CelticNorse

The case of Hulu and the Old School ISP

I signed up for HuluPlus tonght in the hopes of watching an ep or two of Castle on my new new Bluray Disk (BD) player. I paid the $8 for the month and setup the player… super easy. The vid starts loading and the interface is a bit clumsy. Hulu wrote an app to interoperate with the Sony built in stuff. So it’s not like the desktop at all but it should work. Keep in mind I only have 1.5Mbps DSL. It’s all I can get here. I find the ep of Castle and after the ad stuff it starts to buffer. On my PC I usually let a show start then pause it and get a snack or “something” to allow the buffer to fill. From there it’s smooth sailing. Well a “feature” of HuluPlus is that your video quality is upped from 480p (my usual setup on my Mac) to 720p. That’s a lot more bits!

The ep starts to play and and it goes about 30 seconds and stops to buffer. Hmmm.. Not good. I look for someplace in the Sony/Hulu interface to adjust the video quality. Nothing. I stop the vid and go back to my Mac and find in the Settings tab of my Hulu Profile I can set the “Playback Quality” to 720, 480, 360 or 288p. Non of those seem to have any affect on the experience via my BD player. Also interesting is that the video that eventually starts to play looks awesome! Broadcast HD quality. I google around and try to find out what’s going on and I can’t really find much.

Sidenote: It’s amazing that googling “Hulu Plus” produces so many responses about the “new Hulu Plus for $10/month” thing from last summer/fall. Wierd.

I figure I’m done trying by now and go ahead and send a message into support. This is always a last resort for me for some reason. I assume that the answer is out there somewhere. The actual message is lost in the web form memory hole of support.hulu.com but basically I explained my DSL speed, hardware and what is basically above in this post and wanted to know if the “Playback Quality” setting affected any of it. I also asked nicely that I not just get a form email with the system requirements (which are 3Mbps+ in case you are wondering) for HuluPlus. Here is the reply I got… in less than an hour… on a Sunday night.

Hi Ken,

Thanks for your writing in. Hulu’s system requirements are…

Just kidding! Unfortunately, the video quality settings that you are saving in your account settings page are solely based on your web viewing experience. You aren’t able to manually change the bitrate on Sony Blu-ray players at this time. The device selects the best quality for viewing via your internet speed. I would suggest plugging the device directly into your router if you are streaming over wifi to improve performance. I hope this helps!

If you have any other questions, let me know. Happy viewing.

Thanks,
Eric 
Hulu Support

I thought the humor was spot on. I really did laugh. Not really loud or out so much but I L’d. In the end my beef is really with Qwest. But in the end end, (starting to sound like this post is about something else) what will matter more than anything else is, what speed will my new abode have.

How It Aught Not To Be

So last night I was at my brothers house troubleshooting issues connecting their Xbox360 to their Verizon gateway via a 50ft ethernet cable.  It had been not working in very weird ways.  I took the Dell laptop they have running Windows 7 up to the “game room” to test the cable.  To ensure I was talking over the cable I disabled wireless on the laptop.  Cable was fine.  Xbox is hosed.  That’s another story.

Next morning: 

I get this text from John (my brother), “Call me how do i put laptop back on wireless” followed minutes later by “lil help”.  First let me say that getting a text from my brother is wierd.  Nuff said!  As soon as I read the text though I did the classic Homer “DOH!”  Now I have to provide Windows 7  phone support from my home with nothing but my iMac to guide me.

I call him and he starts to go through screens on the laptop describing and reading stuff to me in the hope that I will recognize where the settings are we need. It’s not working.  Now anyone reading this is probably wondering why I didn’t have him simply right click on something and choose “Enable” or “Turn on Radio”.  The short answer to that question is “That’s what this story is about.  Stop trying to ruin it!”

Not knowing the settings screens by memory as I do in XP I googled “windows 7 enable adapter”.  Which led me to a page with this block of text:

Open Network Connections by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking Network and Internet, clicking Network and Sharing Center, and then clicking Manage network connections.

That is seriously stoopid!  I am reading this on my iMac looking up at the Wifi symbol in the menu bar.  I right click on it and have the option to “Turn AirPort Off”.  How god damn simple is that?  

Mind blown.

Liars fucking suck.

Strands Catch 22

So here is a bit of a problem I’m having with Money Strands before I can even get started. I created the account on my Mac via safari. Now I have the app on my iPhone but it has a app level passcode. Having no clue what it is I try to go to money.strands.com on my phone to investigate/set the code. Oops! Sorry you need flash. Crap!

I google a bit and find that they have a mobile site but their auto redirect is having some problems (beta). So I go to the mobile site (m.mo… Duh!) and login. As mobile sites go it was nice. There was however one glaring problem… The “settings” section on the mobile site doesn’t have any passcode management functionality. So I CAN get to where I CAN’T do what I need to do but CAN’T get to where I CAN do what i need to.

At this point I have decided that walking downstairs to do this on a “real” computer is not worth the time. So my experience thus far with Money Strands is none.

