Ted's Blog

For many years, I have used My Yahoo as my start page. It kept up with stock prices, sports scores, news, weather, and Yahoo mail. They kept changing the design of it, but I kept trying to keep it looking the same as it ever did, which is heavily text focused and in three columns and minimal ads. I could copy and paste the stock quotes into my investment spreadsheet in order to update all of the prices of my stocks and mutual funds. A week or two ago they put in a banner that they were discontinuing it in favor a new improved page, which of course was terrible. It had none of what made My Yahoo great. Today it actually went away.

The first problem I had was how to get stock quotes into my investment spreadsheet which I do at least a few times a week and sometimes every day around 6 PM when the mutual fund prices would post. Yahoo Finance already has my My Yahoo portfolio, but you can’t copy and paste the text because the stocks are now little widgets instead of text. I went looking for web portals like My Yahoo and found one called ProtoPage that was supposed to be decent, but it didn’t do everything that My Yahoo did and it didn’t seem to let you set up a portfolio of stocks and funds. Somehow I found out that Google Sheets, the spreadsheet web app, has a function that pulls over all kinds of information about a given stock or fund into a spreadsheet. So that would be really easy to copy and paste from anyway. I set that up, which took a little doing for gold and silver spot prices, since that isnt built in to the googlefinance() function. I even thought maybe I could convert my investment spreadsheet from Excel to Sheets. But then tonight I noticed that the mutual fund closing prices weren’t coming over. They still haven’t come over and it almost midnight. That’s not very helpful. In doing this, I also learned about the Google Finance page, which has some neat things going for it, similar to Yahoo Finance. But it didn’t have updated mutual fund prices either. I thought maybe Microsoft would have a finance page and they do via MSN. It lets you put in a portfolio and they were updated at least by 9 PM when I started messing with it, plus I could copy and paste all the quotes at once to dump them into my spreadsheet (from the manage list screen).

MSN might not be a bad portal replacement for My Yahoo either. It has weather at least, but does not seem to let you put in a list of sports teams to follow, which seems silly. I will still need to check my Yahoo Mail though.

As I started figuring out last year, Black Friday as a shopping event for getting blu-rays on sale was in real danger. During this past year Best Buy stopped selling movies altogether. Target has cut way back with some stores having nothing, but for the holidays some had a cardboard stand out at some stores with blu-rays and DVD’s, including recent titles, but unfortunately, no 4k movies. The prices weren’t great either, about $15 for a blu-ray, but you could get it down to $10 potentially with the Buy 2, Get 1 Free sale they had going on. There are so few new movies I would want on blu-ray (as opposed to 4k) that it doesn’t work and even $10 is steep for a blu-ray when in the past Best Buy would sell them for $5-$10 and I could reduce that substantially with reward certificates. I hoped Best Buy would get shippers like Target did, but, nope, they are completely done with movies. I had $40 in certificates for Best Buy so I put those towards a new Samsung phone instead. Last year Walmart’s blu-ray deals were actually through Gruv, an online store run by Universal. This year, again, they had no deals in the stores. Dollar Tree used to put out a shipment of movies around Thanksgiving, but they haven’t put anything new out in a year.

Gruv still has decent deals on things from Universal and Warner Brothers mostly, so I picked up 4k’s of Oppenheimer¹ and Dune: Part Two² for $12.99 each. But as of January 1, all online and even purchases of digital movies now have Georgia sales tax. No wonder Georgia has a revenue surplus: they have secretly passed the biggest tax increase in Georgia history just by closing those loopholes. Gruv had a 3 4k for $30 deal on some titles, but I had a hard time picking three from their list. I thought about getting Puss in Boots (which I have on blu-ray already, but would go with my 4k of its sequel), The Color Purple (1985), and Tar. I started watching Tar, but it was slow and I wasn’t crazy about it. I have Color Purple on HD digital, which is probably fine for a movie that age. I could get E.T. instead of Tar, but some people said the 4k doesn’t look that great. I already have E.T. on blu-ray and a 4k digital copy.
Continue reading “Dark Black Friday”

At the end of August, Disney announced the end of Disney Movie Insiders, a rewards program that started as a way to encourage people to buy DVD’s by giving out points that could be accumulated and redeemed for more movies or other Disney merchandise. I earned most of my points by buying Disney blu-rays at Disney Movie Club (RIP), but could also get points by buying digital copies of movies and movie tickets, plus they often gave away codes for a few free points. I got a lot more movies that way so it was a nice way to make the Movie Club even a better deal and I wound up getting 42 movies from DMI including a few 4k titles. I also used DMI to get dozens of movie posters for my two backlit frames.

Other studios had similar programs. Sony Rewards had a program where you could buy 5 Sony blu-rays and get one free, but eventually they only gave digital copies of movies with a list of possible free movies that changed every quarter. They were usually horrible movies, but every now and then there might be something worth getting. That program also ended a few months ago. Another similar program was from Universal, which gave you 500 points for buying a movie (blu-ray or digital) and for 1000 points you could get a digital movie from a list that was updated every month. It was fun to see what new movies would come out at the beginning of the month, with some surprisingly good choices sometimes, though it started out kind of rough. I wound up with over 50 digital movies from them. Of course that closed a few months ago too.

I think these are all a casualty of the decline of physical media and even the decline of movie ownership as people get their movies through streaming services or maybe rent movies to watch. It makes sense. Most people won’t watch movies over and over again, so why not rent?

Also there seems to be a general decline in rewards programs. Coke had a program for a while that has gone away. Dr. Pepper has one that has really gone downhill. I got a lot of stuff from Kelloggs for a while, but that is gone too. Microsoft has a neat program that gives you points for searching on Bing and doing other activities and then you can trade in points for a Microsoft gift card that I would use, of course, to get movies. For a while I was able to get 3 movies a month, but they have throttled that program significantly. They would release a new batch of movies to shop from every Monday night, but the quality of those choices seems to have gone down some.

