Netflix — On Mah PS3!

My History With Netflix and How Now is Better than In The Beginning

I first took up Netflix eons ago, when there was no service hub in Anchorage. Turn around time on my new rentals, from the day I dropped a DVD in the mail for return to Netflix, was about a week. I was thinking it wasn’t really worth it when Netflix produced the ability to stream movies straight to your computer from their web site. Hooray, I thought. Only… I have to use Internet Explorer? And I’m not even interested in any of these movies!

So I cancelled my service and went on my merry way. My friends told me when they put the Anchorage hub in, but at the time Netflix and my lifestyle weren’t going to jive, so I just catalogued the information for future use. A few months ago, I got an e-mail from Netflix. Come on, they said, give us another chance. We’ll even give you another two-week trial. Netflix would very much jive with my current carless lifestyle, I figured, so I said yes.

I am so glad that I did. Turn around is now two days — one to the hub, one back to me — and their streaming library is vast and ever-changing, losing some titles here and there but always getting more in their places. They also offer more ways to view streaming media. In addition to the ability to view movies on your computer from one of multiple browsers, you can get Netflix’s streaming service delivered to your TV through one of various devices. For a while, those various devices have included the Xbox 360, but not the PS3.

As of a several days ago, that changed.

Setting My PS3 Up for Streaming Netflix

On Tuesday, I received an e-mail from Netflix letting me know that their service can now be streamed to the PS3.

To be honest, I expected this to come at some point. Shortly after taking Netflix up again I was asked to participate in an online survey which asked, among other things, if I'd use streaming Netflix services on the PS3.

I eagerly clicked the obvious blue “Get your FREE disc!” button, and was taken to a page that basically told me they’d ship it to me post haste. I assume they had a large number of eager clickers, because I didn’t get the e-mail saying it had been shipped until Thursday. For Fri: Instant Streaming Disc for PS3. And so it was that on Friday it arrived. (I wanted to play Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction yesterday, though, so I didn’t actually pop the disc in until this morning.)

The envelope looked, on the outside, exactly like every other Netflix envelope, complete with the circular sticker and perforated edge to be torn. Is this borrowed, as well? Will I have to return it later? That seems kinda silly, I thought. Apparently the folks at Netflix agree, because pulling the flap open revealed the following.

We don't want'cher stinkin' disc back.

Shortest manual ever.

The instructions are repeated on the slipcover for the disc.

A friend of mine had theorized that the requirement of a disc indicated that you use it like a Gameshark to hack the console code during the boot process. This is not the case, which (in retrospect) makes a lot of sense. Now that consoles have gone profile-based and support downloadable games, fewer people are setting their consoles to load discs as soon as they turn on. Besides, the Playstation 3 doesn’t allow you to take out a disc without turning the console on, making having the disc in during boot up a potentially tedious process.

Anyway, I took Ratchet & Clank out of the PS3 and popped the Netflix disc in. The Netflix disc comes up, appropriately, under the movie submenu instead of the game submenu. Selecting it gave me the familiar streaming Netflix loading screen, after which I was told to go to www.netflix.com/ps3 and insert a six-character code to activate the service for my PS3.

Well, poop. The PS3 won’t connect to the internet through a hub, so I had to turn it off and give the internet back to my computer for this, hoping all the while that I wasn’t required to have the PS3 and computer on simultaneously for the activation.

You have a PS3 disc. Something wrong? Need another one? If not, put in your code, please.

The next page told me it should take about three minutes to finish activating so I can use it. I took the next thirty minutes preparing pictures for and writing this post up to this point.

I decided to try running the PS3 through the hub again without checking to see if the activation worked with the PS3 offline or not. I’m glad I did, because the PS3 seemed to connect well enough when it was plugged into port 1 on the hub… and the activation screen with the code came up again, showing a different code than last time. On the plus side, it took 3 seconds to activate, as opposed to the 3 minutes Netflix generously gave itself.

