Tag netflix bullshit

My Saturday got off to a 4am start since I had to time another race.  This was going to more of a challenge than normal since I would be doing all timing related duties myself instead of having my faithful sidekick Ali helping out.  This was a new race, held at a local hospital.  The venue was really nice with ample parking and full access to the building lobby for bathroom facilities.

Luckily for me the race wasn’t huge in terms of numbers.  Even with the 35-40 walk up entries we only had a total of around 225 runners.  Even so I was quite busy, especially because I once again brought the additional timing equipment to do a chip start.  I was quite eager to atone for the failed chip start from the last race.

I ran out to the start line with about 10 minutes to go to start time and hurriedly got the box set up.  Initially I had a few issues getting connected to the box but it seemed to just be because the Elite box takes considerably longer to boot up and connect to the network than our STK Lite unit.  It was actually a decent race to use the chip start since the road the race started on was narrow, we had people 100 feet or more back from the start line.

I actually only had one of the two mats up and running since the one receiver card was sent out to Ipico for repair.  One mat was enough apparently as I successfully captured the runner start times. I was happy.

In general I was really happy with the way the race turned out.  Like I said it was a nice venue, the timing went smoothly and they had a nice spread of post race refreshments, enough for double the amount of people.  I was proud to have handled it alone as well.

Once I got home and finished up the post race work I immediately dove into chores, fully intending to get everything done.  Doing the manual labor was made more difficult by a right shoulder that was KILLING me.  Any motion that involved the right arm radiated pain from my shoulder.  Great, not only do I have a right knee that is not getting better, now my shoulder is f’d up. I tried to compensate by using my left arm wherever possible, even in tasks where it was awkward to do so.

I headed into the bathroom and buzzed my hair.  Despite my threats to bore everyone by taping the session I decided against it.  It turned out pretty well although I noticed a few stray hairs I might need Ali to attend to.

I worked relentlessly and got both the inside and outside work done by around 3.  I then headed out with the girls in the party van for some errands, they love errands.  One of those stops was at Best Buy.  The intention was to look at CPU fans.  I recently had replaced two fans in my 5 year old computer in an attempt to eliminate some annoying noises.  I was successful in quieting most of them but there was still an intermittent high pitched sound that drives Ali crazy.

So the CPU cooler Best Buy sells was something like $70 bucks. It was a big, gawdy thing.  I started running scenarios through my head.  I had no guarantee that the CPU fan was the source of the noise.  If I replaced the thing and the noise still lived, I was going to be majorly annoyed.

Just for the hell of it I started walking down the aisle where new systems are located.  I spotted an Lenovo mini-tower on sale.  As I examined the specs it seemed decent with 6 gigs of RAM and a 1TB HDD.  I took a picture of the snap tag and was redirected to the Best Buy site.  The customer reviews for the system were overwhelmingly positive, describing the system as a good value for the money.

The system utilizes a Pentium 620 processor which is low on the totem pole as far as CPU power nowadays but still a nice upgrade from my aging, power hungry, hot as an oven Pentium D system.  I justified the purchase as something Ali would endorse since it would eliminate the noise problem once and for all.  I justified it to myself by noting that for the last 15 years I regularly would replace my computer every 12-18 months.  I was now around 60 months, it was time.

The one upgrade I did have to address on the system was the built in graphics which are not up to snuff.  I picked out a Nvidia 545 card with 1.5gb of memory to handle my gaming needs on the system. I rung up my purchase and happily carried my system out of the store.  I was pretty excited to update my home system since it has been so long since I built my current full size tower.

When I got home I immediately noticed something in front of the left fence line.  A closer look revealed it was a turtle. I wasn’t sure what direction he wandered in from or where he was hoping to go.  All I knew is I didn’t want to see him wind up as turtle road kill, something I see far too often in this shitty, thoughtless driver infested area.

