I think it’s great that Nova did a show about this important issue.

2009 Reykjavik Fireworks from Benjamin Garrett on Vimeo.

The whole reason we traveled to Reykjavik during the Winter, necessitating the light machine and so forth, was that I wanted to be somewhere different for New Years.

We only learned after coming here that Reykjavik has a crazy New Years fireworks spectacle. So I was expecting an American-Style fireworks display, where everyone congregates in a particular place and watches the fireworks launched from the bay.

But no, this is not how it’s done. Everyone in town just buys an extraordinary amount of fireworks and sets them off in public places from 11:30pm until 12:30am on New Year’s Eve. During the ’show’, an older American guy in an NFL hat and quipped to us “This is like Iraq”. He seemed too old to have spent time in Iraq, but I do agree it seemed like we were under heavy bombardment.

The scariest part is that about 1 in every 100 fireworks would fizzle out before flying into that air and instead fly into a crowd of people and then explode. Numerous ambulances arrived during the show.

We knew Iceland was going to be dark for much of the time before coming. When we arrived at the hotel around 8a, we asked the concierge when the sun would come up. She guessed around 10:30a. It starts getting dark around 3:30p. But the thing is, it’s kind of hard to tell because it’s not ever really bright. At some point, you just have to figure it’s as light as it’s going to be.

I remember this from when I lived here but I think Neb had some difficulty adjusting. Our sleeping hours were completely irregular and unpredictable (well also because of New Years Eve and the Saturday night we decided to see what the famous nightlife scene was all about, which doesn’t even start until midnight or 1a). By the end, he started to lose it a bit.

Today we went for a swim and some hot tubbing at Laugardalslaug, the city’s largest pool facility and the one I went to as a kid. At the facility, Neb finally found some relief:

Finally, I found the Sunlight Machine from Benjamin Garrett on Vimeo.

The lamp in question is the Philips EnergyLight. Related, and tempting to neb, the Philips goLite BLU.

Geysir from Benjamin Garrett on Vimeo.

The more you know: The original geyser from which the word comes from is in Iceland.

Update: Ditched the embed tag.

The changes they made for the Russian version of Wall-E really wig me out!

We’ve been playing this game called Okami. The game is a lot like a Zelda game except you spend a lot of time feeding rabbits packets of seeds to earn their love.

Clearly this is up our alley.

The torch never came. Due to fears of protests they changed the route at the last minute.
In any case, I was there, and saw nothing but lots of people with giant Chinese flags and someone with a megaphone repeating “GOD LOVE PEACE” continuously.

Oh well, maybe next time.

Well here we are 10 months after the beginning of the great “No More Cable” experiment.

Since we aren’t mindlessly gorging ourselves on the fixed-cost TV all-the-time spigot that is cable television, we are spending less money and also able to extract information about our viewing habits. Below is a chart of the number of hours of television viewed, broken down by source.

Average Minutes of Television Watched per day: 55
(We’re probably over-counting here because TV shows without commercials are 42 minutes long. And we’ve assumed for the sake of simplicity that movies are 2 hours long.)

Now, let’s compare the costs. Netflix is a fixed per-month cost at $16.99. iTunes is flexible based on usage. See below:

Apparently, where we live, you cannot get basic cable. The cheapest plan is a digital plan for $57 per month. If you upgrade to a fancy plan with premium channels, you’re paying $109 per month. That’s off our chart so I didn’t even include it.

Quick Netflix queue update:
In May (when the last post was done) our Netflix queue stood at 70 DVDs. Now we’ve got 130 DVDs. That means that after watching 223 hours of DVDs, our backlog increased by 60 DVDs.

Update 2:
Looks like Hulu just came out of beta. This is the service that NBC and others created as a ad-based competitor to the iTunes Store TV Show section. I haven’t used it yet but have read good things about this service. It seems like a non-starter for most people though because I imagine that less than 1% of the population has a computer hooked up directly to their TV. Luckily, we do.