I cancelled my cable TV subscription a month or two in advance of the launch of Netflix. At the time the decision was a combination of needing to trim all fat from my budget, and an urge to finally “cut the cord” and redirect my TV time to other things. I wouldn’t have even considered myself a big TV watcher, but no one ever does. We all say that we only follow a few shows, but honestly I think we’ve all found ourselves leaving the TV on at the end of one of those ‘few shows’, aimlessly flicking between channels before we settle on that re-run of CSI that we’ve already seen twice. You know you’ve been there.

So really, I didn’t want Netflix to replace my TV and movie watching. I was trying to evolve away from my screen dependancies (as little as I perceived them). Again, overall I think it’s been a success. Every once in a while I’ll find a show I really like and I’ll watch an episode every night until I’ve exhausted all the available seasons, but half an hour every night of commercial-free tube time compared to two hours or more of mindless surfing is definitely an improvement.

My parents have also recently made the decision to cut the cord and have signed up for Netflix as an alternative with much the same hopes that I did a year ago. That said, the transition is harder for them. You see, the Netflix system isn’t pefect, especially for generations other than my own. The first barrier to entry is accessibility.

Just to get Netflix to work you need one of the following:

• A computer or laptop, running Windows and the required (free) software, connected to the internet at acceptable speeds, and with enough horsepower to play the video stream.
• A modern game console (Wii, XBox360, or PS3), connected to the internet, with the required addons/apps/plugins. Note that if you want to watch Netflix through the XBox360 you also have to have an XBox live account – at an extra monthly cost which in my opinion is a totally unneccessary money grab.
• A boxee box or similar “media server” product, connected to the internet.

The first thing all of these options have is that they COST MONEY – like hundreds of dollars. The other key factor is the complexity of setting up the device and service. This is money and effort that most people my age have already expended – they already own a computer or a game console and have a decent high-speed internet connection. People like me find the adoption of Netflix very easy. Many people outside of my limited demographic, however, do not have the equipment or the know-how to set up a system that works for them.

Let’s look back at my parents as an example. I feel they reflect the average baby-boomer couple pretty accurately. Mom and dad have a pretty decent laptop, purchased in the last few years. They also have high-speed internet. Thus they have the equipment needed to watch TV and movies on Netflix. But they’re still not entirely satisfied. Why? Well duh, what couple wants to snuggle up to a laptop monitor to watch a show?!?! So the situation is this: for my parents, Netflix is now more uncomfortable to use than conventional TV or DVDs, exactly opposite the experience Netflix is trying to achieve.

I’m currently looking for ways to help my parents set up a system or method for watching Netflix on the TV that is as affordable and easy-to-use as possible. Not every Netflix user faced with a similar dissatifaction will have the resources to improve their experience.

Hell even I have my gripes with Netflix. At some point this summer our family PC (running Windows) and our TV and game consoles were all packed up to allow for renovations. For a month or two my daughter and I were left with just our netbooks and internet access for entertainment (spare me the comments about first-world problems). The problem is that our netbooks run Linux instead of Windows, and Netflix doesn’t work with a non-Windows operating sytem. I’m sure it’s a problem only .0001% of Netflix users will ever face, but that doesn’t make it any less of a hindrance to wider adoption.

And Netflix wants wider adoption. If you take a look at this article from the Globe and Mail you can see that despite having almost a million subscribers in Canada, Netflix has still lost about $10-million in the year it’s been offering service in Canada.

I think overall if Netflix wants to continue to grow their subscriber base in Canada it’s going to have to offer a service that isn’t just cheaper than a cable TV subscription, but also just as easy to use. And that’s just looking at the situation from a wide perspective. There are a lot of little improvements and tweaks that the geek in me can imagine for the Netflix service that would start making it a service that offered much more than cable TV could ever dream of.

In part two of this topic I’m going to talk about a few things I’m doing to make my personal Netflix experience better, and talk about some of the ideas that could really make Netflix the ultra-rich media provider it needs to be to get in the black here in Canada.

So how does a busy single lady meet new people?
Bars? Definitely not.
The Library? Not in the age of e-readers and amazon-dot-com.
I did what any internet-addicted geek would do and joined a few dating sites.

I get a lot of mixed reactions from people about online dating, and I can understand why. When you can cast your net over an ocean as wide as the internet you can pull in a lot of fish; but we all know that quantity is not the same as quality.

