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I took the wife to see Terminator Salvation last week. Having a hard week we thought we”d catch the 5PM Friday screening and treat ourselves to Gold Class. $30 each.

We are regular(ish) visitors to La Premiere at Sylvia Park in Mt Wellington. $60 gets you two seats (you can no longer buy individual seats), a house wine or beer each and access to the La Premiere ”Lounge” before your movie starts. You are able to order food and drinks to come in during the movie or bring your own in. The La Premiere seats are located in the main cinemas at the rear, so you get the big screen but you are above the rest of the cinema. Sylvia park also has free parking.

La Premiere – detail

• Seats are arranged in pods of two and are leather, motorized recliners. There is an arm rest in the middle which can be slid up so you can have a big couch. Beside each chair is a small table with a lamp for your drinks/meals.
• House wines are decent and house beers good (Steinlager Pure last visit).
• The Lounge is large and on a separate level to the rest of the cinema complex. There is a nice bar and plenty of comfy seating and tables. It even has a nice view over the shopping centre.
• Our usual plan involves getting burger fuel before the movie and taking it in to much during.
• Sylvia park has great screens. You get the big screen experience and you”re reasonably private in your pod.
• Free parking!

Lets compare to Village Gold Class at Queen Street.
$60 gets you two tickets (you can buy individual tickets.). There is no equivalent to the lounge. You can order food or drink but not bring in your own (unless purchased at Village). You are in a small cinema with approximately 30 seats. You have to find parking somewhere nearby (and there ain”t no free parking in Auckland).

Gold Class – detail

• Seats are upholstered,motorized arranged in twos. In between each seat there is a big wooden table. This is of the lift up and fold out variety (like a plane). If you are not careful it would be easy to mash your finger. There is no way to remove this or join seats.
• No free drinks.
• No lounge.
• You can order food, but not bring in takeaways.
• Small screen.
• Pay for parking.

Not really much of a comparison. The one big advantage Gold Class has is it’’s central city location but to be honest I will be sticking to La Premiere in the future. If you don”t want to spend $30 a pop on La Premiere, Sylvia Park also has what the call Director’’s Lounge, which is in my mind as good as Gold Class and from memory about $15-$18 a ticket. You get leather seats, smaller cinema and a bar beforehand.

In short, Village Gold Class bad, Sylvia Park La Premiere awesome. Terminator:Salvation was also quite good.

A final recommendation, if you do go to La Premiere, take a blanket. Makes for a much cosier viewing experience (unless you are going with a mate, as that would be a tad odd).

La Premiere bookings: http://www.hoyts.co.nz

Gold Class: http://www.village.co.nz

So our MySky HDi box dies a couple of weeks ago.

Shows started freezing and skipping, the planner froze when you went into it and none of our recorded content showed up.

After a reset (button behind the sky logo on the right) I could hear the Hard Drive spinning up, beeping and spinning down again. About half an hour later the box just died. No picture.

Called Sky and they were out the following afternoon with a new unit. I asked the tech if he was doing a lot of replacements. His response was “Yep, heaps”. Heat appears to be the issue in most cases. Apparently there is a second fan in the boxes which is supposed to fire up above a certain temperature, which doesn’t appear to be happening. End result, cooked unit.

The new unit is running quiet happily now. We did have to ring Sky and ask them to activate our new card however as we were unable to record until they did!

So we’ve had MySky HDi for about 2 months now. Overall I’m very glad we went ahead with it.

Some observations:

• There is a decent amount of HD content on the movie and sports channels. 
• TV3 looks really good in HD
• The recording and series link functionality is good, but lacking in some areas. For example you can’t series link an NRL game to book all of them, you have to book each one each weekend.
• The decoder is heat sensitive. We’ve had about 4 hard locks due to heat that were only solved by unplugging the power and letting the box cool. It is now in a better ventilated area and has been stable. We’ll see what the summer heat does.
• 720p looks better than 1080i, I think. I spent at least an hour flickign between the two but could not pick a winner. For the moment I’m sticking with 720p.
• The remote is MASSIVE but comfortable and easy to use.
• The new decoder is super responsive when flickign through channels/planner etc. The normal sky decoder is a pain to use now.
• You have to enter 3 digit channel names. Still a pain. e.g. 0-0-1 for TV1 etc.
• It’s kind of annoying not being able to access your recordings externally. For example I’d like to copy some NRL games to DVD for storing but I can’t. As such they’ll probably get deleted by someone to make space for some E! channel crap.
• Adult Content Control is well handled. You can record an R16+ (or whatever you configure) program without entering a PIN but it prompts for the PIN for playback. 

