Things I Like

Most of my posts lately, along with most of my thought, has been on negative things. While there's certainly a lot of crap going on in the world, I thought it might be a healthy change of pace for me to focus on some things that I like. So here, in no particular order, is a list of some things that I've come to like lately:

Netflix's "Watch Instantly" feature-- For $0 extra a month, there are something like 9,000 titles available to stream instantly for Netflix subscribers with a PC. I never got an XP machine to run it, but my brother's Vista laptop had no problems. Literally the day after we said we wished they'd make a set-top box so that we wouldn't have to drag the laptop into the TV room every time we wanted to watch something, Netflix introduced this. The quality is good enough to watch on a 32" widescreen TV even if it is at a relatively low resolution. (Resolution is partially dependent on your connection speed.) I haven't picked up the Roku box yet, but I probably will soon.

The Teaching Company-- A friend loaned me the audio tape course "From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History" while I was recovering from surgery about 2 1/2 years ago. The course is excellent. I thought it might be about time to return the tapes and I found that I'd lost cassette #8 (of 18.) The tapes are guaranteed against warping and breakage, but not loss. I called The Teaching Company anyway to see if I could buy a replacement. I explained that I was not the original purchaser and that there was nothing wrong with the cassette, I'd just lost it. Even though the cassette version of the course is out of print, as a courtesy they sent me a replacement and didn't even charge me shipping & handling. I plan to buy from them in the near future due in large part to their excellent customer service. They now have courses in the MP3 and MPEG-4 digital formats in addition to CDs, DVDs, and transcripts.

The Sony WM-FX303 Walkman-- This is a portable audio player that I picked this up over the weekend at a Salvation Army store for $2.99 It doesn't require any software updates or DRM workarounds because it doesn't use software. It's a full-featured cassette walkman with FM/AM tuner, Mega Bass option, auto reverse, and 2-sided loop play mode. You can "flip" the cassette by just flipping a switch to change the position of the playhead. It has switches for AVLS and DX LOCAL (neither of which do I know what they do) and, most impressively, a feature that has been missing from most portable cassette players for years. A REWIND BUTTON! I bought this to finish listening to the Chinese history course on. Similar to the way the MPEG-4 format is superior to the MP3 format, the audio program is automatically bookmarked so as to start on the track exactly where I stop it when I power down the player.

Board Games-- From Tycho's June 2, 2008 posting on Penny-Arcade.com:

This is one of the things I love most, perhaps, about the sacred table. There is never any point at which your old books, dice, and mechanical pencils may be "revoked" by Wizards of the Coast, or any other kind of wizard. The same can't be said for gaming of the electronic sort, particularly on consoles, where the back-end services that sustain a game are not guaranteed - particularly as gaming has become a "service." Impermanence - for example, constraining access to a game you have purchased, with a recurring subscription - is core to certain segments of the business.

Of course Tycho is referring to earlier versions of D&D, but I think it applies equally well to things like checkers and xiangqi. I've ordered a book to try to learn mah-jongg, but I think I'll have a hard time convincing anyone else to learn to play. I think it's hysterical that in the U.S. mah-jongg is considered to be an old woman's game, but in China it is a major underworld source of gambling revenue.

Posted by Graven on Wed Jun 4, 2008 @ 1:25 pm EDT | 0 Comments