Comments on the Gold Hill trip coming soon. But this has to come first:

The PS3 did indeed show up about 20 minutes before I left to go mountaineering with Minesh and Laura. And as I was getting in the truck, the mailman arrived with a package from Amazon containing my order of Blu-Ray discs. I wanted to buy a couple things and just see how much better it was before I determined my future disc-buying habits. The two discs I choose to get were Casino Royale and BBC's Planet Earth series. Here's a shot of the inside of the Planet Earth box, note the blue plastic smaller-than-a-DVD case which is a visual cue that this is, indeed, a Blu-Ray product:

See anything weird? Here's a closeup:

Apparently guerrilla tactics are finding their way into the high definition video disc format war. For reasons I can't fathom, the fourth disc of this four disc set was accidentally populated with an HD-DVD, not a Blu-Ray disc. And thus it doesn't work in the PS3. This is the weirdest error I've seen in awhile. I could understand being sent the HD-DVD box set instead of the Blu-Ray one, but how do the individual discs get shuffled like this!?

Amazon is shipping me a replacement, and I was very impressed with their customer service system. Their website asked me for my phone number and I clicked on a box that said, "call me right now." The phone rang within two seconds, and I was instantly talking to some guy who helped me out. He was equally bewildered by this mix-up.

Oh, and for the record, watching movies (and playing fl0w) in 1080p rocks my socks.