Halloween?!?

Before the weekend started, I saw signage on one of those shut-down big-box stores for the annual infestation of seasonal costume/accessory shops... but I didn't think too much about it, since they still had "hiring now" signs up, and it could easily be a few weeks before they have everything in place to do the whole Halloween shtick. Tonight, I was walking through the aisles at my local supermarket, and... there's the Halloween candy, etc. That's over 2 months before the event, which, for most people I know, consists of making sure they have some candy on-hand to dole out to costumed children. Holiday creep just blew past the ludicrous zone right into pathetic.

The stuff of dreams, dark forces... and folding?

I had a dream last night... and no, I'm not going to go on in great detail about it. Suffice it to say that it was well on the rational/logical/cause-and-effect end of the spectrum (as dreams go)... but it illustrated how, if "dark powers" exist, they could get evil-loner-types to willingly gather, and willingly sign on for, group activities. Of course, the answer's obvious: you pay/bribe them to do so.

However, among all the makes-good-sense (given the setting) pieces, there was one odd bit... the recruiter admits to the new recruit that the only reason he's involved in this transaction is because the dark powers in question will, once the deed is done, teach him "a spell of folding AND a spell of unfolding", which, by his tone of voice, he considered to be quite the deal. Now, it would be easy enough to say "it's just a dream, you should expect LOTS of strange things"... but I have to wonder, what kind of folding/unfolding would be so appealing to someone, in spell form or otherwise, that they would take great risks to acquire it?

PS3 price drop

To your right, note the new "I spend entirely too much time playing games" tracker... how thoughtful of Sony to release that little toy at the same time they knocked $100 of the price of a PS3. If you've been waiting to buy a PS3, now's a good time to go... unless, of course, you want the new, slimmed-down version they're putting out shortly, with a bigger hard drive and the same price. But where's the fun in waiting, hey? :)

Subscription TV via Internet - one step closer

I'm sure some of you must be getting sick of my "Roku box is the best toy EVAR" posts, but this could be a pretty significant milestone. MLB.com has a subscription service that lets you watch major-league baseball games live, in HD, over the 'net, for about $35/year... and now it's available on the Roku box (link).

So, call it about $5/month for the "active" time of the year for baseball... depending on how much in the way of commercials get added to your video feed (I'd like to believe none, but I know better), it's perhaps a little steep. But, if you can build a system to handle the traffic at that price for multiple, simultaneous feeds of real-time sports data, I'm thinking that it wouldn't be too hard to stream live broadcast of your favorite currently-only-available-by-cable-or-satellite TV channels at a similar price point per channel... and, while I won't shell out $50 a month (give or take) for 100+ channels of stuff I will never watch, there are at least a few channels I could see paying a few bucks a month to watch.

Das Barbecü

Just got back from a Seattle trip... always good to get away from your own "real life" every once in a while, especially if you can get together with friends and/or family. While there, I caught an odd little musical piece called Das Barbecü... think of it as a hefty chunk of Wagner's Ring cycle, distilled down to about 2 1/2 hours, translated to Texas, and mostly played for laughs. I certainly had a good time with it... any Seattle-ites or Seattle-bound people are encouraged to give it a go. Here's a link to the current production.