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Category: netflix

Friday, 17 October 2014

07:51 – I had a dream last night. The US House overwhelmingly voted to impeach Obama for malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, and treason. The vote in the US Senate was along self-interest lines, with all of the Republicans and every Democrat who didn’t want to be lynched voting for conviction, for a total of 100:0 favoring conviction. Obama was stripped of his office, his pension, his assets, and his citizenship, and sentenced to be tarred and feathered, then keelhauled, and then transferred to West Africa to work in an Ebola ward. Mrs. Obama was sentenced to go with her husband to West Africa, where she would be responsible for feeding ridiculously inadequate lunches to school-age Ebola patients. President Biden immediately imposed a complete travel ban to bar anyone who had visited the stricken areas from entering the US.

13:53 – Barbara and I are about halfway through season three of Hart of Dixie on Netflix streaming. It’s a farce, set in rural Alabama. I wouldn’t watch it if it were just me, but it does have a lot of cuties.

As we were watching an episode last night, I commented to Barbara that I was surprised to learn that Montgomery is the capital of Alabama. That’s what my elementary school teachers taught me all those years ago, but since 1973 I’ve thought they’d been lying to me. “In Birmingham they love the guv’nor. Boo, boo, boo. Now we all did what we could do.” I guess that’s why I constantly play that riff on my air guitar the whole time we’re watching the show.

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Tuesday, 19 August 2014

09:55 – Barbara and I are about halfway through the sixth and final season of Dawson’s Creek on Netflix streaming. If it were me, I’d have stopped watching after season four. I commented to Barbara at the start of season five that the series “felt” different, and that I didn’t like the changes. As we continued to watch season five, it became obvious that the writing had tanked, with stupid plotting, poor characterization, and inane dialog. With season six, it’s gotten even worse. Maybe the showrunner or head writer left after season four, or maybe they just ran out of ideas. If you’ve never seen Dawson’s Creek, I’d recommend watching it, but only the first four seasons. Then just pretend that they never made seasons five and six, which they shouldn’t have.

Another of our bottle-top dispensers died Sunday. Fortunately, I have an unused spare sitting on the shelf, because I sure don’t want to be without at least one working unit. These things are kind of like the pumps used to dispense toppings on sundaes, except they’re extremely accurate (~0.05 mL) and repeatable (~0.01 mL). To operate them, you simply pull up on the pump handle, place an empty bottle at the dispensing tip, and press down the pump handle.

They’re not cheap–$200 give or take, depending on the capacity–plus another $50 to $100 for the reservoir bottle, again depending on capacity. Here’s an image of one, not the model we use, but a similar one.

I dithered before I bought the first one because I wasn’t sure a BTD would really save much time, if any. But it does, trimming maybe 10 seconds from the fill time per bottle. That may not sound like much, but it adds up quickly if you’re filling hundreds of bottles in a session and tens of thousands per year.

The one that failed Sunday was the fourth failure. I’ll notify the vendor, who in the past has replaced each failed unit, but by now is probably getting tired of doing that. If so, it’s no big deal. I’ll order another unit today to become my hot spare. I think I got something close to 10,000 bottles filled with the failed unit, which means if I treat the BTD’s as consumables it costs me an extra $0.02 to fill a bottle. Or, another way of looking at it, that BTD saved me 100,000 seconds (about 28 hours) at a cost of about $7 per hour.

10:28 – As it turns out, I don’t need to order a spare. I just opened the box that I thought contained one spare unit. In fact, it contained two: one that the vendor had replaced under warranty and a second that I’d ordered and paid for.

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Tuesday, 3 June 2014

08:06 – One of the minor annoyances with Netflix streaming has been that titles disappear with little notice. In the past, Netflix has provided as little as three or four days’ notice. That’s fine for a movie, but not very helpful for a series. Every time I’ve spoken to Netflix tech support about another issue, I’ve asked them to please make the end date available for each title, or at least give more notice. Yesterday, I noticed that they’ve started doing that. Three of the items in our streaming queue are marked as expiring on 1 July, including one series that we just started watching: Outrageous Fortune, a pretty good series from New Zealand. We won’t have time to finish it. There are 107 episodes, so we’ll just bag it for now and wait until Netflix gets it back, as they probably will.

In the first six seasons of Heartland, Amber Marshall’s character Amy didn’t drink alcohol, other than one incident where a bad guy spiked her drinks with vodka at a party. Even during holidays, birthdays, etc. when all the adults were having wine with dinner, Amy had a glass of water. But during an episode we watched the other night, Amy had a glass of wine with dinner. Apparently, she’s turned 21 and is now allowed wine. So I mentioned this to Kim yesterday because Jasmine turns 21 on June 21st. I mentioned jokingly that Jas would now be allowed to drink. I was flabbergasted when Kim said that Jas has already mentioned this and said that she expects to have wine with her birthday dinner. I thought Jas was an alcohol-shall-never-pass-my-lips kind of girl. For example, she refuses to go out with college boys who (gasp) drink beer. I may have to reconsider my opinion of Jas. She’s not as prissy as I thought she was. She does, however, have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.