As I picked him up he hissed a little bit but then settled down.  He actually had his head poking out a bit as we walked to the far back of the property.  I sat him down by one of the fill pits that transforms into a pond during rainy season, figuring he may enjoy it back there.  He was several hundred yards away from any roadways at least.

Now of course I had a shitload of work to do when it came to migrating my old computer to my new computer.  My plan had multiple stages.  First I pulled the internal 2TB hdd from my old system that is used for back up and installed it in the Lenovo.  I then took my old computer into the hobby room and attached it to the network connection in there and turned it on.  My plan was to copy files from it over the network as well as using a RDP connection to it to verify/check configuration settings. I also installed the upgraded graphic card in the Lenovo while the case was apart.

So I put the new Lenovo in place.  It is a mini-tower form factor, significantly smaller than the full size tower it was replacing.  It was nice and quiet when I turned it on, I really couldn’t hear it at all, Ali will be pleased.

The first thing I needed to do was join my home domain.  This exposed the first hurdle.  The new computer came preloaded with Windows 7 Home Premium which does not support joining a domain, great.  Now Microsoft is “nice” enough to bundle in the ability to upgrade your OS to other versions on the fly.  I could upgrade to Windows Professional for $89 or to Windows Ultimate, which I was already running on the old system, for $139.  Ouch.  Well the last thing I felt like doing was spending that much money to get a version of Windows 7 up and running that work on my domain.  It could quickly turn what was intended as a bargain purchase into not much of one.

Well just for the hell of it, I thought I would try using my product key from the copy of Windows Ultimate I received for hosting that fake Windows 7 launch party.  I did not expect it to work as I recalled that the copy I had supposedly would only work/activate once.  Well imagine my surprise when the Windows Anytime Upgrade took the code.  Within about 10 minutes I was up and running with Ultimate, very sweet.

I spent a good portion of the rest of the evening starting the migration process which surprisingly wasn’t all that bad.  Since I keep most of my data in an organized manner, moving it across was pretty straight forward.  All of the software I needed to reinstall I could download from the web.  I even got WoW moved across Saturday night and was very happy to see I was holding a steady 60 FPS no matter where I was in the game.

I fell asleep quite content with my Saturday.  Topping off a solid day of getting stuff done with a new pc purchase gave me the warm and fuzzies.

Despite having more work to do on the computer swap, I hit bed early since I was getting up early to do water support for Michelle.  It was an early bedtime kind of weekend, despite being solo.  I turned off the light before 9pm on Friday night.

I had my alarm set for 5am Sunday however I woke up on my own at 4, how nice.  I figured I would get up and get ready, plus I could do some more computer migration work.  I was supposed to meet up with Michelle at 6:30.  She was actually starting her run at 4am, running around her development. She had a total of 23 miles to cover.

I got there early due to my early wake up.  I figured I would ride around the development and try to find her.  I was unsuccessful, instead I just met her at our designated spot at 6:30.  I was surprised that Michelle had already got 13 miles in and had 10 to go.

I had made some adjustments to make my role as bike support more comfortable.  I pulled the clip pedals off and threw on regular mountain bike pedals.  I also doubled up on my butt padding by wearing my spandex tri shorts under my baggy bike shorts. The two changes definitely helped.

Doing the bike support wasn’t bad at all.  Michelle had a strong run, only really slowing down the last 2-3 miles when the sun was rapidly heating things up. We finished up a little after 8:30.  Michelle thanked me for the support which I was more than happy to do, I know support really helps with runs that are that long.

I had brought stuff along to swim at the water park but I decided against it.  The park didn’t open up for over an hour and I figured I could make better use of my time working more on the computer migration. Instead I grabbed a large coffee from DD and headed home.

A friend of mine had posted a clip of the ending of the Mayweather/Ortiz fight.  It was quite the scene. By all accounts Mayweather was winning the fight easily although in the final round it was pretty apparent that although Mayweather was outpointing Ortiz, he wasn’t really hurting him.