Let me give you an example. This wonderful bit of prose sure did make a first impression, but probably not the kind that the author intended:

wow very nice profile ….hello I was just reading Ur profile and Ur in to a lot of stuff very nice and i like the lady thing very clever never thought about it like that would u care to chat some time i dont think i have every read a profile like urs thumbs up to u very well said

Ahem. Where to start? The message alone is cringe-worthy, but when you consider that the guy (supposedly) took the time to actually read my profile and yet still thought this was an appropriate ice breaker? Ugh.

At least he didn’t include a picture of himself with his dick in his hand. Yes that has happened, and more than once.

Footnote: I’m still not sure about blogging about my dating experiences, but this story begged to be told. If you liked it or hated it please let me know in a comment! Positive feedback will make it more likely that you will see additional tales of “Amy’s Adventures in Romance” on here.

Independent Romantic Comedies

Huh. I wouldn’t have believed it myself, but now I just can’t stop watching them. Here’s the low-down on what’s been making me laugh, cry, and bawww for the past few weeks:

TiMER

Taking the concept of a ‘biological clock’ to a whole new level, science has created an implant that can tell you when you will meet your soul mate (within 24-hours at least). The heroine, unfortunately, has had her timer stuck at all zeroes since it activated and is starting to loose hope that there is anyone out there for her. I totally feel her pain. This movie is just adorable in all respects: great cast of characters, solid acting, and humorous writing make this a contender for a spot on my “Favorite Movies” list.

(500) Days of Summer

Ugh, this sucked. Alright well it didn’t suck so much as it sucked me in and broke my heart. We jump forward and back in time a bit with this one as we see sweet and romantic Tom try to figure out what went wrong in his relationship with Summer. I probably would have liked it more if it didn’t show me parts of myself I didn’t want to – the same parts that eventually leave Tom all alone with his heart shredded into a million pieces. This was not a “feel good” romantic movie for me. Your mileage may vary.

Wristcutters: A Love Story

So dark, so surreal. In this movie there is a special afterlife set aside just for victims of suicide. It’s not a fire-and-brimstone hell, but it is a little nutty. Zia finds himself in this eternal land of dullness after slitting his wrists. He teams up with a Russian rock star and together they embark on an epic road trip in search of…well, you’ll just have to watch it to find out. I have to admire the talent it takes to make such a lighthearted movie from such a dark topic. The end result was a little predicable and it wasn’t overly romantic, but it was funny and entertaining.

Good Dick

Another unforgettable title, another strange but endearing love story. A clerk at an adult video store falls love-at-first-sight-style for a strange sullen shut-in girl with a penchant for soft-core porn. He does a million things that would never work in real life – basically breaking into her apartment building and forcing himself into her life. It makes me want to have the courage to put myself out there and take chances. It’s a decidedly unromantic romance; not at all what you expect, but somehow it works perfectly. This one is truly unique.

Happy Accidents

There are so many great scenes in this movie. I’ve already watched it twice. I love the two main actors in this – such chemistry! I really identify with the heroine in this one. She loves easily and loves big and makes herself a little crazy in the process. The unfortunate drawback is that she’s kind of a doormat and an enabler for some pretty dysfunctional men. Enter Sam Deed; sweet, funny, playful, smart. At first he seems perfect, then he confesses to be a time traveler. Oh poor Ruby! So cute. See it, see it, see it!

1. Do people contact you on your cell or house phone more? At the moment my house phone, but that’s because I just bought a cell phone YESTERDAY. Yes, welcome to the 21st century Amy!

2. Do you call or e-mail your friends/family more? I definitely use email more.

3. Does your cat/dog/bird/baby/stuffed animal have a livejournal/e-mail/myspace account? No, that’s retarded.

4. What do you think will replace the internet? I don’t think the internet will be replaced as much as it will continue to evolve. Perhaps at some point we’ll have implanted devices that connect us to the global network. Ping my wuffie anyone?

5. How do you feel about VHS’s not being made anymore? No more rewinding. No more eaten tapes. No accidentally recording over something I really liked. Yeah, I’m not about to shed a tear for VHS.

Having now established my fanaticism I will go on to actually talk about the movie. Overall it was good. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t spectacular. There were lots of little disappointments, but there were some things I was really pleased with.