A couple of months ago we finally made the move from crappy old CRT TV to a nice new Sony Bravia V Series 42″ LCD. We got a good deal and with 12 months interest free it was hard not to.

I was very happy with my new TV, especially as it had a VGA input for my Media PC that sits in the lounge. Downloaded episodes of Lost and The Office looked great. I was dissapointed however with how standard definition Sky TV looked. It was by all means watchable but nothing fantastic. It was frustrating as I had a very nice TV with no HD content to play on it! 

After much deliberation (we don’t really need it, etc) I decided to order the new My Sky HDi. Here in NZ you can either pay a one of $600 for the decoder (which you then still don’t own) or $15 a month. There is then an additional $10 a month for the HD ‘ticket’ that allows you watch HD content. We went for the $15 a month rental option, as we didn’t have a spare $600 around to spend on a decoder we wouldn’t own (and that $600 isn’t refundable if you cancel, if my information is correct).

 

We managed to take $25 off our sky bill by cancelling Rialto (which we don’t REALLY watch) and Arts Channel (which Sky sneakily added to our account 3 years ago without asking us). So net result was that our Sky bill stays the same.

We had the installer come in Thursday last week (there was a 1 month delay between ordering and installation). My fiance was here for the install and said the installer was very passionate and knowledgable about the technology. Only took about half an hour. Sky also provides a 1m HDMI cable with installation.

All I can say is wow. I started watching standard definition content (TV1). It looks much better than before. I believe this largely due to the HDMI connection vs standard Composite connections, but colours are brighter and the picture is much sharper.

Then I flicked over to a Sky Sports rugby show that was in HD. There was a player on screen talking and the detail was phenomenal. I could tell he hadn’t shaved that morning, you could see the beads of sweat on his face and the whole picture was absolutely crystal sharp. Having never really seen HD content I was absolutely amazed. More tellingly my fiance even noticed the difference. I am looking forward to Saturday night and the NRL in HD.

An HD movie yielded similar results. Taking half a day off work on Friday (due to illness, honestly) I spent the day watching HD movies. 6th day (OK movie) has a scene where they fly into the mountains. The snow capped peaks look spectacular. Deja Vu, with its explosions was again sharp, clear and colourful.

Update: On the technical side, the Sky box can output 720p or 1080i. It will by default automatically detect what can be displayed and choose that. I’ve been using 720p and I’m happy. 

On to audio. HD content is broadcast with Dolby Digital 5.1 and/or DTS depending on the source content (again if my information is correct, I have been unable to test as I explain). The MySky HDi decoder has connectors for both Optical Digital Out and Coaxial Digital Out. I purchased a Coax digital audio cable and connected it to my home theatre box, but I am unable to get Dolby Digital output working on my receiver. At this stage I am blaming the home theatre receiver as it is getting old and doing some pretty weird things these days. I have changed the MySky decoder to output MPEG audio over the Digital Out and it works, but it isn’t 5.1. The way I see it I’ve now got a good excuse to look at buying a new home theatre setup.

The MySky HDi decoder also has PVR capabilities. Not a lot to say here. You can book shows to record. If they are a series you can activate ‘Series Link’ which will record all episodes in a series. Tou can also record one show and watch another, or record 2 shows and watch a RECORDED show (contrary to the TV ad where the daughter watches ‘the Netball’ without mentioning that it is recorded). The unit apparently has a 250GB hard drive. I’ve recorded Deja Vu (HD) and 2 SD NRL games and I’m currently at 10% usage which makes sense.  The unit can be set up to warn you when disk space is low and prompt to delete some content, or to automatically delete old content to make space.

Watching recorded content is done from the Planner screen. Which shows all recorded content, shows that are going to record and if they are recording, viewed or recorded. When viewing a program you can specify how far in you wish to start playback. Once in however you have to Fast Forward and Rewind as you would a DVD, which is immensely annoying. Any PVR software (Mediaportal, GB-PVR) will show you a playback bar and let you move along it. Not so here. Definitely an area that can be improved. There is also no ad skipping, which is unsurprising but annoying.

