Ted's Blog

On my website I publish movie reviews I write. I started writing these on the Macintosh User Group bulletin board in the 1990’s and eventually started saving them, and then eventually published them to my website. While I had written reviews earlier than 1998, I only saved what I wrote from 1998 onward, so my website only goes back to that year. Because I write reviews whenever I watch a movie (not just new releases, but older movies too), I often will go ahead and write a review for pre-1998 movies as well, with no way of publishing them, but keeping them in my Access database where all of the reviews live. When I joined the Disney Movie Club, I wrote reviews of a lot of the older Disney animated features that I was buying, but my list of rankings couldn’t link to those reviews since they were not on the web.
Continue reading “The Movie Review Vault”

Just in the last couple of days my irises started blooming. I took this picture today.I love all the different things going on with irises: the spiky yellow caterpillars, the weird map markings, and that some petals go up and some go down.

I haven’t done much with the Flashlight Wiki lately, but a couple of other users have made some changes, which is a good sign maybe. My long time web host A Small Orange, which was a local company at one time, has changed hands a couple of times and has finally gone up on their price from $50 per year to $86. That is more than I want to pay, so I looked around for better options and found HostGator which you could get a really good introductory deal on by committing to 3 years of service for only $3.95 per month for their baby plan, which is pretty much unlimited shared hosting. Then before I could make up my mind, the website offered a better rate of $3.48 per month, so I took it.
Continue reading “Moving the Wiki”

Going way, way back, I used to write up a review of the Oscars ceremony on a movie discussion group. My friend Royce from that group started a movie discussion group on Facebook and he remembers me writing those and asks if I will post about it. Since I watch the broadcast every year, it isn’t that hard to write something up, so I am putting the one I wrote this year here. I thought I had posted more of these on the blog, but the only one I found was from 2005 when Chris Rock hosted.

This year’s Oscar was not one full of surprises. FiveThirtyEight made 8 predictions and got 7 correct, barely missing on Best Documentary, which even today after seeing who won, I could not name. They do not try to predict Best Screenplay, but if they did I am sure they would weigh the Writers Guild awards as a heavy predictor, and this year, in fact, Oscar awarded the same two movies as the Writers Guild. So as far as the competition goes, yawn. And they brought back Jimmy Kimmel to guarantee the maximum possible predictability.

What was different this year, was getting lectured by almost every woman on stage. I know they are mad, but I did nothing wrong. I even believe in diversity and inclusion and all of that, so why do I need to be continually hit over the head with it? They also had a couple of short tribute pieces dedicated to basically the same thing. Three women took stage and introduced a segment like that, but what I did not realize was that they were three of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers. So maybe a little bit of hidden poignancy there.
Continue reading “Oscars Review”

After thinking about it for a long time, then buying an indoor TV antenna that worked fairly well, I decided to cut the cord and abandon cable TV, replacing it with a system for receiving over the air (OTA) broadcasts and recording them on a digital video recorder (DVR). I picked Tablo over some of the other options because it seemed to offer a little more versatility than Tivo and was still pretty advanced and reliable. I ordered it from Best Buy and got it this week. At $200 it isn’t a horrible price up front, but there are other costs associated with it. One is they charge $5 per month for the programming guide which not only tells you what programs are coming up, but also helps you record them, record a series of shows, customize the start and stop times, etc. It seems essential to have the guide. You can also pay $50 per year for the guide or a one-time fee of $150 for lifetime guide support. I’m leaning towards doing the 1-year guide and if it works out and I keep using it, getting the lifetime. I don’t have to decide right away because it comes with the first month guide for free.

Also the Tablo does not connect to your TV’s HDMI port like a Tivo. Instead it connects to your home computer network via ethernet or wifi and you can watch shows on your phones or tablets via apps, cast shows to your TV via those devices, or gets apps for your TV. Unfortunately, Tablo seems mostly locked out of the TV app market so you have to buy a Roku, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire TV stick or box to have the apps and then play the shows on the TV.

Continue reading “Tablo OTA DVR”