Looking for deals like this along with blu-rays at stores (which have also mostly gone away) occupied a lot of my time browsing the blu-ray forums, but I have an enormous backlog of movies to watch, so I need to change my focus from acquiring to actually watching and enjoying the movies I have.

Back when the blog was on Movable Type, I had rotating taglines underneath where it says “Ted’s Blog” at the top of the page. When we switched to WordPress, there was a plug-in that offered the same functionality and we installed that and I filled it with quotes. Recently the blog site was hacked and we deactivated plug-ins that were old or questionable because they might be vulnerable to hacks. Looking up some discussion on using rotating quotes, somebody suggested just adding some javscript to the the footer.php file of the theme instead of dealing with a plug-in. The correct way to do that in WordPress would be to create a child theme that I would then modify with the custom code. I had done this when we first started with WordPress and I wanted some customizations of the Twenty Eleven theme and created a child of that theme, but for the last couple of years I have been using a theme called Twenty Sixteen without a child theme. Instead Twenty Sixteen has a number of options that you can set in a control panel, including rotating header images. So I started out trying to set up a child theme of Twenty Sixteen first and wasn’t getting that to work because I needed to activate it in the Network Admin panel first. Once I did that, I just got the plain vanilla Twenty Sixteen without my custom settings. So I decided I would just modify Twenty Sixteen’s footer.php file. The danger of that is if anyone else on our blog network wanted to use Twenty Sixteen, they would get my rotating quotes, plus if there was ever a WordPress update that modified the footer.php file, which seems likely, then it would overwrite my custom file. All that means is I need a backup of the script so I can do the modification again. I am not 100% sure it would be easy to do a child theme with WordPress as it used to be, but maybe I will try it at some point.

The only tricky part was converting the quotes to something that could be stored in strings, so I had to use codes for characters like an apostrophe. I used the second code block from this page. I kept a backup of my customized quotes in a file called code.txt that is in the Twenty Sixteen child them folder I made.

I thought 2024 was a better year for movies in general than 2023 as the industry shook off Covid and put out some big movies. There are still headwinds from streaming and sporadic theater attendance, but they are getting there. Likewise, this was a pretty decent Oscars night as well. Jimmy Kimmell returned again and handled things well, with some good opening jokes and a few funny bits (a good one with John Cena re-enacting the Oscars streaker of the 1974 to present, ironically, the award for Best Costume). One good joke was about the addition of an award for casting coming next year, so that now not only do you have to watch an acceptance speech by the actor who beat you out for the job, but also the person who didn’t think you were good enough. I was glad there were no efforts to do a spontaneous interview with some of the stars in the audience, but they did do a couple of nice bits with the seated Steven Spielberg, Michael Keaton, and Robert Downey, Jr. Some of the presenters kept things short and sweet, which is always safe. Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling were funny trading Barbenheimer barbs, but some of the presenters really bombed. Do they have rehearsals? Some of that should be filtered out. To keep things moving they kept montages, tributes, and production numbers to a minimum, though they did present all of the songs. Although another Barbie song won the Oscar, Ryan Gosling hit it out of the park with his song about Ken. There was also a neat performance of a Native American song from Killers of the Flower Moon. The other songs were forgettable, not unforgettable.

One annoying return was having past actor winners gush about the current nominees. They have been doing this for a few years and, while it is a nice idea for past winners to sort of confer blessings on the nominees, it is just, ick. It is so self-congratulatory (both for the former Oscar winner and the current nominee) and doesn’t even work that well most of the time (though the New York Times review said some of these were highlights of the broadcast). It is great when a legend can say something positive about a new star in a candid and supportive way, but this seems forced and just makes me cringe. Plus it is only for actors, so it also sends a message that the Oscars are all about the actors. I fast forwarded all of these. A minor item was that they asked winners to keep their speeches short by not naming publicists and agents, which I only know because one of the early winners said she wasn’t supposed to name them, but then did it anyway (as did most). Most of the winners did a good job of keeping their speeches short, but some just went on and on, which is just annoying. They are staring at a big clock and obliviously go past it. As I say ever year, just cut the mic. I liked that the Best Editing winner kept her speech on topic and brief, like a good editor. Honestly, I don’t mind as much from some of the big stars from movies I actually saw, but I still appreciate it when they wrap up quickly, like Cillian Murphy did. I don’t think the winners of a lot of the minor awards should even get to make speeches, but the winner of best short documentary actually did a very good job. I also think Robert Downey, Jr. did a great speech accepting his win for Best Supporting Actor.

This year there were three foreign movies up for Best Picture despite there being a separate category for foreign films. The only one I saw was Anatomy of a Fall which at least was partly in English. I don’t think it is fair to include those films in Best Picture given that most of the people voting can’t understand the language being spoken (making it hard, in my opinion, to gauge the acting performance or the writing). I like inclusion and representation, but there are a ton of movies and I think the Academy is kidding itself if it thinks it can accurately gauge the quality of every movie produced in the entire world and then say 70% of the best of the best are in English. Instead, don’t even try, but do keep the foreign language category because there are usually some gems there that deserve some recognition.

One thing they have been doing is they show a trailer for each of the movies nominated for Best Picture when they come back from a commercial. It is harmless enough and they seemed shorter this year, but with 10 movies, it is still kind of a lot. But then when they actually go to present the award, they didn’t even list the nominees first. Instead Al Pacino just said a few words spontaneously and then opened the envelope. It is anticlimatic that here is this big award and you don’t take 20 seconds to name the nominees (though I think it would be fine to just name the movies, not all of the producers, who are actually the ones who win the award).