Month: January 2013

Amazon Prime Instant Video

/ John Weathers / Leave a comment

So last week we started watching Downton Abbey on Netflix Instant Video, but Netflix currently only has Season One available. We finished the first season on Friday evening, and I decided to check Amazon Instant Video to see whether or not Season Two was available or not. I was pleased to discover that not only was it available, but that it fell into the select subset of Amazon Instant Videos that are free for those who have Amazon Prime memberships.

I’ve been a member of Amazon Prime ever since late 2006, and I have always found it a great value given how Melinda and I both do most of our book, music, and gadget shopping on Amazon. And that was just when the only thing a membership got you was the free two-day shipping and reduced price next day shipping. Once they started adding additional benefits to our membership, I was eager to try them out, but up until now I had never run across anything that I wanted to watch or read that was available for free with an Amazon Prime membership.

We decided to use our Wii U for streaming the Amazon Instant Video and found that it’s interface was very nice – much better than the version on the TiVo which is where we had used it before briefly. The TiVo version made the “instant video” part sound like a joke because you first have to download the video before watching it – unlike the web interface version or the version for the Wii U where it truly is instant streaming video. A really nice part of the user interface for the Wii U version is that you can search and interact with the UI on the Wii U Tablet which is by far the nicest interaction for these sorts of applications that I’ve seen on a TV.

When we began watching the video, it came through instantly and crystal clear unlike with Netflix Instant streaming which almost always begin streaming with pixelated video before the quality improves to HD or near HD after a few seconds. I’d guess that it has to do with the fact that Amazon is obviously benefiting from their own network while Netflix is actually hosted on Amazon themselves which means that Amazon can tweak their network to squeeze the best performance for their own services. But that’s just guessing.

I’m pondering whether we should cancel Netflix Instant streaming or even possibly all of our Netflix subscription. I am sad to say that we hardly watched a single disc video last year and yet will still pay the monthly fee with nothing to show for it. We’ve mostly watched Netflix streaming, but I keep clinging to the mailed disc service because there are many videos that I’m interested in watching in our queue that are not available for streaming – although sometimes they are available (but not for free) on Amazon Instant Video. The question is whether or not I’d miss too much the missing content… You know all that stuff that’s been sitting in my queue for years that in all likelihood I will never get around to watching.

Not Giving Up On Day Five

/ John Weathers / Leave a comment

So as I sit here on this Saturday evening, I’m thinking about how I really need to arrange things so that I write these little posts second thing in the morning (first thing should be hitting the treadmill) – because otherwise as the end of the day draws closer, it really becomes hard to find the time to squeeze out five hundred words. I came very close to not writing anything this evening.

Melinda and I spent a good part of the afternoon working on finding the right ski lodging for our group ski trip to Mammoth California this April. We’re very pleased with the place that we found, and the trip is shaping up to be really fun. Unlike our previous two visits to Mammoth, this time the entire mountain will be opened, and we’ll be skiing with a large group of friends. The rental property that we found has a giant dinner table in around which all of us will be able to gather and hopefully some of us will get to indulge in the pleasure of board games during the evenings.

I’m really pleased that the first week of January isn’t even over, and yet, we have the most of the details all squared away for the trip and have the lodging reserved. Now it’s pretty much a matter of picking the exact set of flights and paying for them along with the lift tickets and ski rental reservations, and then the whole trip can be safely tucked away for the next few months.

Having one trip’s planning pretty much in the bag means that I will be free to focus on planning a trip to Italy this September as a sort of sequel trip the one that Melinda and I took for our 10 year wedding anniversary. We really enjoyed the tript to France, and it was really made possible through the valuable information found in The Gluten-Free Guide to France. As the author has also written The Gluten-Free Guide to Italy and as Italy is apparently a kind of gluten-free paradise where one can find fresh baked gluten-free breads, pastas, and Italian croissants, the question of our next European vacation seemed hardly in dispute.

Although planning this trip will be somewhat easier as I learned how to properly do it the last time and will re-use the same techniques, it’s hard at the moment to get going on planning again. When we got back from France, I was so excited about how much fun the trip had been and longed so much to return to Europe immediately, that I sublimated these feelings into planning a 2013 Italy trip within days of landing at home. I quickly ordered the Frommer’s guide and the Gluten-Free guide, and then I created a spreadsheet and an entry in TripIt. Then, I got busy and soon had a high level outline forming that now months later I seem to have misplaced. But invariably, something distracted me before I got too deep in the planning and now the effort has been sitting collecting electronic cobwebs for the last several months.

I opened up the planning documents during the Christmas break and found that while I had a good start, I was missing half of the visits spots that I had sketched out on a piece of paper months before. It meant that I would have to open up Frommer’s again and scan over the various different itineraries once again and reconstruct my own custom itinerary again. That didn’t sound like much fun on my last day or so of vacation, and so I’ve still not gotten my steam for the endeavor. I seem to recall that it took a little bit of effort to really get going on the detailed France trip plans, but that usually once I got started, it would only take something like 20 – 30 minutes, before I was really engaged.

So with one set of plans nearly concluded, I anticipate starting my engines in earnest on Italy 2013 next week.

Twilight Imperium Has Arrived

/ John Weathers / Leave a comment

Tonight,  I got home from work to find that the UPS driver had delivered my copy of the epic space opera board game Twilight Imperium!

Twilight Imperium has arrived!

 

In 1995, I went to Boston University for the summer before college to participate in the PROMYS program for mathematically talented high school students. While I was there staying in a dorm with other students, I first encountered an involved war board game in the shape of Axis and Allies. I was enthralled even though we only managed to get through three quarters of a game that one night that we tried to play. Since then, these sorts of epic battle games have always been something that I’ve hoped to gather friends together to enjoy, but in practice, I’ve managed to do so on once in a blue moon.

A few years ago, we got introduced to the world of German board games by some friends and since then we’ve begun acquiring more board games and have taken up the practice of having people over or visiting the home of friends for an evening of gaming fairly regularly. In addition to party games and multi-player strategy games, we’ve also acquired a large scale war board game or two along the way. My wife and I have only managed to play these maybe a handful of times a year, but they are a lot of fun. Our first such game was the Cold War game called Twilight Struggle. A year later we purchased War of the Ring – a game that truly captured our imaginations.

When visiting game stores over the last two years, two games in particular caught my attention and I kept hoping to decide to get them. One was a World War I simulation called Paths of Glory that I picked up over the Christmas break and have yet to try. While its basic rules are fairly easy to understand – it has a swarm of exceptions that seem rather daunting to learn and after walking through two example turns – Melinda and I decided to hold off on trying for the actual game until I could be fairly confident of my knowledge of the rules.

The other game was the massive and epic Twilight Imperium. While I have heard repeatedly that it is a huge game that takes a long time to play, every reviewer has also stressed how amazing it is and indicated that the game play makes up for the length. I’m looking forward to trying it out, but I will have to be patient as unlike War of the Rings or Paths of Glory or Twilight Struggle, this game requires at least three players.

One of the aspects of Twilight Imperium that really intrigues me is the fact that players can acquire political points as they acquire territory and that one of the parts of a turn is a political phase where players can draw from a deck of law cards and propose new laws that change the rules of the games and that then players with political points have to debate and vote on the proposed law.

Here’s to finding a few brave souls who’d like to join us for a possibly six hour game some weekend!