TV

W Sister Short and The TV Time Out

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I wrote this one over a year ago in July 2024, however still super cute.

The other day when walking home from school, I reminded the girls that they had less screen time today due to timeout from yesterday. I told them I couldn’t recall the exact quantities so I said let’s call it 10 minutes and 20 minutes respectively. A’s response was yes let’s, and she smiled. She and I both knew that she probably had more time than that, but I didn’t want to guess a much higher number so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

All I Want Is A Dumb TV

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We got a new television back in October 2022. As much as I try to stay up on the trends in technology, purchasing televisions has always made me apprehensive. When I bought the television in our living room nine years ago, I remember spending a lot of time researching and still not being 100% sure what I was getting was just right. The time before that, when I got my first LCD TV, was just as stressful. There are so many features that I really don’t know if having them matters. Even when reviewers say you need 240 Hz or whatever is the thing to get, I question whether it’s really worth the extra money when M doesn’t really care and my eyes aren’t exactly perfect anyway. I digress. I just want to talk about one bell and whistle in TVs today that you cannot avoid: the smart in smart TVs.

When I bought my last television in 2013, it was pretty hard, if not impossible, to get a decent TV without smart software. I didn’t like it then. I only used the Wi-Fi on our other television a few times to update firmware. That turned out to be a great decision on my part. The Vizio TV we had was one of the models where they were caught up spying on their customers. I forget exactly what they were doing, but I think it was either using the microphone to listen in or to see what advertisements people were interacting with. Either way, it was creepy and illegal. It didn’t impact me since my Wi-Fi on the TV was off, so there was no way for the TV to communicate with the vendor.

When I received our new TV, the folks from John Lewis went to set it up for me (it was part of the deal of mounting it on the wall). They asked what my Wi-Fi details were. I told them they didn’t need to do anything and that the television would never join my Wi-Fi network. It turns out, however, that I was incorrect. I tried to keep the television off the Wi-Fi network, but if I did that, I got a warning that remained on the screen until I connected it to the Wi-Fi. I guess the TV was smarter than I thought! 😂

Full disclosure I took the original complete blog entry I wrote previously and ran it through Microsoft Copilot, because why not. The results were not far from what I wrote but just better enough that for fun I am posting it!

The Story of My Dad and MASH

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Today is my dad’s birthday. He would be 78 today. I miss you dad. I thought today was appropriate to post this entry i had written a while ago and just haven’t scheduled to publish.

Growing up It felt like most people thought that my dad was a doctor. Big reveal he was not a doctor. He was what they call a physician’s assistant. The way he always described it was that he could do about 95% of what a Doctor does. The difference was that he needed a doctor to sign his chart versus a doctor being fully autonomous. The advantage of physician assistants is its two years of medical school versus four years of medical school to be a doctor.

My dad went through physician assistant School in the mid-70s. A few years after the movie and show MASH came out. Since I was born after the show started I cannot remember a time when he wasn’t watching it if it was on TV. I’m pretty sure that if i had ever asked ever he would have said that was his favourite show of all time.

For my dad I think it was more than a TV show. He enjoy it and thought it was funny yet I also think he felt the adrenaline rush of the glorified combat situation, even if it was a comedy. So much so that I remember during the first Gulf War he had offered to go into the field. I don’t know if it was at a field hospital or at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany however I know he discussed it to some degree. Retrospectively I am not sure how serious he was. I think on some level he wanted to go however on another it was never going to happen. In the end it never did. That never stopped him from thinking of himself as Hawkeye. I’m pretty sure that means one of his friends was trapper. And remembering this particular Doctor friend who he worked many shifts together when i was growing up they were as funny together as Hawkeye and Trapper.

Oi, Why Didn’t Any Tell Me About Gavin and Stacey Until Now?

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On Christmas day M made a fantastic lunch just for the four of us. For dinner we went over to a friend down the road. They had a bunch of extended family over and had invited us for a buffet dinner. By around 7:30 the party was wrapping up. Our friends mum and along with her sisters family was heading home. They wanted to be home in time to see the Gavin and Stacey Christmas special. Up until hearing about this Christmas special I have never heard of this show before. We were told we should watch it.

M and I went home and put the kids to bed. We then proceeded to start watching the first season. By the evening of New Year’s Day we had finished the entire series including the most recent Christmas special. Since I am writting about it you must gather I really liked it. And I did.  It is now one of the top british shows I have seenn.  It is probibly one of the best shows i have seen in several years.

After watching the entire series and really liking it I wanted to know is how all of my local friends have utterly failed me. How is it that no one pointed out this show even existed until this week? It was really funny. I consider this one of the largest pop culture failures in recent history.

Now I have to wonder what else I might still be missing?

Why an I a Sucker For Time Travel Stories?

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I don’t know what it is about time travel stories.  I am a science fiction fan in general but there is something about adding a twist of time travel to a story to make things more interesting.  Since I was a kid I have been fascinated by them.  I think I started thinking about this earlier this week after the new season of Doctor Who came on.  I also have thought about what things I like that I can introduce to the baby once she arrives and is old enough.

One of my favorite movies of all time is one that I remember watching as a kid was The Final Countdown.  What little boy could resist it?  It had aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and time travel.  Even today I still think it is a pretty neat plot and I will watch the DVD every now and again.

I started watching Doctor Who in middle school, around 1983 or so.  I think I just stumbled upon it changing channels.  I started off at the end of Tom Baker.  I think I saw bits and pieces of episodes and then the first one I can completely remember was the Warriors Gate.  I didn’t understand why soon after the main character changed.  i would figure that out later, but to this day I was hooked.  Recently David Tennant’s portrail as the Doctor is probably one of my favorites  but Peter Davison is also still a favorite.  That is most likely because he is the one I remember most growing up since he was what was on the air.

