Summer drips away like softened mint chocolate chip down the inverted incline of a waffle cone

So how has summer been working for you? After being scorched and burned last year, the dam area has just finished draining after a really wet July. I feel like it's time for another bullet-point post to recap random stuff.

• Pittsburgh-based Cello Fury made a tour stop in Houston at the end of July and we got to enjoy a free performance at Market Squre. A trio of cellists backed by a drummer, Cello Fury's expressive sound spans that gap between chamber music and Headbangers Ball that you didn't even ask to be bridged. Their YouTube channel is well worth the visit.
• Last weekend the summer Olympics left us for another four years. Requiring a cable or satellite TV subscription turned the online offerings into a non-starter for me, and made NBC look like the old legacy media company that I guess they are. So among the garbage I had to scrap for the worthwhile moments on the network broadcast -- especially Meb Kefleghizi's fourth-place finish in the men's marathon. My gut feeling told me that he was the USA's best shot at a medal, and I was correct.
• We took a tour of the Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting. As a contributing member of KUHF, I finally got to see exactly where my dollars go, including the studio where The Front Row is recorded and the workday desks of news staffers like Carrie Feibel.. Our guide was Eric Ladau, whose voice I've heard on evening traffic reports. 
• My running mileage is on the upswing. This morning I hung on pretty well during our group run of five miles. The Aramco half is now less than five months away.
• I've been surprised that site traffic on Houston Running Calendar has merely leveled off during the summer when I thought it would nosedive. On August 1, the Facebook "fanpage" reached 500 Likes, which I think is a happy metric for something that isn't being actively marketed; people are searching for this stuff.
• My "must-see TV" right now is Breaking Bad. The conclusion of season 4 was so decisive that it could have easily served as a series finale. But I suppose the fans now get one last season to see exactly where "ever after" takes the characters. As counterweights to that heavy drama I've discovered Portlandia and The Guild on Netflix; both are comedy gold.

Now, if you'll pardon me, there's a carton of Breyers waiting for me in the freezer....

Fall opens with a bloom of bullet points

• There's no doubt now; autumn is firmly in gear. The air is cooling. The calendar has flipped to October. Pumpkins and (artificial) Christmas trees are prominently on display at the local plant nursery.
  
• I've updated my running calendar blog with a lot of events coming up in October and November, many of which seem to be new -- at least to me. H-Town runners, have fun scheduling your weekends.
• I've already signed up for the Celiac Run and the Energy Capital Run; it's always nice to be able to support races that are in easy reach of home. I'm still far, far off my peak speed from the spring. Anything below a 40-minute 5K will be acceptable right now.
• Spearmint has earned my respect. A plant which I thought had been neglected to death during the brutal summer heat on my patio has sprouted fresh leaves as fall has started. I'm rewarding it with a larger container that won't be so prone to drying out.
• My crop of Swiss chard was totally overrun by some sort of leaf miner bugs that ripped holes in the foliage, then stripped them clean. It only took a week. The devastation was so complete that the barren stems that remained reminded me of those pictures of the timberlands surrounding Mount Saint Helens after the mountain blew up. After raising the white flag, I've planted nasturtium and cilantro seeds in those containers instead. Maybe they'll be less appetizing to pests.
• Speaking of seeding, fall is supposed to be the proper time to sow wildflowers for next spring's bloom. Within the view from my patio, there is a patch of earth just outside the apartment complex that is just growing some very ordinary weeds at the moment. I am having thoughts of doing something to help it become more interesting in the future....
• I'm glad to see a new season of The Amazing Race. I'm still hoping that the producers will shed the manufactured drama that infects just about all "reality TV" and revert back to a focus on team logistics and problem solving that brought me in as a viewer in the first place. It's a faint hope, to be sure.
• The CR-V clocked its 175,000th mile this week. I'm looking forward to posting a long-long-term test drive report in a few months once she hits her 10th birthday. It's been a pretty good ride so far.

Review: Roku Digital Video Player

YouTube proved that the masses were ready for Internet video. Every hour millions of people visit that site for a song, an informative message, or a quick laugh. But for a full-hour TV show or feature-length movie, I don't want to huddle around my laptop; lounging on the couch and watching on the 31-inch screen in my living room is a much better experience. This is especially true if I have company over.