My Take on the Service

If you’ve seen the Xbox 360 version of the Netflix service, you know that in the past its only shows movies on your instant queue as options for watching — you can’t simply browse what’s available like you can on the web site. The PS3 service works the same way. The visual aesthetic of the menu is different, though. On the Xbox 360, the movies in your queue are listed the way everything in the system menus are listed, as stacked pages which flip. On the PS3 it looks more like the Netflix web site’s film strip galleries of available movies with their cover pictures

You can either use the arrow buttons to scroll left and right one movie at a time or use the L2 and R2 shoulder buttons to page left and right, respectively. When you select a movie, you are shown a detail page with all the info you get from the little mouseovers on the web site. There’s a button to click to play the selection, as well as an option to remove it from your queue. If you choose a TV show, an additional option lets you select a different episode than the one it wants to play for you by default.

If you select something you were in the middle of watching recently, you have the option of resuming playback or starting from the beginning. This works across platforms. I found out about this because I wanted to watch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which I started watching the other day on my computer, to test the streaming service.

The quality of the streaming is excellent. There’s no lag between visuals and sound, and no noticeable choppiness. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was watching a DVD. Granted, I have a good internet connection; I don’t know how a poorer connection would fare.

Overall, I am extremely pleased. It would be nice, perhaps, if a list of commands useable during playback had been included on one of the Netflix envelope flaps, but since the commands are fairly intuitive to people familiar with playing DVDs on a PS3, I can’t really complain.

Bright Green Gaijin Pants, Post 3-3

My first blog, titled Bright Green Gaijin Pants, was a chronicle of my time as an exchange student in Kushiro, Hokkaido, Japan. I’ve decided to repost its contents on this blog. All reposts from Bright Green Gaijin Pants are available under a blog category tag of that name.

The first blog post of any real worth that I published from Japan was far larger than it had any right to be. It was actually several posts combined and posted at the same time because I didn’t have internet access when I first got to Japan. I will be reposting them seperately, as they were meant to be. And hey, this segment isn’t as long as the others have been. Whee!

On to Kushiro

When the alarm went off, I reset it for 4:35. When it went off again, I reset it for 4:40. Then I got up. I did morning things, then went down to the lobby. Before checking out, I got on line and checked some Neopets stuff, as well as sending an e-mail to everyone to say, “Yo, I am alive.” It seemed like my contacts on gmail did not include someone, and it wasn’t until I got to the part about the hotel key card in writing this that I realized that for some reason, Zeal was totally not on there. Sorry, Zeal. m(_ _)m Did Gokuiroth tell you? :s

Anyway, I checked out in time to catch the 5:40 AM shuttle to the airport. No lateness again for me! Everything happened smoothly. The young woman at the ticketing counter seemed to be in training, but there was no slowdown of services. Even if there had been, I would have been fine with it. I usually am fine with new trainees, but even if I wasn’t, the service I had received the day before was so good that I’d have been patient anyway. At one point they informed me that there was a flight change charge. It didn’t surprise me, so I was like, *sigh* “Hai.” Then they told me the charge was 100 yen.

What do they charge you for stuff like that in America? I doubt it’s as low as like 90 cents. That’s a rough equivalent of how much I paid. Delight!

So anyway, I got through that with a pink airline ticket and a Yokoso Japan! ticket envelope. I went straight to my gate — skipping food because I wasn’t all that hungry and I was damned if I was gonna miss this flight — and sat down. I was at the lower domestic gates. And very early.

While waiting for boarding time, I took this picture of a TV that was playing ads for those who waited. In retrospect, I wish the picture I had gotten was of the segment boldly labeled “Space Station TV”, but by the time it came around again I was heavily enmeshed in starting this blog post in notepad.

Gate, gate, gate, television!

The Japanese domestic boarding seems both less organized and more efficient to me than its American counterpart. See the picture below for how close the “gates” are to one another.

They remind me of the concession stands at a movie theater.

This is, indeed, where boarding passes were collected. But they didn’t start taking people until 15 minutes before the plane’s scheduled departure. When I got through the gate, I got onto another Friendly Airport Limousine. The bus left for the plane 10 minutes before the scheduled departure, completely full of people.

Couldn't be friendlier if it waved. Hello!

That took us straight to the plane, a trip of about 2 minutes. There were two doors open on the plane, and thus, two staircases. Somehow, a plane big enough to have three seat sections filled up with everyone stashing their bags with plenty of time to leave on schedule 8 minutes later. None of this, “Now boarding section 3,” crap. Just pure, unadulterated, “All aboard!”

