I usually run a little late to the technology party. It’s a combination of not feeling the need for the newest gadget and my innate frugality. Although I was born in the ’60s, my brain was set to The Great Depression. “Waste not, want not” and all that jazz, flatfoot.
Twelve months ago, I finally bought an HDTV. Last month, I ended my 16 year laptop hiatus. My previous laptop had a whopping 80MB hard drive. That’s not a typo – 80 MEGAbytes. Just enough room for a Word document that says “I need to get a larger hard dri”.
And a couple weeks ago, I jumped on the NETFLIX train with a 1 month free trial. It streams perfectly on my HDTV and laptop. Who knew?
This was driven by my desire to do a li’l binge viewing of Breaking Bad, starting with Episode One. I’d never seen the show but a lot of my friends are nuts about it. Better late to the water cooler than never. Besides, it don’t cost nuthin’, and I wasn’t watching much of anything else except Under The Dome. Man, that show’s like LOST with a lid!
I also checked out a few of the NETFLIX documentaries, including The Queen of Versailles, who is the polar opposite person I am fiscally (although we have the same taste in rattlesnake lederhosen). As I wrote about in “257 Channels and Nothing On”, it may not be worth $1,000 a year to watch Honey Boo Boo via cable or DirecTV with handy and inexpensive options like NETFLIX.