For some time I had even been interested in the idea of building my own home-theatre PC (HTPC) to route streaming video to the television, but this summer I decided to try a cheaper and simpler alternative -- the Roku Digital Video Player. I've been living with it for three months and have had a positive experience so far.

The most important concern, of course, is exactly what programming is being delivered. The two main content partners at this time are Netflix and Amazon. As I've discovered, the two companies' offerings are plentiful and complement each other very well.

Netflix is most well-known for its DVD-rental-by-mail business, but it also makes a portion of its catalog available for viewing online by subscribers with one of the "unlimited" plans. Anything added to a member's Instant queue will show up as available to watch on the Roku player. (The queue can only be altered on the Netflix website, so I recommend having a laptop computer in the living room to fully enable the couch potato lifestyle.) The Instant selection seems dominated by older or more obscure movies and documentaries, but it does give members something to watch while they wait for the postal service to deliver the next DVD. Be aware that as Netflix makes and breaks deals for distribution rights, the list of titles available for Instant viewing is in a constant state of change. For example, I had added Happy Feet, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Eddie Murphy: Raw to my Instant Queue, but they were later made unavailable (marked as "Saved") before I got around to watching them.

For newer or more popular releases that are not available on Netflix -- or when I don't want to wait for a mailed DVD -- I can turn to Amazon and spend a few dollars with its Video On Demand service. Some titles can be rented for one day, others are purchased to "own" for permanent availability in "Your Video Library," and some offer both options. The available titles include both hit movies and television programs.

This brings me to my example of how the Netflix and Amazon selections complement: Thanks to DVDs from Netflix, I had gotten myself hooked on the drama Mad Men. I splurged and signed up for an Amazon "TV Pass" for the current season so I wouldn't have to wait for the DVD release to find out what happens next. Every Monday morning, the previous night's episode of Mad Men appears as available on my Roku player. Yes, it feels a bit strange to pay $1.89 per episode. But it is still cheaper than subscribing to cable just to get the AMC channel.

Earlier in the month, Roku added Major League Baseball as its third offering, letting MLB.com Premium members watch games online on their TV. At the price of a Premium membership, though, I can only see only die-hard fans of out-of-town teams finding this worthwhile. Roku has announced that it is working on partnerships to deliver more "channels" by the end of the year.

Physically, the Roku player is a very compact device, approximately the size of a small stack of CD jewel cases. Setup is as simple as it gets: Connect a cable to the TV, power up the Roku, and use the remote control to tell it how to connect to the Internet. There is an Ethernet cable port on the back, but I decided to take advantage of the built-in Wi-Fi adapter to join it to my my WLAN. (The longest part of the install was entering in my absurdly-long WPA key.) The remote itself feels like a "throwback" in its sparse design, being "chunky" in feel and sporting only nine buttons, but I like it. I'm still trying to figure out if I can use my universal remote instead. Once online, the setup routines for the Netflix and Amazon "channels" will display codes that are used to link the box to the customer's existing website accounts.

There is no internal hard drive to store programming. so the Roku player must always have a live broadband Internet connection to function. Every time a program is started, rewound, or fast-forwarded, a few seconds are needed to reset the buffer. (On the plus side, there is no hard drive to mechanically fail, either.) It will modify the video quality of the stream according to the bandwidth available. To my eyes the quality was very acceptable with a 3-Mbps downstream connection. Upgrading my DSL service to 6-Mbps enabled the device to achieve its potential of delivering high-definition video at 720p. Roku only packs a cable with RCA-style composite connectors in the box as standard, however. Consumers will need to bring their own HDMI or component cables to put the hi-def party into full swing.

There are other products on the market -- such as certain Blu-Ray players and TiVo DVRs -- that can also stream Netflix and Amazon content. But shoppers not interested in the other features that those devices offer may see the $99 Roku player as a do-one-thing-and-do-it-well alternative. I believe it's a compelling value for my readers that are Netflix devotees with broadband connections. Depending on the future partnerships Roku can forge, this little box could represent the beginning of a big alternative to the cable and satellite companies in the pay-for-TV market.

Stay tuned.

Warmed Over Blog Bits for Thursday, March 12

It's been a while since I've posted to this blog something other than a race report. Here are some of my random CurrentlyVince thoughts for those of you still following along....

• Right now I'm feeling a bit disconnected from today's tech culture. I realized that I really like the feeling of having physical media for my recorded music and movies that I can hold in my hands. Just last night I noticed that my checkbook was nearly finished and felt strongly compelled to do something about it, despite the fact that I have occasion to write a paper check only a handful of times a year.
  

