Today, I received this email:
Dear Derek,

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.

While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.

We’re constantly improving our streaming selection. We’ve recently added hundreds of movies from Paramount, Sony, Universal, Fox, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, MGM and Miramax. Plus, in the last couple of weeks alone, we’ve added over 3,500 TV episodes from ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, USA, E!, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC Family, Discovery Channel, TLC, SyFy, A&E, History, and PBS.

We value you as a member, and we are committed to making Netflix the best place to get your movies & TV shows.

Respectfully,

The Netflix Team

I’m not sure what is going on with them, but they need to make up their mind on a direction and stick to it. I know the prospect of losing over 1 million customers in the next year is a scary one, but most of them haven’t left yet. Quit trying to hurry them to the door with your crazy behavior. Nobody likes not having faith in a company they do business with and right now, I am quickly losing my faith in the company. Stop sending out emails with yet another direction change, just send me DVDs when I ask for them and make sure streaming doesn’t take a crap (like it seemed to do a few days ago), and I’ll be happy.

If I wanted to create a form connected to a database and wanted to display the contents of a drop down field, I would use something like:
< option selected="selected" value="< ?php echo $script_architecture ?>" >< ?php echo $script_architecture ? >

How would I do the same with a checkbox?

What I need to do is figure out how to do the same thing but with more than one field (and they might be empty). For example: If there are three fields for entering search terms: Name, Rank, SerialNumber, but the user only puts in less than all of them, I want the query to be something like SELECT * FROM table WHERE name` LIKE '%Named Person%' OR rank LIKE '%Rank Amateur%'

However, I don’t want it to try and add OR serialnumber LIKE'%%' because that would mess everything up.

If anybody could point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.

Another thing that most people don’t know about me is that ever since I started my new job, I fast every Friday while at work.

By fasting, I mean that I only drink water and don’t eat any food. I know that some people also don’t drink water in their fasts, but for some reason I think that is a step too far.

A few weeks ago, I decided to record all of the money that I spent. I didn’t make any changes to my spending habits, I merely documented them. I discovered that I spent a lot of money on food, junk food from the vending machines specifically.

Since then, I have been watchful about how I spend my money and how much time I spend going to the vending machines.

The way I figure it is that skipping a meal one day out of the week won’t kill me and I will save a little money as well.

My friends and I were more likely to call each other “motherfucker” than the other word. However, we mostly called each other “man”, if we weren’t using our names. To this day, I will use the word “man” more times in one conversation than I have used the other word in the past decade.

So basically I have to choose between a service that is too slow (DVD only) or a service without a lot of selection (streaming only). Horrible choices, especially for a company that next year will probably be raising their prices considerably as well as losing a lot of their current selection.

There is a lot of talk about what it will take for Netflix to no longer be the 800 pound gorilla of the streaming industry. I think this may be the first step. Google and Amazon are starting to get serious about competing in this space. Hulu is up for sale and whoever buys them immediately becomes a player. The studios are starting to realize the amount of money that can be made. TV networks are offering more shows on their sites. Cable companies are starting to offer streaming. This is a very volatile time and I’m not sure if Netflix is making themselves stronger to withstand everything that is coming or if they have put the first nail in their coffin themselves.

As for me, I have a decision to make.

1. Don’t send it to an account that doesn’t exist, so that the only way a person can see it is if they have a catch-all account set up for people who get names wrong all the time, and
2. Make sure you get the company name right. It is Comic Book Noise, not NOISE COMIC BOOK WEBZINE. That’s just embarrassing for all involved.

I wish I could have had the option to not import my podcasts, but I’m not sure if that was even possible. Google also gave about 200 ‘free’ songs, but I am almost positive those can’t be downloaded.

I’m not sure why the skipped songs weren’t imported because I don’t have any OGG, FLAC or APE songs in my iTunes database (and a part of me could understand why those weren’t brought in) but a couple of WAV files were brought in. It sort of pissed me off because I spent years converting my CD and LP collection to MP3s only to have them not accepted by Google Music.

Oh well, it is a sixth option behind listening to music on my Android, my iPod touch, my iPod Nano, Pandora and YouTube.

Are you using Google Music? And if so, what do you think?

This thing is so over the top offensive that I find it difficult to believe that it is serious.

I was worried for nothing, because when he heard the rules for having a Mogwai, he was uninterested. ‘Don’t get them wet’ and ‘Keep them out of sunlight’ didn’t bother him, but ‘Don’t feed them after midnight’ killed any interest he may have had in the movie. He got this really odd look on his face like he was trying to figure out something that didn’t quite make sense. Finally, he just turned to me and said “Wait a minute, it’s always midnight somewhere, so you’re NEVER supposed to feed them? That’s stupid.”

I didn’t want to admit to him that little bit of logic never occurred to me until they pointed out the same thing in the second movie. I didn’t want him to think his old man was a dopey guy when he was a teenager. I also didn’t want to make up excuses for the creators of the movie.

I just shrugged, said “Good point.” and changed the channel. He went back to doing what he was doing and hasn’t thought about it since.