Amazon Unbox on Tivo

If you have a Tivo at home, like watching movies, get bored at home occasionally, or are too lazy to drive out to Blockbuster, then this post might interest you.

I read about Amazon's Unbox feature on Tivo earlier this year, but back then we didn't have a Tivo yet, so I couldn't test it out. It's a service which allows you to download movies from Amazon.com onto your Tivo box to own or to rent.

Thanks to a friend who works at Tivo and my constant nagging to Jean, we finally gave up on Dish Network and switched to Tivo HD a few months back. Oh yeah, with lifetime service too!

We finally ran out of things to do at home one day. You can only clean so much, and it was too cold to go out that night. So as I surfed on my Tivo menu, we noticed the download movie feature. They happened to have a special for $1.99 rental on a movie which Jean wanted to see for a while, "Waitress".

The setup was fairly simple, easy enough that Jean did it while I was cooking! She entered our Amazon.com account username and password onto Tivo, selected "Waitress" to rent for $1.99. Then as a final setp, we had to log onto Amazon.com to do a one time confirmation. Tivo then started the download. It took about 2 hours. But about half way through the download, it allowed us to start watching, so that was pretty cool.

When you rent a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it. And once you start, you have 24 hours to finish the movie before it is removed from your Tivo. As for selecting movies, you can do this either on your TV via Tivo or on your computer on Amazon.com's Unbox section.

Have you tried Unbox before? Let me know if there are other cool features I can try out. Now I gotta go and watch the other movie we downloaded last night for just $0.99, "Ocean Thirteen".

27 Dresses

We rarely watch movies. When we do, we are pretty frugal and usually use the "silver passes" which only allow movies 2 weeks after opening. So it was quite a splurge for us to go see a new movie, let alone paid full prices for it!
Now, if you are a movie buff or a serious Grey's Anatomy fan, you might be asking: "Izzy's new movie doesn't come out until Jan 2008, how did you guys watch it?" Well, it appears you are correct. According to the 27 Dresses homepage, it doesn't comes out until Jan 11 2008.

Well, we got lucky and saw an ad in SJ Mercury this morning of "special advanced preview" at 4 Bay Area theaters, so we thought it would be fun to go out and see it.
I know we don't see lots of movies, but it's been a while since we've seen a theater this packed. Granted it was mostly filled with high school girls, but I didn't feel too out of place. Not exactly a must-see theater movie, but we enjoyed it. It's your regular "chick flick". Yes, I dragged Jean to come along. It's a fun movie! :-)

I've come to realize, for comedies like these, it's half the fun to laugh like mad with people around you in the theater, so go see Izzy.

OLPC pics and a video

Finally.... the green little baby came!

We'll take it around in coming days to Starbucks, around the house, to Coffee Society in Cupertino and let ya all know how it is.

But first up, some pictures and a video.

OLPC on MBP, size comparison.
Of course the first site I visited...
See rest of the 9 pictures here. And a 3 minute video we did.

Oh and in case you haven't even heard of OLPC, maybe you seen this guy from Hero?

Charlie's sister

Alright, a non Twitter related post per reader request. You know who you are... :-)

This is a post about how web 2.0 and social network got Charlie to connect with his long lost sister. Yeah, Charlie, our half Lab, half Chow Chow.

You might be aware, or not, so I'll give you the full scoop. Back in 2004, we bought 2 dogs on Craigslist (where one can buy anything, right? and sell.. you'll see below). We originally just wanted one, but once we visited Charlie's mom and her litter, we couldn't resist and bought two! Tell me you can't resist looking at these puppies.At price of only $60/each, what can go wrong, right? They were no doubt a ton of fun, but we soon realized that with 2 puppies, they really just want to play with each other and don't really care about us. Friends also told us that Labs do just fine on their own and might be better for us to get rid of one. We were finally confirmed when they both had to get neutered/spayed and Daisy had to stay an extra night at the Humane Society, poor girl. Charlie was home alone and for the first time since we had them, we had peace and quiet in the house and Charlie seems perfectly fine!