Other shows with a bit of a time travel twist that I couldn’t get enough of were Lost, Journeyman (it got canceled way too soon), and Life on Mars,  I am also a sucker for the genre getting drawn into watching stuff that is really bad.  I wanted to watch Terra Nova for the premise alone and I haven’t been able to watch more than a handful of episodes.  Just because you have good effects does not mean I or anyone else will like something if it doesn’t have a good plot.

Tuesday, August 28

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I think I’m going back to using the date as the title of blog posts instead of coming up with snappy subjects for each regular day I write about.

Today was the first day are cleaning has been here since late July. I think she took some vacation time and also was resting from minor injury. We were glad that she’s back. Her arrival meant I had to leave for work early. I had a lot to do anyway.

I know I have an awesome wife when her best friend is going to be in town and she says I might be busy Saturday night because it’s the premiere of Dr. Who. I didn’t think of that and of course I’m available see her friend. I just thought it was hysterical that she would think that I would want to bail out for TV. It was very sweet though.

On the plus side one of MC’s best friend that lives in DC is going to be in New York this weekend. We will hopefully get to see her for brunch one day.

This evening was pretty low-key. I need to get up early for a meeting at 6 AM going to bed early. The rest of the night was taken up with a little bit of TV, and calling some perspective nannies.

Hulu Plus Take 2

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Last September, I tried Hulu plus for about two months. I ended up canceling it because I didn’t use it that much to justify the $7.95 a month charge. My original thoughts were to use it on my iPad and possibly my TiVo. It didn’t really happen.

Flash forward to last week and I signed up for a weeks free trial of Hulu plus again. What’s changed is it is now available on the AppleTV. Last month even having Hulu plus available on the AppleTV wouldn’t really matter to me, but recently I have jailbroken the operating system on my Apple TV so I could install Plex media center. With Plex on my AppleTV I am using that as my main Media Center endpoint on my TV instead of using a Mac Mini plugged directly into the TV. So far it’s actually been working out really well. Adding Hulu plus for streaming of TV shows in addition to the downloaded content I have on Plex both available via the AppleTV has been working out pretty well. It’s also less buggy than using the Plex UI on my Mac Mini directly plugged into my television.

For now I just started paying for the first month of service. Will I keep it forever? Who knows, but were enjoying it while we have it.

Hulu Plus

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With Netflix annoucning that streaming movies and TV shows will now cost extra I decided to check out alternatives.  I have been skeptical about Hulu plus just because if i am paying for a streaming system I would hope that there is no commercials but with the ability to watch content via a Roku or iPad on Hulu won out and I signed up for a free trial.

Now I am in the middle of my first paid month and I will say I haven’t used it too much but when I have used it I was glad i had the service.  Tivo failed me a few times and just going to an online library was nice.

Having Hulu Plus alone to me was useless since I don’t want to watch stuff on my computer.  At the begining of the month I bought a Roku 2.  The main reason I got one was to use it as a front end to Plex, but Roku offered a Hulu client so I figured why not try it.  Together Hulu with presentation on the TV makes it worth it.

Of course the main reason i bought the Roku was to use it with Plex.  Unfortunately the Plex client for Roku is very basic.  I love the Plex media center but using it on the Roku was not as good as it is on my Mac Mini.  I need to figure out what is wrong with my Mini that the HDMI connection is flakey.

Plex Media Center 9

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Earlier this month Plex came out with a new version. I had been really liking version 8 since I started using my Mac mini as a media center back in late June. I was eager to download the new version when it came out. Initially I was not very pleased. I had significant issues with my media library upgrading. Well, part of the problem was it didn’t upgrade. I had to start over and lost all my customizations. The new version also had issues downloading TV metadata initially. Thankfully the download issues were resolved and I am actually quite pleased now how Plex 9 is turning out.

I also purchased the IOS media streaming app for my iPhone and iPad. That is slightly slow, but it is very cool to be able to stream everything to my portable devices.

I’m still playing around with my set up, but I hope to have everything tweaked the way I like it very soon.

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The New Mac Mini

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I ordered one of the new Mac Mini's the other day.  It should arrive on Wednesday.  It is taking so long since I wanted 4gig's of RAM so it was a special order.  I got the stock HDD and Processor since I don't think I needed more than what it came with.  Now I will agree I have a few computers so why would I want another one?  Good question.  No real good answer.  I don't "need" anything.  However with this new Mini I can use HDMI naitivly so my hopes for a media center machine are once again alive.  I don't know if this Mac will have the same HDMI issues as my other ones have with the adapters to HDMI, or if the native cable will "just work".  If this doesn't work I am sure it is my TV that is the problem.  Well I am already pretty sure it is my TV that is messed up but we will see Wednesday.

If the media center doesn't work out I mainly bought this new one because my 20" iMac is slowly going.  Not sure why since it is only 2 years old but I don't have Apple Care and the screen has lighter colored vertical bars here and there (in regular intervals) that make me think it is the back-lights.  That was an issue for a while but now I am not even able to put most DVD's into the drive.  It starts making really bad sounds and wont spit them out.  I know I use the iMac as a server mainly to host up my iTunes video library but I do want it to work.  If the DVD drive goes I may end up just moving it to my bedroom to use as a TV or streaming host for videos that I wanted to do a while back and use the new Mini to host my iTunes collection.  In the end the Mini will be used as some sort of media center.  If it plugs into my TV or an extra monitor on my desk is really all that is up in the air.