Other TV viewing features include Live Pause and Live Rewind, which I guess could be useful but to be honest I’ve yet to use them.

On to the remote. It is much larger than the standard Sky remote, mostly due to bigger buttons and the addition of the recording/playback options. Buttons are firm and it fits nicely into your hand. A minor annoyance is having to put in 3 number channels to quickly switch. e.g. 0-3-0 for Sky Sport.  Pushing 3-0 will get you nowhere.

In general operation the new decoder is much faster than our old one, checking channel listings, swapping channels and the like are all far faster than before which is great. The info screen (you get to it using i now, rather than ?) also shows the current show and the one following, rather than only the current show. You can still browse through channel/program listings as you could before.

So overall, I am immensely happy with my new MySky HDi and I certainly think it is worth an extra NZ$25 a month. I will be very interested to see what features get added over the next 12 months, as the decoder has a currently unused USB and Ethernet port.

More Details: http://www.myskyhdi.co.nz/

Connectors on the Back:

1 x HD Component Video Out (Y/Pb/Pr)
1 x Composite Video Out
1 x RCA Audio Out (L/R)

1 x VCR SCART (Fixed Audio)
1 x TV SCART
1 x SVIDEO Out
1 x HDMI Out

1 x Coax Digital Audio Out
1 x Optical Audio Out

1 x RJ11 Telephone Connection
1 x RJ45 Ethernet Connection (unused)
1 x USB Connection (unused)

4 x Satellite BNC Connectors

I was given a personalised plate for my 18th Birthday. At the time a plate cost around $400.

 Over the next few years I sold the car it was on so the plates got taken off. While in storage they got munted. I have a new car so thought I’d put them on there. I rang plates who put me on to 0800 REMAKE. I asked how much it would cost to get them reprinted.

 $21.

I received my shiny new plates a few days later and found that the $21 was for the LTSA registration changes, not for the plate reprinting. So if your plates are stuffed you get them replaced for nothing.

Awesome customer service in my book.

On checking the plates website I see that new personalised plates are now a whopping $700. I know it’s a diminishing resource but jesus.

Anyway, my new car looks awesome with my new plates on them, so I’m a happy monkey.

This is going to be a big, long, childish whine fest.

I went to fill my car up with Petrol the other day. I was in a rush. It was a Saturday. The Petrol Station just up the road from me was reasonably busy.

I rocked up, saw the the EFTPOS at Pump was broken (again…) so I put the nozzle into my car, hit fill and waited.

and waited.

and waited.

Apparently the attendants at my local petrol station, who I visit weekly, decided that I had to Pre Pay before I could get any petrol because I might just fill up and leave. I left that petrol station and went down the road where I filled up then paid.

I can totally understand the need for it. I’m sure there are cocks out there that do steal gas. But I am tired of being treated like a fucking criminal every time I go to fill up.

Had this happened at 10PM, I would have been annoyed, but not this pissed off. Had this been at a Petrol station I had never been to I would have been less aggravated. But the fact that I went to my local station, in a nice car wearing a suit FFS and they decided I was a risk?

So now I drive an extra 3kms to get my gas from another petrol station. I don’t believe this will make any difference to my local petrol station but at least I can fill up first, then pay and not get treated like a low life.

I bought a new car a few months ago. New job means new wheels. I ended up buying a 2000 Caldina GT-T.

For non car people it’s a Station Wagon with a 2L turbo engine which develops around 250hp. Suffice to say it’s reasonably quick. On top of that mine is black, with 17″ mags and “boy racer” lights. I didn’t put them there, I bought the car like that.

This apparently makes me a target for every dick who feels the need to prove their manhood by racing down SH16 every night. It is a common occurence for someone to pull alongside me, look across and signal we should race.

These people are dicks for several reasons:

• I am not going to risk my license, job, money and life to prove something to someone else.
• I’m not going to put others at risk for that matter either.
• I don’t know how to handle a car at 150km/hr+ and I bet they don’t either 
• Most of them are in shit cars! If I was ever going to race someone I would waste my time with your 1.3L Suzuki Swift.

In short, boy racers can fuck off. Just because I drive a nice car doesn’t mean I want to participate in your immature penis envy crap.