I thought the CG was amazing, but it was done by Industrial Light and Magic so I guess that should be a given. The animation of the bending was spectacular, absolutely everything I could have imagined possible. Perhaps if I had just put in some earplugs and watched the movie in silence it would have been a better experience. The creatures truly came alive in this film as well. Jasmin didn’t like their interpretation of Appa the air bison but I thought he was perfect. That pretty much wraps up everything that was great about this film.

Now I know a fanatic tends to be a bit more picky about film adaptions than the average movie-goer, but I don’t think the flaws in this movie are just things the fans are going to notice. The first and biggest downfall was the lack of character development. The TV series is almost a perfect balance of character, story, and action. The Airbender movie puts magic into the action sequences but forcefully shoves the story line into you with a pointy stick and has locked character development up in a closet somewhere. Aang should be a youthful and exuberant kid, but they’ve turned him into a quiet and sullen little emo boy. Saka and Katara should exude compassion and morality from their pores but instead you kind of wonder why they are even following the emo boy around. I want to tell you everything that is wrong with uncle Iro but it’s too painful. Let’s just say that my favorite character no longer exists – he is dead to me.

The story is driven so forcefully fast I’m sure that anyone not familiar with the series would leave the movie theater still wondering what bending actually is. Update: Uh, yeah, I guess I’m right about that. I get it, there was a lot to explain and a lot of story to move through, but there were also twenty minute chunks of movie that could easily have been left on the cutting room floor to make way for more character development. There were lines in this movie that sounded like a ten year old wrote them. To make things worse, the lines were delivered with the kind of emotion reserved for phone-book recitals or “grocery on line one, grocery on line one” calls from the checkout. It was truly cringe-inducing.

The 3D fad does nothing to make this movie better, but that can be said for just about any movie these days. I will be so glad when this trend dies.

Lastly I will mention what will surely be the most annoying feature of this film for fellow fans: pronunciation. For whatever reason (probably clinical dementia) the filmmakers decided to change the pronunciation of many of the lead character’s names:

• Iro: pronounced “eye-roh” in the series is now “ee-roh”.
• Sokka: pronounced “sa-ka” in the series is now “soak-ah”
• Aang: in the series the name rhymes with “twang”, in the movie it’s more like “ankh” without the “k”.

I’ll tell you what; if you want to make a movie based on a (popular)TV series, how about you DON’T MESS WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER?!!!!??

So yeah, I was kinda let down by this movie. Maybe the saddest thing was that I didn’t get my hopes up in the first place, knowing what movies are like these days. Always the optimist I am still going to look forward to the next movie. I mean, they can’t possibly screw Toph up that badly, can they?

Also, I make a wild guess at what my gift could be.

I got matched up to a lucky redditor who I’ll probably talk about in a later video, and some mysterious redditor got my name and mailing address. Last Friday a message from a user called “yourredditsanta” told me that my gift was in the mail, coming from upstate New York.

So far this whole thing has been a blast and I’m mega-excited about my gift, so I’m going to document the whole ordeal on video and share the fun!

Every time I’m out with my friend Peter and I mention Twitter he breaks out in a fit of giggles. Apparently when he was younger he used “twittering” as a euphemism for…well you can guess. It’s a good thing that term didn’t catch on, or this neat social networking tool would be unfortunately named.

Twitter at its core is a messaging tool. It lets you “tweet” a message of no more than 140 characters. You can tweet about what you’re doing, what you’re thinking. You can include a web link in your tweet as well, but that’s just the beginning.

Who reads your tweets? Well anyone who chooses to “follow” you can be alerted with your tweets. As well, you can follow other people and see what they are twittering about. You can reply to a tweet. Replies can been seen by anyone on Twitter. If you want to message someone privately there is a “direct message” option.

Alright, so you and all of these random people on Twitter are tweeting out short little tweets. Still don’t get what’s so cool yet? It’s all about how you use it, really. Here are some cool things I use Twitter for:

Celebrity Stalking
Twitter is catching on with celebrities minor and otherwise, as well as politicians and the media. Here are some interesting personalities to follow:

• Wil Wheaton; writer, actor, father, and blogger.
• Adam Savage from Mythbusters.
• Rick Sanchez is a CNN reporter that will hold polls and ask questions via Twitter and use some of the replies during his show. I don’t like CNN, but I like the adaption of new technology.