Ortiz actually was putting Mayweather against the ropes a few times, dropping some bombs.  Well during one exchange Ortiz did an obvious, deliberate head butt, a dirty move for sure.  The ref immediately flagged Ortiz for doing so and took a point away.  Ortiz, to his credit,  knew it was shitty, hugged Mayweather and presumably apologized.

So after the ref finished the point deduction he was looking away for some reason.  I don’t know if he ever uttered the command “FIGHT” to signify the resumption of the match.  Well obviously Ortiz thought action was not resumed as he had both of his hands down by his sides as Mayweather smacks him in the face.  Ortiz is obviously surprised by this but instead of putting his hands up, he looks to the ref, I assume to say WTF?? Well Mayweather follows with another punch that lands squarely on Ortiz’s unprotected chin, knocking  him silly.  Ortiz’s hands were clearly down when both punches were delivered. Even if the punches were legal, there was no way to classify them as anything but cheap.  Obviously Ortiz thought time was still out.

So after the controversial finish we are treated to even more fireworks when Larry Merchant interviews Mayweather, asking him the obvious questions about the ending of the fight.  Well a few questions in Mayweather loses it and screams at Merchant, saying he has always been critical of Floyd and that he doesn’t know shit about boxing.   As he walks away from Larry, Merchant fires back that if he was 50 years younger (Larry is pushing 80) he would kick Mayweather’s ass.  It was GREAT.

It was the most interesting thing that I have seen come out of boxing for at least a decade if not more.  You know there HAS to be a rematch.

Despite my best intentions, I was unable to stay awake for the entire Eagles game, falling asleep for good early in the second half.  Watching a game in bed is a recipe for shuteye.  Well it appears I was lucky to miss the ending.

The Eagles had a 31-21 lead going into the 4th quarter and collapsed.  Vick left the game with a concussion in the 3rd quarter but even so, a team with a reasonably solid defense could close that game out. Instead they fell flat and lost a game by all accounts they should have won easily.

Last night during the game they flashed a stat that revealed just how bad the Eagle D was last year and possibly this year.  Last year 76% of the time an opposing offense entered the red zone, they scored a touch down.  The Eagles rated dead last in the league.  In fact, no team in over a decade has posted such a miserable defensive red zone performance.  No wonder Howdy Doody was shown the door. Last night the Eagles set the fail bar even higher, allowing the Falcons to score a TD in all FIVE of their red zone appearances, sad.

It seems the core of this problem is the round robin linebacking crew the Eagles have had the last several years.  This year the Eagles are starting a rookie at MLB, Casey Matthews.  Thus far it seems the only thing he shares with his outstanding LB brother Clay is the long hair.  Casey has been in a word, awful.

The good news I guess is it is early in the season.  Hopefully there is enough time to do something about it.

I was surprised that when I woke up on Sunday my right shoulder was dramatically better.  I hardly felt any pain at all.  It felt so good that I almost went outside and did a bar session but I reconsidered, erring on the side of caution.  The last thing I needed was to injure it again.

I wish I would have a similar miraculous recovery from my right knee issues.  I still have persistent, deep stiffness and soreness in the joint, especially when getting up from the seated position.  It seemed like even biking with Michelle aggravated the knee a bit.  I need to get this sorted out.

So today I receive an email from the president of Netflix, Reed Hastings.  The letter started off being an apology for the recent ridiculous decision to dramatically increase the price of their service essentially doubling the cost to the consumer if they want to have both DVD’s in the mail AND online streaming.   He starts off trying to explain why the change was made. Ok, that’s nice that he is at least making an effort.  However as I read further I was in disbelief.

Reed goes on to explain that Netflix is making further changes to their service, breaking the DVD part of their offering into another entity called Quickster.  Quickster is going to be a totally separate site, while the streaming part of the business will still be called Netflix.

This is an incredibly idiotic move, especially on the back of a price increase that already flushed a number of customers away.  Let me explain why.

