Ben Benner’s Blog

It has been said “It is better to be a pirate than join the navy.”

Notably, it was said during the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”, which Gina, John and I watched yesterday in the living room. Normally, this wouldn’t be remotely blog worthy.

This however was not a normal viewing. We watched it on YouTube.com, on the living room TV, via the S-Video cable on my laptop. The reason we had to watch it on YouTube, is because I apparently left the DVD disc in my old HP laptop, which is back at the office. (We had watched it a few weeks ago, late on a Friday afternoon at the office.)

But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I was able to pipe the YouTube version out to the TV. The sound aspect was a slightly different story, I had to steal the sound system from my office computer. There were a few downsides to this setup.

The first downside, was that the 95 minute film was broken into about 10 parts, each being just a little bit less than 10 minutes each. This meant that after each part ended, soemone would have to click on the next segment, which was usually me.

The second downside, is that for some reason part #7 was missing, not sure why it was missing, the “video had been removed”. All the others were perfectly good.

The last downside was more of a minor, minor annoyance. Not sure that John or Gina noticed (or cared), but the dubbing looked to be a bit off. I am not sure if this was a combination of the s-video output or the videoes themselves. But the audio appeared to be about a half second ahead of the video.

The, next marvel of technology was that we all wanted to watch Hackers, a cheesy, yet classic techie movie. I love it because of the cameo appearances of Jolt Cola. Now, I still swear that we own the DVD of Hackers, but it could have been a VHS tape. Either way, we searched our DVD collection and could not for the life of us find it.

So we turned to the U-Verse’s video on-demand service. Low and behold, there it was for a mere $2.00, we could rent it. The movie started up almost instantly (not suffering from any of your usual “buffering lag” that you get when watching movies over the Internet.

I mean, the idea of a video on-demand isn’t anything new, cable companies have had the technology for quite some time. But overall the number of movies available have usually been limited and therefore only your current titles. The U-Verse video library has a wide variety of movies available, Hackers was made in 1995.

While, I am talking about this type of tech, I have to mention the recent addition of a marvelous feature to the XBOX-Live experience, Netflix Video On-Demand. Meaning that I can watch streaming Netflix videos through my XBOX-360. I have used the service to watch some silly TV shows (”Battlestar Galactica 1980″) and some funny movies (”War Inc”, and “Cash Back”). The quality was quite good, DVD level and I experienced no lag.

Earlier today we went and saw a fabulously funny film, “Four Christmases”. We went to see it with Jeremy and Nichole. I had been a little apprehensive about it recently, as I was afraid that having seen numerous trailers for the movie that I had already seen all of the funny parts. Nope, not in the least. If you haven’t seen the movie and think that from any trailers you have seen that you might be interested in seeing it, please definitely go and see it

Tonight we watch “Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day” via the U-Verse video on-demand. It was one that Gina and I had wanted to see in the theatres but had missed out catching down at the Great Hills Regal (which tends to show more of the art-house style flicks).

We closed out the evening with “Sweet Home Alabama”, which we have on DVD. It is one of Gina’s favorites and I have to admit I like it too.

Well, it is definitely time for bed.

Laterz

I took the photos a while ago, but haven’t really had a chance to put together a post.

(One of my gifts has been taking up a lot of my ‘free’ time.)

I’ll let you guys figure out which one.

Last year my mother-in-law, Brenda got me a cookie basket (mmmm… cookies). This year, to be a bit more healthy I got a fruit basket (with a balloon). The basket was mostly melon, which I will have to admit I am not a huge fan of. I have on occasion eaten a few pieces of musk melon, but not a fan. So I let Gina eat the melon, she LOVES it. I really enjoyed the grapes, strawberries, apples (dipped in cholocate) and the pineapple stars.

Thanks MOM(-in-law)!!!

Our good friend John Hale got me a 4th Gen Nano, in light of the fact that Steve Jobs stole my last one.

Thank You John!!!

This brings us to what the wife got me for my birthday.

The first thing I will mention is that she got me a Neti pot. Which I actually used, after weeks of it sitting in my bathroom, in the box. I NEEDED it when I was sick to help remove the pressure from the sinuses that were giving me a serious headache.

The next thing she got me was pretty much the only thing left on my list.

The Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25 gun. It is a fully automatic, belt fed NERF machine gun.

Because of the fact that while shooting the dogs might be fun (namely the evil little black and white one), the fun would be short lived as the darts would probably mean costly trips to the emergency vet, the gun is staying at the office.

The gun is a bit louder than I originally was expecting. I didn’t think it would be silent, but not quite as loud as it is. However, the speed at which it can burn through the full 25 dart belt is quite impressive. But the noise makes it like a after 5pm toy. (unlike the revolvers which are more of a ‘not on the phone right now’ kind of toy)

I also bought myself a couple of gifts, Civilization Revolution (for the Xbox360 and the Nintendo DS-Lite).

The folks at Firaxis did a great job of optomizing the play control of the game for both the Xbox360 and DS-Lite. As a long time Civ player, I really enjoy the fast paced action of the game. They made certain parts of the game simpler, in a good way. Except one.

They only give you one Nuke. For whatever reason, as Jeremy can (and does) comment on, I seem to like games with Nukes. In part, because I actually use them. In Rise of Nations, I can be found to use them to help level the playing field. In Civ3 and Civ4, there were a few times I found myself at a relative stalemate (cold war if you will) and had enough cities with high production, to be able to build enough of a nuke stockpile to be able to hit every city of my computer opponent, in a single turn.

The one thing I will say about the nuke in CivRevolution, is that rather than simply eliminate the enemy units (and reduce the population of a city) as it does in the other Civ games, the Nuke in CivRevolution completely removes the city in question off the map, nothing but a smoking crater.

Well, I need to pack it in and get to bed.

Laterz