It was a short plane trip, 1 hour and 20 minutes. I’m pretty sure the seats on that Japanese plane were wider than the seats on its American counterparts, since my hips didn’t feel squished for once. No leg room, but it’s Japan, so I expected that. Got work on the blog post in up to… some point. I was gonna remember exactly where so I could tell you, but I’ve forgotten.

The Birth of a Quilt Log

I went to the Loussac Library’s fall book sale last weekend. I was hoping to find good Japanese reading material, but they were pretty much cleaned out on that. I did find some quilt books, though. I only ended up with one because this one lady snapped up every quilt book but the one I was holding while I was flipping through it to decide if I actually wanted it or not. I’m very happy with my one book, though.

The copyright on this book is over twenty years old, and there doesn't seem to be a newer edition. What would you call it, anyway -- The New New Quilting and Patchwork Dictionary?

The New Quilting and Patchwork Dictionary by Rhoda Ochser Goldberg is a nice quilting resource book. The first third or so of the book is information on different quilting supplies and techniques. Concise introductions all around. The rest of the book is quilt block patterns built on grids to make drawing them out at any size for templates a piece of cake. There are pre-drawn templates for basic geometric shapes at the back, right before the quilt block index.

The real gem in this book, though, is page 1, which I’m sharing with you.

Click for legible size. It's worth the read.

A quilt log! Plans for quilts to make in the near future and others to make eventually when I have the appropriate skill have been circling around my head and scattered through text files on my desktop since I first bought cloth. A quilt log gives me a single place to keep all that information, in addition to the above-mentioned benefits. You’d think something as simple as a quilt log wouldn’t be that important for posterity, but between my recent world history class and having a genealogist for a friend-sister, I’ve come to realize just how important such things are to really understanding the people of a given era and area. I’m not exactly representative of the average, I don’t think (one of the pages going into my quilt log is for a fussy-cut Super Mario Bros. quilt I’m planning for the distant future, for instance), but maybe that’ll make my quilt log more interesting to anyone who bothers to read it later.

Like the author of the book, I’ve opted to keep a three-ring binder. I will (hopefully) fill it to overflowing at some point in the future and have to split my log into multiple binders and/or transfer it to a bigger binder. For now, however, I’m using one of my ridiculously old binders that I’ve been keeping since middle school — or maybe earlier — simply because it’s a shame to throw away a good one.

The shark and headless horseman stickers glow in the dark.

Behold the power of adolescent doodles!

Making the Best Use of Recount, Part 4: The DPS Report

This is the fourth in a series of posts about Recount, an addon for World of Warcraft. It gathers and reports on data taken during combat.

Segment List:

1. The Introduction
2. Display Window Basics
3. Damage Done Details
4. The DPS Report

A Quick Note

In my last installment I overlooked the most obvious part of the Damage Done window, which is the summary chart. It’s fairly straightforward, but I still should have covered it.

The chart lists all the players who did damage during the fight or fights whose data is displayed, with the player who did the most damage at the top of the chart. Each player is represented by a bar in the color which commonly represents their class. Overlaid on that bar are the player’s name and the total damage they did during the fight or fights for which data is displayed, followed by parentheses containing a decimal number representing the damage the player did per second while in combat and what percentage of all damage done came from that player. All of the summary charts Recount displays use similar formatting.

That said, you may have noticed that the person who did the second-largest amount of damage in the above screenshot did more damage per second than the person who did the largest amount of damage. This leads me into Recount’s second data report.

The DPS Report

The second data report recount offers us — assuming we’re proceeding from left to right using the navigational arrows at the top of the window — is the DPS report. DPS is an abbreviation for Damage Per Second, and is a measure of ouchies a player causes in a given amount of time.

I don’t know what happened to the image I had for this. I may add it in later, but I don’t think it’s really necessary. The DPS report looks a lot like the Damage Done report, except that the only number displayed on a player’s bar is the DPS number. Players are ranked according to who’s putting out the highest damage over time according to Recount’s calculating formula.

Clicking a player’s name in the list brings up the same detail windows you get from clicking player names on the Damage Done report.