The Delicate Dance

What is it that makes us humans so fucking competitive?  Is it the evolutionarily instilled instinct to fight for mates and sustenance?  Does that carry over to this day fueling wars and property disputes?  Making us buy all kinds of crap with the picture and colors of our favorite team?  I dunno but I suspect whatever it is also feeds our desire to drive like ass holes. 

You can probably see where this is going…

There is some intrinsic instinct that pushes us to see driving as a race, a competitive game in which there are winners and losers.  Don’t get me wrong, I can compete and enjoy it at times.  But when we are driving we are likely going to different places than the cars around us and in the end we really don’t get any particularly greater advantage in the long haul… but there in lies another problem… short sightedness. 

Back to the evolutionary theory for a sec… back then we would not be worried about next week or next month, probably barely about tomorrow.  We’d just be worried about the next meal or opportunity to spread our seed! (Sorry I keep coming back to thatJ).  Driving like an idiot on the way to work has zero affect when we are at work but make the drive less enjoyable and more dangerous in the mean time for no benefit. 

This morning I had the pleasure of see this play out on not one but TWO occasions.  The first was simply the lady right on my ass through the bumper to bumper parts of I5 south.  Typical for any morning but once we are south of the construction things open up a bit and we are motoring along at 60MPH (the speed limit here is 55MPH so we are achieving the ideal 5 over).  The distance between my rear bumper and her front changed little between 5MPH and 60MPH.  She is clearly in a hurry.  But guess what, so are all the other drives on the road with us.  Long story shorter at her first opportunity she pulls a few maneuvers hopping around in the lands and after a mile or two is right in front of me.  Seemed like a lot of work for not a lot of gain. 

That wasn’t what motivated me to write however.  The thing that got me going was when I was exiting.  There is this great little flyover off ramp thing that brings on lane from I5 south to meet one lane from I84 west in a short stretch of elevated and walled in two lane highway that soon splits again the right going over the Morrison Bridge and the other turning east to become SE Belmont St.  (locals of course know this area well)  Invariably everyone entering from the left wants to move over to the right and vice versa.  It’s always a delicate dance of cars migrating through each others path.  It seems to require a level of cooperation as well as a degree of non-competitiveness to successfully keep things moving.  What I mean here is that sometimes the best way to get over is to slide in BEHIND the car next to you or to LET another come in front of you. 

As noted above I enter this mess from I5 south heading to Belmont so I must enter, change lanes and then split off to the left.  She enters from I84 west ironically in a blue Subaru wagon (same as mine but older) apparently also heading to Belmont.  As the two flyovers come together then become one road with a dashed yellow line she is at about my seven o’clock position.  I apply a small amount of acceleration to open up a bit a room to change over (my blinker has been on since before the merge).  She promptly steps on the gas.  It would seem this little stretch of road is her drag strip.  I lay on a bit more gas as she is now at my nine o’clock and I realize I’M DOING IT!!! I’m racing her to the cliff like in those old greaser movies.  Why?  What the hell!  What happened to the delicate dance? The cooperation?  Realizing that my at my current course my options are 1) take an unplanned trip downtown 2) take an unplanned trip to the ER.  I opt for 3) brake and slid in behind her.  But this leaves me pissed off and angry… road rage is creeping in.  Why am I so mad?  Did I loose?  Am I worse off?  No.  And in the end we both end up at a red light.  Me behind her.  I’m still steaming at this point but I’m not yelling or flipping the bird.  She puts on her glasses.  I start analyzing what this means because… that’s what I do.  We get the green she goes her way I turn and head to work, PISSED.  To add to everything the radio perfectly started playing Smashing Pumpkins Bullet With Butterfly Wings during this debacle and the chorus is kicking in my car:

“Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage”

I parked and thought for a bit… cooling off.  This is the start of my day.  The next song is Lasy Eye by the Silversun Pickups which mellows me out a bit… next is Waiting in Vain by Bob Marley and mellows me more.  So in the end I decided to write about it.  Good new blog fodder.  So I guess from that perspective this mornings commute was a good thing.

First Post Yay!

Well I have been putting off dealing with domain name registrations that are due and ongoing debate about what to do with my old webite/blog.  I HAD a blogger site published to my own domain hosted by godaddy.  Put simply I don’t use it enough to justify the cost.  I can’t “regress” back to a something.blogger.com domain because they have changed so much since I originally set it up.  I debated whether I should have a blog at all… truth is I never used it much and with Facebook and Twitter now in my circle of communication it didn’t seem necassary.  BUT, I am one of a growing crowd of folks that are more and more disappointed by Facebook and 140 characters just doesn’t cut it sometimes.  

I googled a bit and have seen lots of good things about Tumblr.  I’ll give it a shot and see how it goes. It seems to be more blogging meets social networking but we’ll see.  If in five years I am sitting at my computer on random Sunday night wondering what to do with the four posts on my tumblr blog I’ll know to get out of the biz.  Till then we’ll keep trying.

ONWARD!