Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

y'all will have to forgive me for awhile, but I'm just getting used to having a moderately high-speed internet connection
for my personal entertainment; it's like a whole different internet ...

so after the DishTV had a falling-out with Fox and dropped the FX channel & FoxSportsSouthWest,
but left me with the local Fox affiliate that I never watch anyway, and motherfucking FoxNEWS, I've
been a little ticked .... FX was one of the few "entertainment" channels I ever watched, but that's
not a very big deal, because the new season of "Sons of Anarchy" proved in the first half-hour of the
first episode to be a retread of the same shit, and I'm sure than when "Justified" makes it back on, it'll
do the same .... it's like I said elsewhere today about character development ... if your characters don't
change over time due to the experiences they encounter, it's not art, it's just a serial ...

{BSG did a good job with that, one of the reasons I'll be forgiving of the mess they made of the last season -
the characters that landed on whatever planet that was were definitely not the same ones that were on Galactica
when the toasters attacked ... hell, Boomer thought she was a hot Asian chick, and Starbuck was alive ...}

but FoxSportsSW is the home of Ranger baseball ... not that I really give a fuck, but I have to keep up appearances,
and to go across the valley to Jess Buck's place to watch the last three regular season games, which put them in
the playoffs ... all that and the division series and the world series will be on TBS & regular Fox .... so I've gotten
to join in the general bitching about the DishTV & the Rangers with some of my old cranky curmudgeony buddies ...

occasionally, IFC shows great movies, but they repeat so much, and the really good ones are few and far between;
TCM shows all the movies I saw growing up, and AMC all the ones from my young adulthood and so forth, but nostalgia's
overrated .... since they moved all the real content to History International and left me with Ice Trucking Ghost Hunters
Pawn Their Nostradamus Antiques for the Sex Secrets of the Ancient World, I don't even have that channel on my
favorites menu anymore ....

occasionally there's good stuff deep in the 9000s, but not often ...

so I'm left with NASA, when there's a launch and a mission, and there's fixin' to be none of them, FreespeechTV, and
John Stewart & South Park .... so I've been busy this week, and missed Stewart ... so I just sat here and browsed
around the web on one monitor, while watching all of this week's Daily Shows on the website on the other monitor ....
and all of Amy Goodman's War&Peace reports are on FreespeechTV.org .... and all the South Parks are at comedycentral.com ...
and I just figgered out Hulu .... and USstream has the full Rocky Horror Picture Show .... and there's more tube-porn
that I could ever watch .... and I've got to check this out, but my Netflix account says I get unlimited movies on-demand,
but I think there may be a "device" involved ...

so ... why do I need the DishTV?

I stream content to my tv through netflix via my ipad, ABC and Hulu do a pretty good job of free recent content. NPR, BBC, Al Jazerra, and other news sources can be found online in various forms for free, big sports events I prefer to watch in the company of of others. I have this great app for the Ipad called Flipboard that takes facebook, twitter, and others sites and formats the feeds into a magazine format that turns those websites into a reading experience.

There are solutions out there, just find the one that works for you.

Rob

just read the stuff on the Netflix site - I like that unlimited movie deal - and this big-ass monitor has been
just fine for watching DVDs on ... I'm not a lay-on-the-couch and watch TV kinda guy, anyway ... I got the
huge leather chair and the massive desk with wings ... if I'm "relaxing" in the house, I'm in this chair, on the
computer, watching the TV out of the corner of my eye, listening to music, reading, or just sitting here in the
dark, getting drunk, contemplating the Fate of Humanity ...

I gots some questions about the internet radio, too, and all these goddamn audio player applications I've got;
that's another day ...

right now, I'm mainly using RealPlayer, altho I've got another ten or so loaded up, and try them all out from
time to time ... RealPlayer seems like the best one to use a default for everything, but I've got the sneaking
suspicion there's something wrong with the company ... like they're just ... evil ... the hand-tool of the Anti-Christ ...
like google, only they don't care what people think ... like the Nazis ...

I watch Netflix on the kid's Wii. They have a nice selection if high resolution isn't extremely important to you. If it is, you can order it on DVD.

changed the netflix to unlimited watch instantly - after a little angry discussion between the netflix site & firefox, the
starz streaming channel & the window media player, the InternetExplorer9beta (and it's fucked-up Silverlight) and the
temporary DRM, I've got it all working ... first thing I watched was the very first episode of Rat Patrol ... now I'm
watching Zombieland on one monitor and posting this one the other ...(that was one of the movies I had loaded
up in the testing, so why not ?)

Imma like this ... fits my lifestyle ... & they got every Gene Autry movie ever made ...