Click here for a much longer list of celebrity twits.

Group Think
Every Monday evening a bunch of journalists, bloggers, and PR people join in a group discussion called Journchat via Twitter. Twitter doesn’t have a built-in chatroom feature, so Journchat uses a special “tag” in each tweet to track the conversation. You just need to add a “#” infront of a word in your tweet to turn it into a tag, and there are programs and web-based tools that help you track tweets with that tag. Try searching for “#haiku” for a neat example of how tags work.

Updating Facebook
I like to post my thoughts and goings-on to Twitter, but I don’t want to neglect all my friends that aren’t using it. Thankfully there is a Facebook app that links into the Twitter system and updates my Facebook status with my most recent tweet.

Announcing Blog Updates
One of the great things about Twitter is that if there’s something you want it to do, someone has probably already written an application to do it. One such application I like is twitterfeed. It checks on my blog every few hours and if there’s a new post it will create a create a tweet to announce it. The double-whammy here is that since I linked my Facebook and my Twitter account, my new blog posts also get posted to Facebook.

Right. So like I said: Twitter is fun, all the cool kids are doing it, and so should you. Just try it. Sign up, post a tweet every day and find some interesting people to follow. You might just like it.

If you get my updates by email or in a feed reader you shouldn’t notice a thing, though I’d love it if you would take a look at the new site layout and leave a comment if you like it or hate it.

For my fellow bloggers I’m now going to tell you how I made this magical transformation work, with very little bloodshed or tears.

My site was running three separate installations of WordPress, each at a different version. Each blog was installed in a subdirectory of delicat.ca:
/journal/
/cookbook/
/workouts/
Though I liked keeping the content separate, it was getting bothersome to manage three intallations of WordPress with all the themes and plugins and comments. I wanted to manage everything from one interface, but still be able to keep data separate for site visitors and feed subscribers. I thought I would have to switch to a large CMS like Joomla or Drupal, but then a site I visit regularly (allfreelancewriting.com) updated in exactly the same way I was hoping to do, and kept it all in WordPress! With a bit of advice from that site owner, I started merging my three sites. Here were the steps I took:

Step One: Exporting posts and comments from the three existing blogs. I simply logged into the administration panel of each WordPress installation and used the “export” tool to export all the posts and comments.

Step Two: Installing WordPress 2.7 on the root of delicat.ca and importing from the three blogs. Again, WordPress has a handy “Import” tool that did most of the work for me, it even imported all the images from the posts! I then installed the theme and my favorite plugins. Some of the magic of the site is done by the theme. I’m lucky to have found such a great theme for free!

Step Three: Category editing. Where before I had subdirectories, now I needed a category structure to separate the areas of my site. During the import process all of the categories from the three sites were created. All I had to do was organize them under the main “Journal”, “Recipes”, or “Workouts” categories.

Step Four: Redirecting from the old subdirectories to the root with .htaccess. Anyone following an old bookmark or search result that pointed to the old blogs would eventually get a 404 error, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to make sure that any visitor hitting the subdirectory or anything beneath it would be redirected to the new blog. To do that, I added these lines to the .htaccess file at the root of my domain:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/journal/.*$ http://www.delicat.ca/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/cookbook/.*$ http://www.delicat.ca/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/workouts/.*$ http://www.delicat.ca/

Step Five: Updating Feedburner feeds with category feeds. My biggest concern about combining my three blogs was that I’d like my RSS feeds to be kept separate. I figure some people like reading my blog, while others just like my recipes, and neither of those readers are interested in my workouts. Thankfully I had already employed Feedburner to serve up my RSS feeds some time ago. If you aren’t using Feedburner you’ll either have to do some magic redirecting or just tell your subscribers that they’ll have to change their feed settings when you move to a new site. To access a feed that is filtered based on category, all you have to do is add “/feed/” to the end of the category page. So to get a feed that only includes posts to my “Recipes” main category, the address is “http://www.delicat.ca/index.php/category/recipes/feed/”. I simply updated each of my feedburner feeds with the new addresses, and it worked like a charm!.

I still can’t believe how easy the move was. The longest process involved was tweaking the theme and graphics to give them my own kind of flair. If you’re reading this and considering a move of your own, feel free to comment with any questions you might have. I’m a vast, untapped resource of geeky WordPress knowledge now.