Currently when you search for a title you will see if it is available via DVD AND via online streaming.  If it is available via streaming, there would be no reason to wait for the DVD to arrive in the mail.  Well with the new proposed arrangement you would no longer have this ability.  You could wind up renting a DVD in Quickster even though it is available via streaming from Netflix.  The two sites do not interact so the only way you can tell if this is the case is to search both sites.

So Netflix’s brilliant strategy is to RAISE prices and offer LESS convenience.  I don’t know anything about Reed Hastings but if this was his brainchild he is a dipshit, no doubt about it.

I love what Netflix offered me but these recent developments make me think more and more about going without.  I don’t enjoy dealing with stupid companies.

Having taken an extra two days of vacation to my extend my weekend is a blessing and curse.  Sure it is nice to have the extra time off, unfortunately I have plenty of things in my mental wheelbarrow of things to be addressed.

I started off my weekend Saturday morning with a trip to Home Depot for supplies.  I grabbed some river rock to fill in a few areas in the border around the house, a bag of rubber mulch to put around the pygmy palm in the dog area, a white eggplant, a roll of weed block, a new outdoor ceiling fan and two 10 foot sections of 1 1/4″ galvanized pipe.

The fan was to replace the unit on the lanai that had it’s fan motor die.  Mom requested I fix it before she dog sits for a week.  She has this weird thing where she likes having a fan on outdoors.

The pipe was for an impromptu addition to my outdoor exercise equipment that came into my head a couple days prior, a high bar.  Now you say that I already have an 8 foot high pull bar? Yes but I want a HIGH bar that can be used as a mounting point for my gymnast rings.  Trying to do ring work on an 8 foot bar has some limitations.  The bar I had planned would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 1/2 to 11 feet high.

I planned on utilizing the peak of the large shed as one anchor point for the bar.  I would be attaching the pipe in an upside down L configuration which would then be buried 4 feet into the ground and set in concrete.  It seemed like a solid plan.

Once I got home I started on various items.  Among them was my first lanai door rescreen.  The corner of the bottom panel had a tear in it from Sadie shoving her snout in that area in her anticipation of being let outside.  I put in a fresh piece of super screen that should hold up to future nose pressure.

I also did the ceiling fan swap which took longer than I expected.  I bought the exact same model as I had before.  I noticed on the box that the motor had a lifetime warranty, meaning technically the old fan should be covered.  But of course, who the F is going to take down a 3 year old dirty fan, throw it in a box and ship it back to them?

The most annoying part of the fan is getting all the wires connected.  I have a secondary electrical line tapped into the fan that powers the flood lights outside.  Trying to get all the wires twisted together securely was a PIA.  When I got the fan in place I hit the circuit breaker and was underwhelmed.  The fan worked but now the lights did not! WTF?

After some troubleshooting I discovered that I had the fan wire attached to the white instead of the black wire.  After reversing the wires I was happy to see the fan was now operating properly.  I had to leave all of my installation by product and the old fan laying on the ground because we had to get ready to go to our friend’s house for dinner.

We had not seen Rick and Michael for a long time, hell it may be close to a year.  They live relatively close to us in a beautiful courtyard style home.  The only bad part of it is that the house is in the estates where you are always rolling the dice with what sort of neighbors you will have.

When Rick lived next door to us it was fantastic, it was so nice having a friendly, helpful neighbor that took pristine care of their property.  Now I have had to endure watching the property decay into a ratty looking mess under the new owner’s care.

Rick has a similar problem at his new house where he is next door to people that have way too many animals in too small of a space.  Just by looking at the property I would think they could be related to my trashy neighbor.  In addition to barking dogs they have horses in a tiny little area.  Rick told us some wonderful stories of the horses roaming loose and using his yard as a dumping ground for their massive bowel movements.

