Month: December 2006

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I really hate DRM. If ever there’s a technology designed to drive customers away from legitimate music, film, and tv downloads, and back to bittorrents, then DRM is it.

I had an infuriating experience over Christmas recently trying to watch a movie I’d downloaded off LoveFilm. Luckily, I hadn’t paid money for the film: it was part of a special free Christmas offer, presumably dreamt up by their marketing team who were labouring under the misapprehension that, having tried the film download service for free, their customers would subsequently think that having been treated to such a wonderfully simple user experience, they’d be prepared to pay for that service in the future…

So, I’d downloaded my film before heading home for Christmas (rather slowly, I might add) and was all set to watch it on Christmas Eve. It started fine: I hooked up my laptop to the TV, connected to the Internet to acquire my licence, and after I’d downloaded an obligatory update to Windows Media Player, we were off. Sure, the picture quality was a little grainy (despite my having opted for the largest, highest quality download), but nothing too noticeable.

But then, foolishly, we decided to stop watching and come back to the end of the film later. I should have known that doing something so unusual and ridiculous as this would prove to be a mistake.

When I tried to start it up again, there was no sound, unless I restarted playback from the start of the film. Attempts to fast forward mostly resulted in the film continuing to run at some random inappropriate speed (with no sound). I decided that watching the first hour again wasn’t really an option, and tried to do something about it, but in retrospect it would have been a lot quicker than what happened next.

“Hmm,” I thought. “I’ve only got Windows Media Player 9. I wonder if upgrading to the latest version will solve the problem?” This was my big mistake. I installed WMP 11 only to find that this somehow invalidated all of my acquired licences, and left me no way to acquire them again. (Helpfully, Microsoft have a knowledgebase article about the problem, which I can’t find right now, that basically says “yeah, it’s a bug. Sorry”). So I “rolled back” to version 9, but this just did a fresh install of WMP 9 leaving me with no licences at all, and trying to play the file now would generate an “Unknown Error”. Hmm. Helpful.

Then, to add further insult, my new install of WMP 9 helpfully informed me that an update was available, and would I like to install it? When I clicked “Yes”, it started installing WMP 11 again. Thanks Microsoft.

After exhausting all possibilities with my laptop, I discovered that we could watch the rest of the film by copying it onto my mum’s computer via an external drive and re-acquiring the licences from there. I was even able to skip to the bit we’d stopped at.

And so, the entire process of getting the film restarted after pausing it took about 2 hours. I’m not sure it was worth it to be honest, and I don’t think anyone else was remotely bothered about seeing the rest of the film by that point, but I couldn’t let the technology beat me.

Thanks Lovefilm, but I think I’ll stick to DVDs from now on. At least my DVD player doesn’t have to connect to the internet to acquire a licence before it will let me play a disc, I’m allowed to pause films whenever I want, and the disc doesn’t “expire” in 24 hours either, (although I’m sure it’s only a matter of time…)

Via Rhodri, Charles Arthur and mytornadohell.livejournal.com, comes this article by Caroline Phillips from last Tuesday’s Evening Standard.

You’ll want to read it in full for the full effect.
You may wish to read it several times.
You may wonder if it is simply a parody.
It is not.

Of course there’s nothing in the slightest bit amusing about losing your home. But this? Well… read it for yourself and see what you think.

These are some of my favourite bits…

My home has always been my sanctuary, a place of exquisite beauty and calm. I read or sit undisturbed on our leather sofa in our family room with its off-white walls, stainless steel and sage-green stone surfaces, and gaze through its wall of sliding glass doors onto our fragrant cream and lavender garden with its climbing roses, ancient apple and pear trees, camellias and jasmine.

The Apocalypse was not all bad. There was something comforting about watching the Salvation Army dispensing tea and sandwiches. Uplifting seeing people in crisis helping one another. And meeting kindly new souls in the street. As for the house, it’s just bricks and mortar. We’re not in a tent in Pakistan or even Brent council’s temporary accomodation. […]

So presumably in future I should expect not just the cheeky girls to be wandering past our house, but Lembit Opik too?

I’ll start composing my haiku now.

So we finally went down to the Screen on Baker Street to see Casino Royale on Saturday night. Yeah, I know, about three weeks after everyone else, but there you go.

And it’s really good, of course, but that’s more than could be said for our fellow viewers. Just like Rob and Al before us (although admittedly they were distracted from rather more highbrow pursuits) our enjoyment was diminished by being in close proximity to the general public.