The two of them got along just fine most of the time...
With rare exception... toys are important when you are only weeks old!So it was a tough decision to figure out which one to "give up". We finally decided on keeping the dumber one, a.k.a Charlie. Even for the few months with us, it was evident that Daisy is more sly. She quickly adapted to our system and learned different ways to get around "obstacles" while Charlie is always the one stuck behind wondering "how did she get out beyond the gate blocking the room?"

It was tough and sad at week #20 to finally let go of this cute girl.
We went back to, where else, Craigslist, to start looking for a new owner for Daisy. We were soon contacted by a nice couple from Palo Alto and sold her for a little over $100, including all the shots she got. Charlie got stuck with us, while Daisy got upgraded to nicer neighborhood and is living large.

A year after we last saw Daisy, her new owners were so nice and send us pictures of Millie (new name) in mid-2005.

Forward 2 years. Here's the best part! We found Millie on Facebook's Dogbook application. This can happen *only* in Sillicon Valley! So if you are on Facebook, install Dogbook, add a pet or not, and come pet Charlie here.
His sister Millie's profile.

Twitter keywoards straight from @biz

I frequently visit the Twitter forum and occasionally answer threads when I know the answer. Today @peterdawson started this question:
is there a list of words that are systems driven ? e.g by typing in "Stats" , twitter responds displaying followers /following stats !! thas kewl, but there must be more keywords correct ?? :)-

@biz (one of the founders of Twitter) answered us, here's the useful list in case you use Twitter too. I learned about "get" today, cool!

"invite 415-555-1212 john" sends a text invite to john
"follow username" you will get phone updates from this person
"on" enables twitter updates
"get" gets recent updates from all your friends
"get username" gets this person's last update
"nudge username" encourages this person to update
"leave username" disables updates from this person
"off" disables twitter updates
"stats" a few statistics about your Twitter account
"help" sends back a list of twitter lingo commands
"followers" sends back a list of your followers
"d username message" sends a direct message to this person
"whois username" for information about a particular person
"track keyword" to start tracking a keyword
"untrack keyword" to stop tracking a keyword
"tracks" returns a list of keywords you are tracking

BTW: I'm writing this blog from YAB Flock, testing out yet another browser.

Update: The "get" and "followers" have been taken out from above as peterdawson and myself discovered.

• "followers" returned "We're no longer supporting this command. Soon it will be received as an update."
• "get" returned "Can't find that person. Did you misspell the name?"
  

Blogged with Flock

Tis the weekend of holiday parties

Friday night was a holiday/game/white-elephant-gift night, lots of fun, met new people and got to explore the East Bay briefly. Such a small world, one of Kimmy's coworkers from Google land was from my high school and later that evening we found out another girl was also from Monta Vista High. Incidentally, the next morning, we found M.V. High on the front page on SJ Mercury News, for a not so good reason.

I thought this was a pretty funny white elephant gift from the night. Big-a** remote.
We got 2 pretty good gifts ourselves. One is a "box of chocolate" w/ a certain DVD in it :-)
The other is the "2008 Dogs of Google" calendar which features both of the hosts' dogs. Toby at the front and Max as Mr. Feb. We've already put up the calendar at home, hope Charlie won't get jealous!
See other 17 pictures from Friday night on Flickr or as a slideshow. And these are from the hosts.


..... Forward about 24 hours .....


On Saturday night, it was hot pot gathering, appropriate for a cold night. Not sure how the conversations during the night turned to Twitter and Second Life.

Before you know it, Jeff busted out the projector and they played with my character "Thomas Li" in SL for a while. Until Shin-I officially declared "I just don't get this thing..." Yeah, others there kinda agree as well.

Here are the other 12 photos or as slide show.
Ah, my character turned into pink-faced-vampire looking "Thomas Li"
Happy holidays everyone!

Monta Vista High School is famous

Thanks to @kimbalina and @bertrandrich for the holiday/game party on Friday night. Two of their friends went to the same high school I did in Cupertino, small world.
Woke up on Saturday morning and saw Monta Vista High School of Cupertino on the front page of SJ Mercury News. Not something to be proud of for the school, but hey, it made the front page news.

