Well, I’m in the Tri-Cities now. On Wednesday I did a sort of one-on-one focus group thing at Gilmore Research for Sterling Savings Bank’s new web site. It was pretty fun, only took an hour, and they paid me $75.

Yesterday I was really bored. Beefy and Jones didn’t want to do anything, so I went and saw The Departed at the Carmike 12. It was very good, but the twists at the end weren’t of the magnitude I’d expected. Some of the dialogue was a little hard to swallow when delivered with that heavy Boston accent. Maybe it was accurate, but to me it sounded silly. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief and accept that people who talk like that could actually be competent detectives.

I set the Moxi DVR over here to record some shows for me. In addition to the lack of a 30-second skip button, the machine lacks another critical TiVo innovation: It doesn’t warn you of scheduling conflicts. It just overwrites pre-existing recording slots without telling you (whereas TiVo throws up a window when a conflict occurs that shows what programs will fail to record if you confirm the action). Oh, and apparently you can’t pause video indefinitely — it resumes on its own after about 15 minutes. I ended up missing The Office because of that “feature” — I kept pausing the playback and when I finally hit play it had replaced the stuff I thought I was saving with some game show (Deal or No Deal or something lame like that). Now I’m going to have to BitTorrent the episode and install the proper video codecs on this machine.

Doesn’t look like much’ll be happening today again. I’m probably just going to run errands for the clinic, get some fast food, and buy some kitty litter. Maybe I’ll install MTGO on a computer here and participate in a Time Spiral booster draft.

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