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With the end of the regular TV season, I figured it was time to try Netflix out again. They tried to raise the price from $20 a month, but competition from Walmart and Blockbuster forced them to actually lower the price to $18. Still, I decided to go for the $15 per month plan that gives you only two movies at a time. That should still allow me to see three movies a week which is about the most I was ever able to watch the last time I joined.

I really do like Netflix. I enjoyed going through recommendations and finding some obscure movies and movies that I would probably never pay to rent, but would still like to see. Also, I decided to rent the first disc of Season 1 of 24 to see if I like the show and would like to buy the whole season. I came very close to buying the Season 1 DVD today, but then decided it was too big a risk for a show I had never watched and didn’t know if I would even like.

Anyway, my first two movies should arrive Tuesday.

Continue reading “Netflix Again”

The story behind the game Freecell that comes with Windows is interesting. The help file includes the following mysterious line: “It is believed (although not proven) that every game is winnable.” The game lets you choose the number of the game you would like to play, from 1 to 32,000. So it wasn’t long before an early internet project started where people divided up all of the games into 320 batches of 100 games and tried to solve them all. And not long after that they came up with only one game that couldn’t be won, game number 11,982. I’ve always suspected that the programmer did that on purpose and 11-9-82 was an important date for him (probably not his birthday since it was written in 1995). I found this out a few years ago.

What I didn’t realize was that when Microsoft introduced Windows XP, they increased the number of games you can play up to 1 million, good news for the people who had played all 32,000. At this point the game was popular enough that people had written computer programs that would try to solve different games, so rather than doing parallel human processing, computers chewed through the games and found 8 more that are unsolvable.

Wikipedia’s Freecell article

My yard was looking seriously parched this weekend. I don’t usually water the yard, but it was needing it. I wasn’t sure what the rules were on watering so I checked Dekalb County’s website. I had thought the rule was if you had an odd-numbered address you could water on odd-numbered days. However, the current rule is that odd-numbered addresses can only water on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Even-numbered addresses can water on Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday. There is no watering on Friday.

I told this to Susan and said how ridiculous it was that they took something so easy to remember and made it much harder to remember. Having vented about that I gave it no further thought. However Susan wrote to me today after thinking about it during her drive to work. She calculated that a year has 7 more odd-numbered days than even-numbered ones and that 3 of those are from May to August. Under the old system an odd-numbered house could water on May 31 and again the next day, June 1 while the yards of even-numbered houses would wither and become dust bowls. She blames a misplaced sense of fairness for the more complicated rules, probably by someone with an even-numbered address. But, like I told her, if people don’t want to abide by rules against even-numbered addresses, then they need to buy a house on the other side of the street.

Every morning I check on my Amazon account to see what I sold the day before and what shipped. May started very strong but then sales really dropped off. The reason? Amazon ran out of the most popular battery pack. Rather than just say they were out of stock, they let a number of third-party sellers offer theirs, at much higher prices. The $25 pack went up to $35 and as high as $49. And for me, sales for that model went to zero for two weeks. I felt bad for visitors and found out that Best Buy had them for $20, so I put in a link to their product page and could tell from Site Meter’s out links that a few people a day were following the link.

Last night Amazon must have re-stocked that product because the price was down to $20 (a new low for them, perhaps to match Best Buy), so I took away the Best Buy link. Already people are following the link again, and I will find out soon if people are buying again.

What amazes me about this is the inefficiencies of capitalism. Theoretically the internet should bring prices in line at a similar low level. While visitors to my web site knew not to buy, I am sure others must be buying from the higher priced affiliates. The Apple Store sells the same product for $50 and there are enough product reviews on that page for me to think they do a pretty brisk business.

I thought Lost’s finale was 2 of the best hours of television I’ve ever seen. Every time a commercial would come on, I would just think “Man, I love this show!” I loved that Desmond was back and that it was his flashback (with Libby giving him the boat, so she finally got some backstory too). I loved Eko telling John “But I *am* going to push the button.” The moment when Michael confessed that he had murdered two lostaways was just incredibly powerful. Finding out that the plane crashed because Desmond didn’t push the button and that the guy he was in the hatch with was the special forces guy that trained Sayid? Awesome. Then NotHenry gets off the Others’ boat and is clearly the one in charge. Even though I saw it coming, it was chilling to see NotHenry again.

Continue reading “Lost Finale”