I’ve been paying a little bit of attention to Netflix’s Watch Now feature for quite a while, ever since it was introduce last year.  As I wasn’t a Netflix customer until recently (I was using Blockbuster who I recently ditched) I didn’t really get to play with this much.  Now that I am a happy Netflix customer I decided I’d check it out.

The first problem with the service is selection, there really isn’t any.  It’s pretty damn terrible in fact with one exception (so far), TV shows.  After browsing around I found two shows that I’ve been wanting to catch, NBC’s 30 Rock and Showtime’s Dexter.  There remained one problem, I really don’t want to watch these on my laptop but rather on my Windows Media Center edition PC in my living room.  This is where MCE Browser comes in.  MCE Browser is just as it sounds, a browser add-on to Media Center that lets you surf around with your standard remote control.  After a few keyboard entires (to put in my Netflix user/pass) I was happily watching the pilot of 30 Rock on my nice 46″ LCD TV.  Sweet.

While this worked it wasn’t a great experience (had to use a keyboard a lot, no playback control from the standard remote), someone needs to build a real interface into Media Center for this sorta stuff.  With tons of Media Center PC’s out there (no clue how many are actually used for Media Center) this seems like such a natural fit for these types of applications, I just don’t get why no one has connected the two.  Anyone wanna start a company???

Ok so this isn’t the sort of thing I would usually post but I just felt compelled.  If you read my blog enough (or know me) you know I’m a car guy (or have become one anyway).  I’m definitely a fan of hot looking cars (the Aston Martin V8 Vantage comes to mind) – and I equally hate ugly cars.  Easily my all time least favorite car is the Pontiac Aztek (as is almost anything made by Pontiac).  When I read that they only sold 25 of them this year my first thought was why wouldn’t they just cancel the thing.  Quickly my next thought was how stupid would you feel to be one of the 25 people that actual bought one! Then again I guess to be an optimist how proud would you be to have been the sales guys that actually moved one of those monsters, I wonder what kind of award you get for that?

So a few weeks ago I was bitten attacked by the snowboarding bug.  I’ve only been a few times but hope to get out somewhere every weekend for the rest of the season.  One of the first pieces of gear I got are the TuneUps helmet speaker system.  This lets me listen to music from the ear flaps on my helmet instead of having ear buds jammed down in my ears.  The great thing here is I can hear everything going on around me (I listen sorta low) and can easily mute them with the big button on the cord so I can easily have a conversation with anyone around me.

So since I have this new toy I’m in search of great music to board to.  I’ve been using my general workout mix (upbeat rock stuff mostly) but it’s a bit too heavy for me.  So I’m looking for your favorites, something in the trance or techno type of style (St. Germain comes to mind).  Any suggestions?

If you’re reading this you’ve probably been following Macworld in one way or another.  I didn’t get a chance to watch the full keynote speech by Steve Jobs and today I stumbled upon a version someone edited that condensed it down to 60 seconds.  Enjoy:

This weekend I tried out the below Risotto recipe and it was fantastic.  We ate it a few hours after I prepared it so it got a little mushy when reheated but it tasted wonderful none the less.  While it takes a while to make the risotto (constant stirring for almost 30 minutes) it’s well worth it in the end.  It’s actually very easy to make it just takes time.  If you’re looking for something to impress with I highly recommend it.

Ingredients
6 uncooked large shrimp, peeled, deveined, diced
4 large sea scallops
3 8-ounce bottles clam juice
1 cup low-salt chicken broth
1/4 cup dry white wine
3 tablespoons olive oil
Truffle oil (very important)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 garlic clove, minced
1 cup arborio rice
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives

Directions
Simmer the clam juice, broth and shrimp shells in a medium saucepan; once it simmers reduce the heat and cover (the shrimp shells really add a lot of flavor so don’t leave them out). Saute the shrimp with the olive oil in a heavy medium-sized saucepan over medium-high heat for about 2 minutes. Using a slotted spoon transfer the shrimp to a bowl and save for later.  Add the onion and garlic and saute for about 1 minute then add the rice for another minute.  Next add the wine and simmer for about 2 more minutes.  Next slowly add the broth mixture (discard the shrimp shells) about 4 oz at a time waiting until it’s absorbed before adding the next 4 oz.  Continue this for about 20-30 minutes until you’ve absorbed all the broth into the rice.  Add the butter and shrimp, season lightly with salt and pepper.

