Who
I'm not sure if I should hand in my geek card for this or not, but this past weekend I finally watched my first episode of Doctor Who. I've had friends buzzing about it for so long that I can't really come up with an excuse as to why I never watched it, but I didn't. Now I am, though. I started with the resurrection of the show back in 2005 with Christopher Ecceleston manning the helm of the TARDIS. I'm now three episodes deep and loving it. Eccleston is great (yeah yeah, I know, don't get too attached to him) and the show is fun and exciting and does a great job of proving that you don't need a Michael Bay-scale budget to have sci-fi fun.

I'm gonna keep with it. Not sure how long it will take to get through it all, though.

Notes
There are so many note-taking apps available for the iPhone and I've tried several of them in an attempt to figure out what I prefer to use. There is so much functionality available in some of these apps that it almost becomes too difficult to use them easily. However, something changed the other day which helped me make my decision. While logged in to my Gmail account, I discovered a label titled "Notes" that I never noticed and didn't recall creating. Turns out that Gmail has been syncing somehow with my iPhone and backing up all the notes that I've created in the iPhone-native Notes app as pseudo-messages in the system. VERY COOL! Now I've got a backup of all my notes. All I really need is something simple to type quick messages to myself. Stuff like shopping lists, books I want to read, CDs to dig up, etc. I don't care about tags or annotations or whatever else (although I like the checkboxes that I can create in Evernote even though they still don't allow you to create checkboxes in the mobile version).

Simply put, make mine NOTES!

Paladia
This past week, I've become addicted to the Paladia cable network. It's a 24/7 music network playing concerts and performances and videos and everything that MTV used to be. In fact, they even have rights to replay some MTV-owned titles like Unplugged and whatnot. This last week alone, I've recorded concert specials from Depeche Mode, Weezer, and Sara Bareilles; Unplugged episodes from Lykke Li and Mumford & Sons; and a video special from TV on the Radio. My TiVo is really gonna hate me soon.

Netflix
This one is going to be a mixed one in terms of sentiment. First off, Katie and I discovered that using Netflix Instant Watch through our Nintendo Wii works AWESOME! We had tried watching through our HD TiVo and the audio and video really suck. The audio is off by a fraction of a second and is sped up so it was almost like mice talking but not in sync with the image on the screen. This isn't so bad if you're not familiar with the actors and how they sound. But if you are, it is annoying. And the video was very blocky. The TiVo experience had turned us off using Instant Watch. But the Wii has brought us back.

And just in time for a cost increase courtesy of Netflix. Now the Instant Watch plan, which was always free if you had a DVD-rental plan, is being segmented off into its own separate charge with the DVD plans off on their own. Not a big deal since a streaming-only plan has existed for about a year at this same price point. Then you discover that the DVD plans have jumped dramatically in price. My overall monthly cost is going up $4 per month for the 3-DVD+Streaming option. We still use Netflix quite a bit, but not enough that it is going to stop me from dropping to the 2-DVD plan to save a few bucks. And, if our Streaming habits increase and our DVD queue keeps decreasing as it has been, I may drop to a single DVD rate plan. Only time will tell.

Tabs
I was pretty stoked when I finally got around to downloading the latest version of Firefox to Katie's Macbook and discovered this cool thing called App Tabs which allows you to create a permanent browser tab for a certain page or service on the web that will always be there.

I guess it's so akin to a bookmark that it's not really a big deal, but I dug on it. Until I shut downt the browser and computer and rebooted and lost them all. That was frustrating. I think my most recent round of App Tabs have stuck, though, so maybe it was just a glitch. Hmmm...

Goal
And now to exit on a very positive note... U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

[image courtesy of the Associated Press]