10:06 – I’m in the midst of making up 137 30 mL bottles of iodine solution, which is included in most of our kits. That’s as many bottles as I could fill with the ~4.25 liters of solution I had on hand. I’ll make up another 6+ liters of iodine solution today, but I can’t fill another batch of bottles because I’m down to only half a dozen of the special phenolic cone caps we use on those bottles to keep the iodine from outgassing.

I spent some time yesterday afternoon getting one of the new laptop systems configured for Barbara to use as her main system. It should have been easy to transfer her Thunderbird email data and Firefox browser data over from her Linux system, but it just didn’t work. I copied the contents of the .thunderbird and .firefox profile directories from her Linux system and pasted those files into her new default profile directories under appdata on the Windows 8.1 system, but neither Thunderbird nor Firefox used those data. Fortunately, Barbara doesn’t have much that she cares about having transferred. She said not to worry about it. She’ll recreate her addressbook manually and send herself any emails that she cares about keeping. What really matters are her documents and spreadsheet data, which I copied over directly.

I also got power management set up for an always-plugged-in desktop configuration. Apparently, even though the charger is connected at all times, the system ignores the charger and allows the battery to run down to 50% before it actually charges it. Supposedly, that’ll make the battery last a lot longer.

I connected a standard mouse to one of the USB ports because Barbara doesn’t particularly like touchpads. She’s happy with the keyboard and display, though, so I won’t bother connecting a USB keyboard and full-size display. I also didn’t bother to connect her Ethernet cable. She’s happy using WiFi instead.

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Saturday, 10 May 2014

10:23 – Barbara is out planting potted flowers before the rain arrives. I’m doing laundry, shipping kits, and getting ready to build more.

I also just climbed up on the roof to get rid of the spring accumulation of maple seeds and so on in the troughs. This may be the last year I’ll do that. Having vertigo means I can lose my balance without warning, which isn’t a good thing when I’m standing up on the roof. I don’t want to pull a Max McGee. As Harry Callahan said, a man’s got to know his limitations. Next year, I’ll just do the best I can with a rake while standing at the top of the ladder.

I got email yesterday from Netflix announcing that they’re increasing streaming prices from $8 to $9 per month, but only for new customers or those who change their plans. Others are grandfathered in for two years. I still think that Netflix is being too timid, but I suppose they must know what they’re doing. If it were me, I would have doubled the monthly price and announced that I was doing that so that I could afford to greatly increase the number and quality of streaming titles available. In an era of $150/month cable TV bills, I can’t imagine that many people would drop the service if it increased from $8 to $16/month. More likely, they’d drop some of the cable TV options.

Amazon is now streaming a limited selection of old HBO series. As far as I can see, it’s no big deal. Every HBO series I checked on Amazon is pay-per-view. If you want to watch an HBO series, it’s actually cheaper just to sign up for Netflix DVDs than it is to pay per episode or per season on Amazon.

Speaking of expensive streaming, Barbara and I watched the first five seasons of the Canadian series Murdoch Mysteries on Amazon Prime streaming, all at no additional charge. They also have series six, but the only option is to buy episodes or the entire series. I don’t know who Amazon thinks they’re kidding. They charge $4.99 for each 45-minute episode or $58 for the 13-episode series. Give me a break. For comparison, I recently bought the most recent season of Heartland on DVD from Amazon.ca. Those five discs and 18 episodes cost about $22, including shipping.

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Wednesday, 30 April 2014

08:45 – Imagine my surprise the other night when I fired up Netflix streaming and was presented with a screen of legal jargon. The icons below the boilerplate offered only two options: “Accept” or “Email me a copy”. So I emailed myself a copy, and was then down to one option: Accept. Whatever happened to decline?

As I was about to click Accept–since there was no other choice–I noticed that I did indeed have another option. I could view the next screen of the contract. I was on screen 1. Of 102 screens! I clicked through the first few screens and got the general sense that (a) Netflix isn’t liable for anything, (b) that we can use the “service” only by doing exactly what Netflix says we’re allowed to do, and (c) that we’re under no circumstances allowed to sue Netflix. By this time, Barbara was getting impatient, so I just clicked on accept.

I can’t believe that Netflix lawyers actually think this “contract” would be enforceable, particularly since they don’t (as Microsoft does) force you to scroll all the way through the whole thing before you can accept it. My guess is that about 99.999% of Netflix streaming customers (including attorneys…) will simply click accept at the first screen. In no way does that constitute a meeting of the minds. Unconscionable, more like. What was Reed Hastings thinking?

