-Ray players and the TiVo HD. I have both the TiVo HD and an Xbox 360, and have tried out Watch Instantly on both.
I haven’t done extensive testing, so I’ll make this quick: it’s better on the Xbox. Movies seem to be a notch lower on the quality scale when viewed through the TiVo, as if my internet connection is slower than it really is. Even my wife noticed the lesser quality immediately, and she’s not nearly as much of a HD nut as I am. In addition to being so obviously pixelated, the TiVo variant of the Netflix software stretches 4:3 aspect movies for some reason; I checked Eraser the other night, and the TiVo stretched it while the Xbox’s Netflix program played it in its proper ratio (with black bars on the sides — I hate stretchovision, I’d rather have the bars than fat faces).
Finally, I found the Netflix interface on the Xbox more pleasant to use — the new sliding panel interface of the NXE plays well with browsing movies, while the TiVo’s Netflix interface — like the rest of the TiVo interface — seems dated and clunky. I love my TiVo, but they really need to get moving on that rumored interface overhaul.
I was digging through some old files on one of my hard drives the other night and came across what I believe is my very first web site design, from my early college days in 2002. I had cobbled together a few web sites before this in high school, but the mockup you see here is the first time I actually planned the whole design in advance with a graphics program (Macromedia FireWorks, in this case). Please keep in mind, this was done by someone with zero art or graphics training, so excuse the atrocious green! MRNonline.net was sort of a blog (way before there was all this great blogging software available), sort of a community site — I ran it for my friends off of a server in my dorm room for about a year, providing news and discussion forums. I wrote the whole thing from scratch using ColdFusion (the first dynamic web language I taught myself…that was the first and last time I used CF), and the whole experience taught me a lot. I’ve designed dozens of sites in the six years since, but this was what really kicked me off on loving web design. Sadly, it’s the oldest surviving piece of my work that I can find — I’ve been unable to locate a copy of the very first web site I built, which I believe was in 1998 or 1999, but I did that with FrontPage so seeing that code might prompt tears of agony rather than nostalgia.
It’s kind of fun to look back at where you came from, especially if what you find was done at a time when you had no idea that such work might be your career one day. This type of fun digging and nostalgia also reminds me of how important it is to back stuff up — due to a hard drive crash a number of years ago, I lost everything I ever wrote and created for high school. I don’t need that stuff, obviously, but it would be fun to have.
What kind of work do you have really old examples of?
This is the final part of a three-part series, Navigating the Financiapocoalypse. It’s intended as a get-started guide for people just starting down the path of actively managing their money.
Saving money in and of itself is representative of a longer view of life than someone who blows their whole paycheck every month. But saving for your retirement and other really, really long term goals is different from saving for your next car or vacation. Before we go any further in: I am not a certified financial planner, and I haven’t been doing this all that long — I can only tell you what I have found, and crunch some numbers as examples.
The sooner you start saving for your retirement, the better. Well, that’s obvious, you might say, but just how much better are we talking about? Let’s look at a couple scenarios. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m going to take a little intermission before Part 3 of the Navigating the Financiapocalypse series, since I need a little more time to get my thoughts down on investment advice. Instead of saving money, today we’re going to talk about what you should buy if you want to spend some money: gadgets! That’s right, get out there and stimulate our crappy economy any way you can. And yes, you’ll stimulate my personal economy if you buy through the links I’ve provided — which just happen to be great deals!
I’ve thought about doing this for awhile because if there’s one type of question I get more than any other, it’s “What ____ (TV/MP3 player/camera/monitor/laptop/etc) should I buy?” I keep up on most of this stuff, so allow me to point out my favorites for this season. My criteria is really just one thing: what gets you the most for your money?
I’m going to hit the big categories first and probably come back later to make more obscure picks. Do you want a recommendation? Hit up the comments!
