Category: Personal Blog

In Which Netflix is mean to me and then I write about it

All of a sudden I couldn’t stream any Netflix titles instantly so I called their support line. Found out they put my account on hold December 30th. During our conversation, the operator said I wasn’t being punished and that they were just trying to find a way to make the service work for me because it wasn’t working if so many of their discs were going missing. You think? Well, why if it is a physical disc issue does my complete account have to be suspended? And why did it have to be suspended over the New Year weekend? Even Time Warner wouldn’t do that. I acknowledge the fact that I live on what might be one of the worst USPS mail routes in the USA in a building full of people who might or might not be “borrowing” my Netflix discs and never returning them. But to put someone’s account on hold over a holiday weekend is not very nice at all.

Of course I can’t prove that I’m not building quite a tidy DVD collection at Netflix’s expense. But if you were looking at my account history you’d see that I have returned all of these TV shows:

  • Mad Men:Season:2 (all discs),
  • The Wire:Season 5 (all discs),
  • Damages:Season 1 & 2 (all discs),
  • Jackie Woodman: Season 1 & 2 (all discs),
  • True Blood: Season 1 (all discs)
  • Squidbillies: Volumes 1 & 2 (all discs)

Film:

  • Frozen River,
  • The White Ribbon,
  • The Ghost Writer,
  • Five Easy Pieces,
  • The Secret in their Eyes,
  • The Hangover,
  • District 9,
  • The Hurt Locker,
  • Blindness,
  • 28 Days Later,
  • Black Book,
  • The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Considering the fact that I gave all of these movies and shows at least a 4 star rating – why would I then keep a bad movie like Expired when I could have kept 28 Days Later, one of my all time favorite movies?

Even though I know it probably wasn’t a person with the power of logic in charge of putting my account on hold and that more likely a computer somewhere keeping track of my missing discs triggered the decision, I am still very much put out.

Normally I would try to spare my 4 subscribers from having to read this sort of of thing but Netflix doesn’t have a contactable email address and so now you have to know what happened,too.

My New Issue: Falling in Public

Yesterday I went to meet a potential new client with a work colleague and felt so grownup for not wearing ripped jeans and being 15 minutes early instead of 15 minutes late as usual. Thank you taxi cab driver for picking me up on Park or it would not have happened. The meeting went well. My colleague did most of the talking which is probably why. When it was time to get up to leave I fell down. I still do not know why. I was not drunk and I don’t have an inner ear infection.

Another incident took place near my house while walking Bozzio and Luna, a largeish female Akita. Luna decided she had had enough of the stop and chat with Bliss’ owner (Bliss and her owner saw the whole thing) and yanked me off my feet to try to get to the park a bit faster. I fell and fell on Bozzio’s leash and we both tumbled around on the ground for awhile and Bozzio squeaked so I know I bashed him pretty hard. I got up and of course I’d ripped my jeans and had a nice cut on my knee. My palms felt pretty good, too. And then I felt awful for hurting Bozzio. I didn’t care about hurting myself. Poor Bozzio.

Then there is one more incident. Less fancy but possibly interesting because it might have been the beginning of the trend. Again, walking Bozzio but wearing my Kork Ease wedges, unusual footwear for dog walking, I stepped onto either a pebble or twig the wrong way and went down, stupid shoes. Of course there were about 60 people waiting for the bus who saw me. It is much more awful to fall where lots of people can see you. But of course falling in complete privacy can’t always be arranged.

The Most Dangerous Animal


Guess who it is. To a web designer slash web developer the most dangerous animal is a graphic designer who doesn’t build web sites. Who has no idea of how web sites work.Who has never written a line of CSS or XHTML (or HTML for that matter). But they’re the one telling you how the site should look. They make a pretty picture in fireworks or indesign with out a care in the world about how web sites actually work and you’re left holding the bag. It’s up to you to deliver the site looking the way the graphic designer wants it, which is usually not that much of a challenge, until it is. I’m sure we’ve all run up against the moment the picture and reality don’t quite match up. For these moments we have position:absolute or Jquery to try to get it to happen.

Case in point: A shopping cart that is also a Slide show.

Well, we’ve seen a slide show requested on a product details page.

We’ve seen a Featured Products Scroller (but here no creation of a featured product category could solve the issue since we had to put each the product in a slide show regardless of category).

We’ve seen a slide show requested on the landing/hub/splash page.

But a shopping cart that is also a slideshow? We’d never been asked for such madness. Never in our protected, sheltered lives. We grasped the concept but we quaked in fear just the same. We’d put add to cart buttons in funny places before so we knew it wasn’t entirely impossible though we did have to have a little cry in the bathroom once.

We have more gray hair and our eyes are smaller, redder and more beady than ever but we did it.

Most catalog (multiple products on one page) page templates have HTML and if we have HTML to mess with we can hook our Jquery into it by turning the main div into the container for the slide show and then hiding all the other looped products until the clicking action of the slideshow brought them in to view. Our tools were the wp-e-commerce plugin and our years of hacking the product page templates to pieces.

So here was the wireframe: A container with a large image up top with a strip of thumbnails under it. The large image being the first product in the slideshow. Click one of the thumbnails underneath and you bring up the next product in the catalog. On the side, to the left of the large image there was the product details(sizes,colors,etc) and the add to cart button. We still have the challenge of producing next and previous arrows but we are very close. We are beginning to see the end of this project in sight!

Why Do Splash Pages Still Exist?

What’s Wrong With The Splash Page?
Mainly, that ridiculous enter prompt. By going to the site we have already decided to enter the site. Requiring your site visitors to click on an image in order to get to see something is just a waste of their time. Can’t you just assume your site visitors want to see stuff and that is why they have chosen to visit the site? What would be the harm in showing them something without requiring them to perform another action in order to see it? When you open a shop’s front door expecting to see the interior do you think it would it bug you to find instead a door marked enter?