As soon as the trailers started up, it became clear that the middle-aged couple next to us had confused a full cinema and the 80-odd strangers seated around them for their own living room and DVD player. Easy enough to do, I suppose. They talked loudly throughout the trailers, filling the cinema with their inane chatter (and to give you an idea of the kind of insightful commentary they were providing, here’s a small sample: at the end of the Orange-sponsored “please turn off your phones” ad, which finishes with just the first half of their slogan, “the future’s bright…”, the moron next to us felt that what the entire cinema really needed was for him to loudly complete the line “ha, ha! the future’s orange…”)

But you sort of expect some low-level chatter during the ads, I suppose. “They’ll stop when the film comes on, won’t they?” I said to Sal.

They did not.

And so, I spent the first 10 or so minutes of the film itself–through the whole of the base jumping sequence and beyond–listening to them present evidence of a complete lack of internal monologue with their idiotic verbal outbursts (at one point early on in the film some cards are turned over in a poker game: “ah! two aces!” shouted the lady, apparently in some kind of service to the partially sighted). As time passed, I tried to compose the wittiest and most efficient put down I could, each time vowing that the next time they spoke I would use it, but by the time I’d settled on “Excuse me, I came to watch the film, not listen to you. Could you please be quiet”, and turned to deploy it, Sal had reached breaking point too, and she beat me to it with her own variation.

They were largely quiet from that point on.

You don’t mess with Sal.

After 4 days in San Fran, it was time to move on. It was about a 10 minute walk from our hotel down to the car rental office, where we were due to collect our convertible. All downhill, though, and not via The Tenderloin, so I figured that we’d be fine to walk down there with our bags.

It was only as I rounded the corner to the Dollar car rental office, struggling under the weight of the backpack (honestly–who needs that many pairs of shoes?) that I realised that we were, of course, there to pick up a car, and that it’s just possible that we could have left the bags at the hotel and swung by later to pick them up.

Once a pedestrian…

Our directions to get out of San Francisco and down to the winery where we were spending the night were ridiculously easy–first right, take the ramp onto highway 101, and drive for 200 miles–so after the ease of escaping from San Fran, we opted to mix things up a bit by stopping off in Silicon Valley on the way. Well, as I said to Sal by way of justification, it is where the computers come from, after all. And so we decided to pull off in Palo Alto, allegedly home to Stanford with its garden of Rodin sculptures, and a pretty town centre.

Not that we’d know it–my pathetic efforts at navigating resulted in us missing the exit and spending 20 minutes driving along quiet suburban streets only to end up in the next town, Los Altos. It has no Rodins, and no world-class university, but it’s another sleepy, quaint Silicon Valley town and I’m sure they’re all the same really.

We parked up in what passed for the town centre, our tiny car dwarfed by the SUVs around it. As we wandered in search of somewhere for lunch, a young girl with a clipboard stopped us to ask if we could “spare a minute to stop global warming”. I’m afraid to say that we said no. Sorry everyone.

Back on the road, we made just one more attempt to stop, this time in Salinas, birthplace of Steinbeck, and home, allegedly, to a new multi-million dollar museum dedicated to him. Again, we wouldn’t know, because after driving round for 20 minutes all we found were some suburbs, a lot of spinach, and a strip mall where we bought cokes and crisps in a tiny shop where the assistant was utterly baffled and confused and stared back at us blankly when we asked the question “are there any toilets round here?”

We decided not to stop again.

Now, most wine country tourists in Northern California follow the well-worn path up from San Fran to Napa or Sonoma, but, never ones to follow the crowd, we opted to spend the wine tasting portion of our trip in tiny Paso Robles, staying in a lovely winery/hotel with impossibly friendly staff (even by American standards) and complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres served in the afternoons.

Heading outside to sip our free wine on the terrace, we realised that we may just possibly be bringing down the average age somewhat. Luckily the oldies were friendly enough–“Let’s go talk to those kids!” said one as they moved over to sit near us, ask us if we were on our honeymoon (!) and give us some good advice on which wineries to visit.

Later, not keen to drink and drive, we booked a cab into town for dinner. Correction: we booked the cab into town for dinner. (And it was just as well we realised just how small a place it was before he dropped us off–it turned out he finished at 9pm).

“Are you the ones who came by cab?” asked the waitress as she showed us to our table. Ah. Small towns. Don’t you love em?