[edit]
I knew that kid was going to shoot Bill Murray ...


and as a (former) lineman and power distribution supervisor, I always have to ask:
yeah, who's keeping the fucking electricity flowing? w/o constant manning, at a hundred
different levels, the grid would shut down in a matter of minutes ... or less... it's one of
those "suspension of disbeliefs" that I can work around, but still ... post-apocalypse books
and films that take that into consideration get cookie from me; even if their solution is unworkable
or unrealistic, atleast they tried ... one of the reasons I liked King's The Stand so much when
it was first published ...I was thinking of another movie that had dealt well with the issue, seem
to remember a hydrodam and Tom fucking Petty ... Costner's Postman ? I dunno ... hey, wait,
I got the WatchInstantly Netflix ...

anyway, I enjoyed it okay, altho I kinda wandered over to the other monitor about 2/3 thru ... I'm
not a real zombie or post-apocalypse movie fan (28 Days I enjoyed enough), and the humor/cuteness of
the movie was adequate - I guess I'm really a Woody Harrelson fan ... I enjoy watching him in roles like
this, always been impressed with his dramatic stuff ... and not because he's that great of an actor, altho
he is pretty good, but because when he first showed up at the bar after Coach died, whodathunk
this kid had that kind of potential ? I've enjoyed watching him evolve and grow as an actor over the years ...

so NetFlix WatchInstantly test was BIG SUCCESS; and since the DishTV and Fox sports are obviously not
going to settle this dispute any time soon, and since the ten NCAA teams of the Big Twelve's home station
is FoxSports SouthWest, the answer to the Topic Question is : You wan mirrion dorrar? Fuck You, here bomb!


and on a side note, I finally got to cancel my Verizon landlines, because all I was doing there was running
dial-up for the computers ... the other day, I called the "service center" in the LittleBigTown and started
screaming at them to come dig up their fucking cable and get their shit off my land ... the poor just-barely-
graduated-high-school kid on the other side of this tried to explain to me that that's not how it works, they just
cancel the service but leave the line in the ground ... I started screaming "Why? What the fuck for?" and he
tried to explain that if I sold my house, the new owners would have to have new line installed, and he wasn't
sure who would have to pay for that, but Verizon's policy was that ... and then I really got loud - "Sell
my house? My House? You little shitheel, I'm dead in the middle of a thousand acres of fucking nothing,
me, the cows and the cactus, if I ever sell any part of this place, your little fucking telegraph string'll
be the last fucking concern ..." and I think it was the "shitheel", because then the kid called out my name;
(I hadn't given it at the beginning of the call, just started hollering "Who's this? Fuck you, you people come get
this fucking line off'n my land, I'll be goddamned if I use my own motherfucking backhoe to do your work")
and it turned out this was a kid whose folks I knew,and I vaguely could place him, but if asked, I'd'a said he
was like in junior high school, maybe ... I apologized for calling him a "little shitheel", said I knew it wasn't his
fault personally, I was just calling to blow off steam and fuck with Verizon ... and by the way, Son, what the
fuck are you doing working for those vampires? I thought you're daddy raised you better'n that? and he
sighed and said "yessir" and said something about the recession and the lack of jobs around here and he had
been hoping to be able to go to the state college here, but that hadn't worked out ... "Well, goodlord, Son,
I'm sure sorry about that .. say, you ain't thinking of joining the Army are you?" and he laughed and said
"oh, fuck, no" and I said "Good boy; lissen you come on out when you got days off, I'll put you on my crew,
got some light work I can't spare nobody for right now, you know how to fence?" well, sure he did, and I knew
he did, cause I knew his daddy ..."C'mon then, it's nice and cool out now, be easy money ... now, you gotta
asshole supervisor right handy ?" well, sure he did, and he did a good job of sounding scared at the Crazy Man
With a BackHoe when he handed me off and I yelled at the asshole supervisor for a good ten minutes before
Verizon's phone system somehow mysteriously dropped the call on their end ... (I got a local cell phone
provider; I can get full bars in parts of Texas where the Sun ain't shone since 1852 ...)

the point of all that is : Rule #32 Enjoy the Little Things
[/edit]

I've always been partial to Rocky Lane....


Rob

Re: the whole Verizon thing

I use Live 365 for internet radio. They have free and pay versions. Te adds are not bad as part of the free version. Huge selection. I like the soundtrack channel while writing and the celtic channels are great for winding down.

Rob

Robspierre wrote:I use Live 365 for internet radio. They have free and pay versions. Te adds are not bad as part of the free version. Huge selection. I like the soundtrack channel while writing and the celtic channels are great for winding down.

Rob

I'm a big fan of Pandora, personally.