Netflix + Xbox 360 + HD = Awesome!

Netflix instant queue

I’ve had my Xbox 360 for a while now and I’ve had my Netflix account for even longer. And, I’m pretty sure I’m the target customer for Netflix; i’ve had an account with them probably since they opened their doors, and as a member, I’ve probably rented 10 total movies. But with their Instant Queue stuff, it’ll all change.

Over Christmas break, I discovered The Office on Hulu. It’s awesome that you can watch real TV shows on their site, but unfortunately, you can only watch the current season or the last few shows of the current series. I also learned that they have classic shows like Doogie Howser, M.D. and completely awesome movies like The Karate Kid, but I digress. I was trying to figure out how to watch previous seasons of The Office without waiting a few days for the DVDs to arrive from Netflix. I almost bit the bullet and purchased the episodes from iTunes, but then I remembered Netflix Instant Queue.

I found the DVD on Netflix’s site, hit the “play” button and it started playing right away on the screen on my Mac! It was decent quality, but nothing to write home about. After a minute or so, I decided to try it on my Xbox to see how it looked. To my surprise, all of the episodes from Season 4 (4 DVDs) were listed, and it indicated that I had already watched 4% of the first episode. I hit play, it continued from where I left off, and kept playing in HD. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Best of all, instant gratification and no additional cost. Well done, Netflix, well done. Almost as good as the Sharks beating the Red Wings last night. Almost.

CBC and Wargames

For those of you that actually know me and don’t just lurk on my blog, you know that one of my favorite movies is Wargames (and the Karate Kid, damn you Will Smith!). Anyway, a few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep, so I started watching some news video on Yahoo! News and stumbled upon this story (sorry if the video is no longer there). Interesting story about a Russian space rocket part landing in Canada. At around the 0:50 point in the story, the reporter talks about a conversation he had with NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). There’s a representative image of NORAD on the left of the video screen.

Whoa.

That looks an awful lot like what I remembered from Wargames. Here’s a screengrab from the NORAD set of Wargames from Wikipedia.

Despite the $1m cost of the Wargames NORAD set (according to the Wikipedia entry), it really looks nothing like the real thing, according to the NORAD website’s image gallery. Here are a few samples.

And I thought I only liked the CBC for Hockey Night in Canada…