Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Gripe Session


So many things to complain about and so little time. First up, Netflix. A big "Boo" to Netflix. They're doing away with profiles which allowed you to have multiple DVD queues under one account. It also let you rate movies based on profiles also. Now all that's going away as of Sept 1. And why are they doing this? According to them "While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers." I call shenanigans. Since I'm one of their customers I don't see this as an improvement. And I would wager anyone that is a customer and is taking advantage of profiles won't see it that way either. This means we'll have to go back to one movie queue and Ginger and I will have to manually adjust the queue almost daily to determine which movie shows up and we'll have to come up with some system for allocating who gets the next rental. All in all pretty annoying considering the profile system solved all that for us. If there was a way to do multiple accounts at the combined account rate I would probably consider that if it was an option.

Also what's up with Google's feed reader? If you use Google's home page to read RSS feeds then you may have noticed over the past week it's been sluggish (and I think that's putting it mildly). At the moment it's not uncommon for a feed to be two days behind on updates. One of the guys where I work has quit and is going to work for Google, and I made my displeasure about this known to him. Luckily he assured me it would be the first thing he would look into once he starts.

And then there's the new Firefox. The big 3.0 is out now. Can't say I'm thrilled with some of the changes they've made. Like the word completion when you're typing in a URL, were people clamoring to have the title and the address icon information available when displaying previously visited addresses? That just seems like information overload to me. And I'm really not thrilled with the changes to the default font that is being used. I may have to search around and see if there are some settings I can use to change back to the fonts being used in 2.x.


And I have no particularly good reason for interspersing the hydrangea pictures in this post, but I felt there needed to be something good to offset some of the venom in the post itself. Plus I liked how some of the recent shots I took turned out.

4 comments:

Curt Sawyer said...

You complain endlessly!
---Ramirez to MacLeod, Highlander

Anonymous said...

It's what he does. It's ALL he does. And he will never stop; EVER! Until you are dead!

--Reese to Connor, Terminator


But seriously, as I understand it, you have two solutions to your Netflix "problem":
1) actually talk with ginger and work together. Pretend you're not married, it might help.
2) take over responsbility for mailing back the discs. Mail them from work in the morning. They are guaranteed to get there next day, so that night, after you update your blog, update your queue. voila! Your entry will be at the top of the queue the next day when your Netflix processes your disc. No need to fight back and forth almost daily. Note: with a cronjob and a little "wget" action, you can reorder the queue the way you want every minute of the day, without having to be in front of the computer. She can't compete with that.

Your call.

p.s. don't tell her I sent this. Oh, I know, I'll sign "anonymous" so she won't know it's from me.

JamesF said...

I don't believe there's a good queue management solution for multiple people using the same queue. You're making an assumption in your suggestion that all our selections are immediately available. If that were the case, then yes, I agree queue management would be easily doable. But since you (apparently not "you", but rather "we") typically have all the "XXX Wait" entries at the top that foils your proposed scheme since you can't know which item on the list will ship next and therefore have no way to insure an equal (or previously agreed upon) distribution scheme.

And mailing them back has never been a problem. If I mail it from home it will get there the next day barring extenuating circumstances (although I do question the "guaranteed to get there next day" statement since I'm unclear how you're attributing a delivery assurance to the USPS).

And yes, signing it anonymous and referencing cron jobs and making jokes about us pretending like were not married have completely concealed your identity. And it's been further obfuscated by the fact that it came from someone using Firefox on a Linux machine here in the local area. And why are you living in the stone age and still using Firefox 1.5? Have you heard we now have the ability to control fire. :-)

Anonymous said...

You're right, I have never seen a "Wait" note on my queue. I guess I always watch old, low-demand discs.

And yes, of course you can tell who I am. It was just for the sheer amusement factor, naturally. Thanks for the laugh!

And I use firefox 1.5.0.12 because it works well enough and I don't upgrade unless I need to. I get security upgrades and that's enough for me.