As some of you may have heard or experienced, Netflix is having lots of problems with like every part of their system right now with their shipment system. After I realized the problem and got the message from Netflix apologizing for the problem, I have watched the whole thing for its humor value. I shipped in four movies on Monday, which are normally received on Tuesday (city life is awesome). I normally go through movies at a pretty fast rate (it was a summer goal of mine to watch and ship in movies the next mail day–I feel proud), so I first though it was Netflix fucking around to screw me over. On Wednesday, I got emails for the two of the four, but on my queue, all of the movies appeared to have been received on the website as the status was listed as ’shipping today.’ Normally, that message is only up for an hour or two; all of the movies I was requesting were common enough that there shouldn’t have been a problem with supply, so I realized the problem when status stayed that way that something was up. Imagine my surprise when I got Serpico on Thursday, but none of the others that were slated to come! Supposedly, everything is fixed and the last few were sent on Friday (a call to customer service revealed that there are still some more to be sent today). I got the documentary Fuck today (that was one for headphones in the maclab; the movie uses the word ‘fuck’ more than any other movie by a lot: 834 times in 93 minutes), but I am still missing two. The best part of it all is that the website is just totally and completely borked. Serpico still reads as “shipping Wednesday” along with the other two I still haven’t received, although I did receive an e-mail for Serpico on Friday. Fuck (or ‘F**k’ as netflix calls it) is registered correctly, but it was still in my queue of things yet to be shipped as well, but I deleted it. I also got an e-mail for it after I had already watched it. We will see what Monday brings…. I am supposed to receive a 15% discount for this month, which comes to about $3.50 on a 4 at a time plan, which is really just exact compensation. I average a little over 20 movies a month or more, so that means that I am paying around $1 per movie with my rental. One was delayed a day, which I can’t really complain about, but I was outed a full watch-return cycle, which by that logic is about $3. With the Olympics, there is plenty to watch, but the failure to provide service is a bigger sting. I was pretty close to canceling before they announced the problem, and I don’t really feel like they have done a whole lot to make feel better about them.
The problem is rather curious. Seems like some sort of database problem, especially with the website, but they are still managing to ship, just slowly. If the whole system was down, nothing would be coming out, and if it was some problem updating the site, the shipping would presumably still be working fine. They are somewhere between those two states. I suppose the details of the problem will meet the news in some form sooner or later, so we will have to find out.
I just got a new cell phone (it is on my facebook profile if don’t have it already and you know me), so I have been dealing with wrong numbers. I can ignore those and let my voicemail deal with them, but what sucks are wrong number texts. I think texting is utterly stupid, but it is definitely right sometimes, but most of the time I don’t understand why someone has to use what has to be the most expensive form of communication (in terms of data size/price) in existence today when e-mail would be more appropriate and cheaper. Anyway, I can live with texts from people I know, but what I hate is when it is from someone with the wrong number. I have been getting a stream of incoherent texts recently, which I feel need documenting. I will obscure no details for reasons that will become obvious:
July 7 - 773-699-6104: Alrite ppl this is k. ken etc… delete my old number n replace it wt this 1
July 12 - 773-699-6104: Watz good
July 17 - 773-699-6104: New muzik dropic soon my pg so b on the look out this weekend
July 17 - me: you have the wrong number. please stop texting me
July 17 - 773-699-6104: Nigga shut up (it’s an exact quotation; sorry if you are horribly offended)
Will I continue to receive texts out of some combination of some ill-conceived form of spit and ineptitude? I guess I will have to find out. I honestly don’t get why I should get a nasty response for a reasonable request. Anyone know of something I can do if I still get texts? I don’t have a texting plan, so I am not so fond of paying for these.
I just got a message from the facebook group for students staying at UofC over the summer; I never go, but I still get the messages. Something just seemed wrong with this one:
Subject: Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Party (Open Bar)
SUMMERFEST: benefit for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. There will be everything from:
Free food and drinks (including OPEN BAR)
Games and music
Awesome raffle and silent auction prizes, like gift certificates to high-end restaurants, memberships to museums, tickets to shows at places like Second City and the Metro, airfare and hotel stay at a spa, and so much more.