"Students hack Monta Vista High's computer system"

Twitter 101

Friends often ask me what Twitter is or why my Facebook status starts with "is twittering..." So I thought I'd write a Twitter 101 to explain what it is and some of its features.

If you have other questions after reading this, you can post them to the official Twitter forum where I actively answer questions.


Let's start from the beginning: "What is Twitter?"
Twitter is what I call "micro-blogging". You tell the world what you are doing in 140 or less characters. You can do this via the web interface, SMS on your phone or IMs i.e. Google Talk.

The best analogy I can think of for Twitter is like having conversations with your friends over dinner. Everyone at the table are friends who 'follow' each other. As friends 'tweet', you can listen in various conversations. But as you can imagine, with lots of friends talking at the same time it can get a bit noisy.

That's where the @ comes in. Using @username is like talking to someone directly (e.g. "@thomashan how is your day?"). This tweet is still public for all to see.

If you want to have a private conversation under the table, you can DM (direct message) them and then only they would get that tweet, via email, SMS or IM.

So how do I setup Twitter?
Go to Twitter.com and register, then you can start twittering immediately via the web.
Now what? I'm at the table by myself, who do I talk to?
Like any other Web 2.0 social sites, Twitter is not very interesting if you are at the table and talking to yourself, unless you enjoy that. So the next step is to find some people to follow. Twitter offers a way to look through your email contacts (Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN & Gmail).

Click on the "Find and Follow" link on top of the page to have Twitter comb through your contacts and see if anyone you know is already on Twitter, you'd be surprised!If that doesn't turn up anyone you know. There are a few other options. You can invite new people by sending them email. You can use the search feature (e.g. search for "Cupertino"). Or you can simply look around to see who others are following and follow those interesting people. Start from a person's profile and click on the 'Following' link to see the people they follow.
If you still can't find anyone, here are a few that might interest you.

• CNN
• Anderson Cooper of CNN (as Steve pointed it out below, this is a parody, as if he really has time to Twitter)
  
• Barack Obama, yeah, the presidential candidate
• John Edwards is also on
  
• One Laptop Per Child (OPLC)
• LAFD (Los Angeles Fire Department)
• I wrote Cupertino Emergency Services and Fire Department and got them to start an account, they're still testing it, but it's here
• If you live in the Bay Area and want to know what that shake was before anyone, here's Bay Area Earthquakes
• ICHC
  
• Lunch 2.0
  

Archive? Replies? Recent? Direct Messages, huh?
On the Twitter homepage, you'll see 3 tabs (see image below).

• Archives shows your own tweets.
• Replies shows tweets from others when they talk to you using the @ notation. E.g. "@thomashan how is your day?" You can @ anyone regardless if they follow you or not.
  
• Recent shows tweets from all the people you follow.
  

Earlier, I talked about private message under the table via direct message. This can be done in several ways. You can type directly into the "What are you doing", e.g. "d thomashan want to meet up tonight?" Or you can go to the Direct Messages page by clicking on the "Direct Messages" on the right navigation section. See what the Direct Messages page looks like below. You can select the person you want to direct message to via the drop-down and then simply type in the message, no need to append it with "d thomashan". Note that you can only direct message someone if they're following you as well.
Setup SMS and Instant Message (IM)
IMHO, one of the most powerful features about Twitter is its multiple interfaces. You can setup both your phone for SMS and your IM in similar way. Go to Settings -> Phone & IM.
When you enter your phone number, Twitter will send your phone a code which you'll send back to 40404 to confirm. Similar on the IM side, you'll add twitter@twitter.com as you a new friend and send the confirmation code to it to set it up.

