February 17, 2004

Web services

Posted by Scott at 10:34 PM

Netflix - Over the past year there have been several times per month when I would stop at the BlockBuster about a quarter mile from our house. I'd rent something for the kids and try to find something for Michelle and I. Often the rentals would be new releases and so would be due back by noon of the second day. The problem was that about half of the time, Michelle and I would not see the 'not G rated' rental. I'd end up returning it unseen to avoid late fees. When you rent a video, it can be hard to know what your schedules are going to be over the next night or two. You might be exhausted by the time the kids go down and decide that you'd rather forego the video and just catch some sleep.

After hearing several recommendations from co-workers, I decided that perhaps it would be better in our situation to use Netflix. For those who may not be familiar with it, Netflix is a DVD rental by mail service. You use the internet to plan the movies you'd like to have shipped to you. You maintain a prioritized list of movies from their selection (which is huge!). You have three videos checked out at a given time. You return them whenever you are done with them. At that time they send you the next movies from your list. Rather than paying per movie for a fixed time interval (the traditional rental model), you pay a flat monthly subscription fee. How many movies you see in a given month depends on how fast you can take the movie that just arrived by mail, watch it, and mail it back in the pre-paid mailing envelope.

It's a little known fact that you can do this at BlockBuster. It costs a little more but you get the advantage of no waiting for shipping. What bothers me about video store rentals is that you are deluged with walls of videos and no tools to discern with. It's just rows of videos that you scan and try to judge based merely upon the cover art and perhaps recommendations from an acquaintance. I've often wished that the store had a wireless internet link so that I can read some reviews of something that caught my eye. In ordering online you can have a second internet browser window open to read other reviews and perhaps see a streaming video trailer from the movie. Netflix, like Amazon, can do recommendations based on what you've rented in the "people who rented xx also rented yy" style. This can help direct your attention to other videos within the same genre.

To speed delivery time Netflix maintains distribution centers throughout the USA. Lucky for us the local distribution center is "just up the road" in Manchester, NH. I originally signed up with Netflix on Thursday morning. By Friday afternoon my rentals were in my mail box. For so called "snail mail" that was pretty nice.

So if you rent a lot of movies and are looking for ways to cut costs in your "movie consumption, consider Netflix.

Wikipedia - I was reading the Wall Street Journal this morning when I woke up and their technology section had a favorable article on cooperative online encyclopedias. Their strongest recommendation was for Wikipedia. I had seen it before but not recently. It's grown and the quality of it's content is quite high -- pretty amazing, in fact. For those unfamiliar with the term, a "wiki" is a kind of web page that is publicly editable, typically by anyone. To prevent abuse a wiki has built in revision control so that your peers can see your changes, edit/add to them, and even roll the content back to an earlier version (in case someone abuses the 'publicly editable' characteristic). Wikipedia strives for quality through peer review which also helps things maintain a Neutral Point Of View (NPOV). Wikipedia is to online encyclopedias what Google is to online search engines. Give it a whirl -- they even had a listing for Milford, NH !

Gospel - I wrote another perl script tonight. This one fetches the Gospel reading from the day's Mass and formats it into an easy to reach page accessible on the row of tabs. I had made it one of my resolutions to try to read the daily Gospel and was finding it too easy to overlook it due to laziness and negligence. I figured if I put if right on our webpage, there would be less excuse to miss it. As with the birthday countdown, I'm trying to avoid forgetting. We'll see if it helps. *grin*

Misc. News - I wish there was more family news to report. It's mid-February, it's been cold, and there haven't been many events going on. That's why the photo albums have been infrequent as well. If I can't write about new domestic events, at least I've been keeping the links section on the right sidebar current.

Last Sunday we drove north to spend the afternoon and evening with the Nix's. Between the seven small children, there was plenty of squealing to go around. Since I had the day off for President's Day last Monday I got to attend one of Michelle's step classes. It was one of the few times where ogling the aerobics instructor is a good thing, if not encouraged by my wife. On Friday evening I'll take Claire and Abigail to Claire's school to see a showing of The Lion King 1 1/2. Lastly, the whole household is looking forward to a visit from my folks next week. It works out well this time because Claire will be home from school on winter break. I'm hoping to take a day off during their stay. Perhaps on that day I'll go and see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ".

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