Category: streaming video

Monday, 2 June 2014

09:46 – We started watching series 7 of Heartland last night, which we’ll binge-watch over the next few days. Once we finish that, I’ll go back and start watching series 1 again. I figure I’ll have time to make it through all seven series maybe two or three more times before series 8 finishes broadcasting next May. At seven years and 122 episodes, Heartland is already the longest-running one-hour drama ever on Canadian TV. With the team they have, it might be good for another ten or twenty seasons, assuming that Amber Marshall Turner is willing to stick around.

When we started watching Heartland last night, Barbara said I should order the official series 7 DVD set as a birthday present for myself. I told her I would have done that already, but that set won’t be available until this autumn. I suggested that as an alternative, Barbara should tolerate me buying whatever I want when we visit the LDS store later this month. She agreed–she has no problem storing food–but asked me please to stock up only on stuff that we actually eat. She said she doesn’t want a bunch of wheat or pinto beans stored. That’s fine with me. I intend to store a lot of canned goods, with reasonable amounts of dry goods like flour, sugar, rice, dry milk, pasta, cocoa mix, spices, and so on.


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Sunday, 4 May 2014

09:36 – Barbara finished over at her mom’s apartment yesterday. She gave her keys to Frances, who still has a few things to pick up today.

Barbara and I will watch the final two episodes of The Shield tonight. It’s an excellent series, albeit grim. In tone, it reminds me of Rescue Me, another excellent series. From what I know of inner-city policing, it seems realistic, with one exception. Over and over again, they have cops entering a dark threat environment with pistols drawn and flashlights on. But they all hold the two very close together, with crossed wrists, putting the pistol and flashlight only inches apart and directly in front of the cop’s head and chest. Does LA really teach its cops to do that? If so, that’s nuts. You should keep the flashlight as far from your head and body as possible, held out at arm’s length. If a bad guy shoots, he’s going to shoot at the light nearly every time. Just as the cop will return fire by aiming just below the muzzle flash of the bad guy’s gun.


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Saturday, 5 April 2014

10:13 – Barbara is out doing the first major yard work of the season. I’m working on taxes.

CBC announced yesterday that there will be a season 8 of Heartland. Shooting starts next month, so Heather Conkie and the rest of her team must already be working madly on scripts. CBC also renewed another of its flagship series, Murdoch Mysteries, for an eighth season. Barbara and I have already watched the first five series on Amazon streaming, which is all they have available. Series six released on DVD last autumn, so I suspect it should be available soon on Amazon streaming. It’ll be interesting to see the first batch of episodes that were produced under the aegis of CBC after Rogers Media canceled it at the end of series five and CBC picked it up. Given the money crunch at CBC, I was a bit surprised that they elected to renew Murdoch Mysteries. As a period drama set around the turn of the 20th century, it must be very expensive to produce.

Speaking of production costs for Canadian TV series, we were discussing this recently in the comments. My position is that Canadian series pay much, much lower salaries to the actors. And that was confirmed by an interview I read recently with Hélène Joy, who was one of the lead characters in earlier seasons of Murdoch Mysteries. The interview took place four years ago, and she mentioned that her annual income had finally made it into six figures. And even with the leading role in Murdoch Mysteries, she was still working a side job of renovating houses for resale.


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Thursday, 3 April 2014

09:00 – Amazon’s new video streaming box looks interesting. If I hadn’t just bought a Roku 3, I’d probably buy the Amazon Fire TV instead. In video streaming, the Roku 3 is the box to beat, and Amazon’s box is serious competition for the Roku, especially for those who want support for casual gaming. We don’t, so I’m perfectly content with the Roku 3.

I’m going to work on taxes today. Grrrrr.


10:44 – One of the aggravating things about working from home is that many/most chemical vendors won’t ship to residential addresses. I run into this problem frequently. A couple of months ago, for example, I was trying to order three kilos of bacteriological-grade agar from one vendor. They refused to ship to me because the ship-to address was residential. Geez, the stuff is edible. It’s not like I could use it to take down a building or something.

Fortunately, some vendors are reasonable about it. I just realized that I was very low on methylene blue, so I went over to p212121.com to order 250 grams. This is one of those sites that I can never get to accept my login credentials, so I called them to place the order. He warned me that there might be a problem because my ship-to address was residential, but acknowledged that they’d shipped other stuff to me and that methylene blue shouldn’t be a problem. Indeed, about 45 seconds after I finished the phone order I got an email confirmation that my order had been accepted and will ship immediately.

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Friday, 28 March 2014

11:15 – Among other things today, I’m trying to get purchase orders done for a lot of stuff we buy in bulk–cases of beakers, graduated cylinders, test tube brushes and clamps, microscope slides and cover slips, and so on. It’s still only March, but I want to get enough component inventory to allow us to start building finished-goods inventory in serious numbers in time for the summer.

