See The Future...It's Not That Great

Here’s why I don’t get my computer advice from Future Shop. Their latest commercial has a Future Shop ‘tech’ reading a letter asking what kind of computer would be best for a student? His answer is to go to the dude’s dorm room and respond with something like this: “I’d recommend a dual core PC so you can rip a CD, use the internet, and write an essay all at the same time.” Right. You can do that with a Pentium 3 – I’ve done it – and you can get one of those used for well under a hundred bucks. Thanks a lot, Mr. Future Shop Advice Man for needlessly up-selling the customer. Oh, and speaking of Future Shop, I was in there the other day (to buy the DVD for the movie Brick – best movie of the year I’ve seen so far – and of course they didn’t have it), and they had an HD-DVD and a Blu-Ray DVD systems setup and playing. Nothing about it would entice me to lay out the kind of money those systems cost. In fact, the HD-DVD wasn’t really noticeably better than a normal DVD. The Blu-Ray was a sharper image – it was playing the first Pirates movie during a swordfight, and you could really see the sweat on the guy’s faces. However, there really wasn’t enough of a ‘wow’ factor to impress over a regular DVD on a good TV. Here’s hoping both of these greedy, greedy camps suffer a flame out of Howard Dean proportions. And finally, speaking of Brick, on the day of its DVD release, Future Shop had none, Blockbuster had 4 copies all rented out, and only Rogers video had copies. Sure, it’s a smaller Indie movie, but do we really need a whole wall of Failure to Launch DVD’s, and no Brick?! I didn’t think so. And speaking of Rogers Video, unlike Blockbuster – who assumes people have realized the superiority of widescreen – at Rogers, you really have to watch which version you pick up of Fullscreen or Widescreen DVD as they are mixed together. Couldn’t believe it. At least separate them, people…