Backend site upgrade

I have just performed an update of the web site authoring system that I use, called WordPress. You should not really notice anything new on the front end, but if you do see something acting weird, drop me a note.

See when your favorite TV shows are coming back

Television has been quite boring since Christmas due to the Writer’s Guild of America strike. After starting the strike in November, new episodes finished airing around the time of the Christmas break and never came back.

Thankfully, the strike finished in April and the whole television industry will soon be coming back to life with new episodes from your favorite TV shows. To see a full list of the shows that are coming back, along with a number of episodes and air dates for the first ones, check out this page on TVGuide.com.

One thing that you will notice as you go through the list is that studios took the time off to cancel some shows and have decided to post-pone most that had not started yet (like 24) to the fall or next winter.

My personal favorites these days are CSI: NY, The Unit, The Big Bang Theory, How I met Your Mother, 30 Rock. I was very disappointed to see Journeyman not coming back. I felt that the show had really found its rhythm in the last few episodes that aired. I also saw on this list that Bionic Woman was cancelled. No big loss there. It was more filler television than anything else.

Flying through time and space

I flew from Montreal to San Jose in California yesterday to attend a conference organized by one of our partners and visit an office that we have in this area. As I was waiting for my flight in Montreal a little bit before noon, I heard a very interesting computerized announcement from WestJet come over the loud speaker: “WestJet flight XXXX will be boarding at 12:80 am.” A lot of people looked at each other with a very confused look on their face. It’s not April 1st or anything, so some computer was having a really bad day.

The trip to San Jose was quite uneventful, with all flights departing on time, except for a very strange announcement from the flight attendant when we landed: “Welcome to San Diego”. Again, a lot of confused looks and a couple of laughs from the passengers, and the flight attendant did not even correct herself. Given that the two cities are about 740 km apart, we were really hoping that we were in San Jose.

The last funny tidbit of this venture was going to pick up my rental car. The San Jose airport has a consolidated rental car center with a single shuttle line deserving it. After getting on the bus and getting close to the center, they announced that the first stop was for Avis (the company I was using on this trip), Hertz, and shuttles for off-site rental car places! I pity the poor folks who have to get on a second shuttle to get to their car rental. Can’t they just have two different shuttle buses passing my the terminal to save people time?

Like many airports around the US these days, the San Jose airport is expanding. They are building a brand new terminal, which looks like it will cater a lot better to large aircrafts. Coming in on United Airlines on a large plane, we actually had to walk down stairs out of the plane and walk into the terminal. I had not done something like that in a long time. At least the weather was fairly warm.

HD-DVD has folded. Blu Ray is king!

I mentioned a few weeks ago that things looked pretty grim for the HD-DVD camp as Warner decided that it would soon only be releasing its movie in Sony’s Blu Ray format. Well, as of two weeks ago, Toshiba has announced that they were officially dropping out of the High-Definition format war and stopping to produce all HD-DVD players and support for the format. There will still be a few HD-DVD discs coming out over the next few months, but that will be the end of this adventure.

Now, as mentioned before, that does not necessarily mean that you can just run out and pick up a Blu Ray player since most stand-alone players produced today are not going to be compatible with the next version of the BD format, which is usually referred to as BD Profile 2.0. The one player that is a safe bet is the Playstation 3 since it will be upgradeable through a firmware update to support Profile 2.0. There are also starting to be a few stand-alone players that are promoting the fact that you will be able to upgrade them to the new version.

Personally, I am leaning more towards a standalone player than a PS3 for one main reason, the lack of an infrared port on the unit. Its controllers and optional remote control only work via Bluetooth so it is not possible to control it with a universal control such as the Harmony 550 that I have. For a unit that is supposed to become the center of a home theater system, that is quite a way to be closed to other controls and fit inside of a larger environment. I have read a few things about a third-party controller that comes with a USB component that you can jack into the PS3 to get an IR port but I am not sure how well these work. If you’ve tried one of these devices before, drop me a note and let me know how useful they are.

A barrel of fun with Steve Carrell

I just saw a preview for the next Steve Carrell (The Office, 40 year-old virgin) flick, which is a remake of the classic Get Smart TV series, originally created by Mel Brooks. It’s basically about the adventures of a goofy secret agent trying to save the world. Here’s the trailer so you can see what it’s all about.