Why DPS is Not Valid as a Sole Measure of a Player’s Eliteness

If the player who throws out the highest DPS dies in the first few seconds of the fight, he can end up being last on the Damage Done chart. (Just for the record, this is a perfect example of why good gear doesn’t make a good player. He who does not live to bring his massive DPS to bear is as useless as bringing a sack of flour to the raid.)

Now, even if all players stay alive for the duration of the fight, you’ll see some discrepancies between the Damage Done and DPS reports. There are two possible reasons for this:

1. The player(s) with higher DPS weren’t attacking as much as the player(s) with the highest Damage Done. There are any number of possible reasons for this. For some fights you have to move around a lot, so a spell caster with few or no instant cast spells ends up being robbed of time in which he could be attacking. In a fight in which the melee fighters have to keep switching targets, they can potentially spend a lot of time out of range of anything to attack. The raid leader might have started the fight while someone was AFK, or the player could have disconnected mid-fight. The player may have had his face handed to the floor in one swell foop after catching the boss’s attention with a poorly timed critical hit. The player may have spent most of their time on crowd-control and/or interrupts. Etcetera.
2. Recount’s DPS formula doesn’t represent all classes (or specs, even) equally. To use an example from my own class, if a fire mage and an arcane mage do the same amount of damage in the same amount of time, the arcane mage will always show up with a higher DPS number. Why? It seems to have to do with the fact that fire magery is more DoT based than arcane magery. We fire mages — if we’re playing right — are always sapping life from our enemies somehow, which inflates our active attack time and lowers our DPS number. I don’t know what similar inaccuracies there are for other classes, but I’m sure they exist.

Coming Up Next

The next report on our list is the Damage Taken report.

Bright Green Gaijin Pants, Post 3-2

My first blog, titled Bright Green Gaijin Pants, was a chronicle of my time as an exchange student in Kushiro, Hokkaido, Japan. I’ve decided to repost its contents on this blog. All reposts from Bright Green Gaijin Pants are available under a blog category tag of that name.

The first blog post of any real worth that I published from Japan was far larger than it had any right to be. It was actually several posts combined and posted at the same time because I didn’t have internet access when I first got to Japan. I will be reposting them seperately, as they were meant to be. They’re still long, though. I’m sorry. I was a noob.

The Hotel

One thing which is just flippin’ awesome is the key card I received. American hotel key cards each have a magnetic strip, which is somehow swiped in the door to unlock it. This key card did not have a magnetic strip. The door did not have a place to swipe it. what it did have was a shiny black dot about an inch in diameter above the door handle. When I moved the key card in front of said dot, the door unlocked.

What’s even cooler is that just inside the door was a little fixture on the wall that said, “Please insert card. When I did, the lights turned on.

 

Best light switch ever.

 

Sweet-tastic. So I plopped my stuff on the bed and looked around. Let’s start with the bathroom.

 

It's not uncommon for Japanese hotels to have communal bathrooms only.

 

It’s a nice bathroom. Removable shower head, like just about every Japanese bathroom has. Sink, toilet — dude, the toilet!

 

The sort of thing you hear about and don't expect to encounter on your first day.

It’s one of the high-tech toilets, complete with bum-washing mechanism. Well, I needed to go to the bathroom anyway. When I sat down, the toilet beeped and the standby indicator started flashing. I’ll tell you what, the idea of a spray of water coming from the toilet to wash your bum is weird, but it works. The water is warm, so there’s no discomfort. The blue setting was aimed too high, but the pink setting (does anyone know what bidet means?) was practically perfect in every way.

OK, toilet aside. Bring on the desk!

What's that handle for?

Surprise!

Also, a flatscreen TV.

The left side is your average hotel desk stuff. Lamp, tissues, memo paper, phone. It’s made much niftier by the lift up mirror with compartment. The right side, however, is a treasure. That’s one sweet TV. The left-hand remote is for that. The right-hand remote is for a heater or something in the corner — I’m not sure what exactly it does, honestly, because the middle remote was for the air conditioning. Hallelujah!

Embedded in the wall over the bed was the clock/alarm clock and some light switches.

He's not the king, but he's still so proper.

There was also a trouser press.

Ironing boards are SO last country.

At this point, I made a choice. A bath (so longed for), or food and a bit of exploration? Well, I needed food. There was a cafe downstairs, and vending machines on all floors, and I wanted a picture of the fountain across the street… bath would make me sleepy, so exploration.

