I love movies and I have a pretty good collection of DVDs. With the end of HD DVD you'd think we'd see an increase in Blu-Ray adoption. Sales of stand alone players though were so low that they won't publish the numbers. I'm not too surprised at this because the players are still really expensive and the movies are a ripoff. It doesn't help that the economy sucks. Having two HD TVs at home, I'm left with one player and that's the PS3 in the living room. I'm not going to pay $300+ to get a player to watch $30 movies when a $12.99 up converted picture is still pretty damn good on the set. 

I thought I'd go out and snatch up some Blu-Ray movies to watch especially those heavy on special effects. I usually pick up DVDs on release day of movies I want. I mean I picked up a pretty nice TV a few months ago so I can get the best picture quality possible. But having the movies in hand, I was left with a conundrum. If I pick this up instead of the DVD version I can only watch it in one place in my house. If I want to curl up in bed and watch it in my bedroom, I'm SOL. DVD on the other hand is readily accessible in all the rooms of my house via a dedicated player or streamed through Media Center. I can't do that with a Blu-Ray movie and that's where I stopped. Even with regular DVDs, the picture quality is still pretty impressive so it's hard to justify spending almost double the price on a movie where I am limited in my current household on where I want to watch it.

I guess my other option would be to pick up a Blu-Ray drive, stick it in my server Media Center, and stream it through there but the 360 has trouble sometimes even streaming regular standard definition TV on an Ethernet connection so I can't see it doing too well with a HD stream.  

So, if an avid movie collector and owner of several HD televisions is hesitant to jump into purchasing Blu-Ray products, I can see why the numbers are low. I'm enjoying watching HD broadcasts of local and cable programs so at least the TVs are being used to some of its potential. The companies though need to drop the prices on both the players and movies if they want to see mass adoption and I would hope they do it sooner rather than later. 

I've been taking the past month to work my way through MLB 08 The Show in preperation for a review on the PS3 and I have to say I've developed quite a player. The organization is in need of a third baseman so I decided to make that my position of choice. Currently I'm leading the AA in the triple crown with a .412 batting average, 20 homers, and 79 RBIs with a 63 game hitting streak. I'm also first in doubles and have a .980+ fielding average.

I keep constantly getting emails saying they want me to spend more time in AA ball and that they'll eventually move me up to AAA. For months I've been tearing it up in the league and hitting almost every goal they set for me. I've improved ever facit of my game except for bunting and have a good number of game winning hits as well as game tying hits.

Yesterday I finished another 2-5 game with an RBI and I get a message as soon as I go back to the main screen of the Road to the Show... I've been traded to Boston for a starting pitcher....

WHAT??!?!?! You mean I bust my butt for 2/3 of the season in trying to be the Cleveland Indians 3B of the future and they send me to freaking Beantown for a starting pitcher????  I hope the pitcher's the next Cy Young, Satchel Paige, Roger Clemens, or Greg Maddux because the Cleveland organization just gave up a sure thing prospect in an area where the game says they are weak. It even hurts to be a Cleveland fan in a game.

When playing Rock Band, I had the wired headset out ready in case someone wanted to talk with me online. My wireless one has been acting up lately so I keep the wired one around. My kid likes to watch me play but I turned around one time and saw this: 

 

The boy's going to be alright. 

OK, this is pretty cool. Here's a guy playing the Mario theme using an RC car and wine bottles.

 

Doing web program, I spend a lot of time writing javascript as well as other things. Well here's a cool little javascript proof of concept. It's Super Mario and it actually plays well. While it's far from the full blown game, it shows what a little programming talent, time and motivation can do with a language designed for web browser interaction.

A quick news item popped up saying that 20 - 30% of notebooks built with solid state drives like the ones in the new Dells and Mac Air are being returned because of hardware failure and performance issues. That's pretty high considering about 1% get returned for hard drive failures. SSD for notebooks and computers are still pretty new so I'm expecting a lot of hardware issues initially. So I'm not surprised by the news and I was guessing that it would be a few years before the technology matures enough where it becomes reliable and doesn't suffer performance issues as well as be more cost effective. I am a little surprised it was that high though. Until then, I'll keep using old skool platter HDDs in my systems.

I wish this was in stock because I'd pick one up in a heartbeat. I mean how cool is this? They just need an Asteroids, Pac-Man, Pong, and Donkey Kong to round out the classics.

So I run into the article on PS3Fanboy giving 10 reasons why the PS3 is relevant again. Interesting reasons and some I agree with. Let's just remove the fact that it's on a site dedicated to the PS3 for a minute. It seems this year there are more things coming out for the PS3 I can think of off the top of my head that I am looking forward to than other consoles.

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