Then, my adventure began..

I went to my closest Whitcoulls store which happens to be the one in Pakuranga. After having spent a a few minutes trying to locate their Blu-ray collection I approached a staff member, the following conversation ensued.

ME: Hi, where can I find your Blu-ray movies?
HER: Err, what red?
ME: Blu-ray, you know like DVD’s
HER: I’ll have to check, come with me

I follow her to the terminal, I can see her type in “Blue Red” in the title search

ME: It’s not a DVD title, I’m looking for the movies you have on Blu-ray disc.

She starts another search, with the exact same string “Blue Red” this time using a different field

ME: Its not spelt like that, its Blu-ray
HER: Oh, sorry, (This type types in “Blue Ray”)
ME: The Blu is spelt “B L U” not blue, and its Blu hyphen ray.

She types in “Blu:ray”

ME: umm, I said “B L U hyphen R A Y”

She types in “Blu;ray”

ME: umm, it’s B L U dash R A Y

This time she types in Blu-ray and finally seem to have found a result, takes me to the stationary section (I’ve lost any hope of them actually having any Blu-ray discs at all at this stage) and points at a Blu-ray recordable disc. I once again try to explain to her that I’m looking for Blu-ray movies

ME: These aren’t what I’m looking for. I’m looking for movies in Blu-ray format, you know, we had VHS, then we had DVD now we have Blu-ray, its a format, not a particular movie, there are a lot of movies in Blu-ray.

HER: Oh you mean like multiple movie collections? well we have these (points at a triple pack of Lindsey Lohan movies or some such)
ME: Umm, thanks for your help I’ll have a look around myself.

At this point I walk out of the store pretty disgusted that a store would advertise a special on stock they clearly didn’t have. I can’t blame the sales person for her lack of knowledge but I do find it shocking that Whitcoulls would not train their staff on the basic skills required to do their job, even worse that they would blatantly advertise something they just don’t seem to have, wasting both my time and petrol in the process.

The best part about this implementation is that all you need is a IR LED and a Wii remote. Check out the video for a cool demonstration.

Checkout his website for more details and the software to try this out yourself. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

While I was away in Australia I managed to get hold of a DVB-T receiver (ASUS MyCinema-U3000 Mini) that I was hoping to configure and test back in Auckland. Unfortunately the process wasn’t simple, most ‘out of the box’ software products fail to acknowledge the presence of a DVB-T transmissions over here and don’t include the required configuration parameters.

I spent ages trying to get everything working and finally came across this blog post on Geekzone.

Although the post claimed that older versions of DVBViewer would have issues with sound, I managed to decode the AC3 audio streams for TV1 and TV2 without any problems. However the audio for TV3, TV6, TV7, Maori and Parliament TV did not work.

Rest Area, originally uploaded by Sajeewa.

Sometimes you are reminded how beautiful New Zealand really is. Last weekend a bunch of us decided to go for a drive to Gisborne, taking the scenic SH-35 route. This was a rest area by the side of SH-2 on the way from Tauranga.

I refused to believe it was a problem with the shoe. It had cost an much as 2 months worth of fuel, and the shiny “famous” brand name on the side told me it had to be a quality product. But I was wrong, it was the shoe, and It has become annoying.

It was annoying when it announced my presence to the whole world, it was annoying when I couldn’t sneak up on my workmates without giving them a fair warning and it was annoying that a product meant to last for a significant amount of time started giving trouble after just 2 months.

Unfortunately I’m old enough to remember when quality mattered. When certain brands could be trusted to produce high quality products, regardless of the cost. If you were willing to spend the money, you were assured of the build quality. It was a price to pay for peace of mind. I wonder how much of that is true these days. Having a higher price seem to be purely driven by the need to be exclusive, “make it cheap and make as much money as possible” seem to be the norm.

I wonder if a day will come where Ferraris are mass produced in a factory in East Asia and still sold for a quarter of a million dollars.