Mokka mit Schlag

Yesterday afternoon after visiting my accountant (tax time, you know) I stopped over at FIAF for the Tuesday afternoon movie. It usually doesn’t matter a great deal what’s playing. It’s mostly just about practicing French, but boy did this one test me. If I didn’t have another event at 7:30 I might have left early. Apparently Eric Rohmer is not the only nouvelle vague director que je deteste. The poor sound quality in the print we watched didn’t help either. It’s hard enough to follow French without having to strain to hear every word.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way either. At least a third of the audience, most of whom speak much better French than I ever will, had left by the end of the film. That the audience is almost entirely composed of FIAF members who get free admission may contribute to that. Mostly it’s Francophone senior citizens who show up no matter what’s playing. Usually one or two people leave early, but I’ve never seen an exodus like yesterday before.

Still, I can’t help but think there was something more going on that I (and most of the audience) just didn’t get. The Don Quixote theme was apparent, but there were lots of hints of other things. I suspect this may be a deeply symbolic movie, but if you’re not clued into to the symbolism, it’s just flat-out incomprehensible. I’ve googled a little looking for further info, without a lot of success so far. Does anyone understand this picture?

Speakeasy is planning to be acquired by Best Buy sometime next year. Speakeasy has been far from perfect in the 5 years or so I’ve had it (roughly since Northpoint went under). However, it’s usually been adequate, which is more than I can say for most ISPs. That’s why I’ve been willing to pay more for the service. It’s hard to believe simple competence will continue under Best Buy. (Just consider what a Best Buy acquisition did to the Geek Squad.)

Any other suggestions for quality ISP service? I’m currently paying about $120 a month for SpeakEasy. Perhaps I should just combine a couple of different low cost ISPs (e.g. Verizon and Cablevision) along with a hosting package at DreamHost or some such. Probably wouldn’t cost any more and would provide some level of redundancy for the inevitable outages.

So I spend a few hours struggling with Quicken, trying to make it download my mutual fund info. Eventually I fire off an e-mail to tech support and wait. Then when scanning my Inbox tonight to see if they’ve replied yet, I notice that I had the same damn problem last year. It’s Quicken’s fault, and they still haven’t fixed it. Quicken cannot download transactions for single mutual funds. Doesn’t matter what brokerage you use or what the user name and password are or what options you set. Quicken simply cannot download transactions for a single mutual fund account. Full stop.

So here I am manually entering all my mutual fund statements one more time. Word of warning: if you have more than a couple of mutual funds held outside of brokerage accounts, Quicken is not for you. I wonder if Microsoft Money can do this? or GnuCash?

I was fairly impressed with last night’s season finale of Battlestar Galactica. Spoilers after the fold.
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There’s a fascinating article in the L.A. Times today about Why the right goes nuclear over global warming. It’s not your typical piece about global warming so much as it is about the irrational beliefs and attitudes behind the debate. You get the feeling it’s more like high school debate than any sort of rational discourse: the opposing team says “white” so therefore we must say “black”, regardless of what’s true. You contort your beliefs to fit your chosen side rather than the other way around. If you want to support the issue without changing teams, you have to figure out a way to rationalize white as black.

Can someone please explain to me just what the excitement about the Apple TV is all about? Personally this seems like such a crippled useless, product I can’t believe any sane individual would pay $99 for it, much less $299. Is this just the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field at work or is there something I’m missing?

Near as I can tell the AppleTV does nothing but beam videos from my Mac to my TV, except it doesn’t work with any video I actually have on my computer. It only works with videos I purchase from the iTunes music store. Possibly it also works with QuickTime videos from other publishers (I’m not sure about that) but all the AVI files I’ve downloaded? It won’t play a one of them unless maybe I’m willing to crack open the box, void my warranty, and hack it. And even if it would play all the videos I actually own, I still don’t think I could talk myself into paying more than about $49 for it. It’s just a funky network adapter when you get down to it.

If you threw in a DVD player, a TV tuner, and/or a DVR it would get a little better. I’d love an Apple designed settop box that could replace the hideous Scientific Atlanta boxes I have now, but the AppleTV just isn’t that. It’s just one more box next to my TV to do something I don’t have any particualr reason to do. As is, this is like paying $299 for a cable box that plays nothing but pay-per-view. What exactly is the point here?