Breaking Bad - Buried

It would seem not a lot happened in this episode. If you really want to know the details, there is a listing of recaps here. For me it was the Skyler episode that we have been waiting for. Skyler has been a controversial character in the series from the beginning. Anna Gunn even wrote this a few days ago about the Skyler hate she has experienced. As the one of very few women in the show Skyler has been put in a strange position. She is trying to do the right thing, but everybody hates her for it, and there is no way around that. The writers put her in this spot, and viewers are extremely unsympathetic.

Going into “Buried” I had no idea if Skyler would spill the beans on Walt if given the chance. It wasn’t that long ago that she told Walt she wanted him to die. In this episode as she going into the restaunt meeting with Hank she has no idea how much info Hank has. For all she knows he could be going there to slap the handcuffs on her. She quickly realizes that Hank doesn’t know much, and she makes the decision that she is going to keep her mouth shut. For the first time Skyler also learns about Walt’s cancer returning, and it solidifies her choice to stay quiet.

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Breaking Bad - Blood Money

It is amazing how much I forgot about this show after 9 months away. I forgot how tense it made me even when nothing was really happening on screen. I forgot how big of a jerk-face Walter is. I’d liked him and rooted for him for so long that I forgot I started hating him last season. I forgot how much different Jesse is now compared to the kid who started cooking meth with Walt a few years ago. Well, it feels like a few years, but that probably isn’t true in the Breaking Bad timeline. I’ve lost track of how long this whole thing has been going on at this point.

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Like a Gentleman, I Bought Breaking Bad

I finally made the decision to buy the final season of Breaking Bad on Amazon instead of iTunes. That night we sat down to watch “Blood Money”. I was so excited. About 15 seconds into the episode it froze, and we got an error that our bandwidth wasn’t high enough to stream at this time. I busted out my phone and did a quick speed test on our 18 Megabit Uverse service. We were getting less than 1.

I reset our router and it was no better. I tried watching it on the iPad, no dice. It was a frustrating experience. We were on the cusp of watching this show that we had waited so long to see, and then our internet service takes a major dump.

The whole time I was kind of wishing I had decided to buy the season on iTunes instead of Amazon, but I don’t know if it would have been any better. We finally got it working but the quality was horrible. I purchased the HD version, but what we got was less than standard definition for sure. I’m really hoping it will be better for the final 7 episodes.

I’m thinking about writing a post on each episode this season. Hopefully I will have my “Blood Money” post ready in the next couple days.

Editorial on the iPad

Federico Viticci has an great review of the new iPad text editor “Editorial” over at Macstories.

Workflows are at the heart of Editorial: they define the app’s nature, its automation and inter-app communication capabilities, and its unique proposition for iPad users. Workflows are deeply intertwined with Editorial’s feature set and they’re completely open to user customization.

Even though I don’t post to my blog nearly as much as I would like to, everything I write is written on my iPad. When I first got the iPad a couple years ago I wasn’t sure exactly what I would, or could, use it for. Early on I got a wireless keyboard and the iPad became my blogging device of choice. Things just keep getting better when it comes to writing on the iPad. Byword had been my go-to text editor for a long time. I was overjoyed A couple months ago when they added the ability to publish directly to my blog. i no longer had to copy and paste into another app. That always felt nasty. Now a new app has come out that raises the bar even higher, ensuring I will never have to copy/paste to get stuff from one app to another.

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Breaking Bad Download Decision

Last December we got rid of cable. I haven’t really missed it that much except from a few sporting events.[1] With all the money we saved from not paying for cable we planned to buy seasons of shows every now and then. We hadn’t really decided if we were going to do DVD’s, iTunes, or Amazon… and that is the problem. We haven’t bought anything yet. Mostly because Netflix and Hulu + has kept us plenty busy, but also because we haven’t decided where we want our content to live.

I was holding out for an announcement from Netflix on Breaking Bad similar to what they are doing in the UK. Alas, it doesn’t look like that is going to happen, so I decided to buy it. That was the easy part. Now I have to figure out where to buy it from and this I cannot decided. It is between iTunes and Amazon, but both have their advantages and drawbacks. We have an Apple TV on our main television, so iTunes seems like the logical choice. However, we also have a PS3 on there that allows me to stream Amazon video. Other than the purchase process, I think Amazon video offers the better experience for viewing on an iOS device.

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