Blessed by the Potato

I thought I sent this to Netbug a while ago, and thought that maybe he’d do a whole blog post thing on it, since it seems like it would be up his alley, but maybe my MSN wasn’t working right at work that day or something… Anyway… It seems that modern CDs have been reducing the dynamic range to make the overall track seem louder, which lessens the overall experience since there’s less highs and lows (less kick to the drums, etc). This has been termed “the loudness war“. Anyway, I thought it made for an interesting read, and also made me wonder if that’s the reason why some audiophiles have such a fondness for vinyl: nothing to do with digitization or the “authenticity” of scratches and pops, but just that tracks mastered for vinyl had better dynamic ranges so the music had more soul.

Continuing with my efforts to get free food from President’s Choice PC Points, I tried PC Organics microwave popcorn, the butter-flavoured variety. It was actually pretty tasty, however when looking at the nutritional information on the side after getting it home I saw that it had 10 grams of fat per serving (50 g). That’s a crazy amount of fat! Sure, it didn’t have any of the weird chemicals associated with other microwave popcorn (just lots of palm oil and butter flavour), but I typically associate popcorn with the lighter side of the salty snack spectrum, but that’s right up there with chips and nachos bad! And I’d rather have the nachos all else being equal, since they’re less hazardous to my gums. Just another reminder that organic does not equal healthy.

It is, I’m lead to believe, not terribly difficult to download movies from the internet these days. Like music in the 90’s, piracy threatens to significantly impact the movie industry. And just like then, locking content up and making it more difficult for paying customers to access their content is not going to work. Instead it’s going to be all about pricing: the buck-a-song price point was the magic point where people (ok, people with money — there’s not much you can do about students) would just as soon buy a song legally as go to the trouble of downloading it peer-to-peer. So the same logic should hold true for movies — there’s going to be a price point where people will pay to buy/rent a movie digitally as long as it isn’t stupidly restricted.

I was playing around with my Xbox 360 and saw that there is the ability to download movies from Microsoft Live. 440 “points” for a new release like the Dark Knight (in standard def — high def has a further premium). The “points” system obfuscates the price, by design, but that works out to $6.30 (plus tax). This is for a “rental”, which tells me that there’s going to be some weird limited usage DRM on there, and I can’t say I find that price point the least bit competitive with even movie rental stores, let alone piracy (ok, it might be competitive with Blockbuster which I haven’t been to in over 5 years, but not with the smaller places).

Netflix and Zip.ca are getting closer. You can’t be as spontaneous as with the corner video store or video-on-demand, but you can rent a movie for less than half the cost of the Live service, or depending on the turn-around time for mailing DVDs, perhaps a tenth of that cost. For myself, I’d happily max out my internet connection renting movies to my Xbox if the price point was somewhere closer to $2/movie, assuming the implementation was reasonable. At north of $7 after tax that’s gone right past stupid into crazy; it’s not even pretending to compete with regular rentals now (as much as even people like my parents hate having to return movies, even they would balk at that price) and is somehow equating your Xbox “experience” with going out to the theatre, at least in price.

PC Financial has had* a deal on where you could get 5000 PC points for purchasing any organics or blue menu item. That’s a pretty sweet deal, since 5000 PC points is worth about $5, and there was no minimum purchase, so you could buy a $2 organics chocolate bar (which I did) and get paid to eat.

Unfortunately, that PC Organics chocolate was pretty nasty. It was billed as “European style rich milk chocolate” but it wasn’t yummy at all. It just wasn’t sweet, kind of like baker’s chocolate. However, it didn’t have the bitter rich cocoa that some dark chocolate lovers go for either (not surprising since it was milk chocolate).

I don’t know how they managed to make chocolate not tasty, maybe it’s the lack of fertilizers or whatever, but I’d give this one a pass if you’re looking for a PC Organics product to get for free.

* – Oddly enough, the banner ads for “get 5000 PC points on blue menu items” are still around, but they’ve killed the link for the actual coupon, so if you try to get it now you’ll just be stuck in a loop on the website. While no one else can get the coupon now, as far as I can tell they’re still honouring it in-store.

Well, right on schedule, Rogers is forcing through another egregious price hike, in the face of a recession to boot. They’re increasing the price of most services, including bizarrely enough the price of basic cable, by 5%, much higher than the rate of inflation. Basic, analog cable that they are actively trying to phase out. Yes, I suppose increasing the price might get some people off of it (which is their goal, since digital is a cash cow for them), but it makes these price hikes seem like even more of a kick in the pants, since they haven’t put any work into basic cable for years now (at least with the internet they can claim to “add value” every time they hike the price and cut the cap).

I’m getting really sick of it, especially since I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Unfortunately it looks like we’re stuck with Rogers. I figured I’d be fine cutting the cable and going back to over-the-air TV as long as we got a half dozen stations (CBC, City, CTV, Global, maybe a few american stations if we’re lucky)… but we just borrowed a UHF antenna and only one channel came in — and it was A-channel. Ugh. I found that surprising. Maybe it’s something to do with London (I know in Toronto we can pull in most of those stations without an antenna, the signal is so strong), or maybe it has to do with the fact that we’re in a little bungalow with a series of giant apartment towers blocking any signal to our south side. It feels like we’re completely at Rogers’ mercy here.

That’s made even worse this year by the fact that I’ve just gone over a day without cable service — a whole day without internet! Right there that takes Rogers down to “zero” nines for reliability: 99.7% uptime and getting worse the longer I’m sitting here…