Michael is the ultimate host.  He is constantly on the move making sure your drink and plate is full.  We brought our dogs with so they could interact with Zoe, Rick and Michael’s Jack Russell.  Zoe was Nicki’s first ever dog friend when she lived next door.  Zoe is getting up there in years so after our initial greeting she spent much of the evening sleeping in her dog bed.

Sadie had no problem making herself right at home, pulling out Zoe’s toys one by one and playing with them.  Before we left I think I picked up about 7 or 8 of them.

Like I said, their home is beautiful.  It literally looks like a home from a magazine.  Rick made it even better with a new cabinet/counter top addition he installed a few weeks ago.  He has always been very handy.  He did some high quality renovations on his old house next door that impressed me as well.

Ali and I had a nice evening there although we both piled into the van feeling like pigs from all of the alcohol and food.  We were both spent since we both were up since 4:45 in the morning.  Ali at least got a nap in although she did put in a hellaciously long 13 mile training run that morning. Who could blame her?

Sunday morning I was anxious to burn off the excessive social calories from the night before.  We planned to head to the water park.  I told Ali I would bike there and she could meet me at the park.  I planned to do a short run once I got there so she could ride her bike around while I did that.

I really pushed the pace on the ride. I also made sure to pause the GPS as I was coasting to a stop at red lights.  The end result was my best overall pace ever for a ride of measurable distance, 19.6 mph.  I was quite pleased maintaining that for over 15.5 miles.

I then did a short 2 mile run although it felt longer.  I had not run in close to a month due to Rumble related knee pain.  I wanted to keep the run short so I could test out the knee without putting undue stress on it.  I ran the two miles at a high 8 minute mile pace which was good enough for me.  The better news was the knee felt ok during it.

I finished off the brick with 1600 meters in the pool.  Ali has really gotten faster with her swimming since starting her training with the T2 group.  I can barely swim faster than her now where as in the past I could lap her pretty easily.  I guess those 5:30 am swims are paying off.

After eating our traditional pizza and fries water park lunch we headed back home.  Now most Sundays we are pretty pooped from our workout and we are able to relax the rest of the day.  Well my Saturday was very busy but not busy doing normal house chores so there was still a lot to do.

For the most part I left most of the chores to Ali while I started on what became a MASSIVE pressure washing project.  You name it, I pressure washed it.  I pressure washed so much that it actually carried over into a second day of pressure washing.  Over the weekend I pressure washed the bird cage, patio stones, landscape timbers, the inside of the pool cage, the outside of the pool cage, both sheds and parts of my body.  It was brutal.

The only positive I could come up with from all this washing was I was soaked as a result which was actually a good thing since it was so hot and humid.  By the time I finished I was just spent beyond spent.  Pressure  washing  is such a miserable house maintenance chore but very necessary due to the mildew and scuzz that grows on objects from the ultra-damp Florida summer conditions.

On Monday morning after spending a couple hours pressure washing the shed I had a bunch of errands to run.  The first thing I did was return the two 10 foot sections of pipe to Home Depot.  After I bought them on Saturday I realized I was going to have an issue.  I basically needed one of the 10 foot sections cut and threaded so I could connect the pipe together with couplers and an elbow.  Home Depot does not cut or thread pipe anymore.

After doing some investigation regarding the viability of threading pipe yourself (not viable at all), I discovered that Lowes will cut and thread pipe if you buy it there.  Great, I’ll just get the 10 foot pipe at Lowes and have them do cutting and threading.

So after returning the pipe to Home Depot I head into Lowes and quickly find their galvanized pipe section.  I see various sizes and lengths but the longest length was just 6 feet.  Surely the 10 footers had to be hiding somewhere?  I checked all of the surrounding aisles, no 10 foot sections. Damn it.

So now I had to reevaluate.  Like I said, Lowes had a number of different lengths available where as all Home Depot had were 10 footers.  I grabbed two 6 foot sections, a 5 foot section and a 3 footer.  My upside down “L” would have 15 feet of  height ( 4 feet buried and cemented in the ground) and 5 feet of width  that will extend out from the shed peak.

