Dec 11
I signed up with NetFlix earlier this week. A handful of co-workers have told me how great the service is. I couldn’t keep myself from feeling like I, too, had to participate in the evolution. After a minor glitch with registration, I was in and ready to start NetFlixing.
NetFlix’s gig is to send you movies in the mail. You create a queue of movies. They send you 3 movies at a time from your queue, based on the priority you give the movies. You can then keep the movies for as long as you like. Once done, you toss them in the mail and you’ll receive more movies automatically. There’s no need to go to the store and pick out another film. You’ve got a queue so they just continue to send them to you.
The addiction started right away. I haven’t even received a single movie yet but I can’t stop surfing around on their website. Morning, lunch, evening, I’m on Netflix.com I’m adding movies to my queue, ranking movies in search of that one elusive, perfect movie I have forgotten about. It becomes a game much like the Chris Farley celebrity interviews on SNL. “Do they have this movie?! Yeah, that’s a good one. Oooh! Do they have that one? Yeah, I liked that movie too.” I just can’t stop.
The size and quality of your movie queue becomes interesting water cooler talk. “I heard a fable about one guy who has 284 movies in his queue!” Other NetFlixers want to know what you’re watching so they can size up your tastes. What does it say about me when the first 3 films I’ve rented are Old School, Anger Management, and Clockwork Orange?
Dec 11
At some point home improvement will become tiring. Please add sewer mainline drain pipe to the items we have had fixed in the last 2 months. Something, probably tree roots, caused our drains to start backing up. By the time we realized it the drains were not a pretty sight. I will spare you the unnecessary details. Let me just say that I had to do some cleaning up with a ShopVac which now needs a disinfecting with bleach.
I called up RotoRooter again since they did a bang-up job on the water heater. The guy charged me 165 bucks to snake the line. After signing away the 165 bucks he got to work by bringing in an enlarged pipe snake. Unlike the dinky little one I have, this one had to be wheeled in. It had buttons and levers, to the likes I have never seen before. He flipped over his bucket, sat down and pushed a button and my problem was fixed. What a scam. The hardest part of the trip for this guy was hauling the snake up and down the stairs. But then again, would I want to do what he’s doing? Not really.
So, I finally got my technical issues with iTunes squared away and I am now a happy iTunes customer. Rolling Stone has a great interview with Steve Jobs. In it Jobs discusses how they landed the record labels. From the sounds of it, Apple fought an uphill battle. The deals didn’t start rolling in until the subscription-based services started to fail. I am blown away by the fact of how true Jobs comments are. He believes that most people don’t want to steal music. They want an easy way to find music to fill an immediate desire to hear a song. I don’t think he could be more correct. Given the choice between digging through lousy ripped mp3s on a P2P service or just paying a buck to the song on iTunes, I’ll happily shell over the money. The fact that I have to buy an iPod to play it is another story though. I’m hesitant to go balls out on iTunes is there is not an easy way for me to get music without DRM attached to it.
