Blockbuster Prices

This past weekend I was at the local Blockbuster Video store and was surprised to find that the rental price for a DVD had gone from $3.49 to $4.29. My GF and I have been using our Coke Reward coupons at Blockbuster for about a year now. But lately I have noticed that it takes more reward points to get a Blockbuster coupon. They now also have a limit on how many coupons you can get. Our favorite coupon gave you two videos, two 16 oz Cokes, and popcorn for free. The only one we can find now is the rent one get one free coupon. Using that coupon makes the cost for each DVD rental about $2.25. We can go to the local grocery store and rent videos for less than that.

The next logical step is to connect a computer to your entertainment center, so that you can watch movies over the Internet. There are a lot of web sites offering free content out there. Amazon now has a video on demand service. I thought it was cool to be able to view the first episode of Night Rider before it was broadcast on network TV. The problem is that a lot of older graphic cards do not have hd output. You can get an DVI to HDMI adapter, but your graphics card needs to support at least 1920x1080 to be HD. They do make graphics cards with HDMI built in, but only in PCI Express configurations. This can get confusing very fast, but if you can't afford rental fees, it's worth looking into.

Mortgage Crisis?

I don't watch boring news shows like Meet The Press very often, but this week Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was on and I wanted to hear what he had to say about how this country got into this so called mortgage crisis, and more about the plan to fix the situation. Japan was in a similar position about twenty years ago, but their government was slow to react and they still haven't fully recovered. I have to give Paulson credit for proposing a solution, even if the price tag is huge, as he said, doing nothing would be much worse.

I also read a good article today in USA Weekend which discussed the number of people in this country who own homes, but don't have a mortgage. It turns out that almost one-third of Americans don't carry mortgages on their homes. Thinking about this further, I wonder how many defaulted mortgages it would take to cause this much trouble. If there are about 50 million mortgages and 10 percent are in default, that would be 5 million mortgages in default. If the average price per home is $150 thousand, the value of the property in default would be 750 billion. Since these properties probably have 30 year loans at 6 or 7 percent, you need to add another 1.8 trillion for interest. Anyway, you can see how a low percentage of defaulted loans overall, can cause a huge amount of unpaid debt.

I often wonder what happened to all these people who were unable to pay their mortgages. They have to live somewhere. Next we will be hearing about the population of homeless people going up in cities across America. I suspect we will be discussing and dissecting the causes and impact of this latest financial crisis for years to come.

Downsizing Life

With the stock market dropping over 500 points today, I thought it would be appropriate to share one of my latest money saving tips. I think all of us have name brand products that we like to buy because of their good taste or quality. But when times get tough, that's when you need to look at alternatives. An example would be buying a lower priced generic brand instead of a name brand. Every time the economy forces me to do this, I feel like I'm downsizing my life. This week my cat got downsized. Instead of Purina One, he now gets regular Purina cat chow. Luckily, he didn't seem to notice the difference, and I get to save a few bucks. I didn't want to take a chance on getting a totally different brand (cats can be very picky). Sometimes you can find a cheaper brand name product that performs equally well. Another example is toothpaste. When Colgate came out with a product that was similar to Sensodyne, I switched to save a buck. Garbage bags and paper products are other items that don't need to be name brand. I haven't gone totally generic (yet), but these days I measure of my economic status by how often I have to downsize my life.

Wii Review

A few weekends ago I had a chance to try out the Wii game system. My first impression is that using the interactive controllers can give you quite a workout. One thing you will discover is that you can't play this game system sitting on the couch. You have to get up and interact with it and respond to what's happening on the screen. This is a very different experience for a traditional gamer like myself. For kids it's great, because you rarely see them outside playing anymore and this might be the only form of exercise they get. But I was a little sore the next day from the repetitious movements.

Now that the xbox360 has dropped in price it has moved up a notch on my wish list. I suspect the Playstation3 will do the same sometime before the Christmas buying season arrives. But for now, I'm still playing Tiger Woods 2005 on the old xbox, and finding new things about it that keep me interested. I can't imagine what the 2009 version is like!

Digital Antenna Range

Now that people are using their discount cards to get digital tv converter boxes, they are discovering that they need to upgrade their antennas too. Of course, they don't have discount cards to cover antenna upgrades. The antenna issue mainly effects people that are over 50 miles away from a transmitter or people that use a "rabbit ear" antenna, like the one shown here. Digital tv signals are broadcast over the UHF band and are highly directional. With the old analog signal you would sometimes get poor reception, but at least you could see a picture and hear the audio. With digital it's either all or nothing. I think this is going to disappoint a lot of people who didn't realize that they would have to upgrade their antenna too. I haven't heard any complaints about it yet, but I suspect that people in rural areas, who don't have satellite receivers, are quietly looking for ways to upgrade their antennas.

The distance from my dad's cabin to the nearest big city is right on the edge of the 50-60 mile range of most antennas. The antenna looks like the photo shown here and is supposed to have a 60 mile UHF range. It's on a pole about 20 feet high with a powered antenna booster on the line just before the converter box. Sometimes we can get 4 or 5 digital stations, but at certain times the signal will go out. Rescanning on the converter box will find no signals. This could be caused by weather conditions or power fluctuations in the digital signal. But in order to fix the problem we have two choices, either mount the antenna higher, or get a better antenna. I did find a cool looking antenna for $109 that claims to have a 70 mile range. In addition, I think we will need to put a rotor on the antenna. That's at least $169 that we didn't expect to spend!

Online Seminars

It isn't often that I talk about my regular job here. Most of the time I use this space to promote my superb web design skills. But when something new and exciting comes along, it deserves to be mentioned.

This fall MEDS-PDN, Inc. will be offering online seminars for professionals seeking CE credit. These newly developed "webinars" will be 90 minutes in length and cover topics like cyberbullying, bipolar disorders, tourettes, and behavior modification. The programs will start in October 2008. Some of our best speakers will be sharing their expertise on these and other topics. I will be hosting the live events, which will be broadcast over the Internet.

MEDS-PDN, Inc. has been planning these adult educational offerings in this new convenient online format for almost a year. Right now they have over 20 programs scheduled and more are being added every week. For more information about these affordable online seminars for professions seeking continuing education credit, click here: MEDS-PDN Webinars