We just finished season 3 of The Shield on Amazon streaming, and started Life Unexpected on Netflix streaming. It seems we always have one gritty, violent series in progress along with a “teen drama”. Both of these are no longer being made, which is an advantage because Barbara and I have both come to prefer binge-watching series from start to finish. We have a few in our queue that are still being made and that we’ve watched all available episodes of, but I really prefer not to do that. For example, we’ve watched the first two seasons of Reven8e and are waiting for season three to become available. The problem with doing it that way is that we can never remember what’s happened in earlier seasons. It feels like we should go back and re-watch all the older stuff before we start the new season, and I don’t want to waste time doing that when I could be watching Heartland reruns instead.


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Monday, 10 March 2014

09:53 – Barbara filled and labeled close to a thousand vials yesterday, with sulfadimethoxine, penicillin G potassium, activated charcoal, and so on. I even did a few myself. Our goal is to head into the busy summer and autumn months with plenty of component inventory on hand.

Barbara’s sister’s birthday is today. She’s meeting Frances and their mom for dinner. I’ll have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and watch Heartland reruns. I’ll finish season four today on Netflix streaming and probably get started on season five on DVD. CBC is broadcasting the final six episodes of season seven over the next six weeks, which gives me those six weeks to get through the 36 episodes of seasons five and six before we burn season seven to disc and start watching it. The season seven DVD set will probably be released in September or thereabouts. I just checked Amazon.ca to see if it was available for pre-order. Not yet. And still no word on whether there’ll be a season eight. I can’t imagine that there won’t be, but CBC plays things pretty close to their vest. If CBC does decide not to renew, I plan to contact the series producers to suggest getting a Kickstarter project going to crowd-fund season eight. I suspect the series isn’t all that expensive to produce.


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Sunday, 9 March 2014

12:12 – We just finished cutting up branches that had fallen during the ice storm the other day from a large pine in our backyard. While doing that, I noticed that our Sven saw needs a new blade. Fortunately, Barbara had two 24″ bow saws, which worked fine.

Barbara will work on labeling and filling containers this afternoon while she watches her shows (the ones I can’t stand, such as Private Practice–and anything else from Shonda Rhimes– Flashpoint, and so on. I’ve noticed that all of them have a lot of shouting to make up for the fact that the scripts suck). And I just noticed something about the medical drama series Off the Map. I expected to like it because it starred Caroline Dhavernas, another Canadian actress whom I adore, and who starred in the short-lived series Wonderfalls. Unfortunately, Off the Map was simply terrible. There aren’t words to convey how bad it was. And I just noticed that you-know-who was involved in it. Shonda Rhimes. Everything she touches turns to shit.


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Sunday, 2 March 2014

09:30 – The freezing drizzle didn’t show up yesterday, although it was cold with a stiff breeze. Today is to be sunny with the high around 70F (21C). Tomorrow, the forecast calls for snow or freezing rain and a low of 18F (-8C).

Barbara likes The Shield. The main character is a corrupt cop who’s utterly ruthless. He’s also likeable, a genuinely nice guy who’s a good family man and takes care of his crew and the civilians he’s responsible for. Like many cops, he divides the world into cops, civilians, and scumbags. I finally figured out who the character reminds me of. Tony Soprano. A great friend, but a fearsome enemy.


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Thursday, 27 February 2014

09:06 – With two days left in the month, we’re only about $200 short of doubling revenues over last February. This time of year, things are pretty slow and sporadic. We’ll probably sell two or three more kits over the next couple days, but it could be five or eight kits or it could be none. It makes no real difference. Overall, we’re doing twice the business YTD that we did last year. If that holds up all year we’ll have a very good year, assuming we can keep up with demand.

Having finished all three seasons of The Borgias on Netflix streaming, I was looking around for something to replace it in the queue. Years ago, I’d added The Shield to our Netflix DVD wait list. At the time, they didn’t have it on DVD, let alone streaming. They now have it on DVD but still not streaming. Amazon Prime, however, does have all seasons available for free streaming, so we started watching it last night. So far, it seems to be a typical FX series, which is to say top-notch. A lot of the actors and crew associated with it later did series like Justified and Sons of Anarchy. We’re also about halfway through Friday Night Lights, which is similar to but not quite as good as the later One Tree Hill.


13:09 – The USPS Click-and-Ship website is still screwed up. Sometimes, Chrome works but Firefox doesn’t. Other times, it’s the reverse. But this morning I had to use both. Chrome would let me enter the address information and other data, but would not accept payment so that I could generate the postage label. Firefox wouldn’t allow me to enter the address and other information, but it would let me pay for labels already in my cart. So I ended up having to use both browsers just to get a label printed. Then a little while ago I was attempting to do another postage label. Chrome wouldn’t let me enter the address information. I crossed my fingers, fired up Firefox, and used it to enter the address information. When I got to the part where I pay and generate the label I figured Firefox would give me the old “this payment method declined” error message, but it actually accepted payment and let me print the label. This is getting ridiculous.

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