• So what can I do to reconnect as a member of Generation Tech? The latest issue of Maximum PC just landed in my mailbox this week, and the cover story is titled "50 Things Every PC Geek Should Know." Maybe I'll start there. Of course, just the fact that I still subscribe to print magazines might be a sign that I'm stuck in the past. Even the venerable PC Magazine went 100% digital this year.
  

• Chron.com's Dwight Silverman posted a list of 15 movies that he thinks reflects geekdom.

• The property formerly known as Town & Country Mall -- 13 miles west of downtown -- has been wholly redeveloped and rechristened as "City Centre." The name change alone expresses so much about the direction of population growth in the Houston area. The newest Studio Movie Grill opened there this week. Together with the Cinemark at Memorial City that opened last fall, the two movie theaters fill what I've thought has been a very strange void in one of the most affluent sections of the city.

• If you ever need to come up with an example of niche marketing, look no farther than Santa Fe Natural Tobacco, maker of Natural American Spirit cigarettes. I found an ad for this product while flipping through this week's edition of the Houston Press. (Gotta love those Press advertisers!) Do you know people who are both cigarette smokers and members of the buy-organic crowd? Apparently this company does.

• Fellow running blogger Pat in Arizona has developed a strange obsession over the timing chip used by Biggest Loser contestant Dane in his not-quite-a-marathon race.

• I subscribe to neither cable or satellite TV, and broadcast reception was initially very spotty inside of my new-to-me living room. In this digital age of television, I'm one of those who live on the edge of the "cliff effect" -- just a truck passing by outside could be enough to knock out a show. I've found success with hanging an amplified multidirectional antenna inside the window, backed by a double-layer of aluminum foil. Hardly high-tech, but this setup is soaking up enough signal to keep me from falling off the edge of the cliff.

"The world is waiting for you."

I don't watch nearly as much television as I did when I was younger, but one of my "guilty pleasures" is The Amazing Race. I don't like the term "reality TV" that everyone seems to like using, by the way. I prefer to think of programming like this as "next-generation game shows." The main differences now are that the game show has escaped the studio and lasts for an entire season with the same cast of contestants.

Normally, the bickering and back-stabbing that happens on a stereotypical "reality TV show" bores me to tears, but somehow, the manufactured drama on TAR doesn't irritate me that much. It's probably because I'm too busy marveling at all the scenery in the territory covered by each episode. I have a passport (it's here somewhere), but it sadly has a lot of blank areas, so I suppose the show helps fill the void -- just a little.

I don't really want to do complete episode recaps. You can get those on other sites, including CBS's, but I thought it might be fun to try blogging some of my observations as each week's episode airs.

(For those that haven't watched the broadcast: Spoilers ahead! Duh!)

Season 13 launched from the L.A. Coliseum. Wow, that stadium looks so old and lonely. Anyway, the first episode is always the toughest with which to keep up because you've just been introduced to the teams, and there's so many of them to track:

Toni and Dallas (single mom and son from California)
Nick and Starr (siblings from Texas and New York)
Ken and Tina (separated married couple from Florida)
Aja and Ty (long-distance daters)
Marisa and Brooke ("Southern Belles" from South Carolina)
Andrew and Dan (frat brothers from Arizona)
Anthony and Stephanie (dating from California)
Anita and Arthur (married beekeepers from Oregon)
Kelly and Christy (divorcee friends from Texas)
Terance and Sarah (dating from New York)
Mark and Bill (friends from California)

Host Phil Keoghan announces 11 legs, with 8 resulting in eliminations for the last team to finish. A million bucks waits for the winner of leg 11. No surprises so far rules-wise.

I've read that the producers try to contain costs during the few episodes, as they are moving a lot of cast and crew around, and it shows already. The teams are brought to Brazil on two flights and two flights only, and after they arrive and perform their first task, their first overnight stay is in tents on a military base.

The next day, Nick and Starr take first place at the pit stop and claim a nice vacation from Travelocity -- I guess they are seeing continuing benefit from being a sponsor of TAR. Anita and Arthur become the season's first casualties by checking in last.

Based on the very little we've seen of them, today I'll pick Nick and Starr, Aja and Ty, and Kelly and Christy as the teams most likely to be there in the finale. We'll see if I'm right, or if I feel forced to pick another three next week.