Sear the scallops in the vegetable oil in a separate pan for about 3-4 minutes a side.  Be careful not to over cook the scallops or they’ll get rubbery.  They are done when they are white just about all the way through.  Divide the risotto amongst your plates, place a scallop atop each one and lightly drizzle with the truffle oil (very important), sprinkle with the chives and enjoy.

As I promised in my post yesterday about how much I love the EeePC now that XP is installed I wanted to digress for a little dork out session on how to do this.  It’s not hard but does take some planning and a little work.  A lot of credit goes to this post which is where I got started.

Prerequisites
- A USB thumb drive, at least 1GB in size
- SD Memory card, at least 16MB
- Windows XP SP2 Installation CD
- Physdiskwrite (download here)
- Boot disk image (download here)
- A second PC with a SD reader/USB to set the above up

Creating the boot disk
First we need to make our SD card bootable so we can get into DOS mode to start the XP installation.  To do this extract physdiskwrite.exe to a folder on your PC.  Place the wxpboot.ima file in this same folder and insert your SD card into your PC.  Drop to a command prompt, switch to that directory and type in:

physdiskwrite -u wxpboot.ima

WARNING: Make sure you choose the correct drive number when doing this (it was 1 for me) – if you choose the wrong one you will wipe your entire system, this would be bad so be very careful here.  This process should only take a few seconds.

Copy XP to the USB Thumb drive
Next you’ll need to insert the USB thumb drive into your PC along with the XP SP2 CD.  Next copy the i386 directory from the XP CD to the root of your thumb drive.

Beginning the install
Once you’ve got XP on your thumb drive insert it into the left side USB port on the EeePC (the side with only 1 USB port – this will make sure it shows up as D: later).  Put the SD card in the EeePC and power it on.  As it boots press F2 to get into the BIOS – you’ll need to change “OS Installation” to “Start”.  Press F10 to exit BIOS and reboot.  Now you should boot from the SD card and eventually come to a C: prompt.

Next you’ll need to repartition the EeePC using fdisk so at a command prompt type “fdisk” and press enter.  You’ll need to go through and delete ALL partitions from the disk (ALL of them, including the non-DOS ones).  Once you’ve deleted them all you’ll need to create one primary partition to fill the entire drive.  Now exit out of fdisk so we can format the drive by running “format c: /s” (the /s switch makes the disk bootable for us).

Installing XP
Now that you’ve got the drive all formatted you’re ready to begin the XP install.  If you put the thumb drive in the correct port it will show up as your D: drive so all you need to do is switch to that drive, then cd to the i386 directory.  Once there type “winnt” to begin the install of XP.  On my machine I was using a very old USB card reader with a 2GB MiniSD card in it for the install.  The first part of install, up until the point at which it starts copying files to the system took about 15 minutes if I remember right.  The next part however took just a bit longer.

Finishing the install
So how long did it take?  It took so long I was able to eat dinner, sleep, shower, go to work, eat, sleep, shower, go to work – then it was finally finished with the first phase of copying the install files to the system.  It took more than 48 hours to do this on my system!  I’m not exactly sure why but the good news is the next phases of install were crazy fast taking less than an hour if memory serves right.  Go through the install just like any other XP installation.

Drivers
The last thing you’ll need when you are done are all the XP drivers.  Fortunately Asus is already providing them which I think is outstanding for a company that doesn’t even ship XP on this box.  Hell I can’t get drivers this easy for Alienware boxes and those come with Windows! So browse on over to Asus driver pages and download away.  The only thing I haven’t been able to get to work are the function/volume keys, not really sure why.

Conclusion
I’m hoping that like me once you get XP on the EeePC it will become much more useful for you.  I don’t mean to at all diminish the Linux stuff they put on it but for me that just wasn’t a very useful platform.  I’ve been stunned with how well the EeePC runs XP, if the keyboard were slightly bigger I think I could use it as a my primary device at home (for times when I’m just doing quick type stuff).

Well done Asus, well done.