Saturday, October 25, 2008

How 'bout that Blu-ray?

It's been a while since Blu-ray emerged as the winner of the next generation high definition video disc format. I had long maintaned that as soon as a Blu-ray drive went under $100 in price I would snatch it up, and to that end set up a couple of price alerts on Newegg (my main source for computer parts and all things tech). When I received the alert e-mail a couple of months ago, I was quick to buy this baby. Despite the exclusion of the advertised PowerDVD CD and SATA cable (the Newegg people say that OEM models don't come with that extra stuff, though I guess retail versions do), I was able to successfully install and set up the drive in my media center PC using an extra cable that came with my motherboard and the wonderful BitTorrent protocol. So far, I've only watched a couple of (bad) Blu-ray movies (The Forbidden Kingdom, 88 Minutes, Baby Mama), but I'm pleased with my purchase. Now if only a good Blu-ray movie could come out so I can have some people over to check it out...

Climate Time Machine, Proposition C.

This is an interesting little site with some quick interactive climate change demos: http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/ClimateTimeMachine/climateTimeMachine.cfm.

By the way, I support Proposition C in the upcoming Missouri election, and I think you should too. While I'm typically not a big fan of mandates, I feel like this ballot measure (if passed) shows the power companies that the consumers want renewable energy. I will admit that Ameren offers a program called Pure Power that allows one to buy the equivalent of her/his energy consumption from renewable sources for an extra 1.5 cents per kWh (or approximately a 25% increase). Although the price increase seems a little ridiculous, I just signed up for the program as an act of proverbially putting my money where my mouth is.