January 1, 2010

There were 2 posts published on January 1, 2010 (this is page 1 of 1).

Netflix streaming with the Samsung BD-P1600

For Christmas, my parents gave us a gift card to apply towards a Blu-ray player that could stream Netflix. I did some research on models this morning and picked out what I wanted: the Samsung BD-P1600. I don’t own any Blu-ray discs and may not ever. All I wanted was a player that would excel at streaming Netflix movies. If it could play discs too, well, so much the better.

I spent the evening playing around with it. How does it perform? Fantastically. On the first power-up, it took several minutes for the system to download an apply a firmware update. After that, though, it’s worked very well. I was stunned at the picture quality when I tried streaming some movies: it’s amazingly good. So much so that I’m not at all surprised now that the big cable companies are shitting bricks over this technology. The writing is on the wall for cable TV: I have 12,000+ titles of movies and television shows available for watching anytime. Why would I want to saddle myself with a costly cable subscription?
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Highlights of 2009: Elections

There was a city election this year and once again I found myself in the middle of it. I pitched in with the campaigns of Rodger Koopman and Russ Stephenson.

Kelly and I hosted a meet-and-greet for Russ that had to get moved to a friend’s house when our daughter suddenly got sick. I also recorded a robo-call on behalf of Russ that went out to the neighborhood. We were happy to help Russ as he’s been helpful to our community. Then there was the all-day poll greeting I did, which I find is an odd combination of being exhausting and yet strangely energizing.

Unfortunately for Rodger, a reelection was not to be. In spite of my efforts he was defeated. I believe part of his undoing were the Wake school board elections, which brought out the angry voters. Still, Rodger may not be at the table now but he’s not through with politics. I’d like to see him take one of the Wake County Commissioners seats that will undoubtedly go Democratic this year. We’ll see.