Maybe is is just the phrasing, but I always think there is something wrong when a disconnect between the charity and the supposed benefactors exist. Sure it’s for college students, but that doesn’t fix it. There is a decent episode of Dilbert that “delves” into this problem:
Really, I just found the message amusing, but something is definitely wrong.
Twitterfeed got me thinking. How long could I get a twitter-twitterfeed infinite recursion loop to go for? I created the infinatwit to put that question to the test by setting twitterfeed to follow infinatwit and post to infinatwit. I think the next step will be to see how many web 2.0 services I can combine to produce this effect. I think feedburner is next…
I was in MrKay’s today, the used bookstore where I have purchased so many of the DVDs I own (I am back in Oak Ridge until the weekend). Anyway, I overheard a pretty awesome conversation between two high school-aged girls, who were looking at some CDs. I should note that my taste in music differs greatly from the average high school-aged girl, so please forgive anything I miss. Also, this whole thing is heavily paraphrased, but nothing important is taken away.
Girl 1:Looking at some CD. God! Maria Carry is so dumb! Look at her album, she put “E=MC²” on it. I start listening closer. I bet she doesn’t even know what that means!
They blabber for a bit. I assure you it wasn’t worthwhile.
Girl 2: Yeah, it’s like Maria Carry times two or something!
Her Friend corrected her, but the damage had been done. I headed over to the cash register pretty quick, so I wouldn’t laugh at them. I should really get better at storytelling….
As one of the administrators for the ACM mailing list, I am used to dealing with a lot of spam at this point. Even with spam filtering, it used to be pretty terrible, until we made it more aggressive. Of course, none was going out to the list; it was really a difference between spam to review and spam that is auto-deleted. Mailman sucks, so my inbox gets filled with a lot of the bounces, which gmail spam filtering can handle nicely, but a select few can still get through. Spam is one of the most pointless things I can imagine, but at the very least, it usually includes a link, or some sort of ad. I got the same spam message a couple of times that didn’t quit follow that convention:
Subject: best
your life is crap
There were at two different from addresses and names, so it was pretty clear it was spam. The only purpose I could see to something like this spam is to reply back, desperate for answers. Maybe they were writing some huge long spam and hit send by accident a little too early, or there spam creation software sucks. What a strange piece of spam….
I wrote this “eulogy” for two computers that apparently got fried (as in electrical surge or something) recently in the Maclab. I intended it for fellow tutors, but I was fairly fond of it. It would probably help to know that these computers were named “python” and “ada.”
We are gathered here today to mourn the deaths of Python and Ada. They lived good, long lives as G5s. Tragically, Brian discovered their charred remains yesterday, which was confirmed today.
Ada always dreamed of being a missile guidance system, but as a G5, it was never able to fulfill its dream. It forgot its dream, and instead spent its life running word, with the occasional bit of matlab and powerpoint here and there. As it felt its final death blow surge, it visualized tracking a laser point until meeting a glorious, explosive end, it quietly whispered “I’m going home!”
Python suffered a far more tragic death. Realizing it was at its final moments, it began to question the meaning of it all:
>>> raw_input(”So this is it? Was it good? Why do I have to die? Where
I am going?”)
So this is it? Was it good? Why do I have to die? Where I am
going?Traceback (most recent call last):
File ““, line 1, in ?
EOFError
Unfortunately, its questions were left unanswered:
I had some good old fashion fun today on the shell today. I stumbled across this “gem” of an expression:
yes xargs | xargs yes
This expression can be repeated infinitely (mostly) many times without changing the output and without loosing symmetry when joining on the yes’s. In other words, the last expression is equivalent (in regards to output and symmetry):
You can throw some rot13s (with care), cats, and a few other commands in there with the same effect. I am not sure exactly how it functions; it seems to work different on different OSes. I have tried in on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and OpenBSD, and all seem to be a bit different. They seem to run a bit differently, and the output is different. It’s all very fun.
Update: I thought I should clarify that last little bit. The way pipes are treated seems to vary some; the actual functionality is trivial.