Pictures! This is what I had seen upon first exiting the elevator on my floor.

Just in case you forgot which elevator button you pressed.

And the vending machine on my floor.

Anti-climactic, after all the things you hear/read about Japanese vending machines.

Hmm. Drinks only. Floor 2 is supposed to have a vending room instead of a vending corner. I’ll have to check that out. But first… those fountains!

Reminds me of Slimer.

Pretty awesome. I think the building they (there were actually two of these green fountains) were in front of was another hotel, but I wouldn’t swear by that. I took this next picture of my hotel’s foyer on the way back in:

Step into my hotel, said the Japanese to the Lena.

Both sets of doors slide open; the second set has bars. On the right-hand side of the foyer is an intercom for use between 2:00 and 7:00 for the purpose of obtaining entry. On the left is an umbrella rack.

It wasn't until much later that I realized how awesome it is to have an umbrella rack like this.

It’s a coin-operated, lock-the-umbrella-in-place umbrella rack. One of the foreign exchange students had told me that the thing that struck her as most weird in Alaska is that no one uses umbrellas. I think I’m gonna find out, on the first rainy day I encounter, that I’ll be surprised by how many people have umbrellas, even though I have warning.

The last leg of my jaunt, the second floor vending room.

Yeah... still kinda anti-climactic.

Excellent, there’s food, too. After some deliberation, I decide to grab a random instant noodle bowl — but not before taking a couple of pictures of other things in the room. Like the laundry machines.

In retrospect, I don't think I saw dryers outside of hotels the entire time I was in Japan.

And what is (I think) related to fire safety. I saw very similar fixtures at the Narita and Haneda airports.

The right-hand compartment has a fire extinguisher in it. I believe the lower left part has a fire hose fixture.

So I returned to my room and contemplated my food.

I hoped, since there was no microwave in evidence, that the directions I had no intention of translating stated that I just needed to add hot water. So I added hot water and prepared, otherwise, for a bath. I turned on the TV at this point, too, watching first a movie (which had a character named Benkei — maybe had a connection to the Tale of the Genji?) then a wacky variety show going over some guy’s best pranks, dating back to at least 1980.

I also discovered that I was having an interesting time with the whole slippers thing. In case you are unaware, the Japanese take their shoes off at the door, donning in their place a pair of slippers. These are worn around the house, unless one needs to use the toilet. At that point, one switches into toilet slippers. That way you don’t go tracking things from the bathroom floor into the rest of the house. Pretty ingenious, actually. (If there’s a room with tatami mat floors, you take your slippers off at the entrance and walk in your socks, but this hotel is a modern hotel with no tatami.) The hotel included free slippers for the room, but I kept accidentally wearing them into the bathroom or slipping them off in the middle of the room for no apparent reason. Oops.

I recalled my food when I went into the bathroom and saw it sitting on the counter. It was not so hot anymore, but the noodles were soft and pliable. I looked at the flavor packet. It had two sections. I poured in the contents of the big section. Then I opened the small section and started pouring that on, but O SNAP! It was schechwan stuff. Didn’t put all of that in there.

It’s at this point that I wish to instate the Taste-O-Meter. It works on a scale of 1-5, as follows:

1 = OMFG, get this out of my mouth!
2 = Somewhat untasty, but edible in a pinch.
3 = It’s food.
4 = Hey, this is pretty good stuff.
5 = I think I shall actively seek this out from now on.

Taste-O-Meter!

Random Green Instant Noodle Bowl: 2
It had some sort of bread on top that complimented the flavor nicely and was easy to eat after soaking up some of the water. The noodles were odd; they didn’t even taste like rice noodles in the states do, so I’m not really sure what they were made of. But it was edible, and I was hungry.

After that I tried to go Japanese style and shower, then take a bath… however, I was so drowsy by the end of the shower that I was afraid I’d fall asleep in the bath and drown (though I’d have at least done so in Japan! :D) so I just went to bed. The bed was harder than I’m used to, obviously made to emulate a futon on a floor. Fortunately for me, I like that. It was shortly after 21:00 at this point. I set the alarm for 4:30 and laid down to sleep. Initially I planned to have the TV on all night, but for once the noise was distracting, so I regretfully turned it off.