Twitter is clever enough to only send you notifications either via SMS or IM, but not both. You can configure that on the web under Notifications section the main page orr you can send the word "on" to SMS (40404) or IM (twitter@twitter.com) to turn on that particular device. Under Settings -> Notices, there are many configurations including your sleep time, so you don't get notifications during those hours.Follow vs. Notification?
After you follow someone, you'll see that you also have the option to receive Notification. If you have a device setup (last section), then these friends' tweets will go to that device if you have it turned on. So while you may follow say 20 people, you might only turn on notification for your closest friends so you don't get bombarded with SMS or IM all the day. For the rest of the people you follow, you can just catch up on their tweets on the web.
So that's the basics of Twitter. There are other topics we can talk about, like Windows/Mac/iPhone clients, tracking features, etc. But we'll save that for another time.

Hope this has been helpful.

Game night turned into all-nighter

Whew, we're getting too old for these... but it was lots of fun!

We had a game night on Saturday and the last of the peeps left at 5:30AM, wonder if they did go and find dim-sum somewhere in Cupertino? :-)

Met lots of new people and we played all kinds of games throughout the night. At one point, we had 2 tables of Mah-Jong and a game of Sequence, I think even the Wii was going on during that time. By the end of the night... err... I mean early morning, we had played Wii, Sequence, Mah-Jong, Cranium, blackjack, Texas Hold'em, Pai Gow and poker.

Below are a few pictures from the night. Shiu will have to provide us with the rest of the pictures.

Update: Thanks to Shiu, here are the pictures from his camera that I stole and put up on my Flickr account, see here for all 25 pictures. Head over there to see all the Cranium "art" that came out of the night...

Eating....

Games.
Our cooking skills are not up to feeding 20+ people yet or ever, so we had to resort to pizza this time. Thanks to everyone for all the beers (we had lots), wines, sweets and even 3 home-made cakes!

Newsweek error

Along with subscribing to old-school newspaper (yes, the ones printed with ink that you hold in hands), I also subscribe to magazines like Newsweek and Time.

Below is what I read and scanned in the Dec 3 2007 issues of Newsweek. Now, I know we're all mesmerized by the S63, but notice anything wrong below?

...

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...

...

...

...

...

...

hint: is this a game of connect the picture with the text?

Week of new features

Feels like Christmas already, lots of new features this week. Gmail, Twitter and Flickr.

Twitter's @ feature
One of the most common problems I hear on Twitter is "how do I know when someone I don't follow @ me". One solution is to 'track' your own username (e.g. track thomashan). But those messages would still only come to you via SMS or IM and only during non-sleep hours.

Ho ho ho, Twitter introduced a new feature this week, now you won't miss a beat, that's if Twitter itself doesn't miss a beat *jab* *jab*


Gmail's label coloring
If you use label in Gmail to organize all your bacns, you can now do this in color!

Google Talk integrates with AIM
You see what I see?

Flickr adds editing
Edit your photos right on your browser in Flickr/Picnik. While this is nothing new, there are lots of other edit-photo-on-the-brower 2.0 apps, this is a good integration for Flickr. I used it to crop all these screen shots for this blog entry, seem to work fine.

First time you use it, you'll be promoted a window to 'enable Picnik' within Flickr.

Then you can use the 'Edit Photo' button on top of your photos which takes you to a screen that looks like this...

Bay Area in its own bubble

A conversation I had recently with someone at an event. The name below has been changed for privacy :-)

I: "So you must be looking forward to the '08 election given that you work at XYZ?"

Bob: "Oh... No, I don't really follow politics."

I: "Oh OK, yeah, I'm not that into politics either..."
(Even though I've been trying to follow some of it, but didn't want to get too much into it with this guy)

Bob: "So our governor, Arnold, he is a Republican right?"

I: "Yeah, he is a Republican."

Bob: "And Bush, the president, he is Republican?"

I: (Trying to hold a straight face) "Yeah...."

Now before I go any further, you are probably thinking: "he's probably of another nationality", "maybe he is too young", "he plays WOW all day long.", etc.

But from what I know of him in the short period, this individual is in high-tech, went to a reputable university, not a FOB, he was even born in the Valley!

I mean, I don't like to judge people, and Jean (my wife) and I really aren't into politics much either. But seriously?!