12:15 – I had a kit to ship to an APO address this morning. I’d never done that with the Stamps.com software, so I decided to give it a try with USPS Click-N-Ship, not really expecting it to work. It worked, accepting my credit card as though there’d never been a problem.

I’m still making up solutions and filling bottles. I have everything I need to build another two or three dozen each of the biology and chemistry kits, so it’s just a matter of getting them assembled. I want to go into June with at least 60 biology kits and 90 chemistry kits ready to ship, and into July with at least the same number in finished-goods inventory. That means we’re going to have to label and fill thousands of bottles and build quite a few kits between now and then.

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Tuesday, 4 February 2014

07:55 – Barbara got home about 6:15 p.m. She and Frances had finally gotten their mom back to her apartment and settled in with her caregivers. Sankie is not doing very well. Barbara commented that she’s no better than she was when she went into the hospital. She’s still confused and rambling when she’s responsive at all. We’re all hoping that being back in her familiar environment will help her bounce back, but as Barbara said, Sankie has to do this herself. No one can do it for her. All anyone can do is wait and hope.

I just shipped our last biology kit, so my top priority today is to get another batch of those assembled. February is starting out pretty well. If the pace of the first three days holds up all month, we’ll triple sales versus February 2013.

10:58 – I’m starting to get annoyed with Netflix streaming. When I check their “New Arrivals” section, I find many titles that were first available on Netflix streaming several months ago and that we finished watching three or four months ago. That’s not “New” by any reasonable definition of the word. It’s probably no coincidence that Netflix doesn’t allow one to sort by availability date. If people could see only what’s been added in the last seven days or even the last 30 days, a lot of them would start wondering why they’re paying for the subscription. Making matters worse, most of what they’ve added in the last six months to a year has been garbage. Dubbed Pacific Rim and Eastern European titles, cartoons, crap reality shows, and so on. I’m sure they’re doing the best they can, given the $8/month subscription rate, but it’s pretty clear that they’re being outbid for a lot of newer material.

We’re watching a lot more stuff on Amazon Prime nowadays than we are on Netflix streaming. Part of that is because we’re new to the Amazon Prime catalog, but it’s also nice that Amazon Prime almost never crashes out of the program and re-buffers, which Netflix does frequently. On the other hand, I’m annoyed at Amazon for starting to charge sales tax to North Carolina residents, and I hear they’re thinking about increasing the price of Prime from $79/year to as much as $120/year.

Netflix and Amazon are both making a huge mistake by competing to license content exclusively. All that does ultimately is to drive up everyone’s costs and they gain no real competitive advantage by doing so. If Netflix and Amazon would both simply refuse to pay for exclusive rights and insist on the lowest possible fees for non-exclusive rights, both of them would end up with a lot more content at a much lower price.

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Monday, 30 December 2013

09:48 – Barbara and I just finished the first season of the law firm drama The Good Wife on Amazon streaming. The show seems to be competently done but not as extraordinary as most of the critics seem to think. The cast is excellent and the writing above average. However, not an episode passes without at least one and usually several of the lawyers doing things that in real life would get them disbarred if not imprisoned. I mean, they casually engage in major fraud, evidence tampering in murder cases, suborning juries, and so on. Still, it’s not a bad show and Julianne Margulies is very watchable.

Barbara is still cleaning and I’m trying to get everything done that needs to be done by tomorrow.

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Thursday, 12 December 2013

08:23 – Netflix Instant is obviously under pressure from Amazon and other video streaming vendors. Netflix is having to pay much more for the rights to stream programming, and it’s really starting to show in their selection of new titles. For the last few months, I’ve noticed that their new material is heavily skewed towards material from Korea and other Pacific Rim countries. For at least the last three months, their “Recently added in TV Shows” category has been more than half Korean and other dubbed material. I’m sure they get this stuff for almost nothing, and I’m equally sure that almost none of their subscribers have any interest at all in watching it. It’s simply a cheap and cheesy way of padding their catalog. Even so, at eight bucks a month Netflix streaming continues to offer incredible bang for the buck.

I’m not sure what’s going on with kit sales to foreign customers. Over the past year our sales have been steadily about 95% domestic, with nearly all of the remainder going to Canadian customers. Lately, 15% to 20% of sales have been to customers outside the US, with Canadians, Australians, and Brits about evenly split.

I read an interesting report yesterday about generosity by nation. The generosity in question was not foreign aid, but individual generosity, measured not only in monetary contributions but in willingness to help others, contribute time and work, and so on. The PDF included a table of the top 10 over the past five years. Positions 1 through 6 were held by the US, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, and the UK. It’s probably not a coincidence that all of these are English-speaking countries.

