But I want a movie and I want it now....

So last night, the wife and I were a little out of luck. The Netflix movies that we had to return were still in the place that we had set them to remember to mail them out. We don't really have a monstrous movie collection and we have seen most of the movies about a gazillion times and no less.

Fortunately, I had been lurking on Digg the previous night, which is what I usually do when I can't sleep, and found a link that told how to turn on the "Watch it Now" feature within Netflix. I was quite happy to see it and to try it out. The main draw back for me was in order for the feature to work, only Internet Explorer would work with it. I don't have WINE (the windows environment simulator) working because I use VMWare for the total emulation. So, I fired up VMWare with Windows XP. followed the simple steps and it worked. Within the VM environment it was fine for me to watch, but not so much for the two of us.

I shut my laptop and ran the VGA cable to my older DLP TV and there you have it. I did have to boot into my Windows side of the computer as I don't have a huge amount of space for the VMWindows. We ended up watching two movies that night, "Hell House" and "Clue." Both were fine in terms of quality. It did remind me of watching a friends copy that they had taped off cable from their top loading VCR. I just wish that their was a bigger selection of movies to work with, but I understand I did jump into the "Watch it Now" options before I was told officially that it was ready.

I am Mr. Peabody and I am trying to get the most out of what I already have.

Time + Opportunity = Change

Since the last posting, I have had a complete change of scene. My wife was unable to find any kind of work while in Nebraska. I was nearing the end of the summer term and we had to make a choice about moving. Living apart again wasn't really an option, but it was talked about. She did look at jobs close to where we were, but still nothing. It all came down to moving back to Minneapolis. She received some job offers up there and wasn't sure about it. We also found out that if one leaves a grant-funded position in the middle of the semester, that student (me) would have to pay the grant back.

So here we are back in Minneapolis. I have been keeping busy with substitute teaching and working on a paper that was due last summer. Kim now has a full-time job.

The transition back to teaching and working with jr. high and high school was not as hard as I thought it might be. I found that my background with emotional behavioral disorders and classroom management really helped out. Much like my transition from Windows to Linux, which has also happened over the course of these months. I have set-up a home server, so now Kim and I have automated back-ups running. I am not completely running solely on Linux, there are still a few things I need Windows for. All in all it has been good.

I am Mr. Peabody and I am embracing my inner tech-geek.