Lightly Organized Chaos

So I just started up my Xbox 360 for the first time in 6 months to try out the new Metro UI and media features. First stop, the Netflix app. After downloading the app and starting it up, I get told I need an Xbox Live Gold account to use Netflix.

Now I have a free XBL Silver account which is free, but I don’t play enough multi-player games to justify $60/yr. for a Gold account. I do currently spend $8/mo. for Netflix streaming — now Microsoft wants me to pay for Gold access just to get at content I already pay for.

To be clear:
I paid for the Xbox 360.
I pay for Netflix.
I pay for my broadband connectivity.

So all I want is for Microsoft to let me use the app (that’s already on my Xbox) to use the things I’ve already paid for. For this they want $50 each and every year (subject to price increases).

Fail.

For the record you can buy a Roku as little as $50 (one-time purchase) and get more currently available apps.

Our living room as bike parking lot. Notice that we have 6 bikes in the photo and only 4 family members (and that’s not even counting the 3 more at my house). That little purple bike in the foreground needs to go, and I have one of the bikes at my place up on Craigslist now.

The coming days should bring some updates to the blog. Bicycles are big in our house at the moment, so I’m going to start posting the related household news.

Both kids received bicycles for their birthdays this year. Much happiness and a bunch of riding ensued. This has naturally led to more riding for Kim and me. in an effort to avoid paying for a campus parking permit, Kim has already been riding to work most days. So, I just needed to hop on my bike to make it a family affair.

After a few evening rides in the College Park area, we took a longish (10 mile) ride in Rock Creek Park — from Peirce Mill to Grubb Road, and back. At the mid-point of our ride, we enjoyed a nice Sunday brunch at the Daily Dish. The ride was a relative success, and we plan on trying to enjoy a couple more such outings while the weather holds.

Just updated my BasicTeX-2008 install to the 2011 edition. Pretty simple really.

I deleted the old installation using:

tlmgr uninstall

then downloaded the latest incarnation from http://www.tug.org/mactex/2011/morepackages.html, then installed it.

I had to update the path in my .tcshrc to point to the new bin directory, and voila! Latest and greatest TeX install.

I then went ahead and ran the post installation steps from my previous post.