09:46 – Congratulations to John Farrell Kuhns, whose Heirloom Chemistry Set Kickstarter project has nearly reached four times its original $30,000 goal. That’s with only a month gone and two weeks remaining.

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Several people have asked me why I’m supporting and promoting a competitor’s project. The short answer is that I don’t really consider John to be a competitor. We focus on different markets. But even if John were our competitor, I’d still support his project because I think it’s important that kids have as many good options as possible for getting involved with hands-on science.

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Sunday, 1 December 2013

09:24 – We just ended a pretty decent month, with sales about 2.1 times those of November 2012. If that growth rate holds up for this month, we’ll ship 60 or 70 kits in December.

We just started watching series two of Reven8e on Netflix streaming. The plot, such as it is, is ridiculous, but I’ll watch anything at least once if it stars Emily VanCamp.

Speaking of adorable Canadian actresses, there’s the incomparable Amber Marshall, whom I’ll watch over and over. And over. Barbara is heading over to her mom’s today to get her apartment decorated for the holiday. I have only six episodes left in series six of Heartland, so I’ll probably watch those while Barbara’s away today and then jump back and start watching series one again. I plan to make it through all six series at least a couple more times before series seven wraps next spring and I can add it to the cycle.

Barbara always has a hard time choosing a Saturnalia gift for me, so yesterday I simplified that task by ordering my own gift for her to give me: the DVD sets for series one, two, four, five, and six of Heartland (we already had series 3). On the US Amazon site, the sets were priced from $20 to $50 each, averaging about $35 each, so I ordered them from Amazon.ca instead. The same sets there were $CDN 16.99 (~ $US 16.03) except for series six, which was $CDN 22.99. Shipping was only about $12.

09:49 – While I was walking Colin just now, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the almost-mythical Jasmine Littlejohn. Alas, I didn’t have a camera along, so I can’t prove it’s true, but I swear that I’m almost certain I saw her. She came out the front door, walked quickly to her car, waved at me, got in, and drove off. I guess I should file a sighting report on the Bigfoot/Jasmine reporting site.

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Monday, 11 November 2013

09:25 – I periodically get emails like this one:

can u give me a step by step giude to produce MDMA and what for equipment i do need? i got acces to the chemicals, but now idea how to handle it^^ thx

I confess that I’m always tempted to reply something like: “To begin, bring four liters of diethyl ether to a boil over a gas burner …” I would, too, except I’m afraid these morons would be stupid enough to do it in an apartment building full of innocent people. Given a reasonable set of precursors, MDMA is not a particularly difficult synthesis, if you know what you’re doing. But, even ignoring the legal and ethical issues, I suspect most of the chemists I know would hesitate to attempt it, at least on the scale that these morons are thinking about. Synthesizing 500 milligrams or 5 grams of something is one thing; scaling that up to 500 grams or 5 kilograms or 500 kilograms is a whole other ball of wax. There are professionals who have doctorates in these scaling-up processes. They’re called chemical engineers. And, as any competent chemist knows, a reaction that’s well-behaved every time in a 100 mL flask may go disastrously wrong if it’s scaled up by two or three orders of magnitude.

Barbara and I finished watching series 3 of Downton Abbey last night on Amazon Prime streaming. Nine episodes in HD without a glitch, which was a pleasant change from Netflix streaming. On Netflix, I don’t think we’ve been able to watch a full episode of anything in HD for at least a year. When we load an episode, the Roku box shows one to four balls as it buffers, with two balls being about VHS quality and four being about DVD quality. If HD is available and the bandwidth is available to support it, the “HD” icon displays next to the fourth ball. Most of the stuff we watch is supposed to be available in HD, and we sometimes start out with an HD feed. But almost invariably the feed stops while the Roku re-buffers and shifts down to three or two balls. Over the course of a typical evening, that might happen anything from once or twice to several times. It hasn’t yet happened with Amazon.

10:28 – 3D-printed fossils & rocks could transform geology

This is just one example of an application of a new technology that will eventually make a huge difference. Right now, Professor Hasiuk has to use a $170,000 3D printer in another department to get the resolution he needs, but before long that $170,000 printer will be a $17,000 printer, and not much longer after that it’ll be a $1,700 printer. I foresee a day when mass manufacturing will be done in factories full of huge, fast 3D printers. Factories will no longer be dedicated to one product or type of product. They’ll be able to run 24 hours a day, shifting each printer as necessary from one product to a completely different product, simply by loading a new template for each change and loading a bin of the necessary raw material. On a related note, I see that a company in Texas has produced a perfectly good steel Model 1911 .45 ACP pistol. I suspect with the raw materials and amortized equipment costs, that pistol probably cost them $10,000 or $100,000 to produce, but just wait a few years and people will be turning them out on home 3D printers.

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