Ideally I would have rather had the 10 foot section for the tall part as it would be one less joint to deal with but this was going to have to do.  The ironic thing was the shorter lengths meant I didn’t have to get any of the pipe cut or threaded.  One more bonus, the pipe at Lowes did not have MADE IN CHINA stamped on it.  Possibly it is domestically made? It was more expensive than what I got at HD so there is a good chance it was made somewhere other than shithole China.

I had a number of other stops that were made along the way.  The girls loved the extended ride in the van.  In total we were out for over two hours.

So when we got back it was getting later in the afternoon but I thought I would start construction of the high bar anyway.  The first thing I did was take a small portion of pressure treated 2″x6″ and mount it to the top of the shed.  This wood is what I would attach the flange to that was to be screwed into the pipe.

I predrilled the holes in the wood to make attachment easier.  I still had issues using the conventional 3.5″ phillip head screws I had brought out.  While standing high on the ladder I was unable to get the necessary pressure on the screw to keep it from stripping out the head.  I wound up using my more expensive but shorter (3″) screws that came with a custom star bit that is very resistant to stripping.

Once I got the wood attached I assembled my pipe sections together to create a very large and heavy L.  I used just grip power to tighten the pipes into the couplers at first and then grabbed my slip joint pliers to try to tighten them further.  The one pliers was a bit small for the job though so it didn’t help all that much.

I then drug the width portion of the L to the center point of the shed so I could determine where I needed to dig my approximately 4 foot deep hole.  After standing back and eyeballing I was centered on the wood, (a plum line would have been better) I started digging with the post hole digger.

When I hit about two feet of depth I started pulling out very wet sand.  When I plopped the sand on the ground it almost looked like I was building a haphazard sand castle.  As I continued the sand turned into pure slop and the hole began filling with water. Damn it.

I hadn’t give any consideration to the difficulty in digging a 4 foot dry hole during Florida wet season.  I quickly realized I was pretty much f’d unless we would get a dry spell of at least a week or so which would allow the ground water level to drop.  The likelihood of this happening before October is not good.

I was very discouraged by my sloppy hole.  Later on Tuesday I took the L apart and stored the pipe in the shed for it’s eventual installation whenever that may be.

On Monday, until the high bar installation cancellation I was feeling pretty good about things.  I had gotten a lot of stuff accomplished. On Tuesday I felt the opposite.

I woke up super early when Ali was getting up to go swim.  I thought I would get some quality WoW time in since scheduled Tuesday maintenance didn’t start until  8 AM.  I was annoyed to see that I picked a Tuesday when Blizzard decided to start their server maintenance at 4AM so no WoW.

I instead turned my attention to the great Iphone game I found last week Tower Defense: Lost Earth.  I am now deep into the maps with only 4 or 5 yet to clear.  I had been stuck on a level called “Vulcan”.  Well after at least 20 attempts I am still stuck on this level.  It is just impossibly hard, even on the default “EASY” level.  There are 66 waves of bad guys.  I think the farthest I made it was wave 62.  The screen is literally just jammed with enemy units.  It seems no matter how many or how powerful my towers are I am unable to survive the onslaught.

Being stuck on this level for so long has revealed one flaw in the game, no intermediate saves.  With levels as big as Vulcan it would be a good thing to be able to save your progress mid-wave so if you die, you don’t have to start back at the very beginning.  Unfortunately no such mechanic exists so each time I failed I had to start back at damn wave 1.  I STILL have not gotten past this level and to be honest I am not quite sure what strategy to use to do so at this point.

Once the sun came up I thought I would do some work on the super screw pool cage replacement project.  I have had my bag of screws sitting around for a couple months unused.  This project immediately lead to frustration.  The bag of screws I bought were 1 inch #10 screws.  Well a pool cage is held together by a number of different size screws.  The screws I bought only fit in a few spots.

