This blog has a new home

I'm moving this blog over to what was my "professional" blog and I'm combining them both into a single blog. I won't be posting to this blog any longer. Please update your feed reader to the following AtomURL:



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Do you say "nitch" or "neesh" for niche?

I've been pronouncing the word niche like "nitch" for the longest time and I haven't really noticed until recently that some people pronounce it like "neesh". And then just a couple days ago I heard two different people in two different contexts (one in person, one on the radio) pronounce niche as "neesh", and this got me to wondering if it is a regional or cultural thing.

According to bartleby.com:

This 17th-century borrowing from French has traditionally been pronounced (nch), rhyming with itch. The pronunciation (nsh), rhyming with quiche, is a 20th-century revival of the French pronunciation, which some people dislike because they think it seems affected.

So, what about you? Do you say "nitch" or "neesh"? Add a comment or vote in the poll on the right.

Amazon Unbox Review

Synopsis: Amazon Unbox is too lacking in the convenience and features departments to justify the price. But if they address some of the missing features and switched to a Netflix-style, all-you-can-eat subscription model, then they could really compete.

Recently had an excuse to try out Amazon Unbox on our Tivo. The whole family was sick this past weekend and we had already watched our Netflix movie and everything Tivo had recorded for us :) So we thought, why not download a movie from Amazon Unbox?

I had already linked my Amazon account with our Tivo account, so ordering the movie just required that I enter a 5 digit pin number. There was a snafu with the credit card I was using, but once I got that resolved, the movie started downloading almost immediately. Only problem was that it took a LOOOONNNNGGGG time for it to download (we have a supposedly 10mbps cable DSL connection). By long, I mean in the range of about 6-8 hours. Since we started this just before dinner, there was no chance we could watch this that night. We had to wait until the next day.

The movie shows up in the Now Playing list as soon as it starts downloading. There is no estimate of how long it will take to complete, but Tivo does tell you how many minutes of the movie have been downloaded. The Amazon Unbox site doesn't tell you how many minutes total the movie is, but I was able to find this information via Netflix. Thus, you can do back of the envelope calculation of how long the download will take. (By the way, I believe the total download size was 2.4 GB).

The way Amazon Unbox works is that you have 24 days to keep the downloaded rental, but once you start watching it, you have 24 hours before it will be deleted. Tivo's provides a warning message when you start watching the movie and if you stop watching Tivo tells you exactly when the movie will be deleted. So that's all very good.

We started watching the movie, and the picture quality is top notch, easily DVD quality. It's just like a recorded TV program; there are no chapters, no menus, just the movie from beginning to end. So that's one strike against Amazon Unbox, that you don't get the bonus features or options or navigability of a DVD. Since the characters in this particular movie speak with a Scottish accent, we wanted to put on subtitles. Nope, can't do it. How about closed captioning? Amazingly, no, closed captioning doesn't work either. This is pretty much a deal breaker for me.

The movie cost $3.99, about the same as rental from a local video store. Is the value worth the price? No, I don't think so. Speaking of the local video store, it would have been faster to have walked to it to rent a DVD, and we would have had a richer viewing experience on top of it, for about the same price. And it can't begin to compete with the tremendous value of the Netflix service.

I have some advice for the Amazon Unbox team (they're waiting with bated breath for it, I know). They really need to add support for closed captioning, at the very least, but if they could figure out a way to add in the other features that one typically expects with a DVD that would definitely bolster their offering. The long download time could be mitigated if the download occurred automatically, in the background. What I'm thinking of here is a subscription service and that one could have a Netflix like queue with their Amazon Unbox account and when they finish with one movie and delete it, the next movie could start downloading immediately. This would mean a turnaround time measured in hours instead of the Netflix turnaround time which is measured in days.

Parenting Hack: Disabling the auto-flushing toilet

If you are a parent of small children like myself you can probably relate to a situation that I commonly find myself in. I take our 4 year old girl to the public restroom because, well, she's gotta go. And when we get there we see that the toilet is one of those auto-flushing models, you know, with a light sensor that can tell when an adult has sat down and stood back up and hence flushes automatically. I put emphasis on adult because as you may know this doesn't always work so well with a child, especially squirmy ones. Inevitably, the toilet flushes too soon, and these tend to not be wimpy flushers either. The flushing action can remind one of Charlton Heston as Moses in the Ten Commandments parting the Red Sea. And children find this very disturbing, obviously.

Well, on a recent trip to the "facilities", I came up with a simple hack to get around this problem. Simply take a piece of toilet paper (paper towel would probably work well too) and drape it over the light sensor. The child can then safely use the toilet. After the child has dismounted and everyone is ready for a flushing of biblical proportions, remove the toilet paper from the light sensor, which will activate the flushing, and drop it into the toilet.

Happy parenting!

Lost Production Resumes

Lost Production Resumes [Sci-Fi Wire]

Lost returns on Wednesday, October 4th!

Hello World - blogosphere style

I'm doing all things google today. Created a gmail account, started using the google rss reader, playing with google earth, now a blog. Oh yeah, and then there's this firefox extension that will sync up your firefox settings on multiple computers, called Google Browser Sync. I'll install it on my work computer tomorrow and see how well it works.