10:46 – Autumn weather has finally arrived in Winston-Salem. For the few days, our highs have been around 80 (~27C) and our lows in the mid-50’s (~13C). I’m sure the heat will return briefly during Indian Summer, but the worst of it is probably over for the year.
I just shipped another chemistry kit to a Canadian customer. Every time I do that, I keep my fingers crossed, so to speak. I trust USPS to get the package to Canada. It’s not that I don’t trust Canada, exactly. It’s just that I don’t trust any bureaucracy, and every package we ship to Canada has to go through USPS, Canadian customs, and then to Canada Post. That’s a lot of opportunities for problems. Still, I’ve never had a package to Canada lost or returned, so I guess I should just relax.
Yesterday, I made up three dozen small parts bags for the new batch of chemistry kits. Today, I’ll make up a bunch of the chemical bags. The chemicals themselves are already bottled, so it’s just a matter of making up the bottle sets and bagging them.
15:06 – A lot of TV series release DVD’s around this time of year. Sometimes, it’s quite a wait for the discs, but I stick them in our disc queue anyway, mainly to keep track of them. Sometimes, Netflix streaming doesn’t get series that are out on DVD for a year or more. Other times, it’s only a couple of weeks from DVD release to streaming release. I just went over to rearrange our disc queue, and noticed that three series I had at the top of our disc queue are now available streaming: Revenge (with Emily VanCamp), Doc Martin S5, and Grey’s Anatomy S8. I don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy–all of the doctors are accurately nick-named McAsshole, McDork, and so on, and the lead character is a world-class whiner–but I do want to watch the other two. Particularly Emily, whom I adore. So I just deleted all three series from our disc queue, which I’m sure makes Netflix happy. It costs them a lot less to deliver streaming episodes than to pay postage for discs. Every time I talk to Netflix support, I beg them to increase the price of streaming from their current ridiculously low $8/month rate. I tell them that boosting the price even just to $20 or $30 a month would lose them few customers and give them the money they need to get more titles available streaming. Even though it’s currently more profitable than streaming, Netflix really doesn’t want to be in the business of mailing DVDs back and forth. And I really think it’d help them reach their goal of 100% streaming if they’d increase prices to boost their revenues.