So I walked around the cage looking for rusty screw heads that were the same size as what I had.  One of the spots that appeared to have similar screws were the junction points in the pool cage gutter.  These intersections had a number of screws in them, 10-12 per intersection.

Some of the screws were rusty so I decided I would super screw all of them.  As I removed the old screws the hole would immediately start draining water from the gutters.  As I inserted the super screw replacement I noticed that I still was getting some dripping.  I figured it was temporary until I had all the screws replaced.  Well it never stopped.  Now both of these joints have a steady drip of gutter water coming down.  I was annoyed.  I now have plans to reinstall the old rusty screws that don’t leak.

In total I might have replaced 30-35 screws.  Only 500 or so to go. Ugh.

The next item was to finish up the mowing.  Ali had mowed the front of the property and a good portion of the back half of the fenced area.  The rest of the grass was littered with items from the pool deck so she couldn’t do it.  I spent probably close to 90 minutes finishing up the work.  It was good to get the back mowed since once we develop full time standing water the job becomes nearly impossible.

I also installed a new pest guard over the dryer vent.  The piece of plastic grid that was jammed into the vent previously was constantly getting clogged.  The new guard mounts on top of the vent and is much larger.  Hopefully it offers adequate protection while having to be cleaned much less often.

Besides a quick Dunkin Donuts coffee run with the dogs I spent the rest of my last day off at home and spent a good portion of it just screwing around either playing WoW or Tower Defense.

Late in the day I decided to make an attempt at this month’s Bar-barian challenge, a 75 second routine on the parallel bars.  I had put off doing this because I knew I would struggle with it.  Despite building my own parallel bars a few months ago, I am far from adept to doing much of anything on them besides dips and pull ups.  My attempts were comically bad, no one will ever confuse me with Bart Connor.

So I ended my 4 days off feeling like I accomplished some things but that so many other things yet needed to be done, argh.

I received a very annoying email from Netflix last night announcing yet another price increase.  Netflix just increased their prices 8 months ago.  Well this isn’t a price increase, this is bending you over.  In a nutshell they are breaking their DVD and streaming parts of the business apart.  If you want one or the other you pay $8.  If you want both streaming and the option for DVD’s like most Netflix people do, they are going to essentially DOUBLE your rate to $16 a month.  That my friends is f’ing ridiculous.

No, an additional $8 a month isn’t going to break my back but the concept of a company doubling their rate in one fell swoop really pisses me off.  It was classic bait and switch.  Pull in hordes of people by offering a good value and then pull the rug out from under them once they are hooked in.

Now I am not naive, I know what is driving this, streaming rights cost.  A number of Netflix streaming agreements are due to expire in the not so distant future.  Supposedly renewing these deals is going to cost a TON more as there is much more demand for streaming content from multiple providers (Hulu, Amazon, Red Box, etc…)  Evidently Netflix is trying to soften that blow by jacking the rates on their subscribers astronomically.

My preference would be to just do everything streaming.  The issue is Netlfix has limited streaming content, in fact they have been LOSING streaming content from the site, things like Dexter can no longer be streamed.  The only way you can get to see a lot of titles is via old shitty DVD’s.  Netflix knows this of course and is counting on it.

It will be interesting to see if this strategy blows up in their face in the form of a mass exodus of angry customers that don’t enjoy getting f’d.  I know the initial customer reaction to the news has been VERY negative.

I picked up myself a tube of Lotrimin AF today.  I have self diagnosed myself with a case of recurring jock itch that has been coming and going for awhile.  For whatever reason I hadn’t paid much attention to it.  Once in a while I would get itchy down there and then it would go away the next day.

Well last night I saw a defined rash on the top of my inner thigh which motivated the purchase.  It was a bit embarrassing as I pushed the box over the counter at Walgreen’s to the attractive female clerk.  The artwork on the box shows a glowing crotch image on the front to illustrate the area it is used for.  I quickly paid for it without making eye contact.