Tuesday night

You might think I would be busy playing WOW, and normally I would be. Unfortunately due to "upgrades" my WOW Realm (server) is offline for about 36 hours. While I wouldn't say I am getting the jitters (yet), I am kind of "oh my, now what?".

On my other notebook I was reading my old email, and behold on the screen is an email entitled "40 percent of World of Warcraft Players Addicted" by our ex-intern who was QUITE sick of hearing our WOW-inspired conversation during lunch. Of course I am not addicted, I can quit anytime I want, I just don't want to and quit asking thank you very much.

So I'm watching Pirates of the Caribbean which I download on the new spanky-fresh iTunes movie download store.

Of course, why not use Amazon's unbox? Ah yes, well I am a mac-head, so no go, I don't have a Windows XP box to even install it on. I can't personally believe how wrong Amazon got it. The general public is fairly well informed about DRM issues, especially now iTunes has trained users to expect more than highly locked down music. I predict that once iTunes movie store outshines Amazon's by quite a bit, the reluctant Movie houses will come to their economic senses and sign on with Jobs and Disney.

The picture quality of the movie is excellent. It doesn't seem to be H.264, but Quicktime says it is "AVC0 Media, 640x272" - whatever that is. I copied the video to my Linux/Samba drive and am playing back on my other desktop iMac via Samba in Quicktime and all is well. No "download twice" crap that Unbox apparently makes you do.

Ironically we used to trash Apple because they didn't provide options for advanced users. In this case however, Apple is working out quite nicely. Obviously there is still the whole DRM thing, but so far it is manageable. With the iTv device next year, Apple's music store will reach your TV, something no one else currently does or can do with video downloads.