Sometimes Silent

Can Blockbuster Online compete with Netflix? I’m giving Blockbuster Online a try this week to find out.

I signed up with Blockbuster Online after reading the small print. My free trial is for 2 weeks and I must cancel before that ends or I will have to pay a full month of service before it can be cancelled again. I will have 10 days after cancellation to return any dvds or games I have checked out. Some friends at work told me that Netflix’s free trial is for a month…however I checked their site and found it was for two weeks as well with similar fine print.

Price

The basic service at Netflix is $17.99 a month for 3 movies out at a time. Blockbuster’s is $14.99. Blockbuster also gives you 2 in store coupons per month to rent movies or games for free. Neither service charges you for postage either way.

Selection

My initial thought was that I was going to do Blockbuster’s free trial, get my free movies then cancel and go with Netflix. Why? Selection. I have memories of Blockbuster’s censorship; specifically I recall my roommate trying to rent “The Last Temptation of Christ” and being told that Blockbuster did not carry that film. Years later… they have it available. So I decided to test a few other films: foreign films suggested by a Spanish speaking friend of mine, and a documentary I recalled from my Documentary class in college. They were both there. Finally, I tried “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”. No go with Blockbuster, it shows up on Netflix. However, my friend told me he tried to rent it but got a notice that they did not have enough of them in stock and were going to purchase more. We’ll see if he gets it.

Notice I only checked for film availability. If I had a game console (I do want one or two by the way in case anyone generous is reading this) Blockbuster would have a huge plus since Netflix does not rent games.

Timing

My co-workers told me that timing is everything in terms of getting your money’s worth with these services. It so happens that my work is near one of the hub post offices for our area. Because of this my co-workers seem to mail back films on Monday and receive their next films as early as Thursday. They noted the return address on the envelope though was a PO box in the very city our office is in.

I signed up with Blockbuster Online on Monday. I got my first 3 films today, pretty quick in my opinon. The return address says San Jose, CA so we’ll see how quick I get my next round of DVDs. My free in store coupons were available immediately, so I have the potential to see 5 films right now. I also saw a buy-one-get-one free coupon for ice cream at the store.

Services

Both systems handle their movie inventories by giving you your queue (list). You then put the films you want in order and they tell you if they are available immediately, after a short wait, long wait, etc. Both systems also have you rate films and then based on those recommendations, show you other films you might like. So far I’ve rated over 20 films and am quite amused when I check my recommendations list after each small batch of films. Just because I like some “kid” films (The Little Mermaid) doesn’t mean I like them all (non Disney animated films of other fairy tales). My friends tell me the Netflix list is similar. One thing Netflix does have though is the ability to split your queue so you can put films in genres for instance so you can time it to get one comedy and one action movie at the same time.

Preliminary “Final Thoughts”

By stats and value alone, Blockbuster is winning out. I’ll make a note of the return time though, as that will be a big factor. However, where Netflix is strong is in a community way. They have a friend system so you can see what your friend recommends. They also have a larger subscriber base. Somehow I feel a little “left out”. I suppose this feeling is similar to why certain meme type communities prosper, such as Livejournal for instance. Blogsome is free and a better deal (for customization opportunities at least) but Livejournal has that community already in place.

Lesson learned? Something also learned in the online gaming industry: popularity can override some discrepancies of cost.

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P.S. If you’d like to try out the Blockbuster Online service, and you’d also like a PS2, GameCube, Nintendo DS, or an Xbox, please sign up for Blockbuster through this giveaway offer.

A post about that and other offers is upcoming. Suffice it to say for now that they are legit offers.

Well, well, well, looks like my friend Scott has been busy as I suspected, he’s now Senior Producer of EQ2. He wrote a long letter about it and about the state of the game. I’m pretty excited for him and for the community, he’s definitely quite an approachable guy and open to hearing about the game and interacting with the community. I’m not saying that John wasn’t approachable (far from it) but the fact that Scott is also known to some players by his player name first rather than his real name shows his connection to the player base as a player and not only as an SOE employee.

His producer’s letter follows:
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I finally finished this book the other day. I say finally because I kept having to eek out some free time to read it. If had had my druthers I would have finished the book in two days — it became that gripping.

Notice that I said “became”. The novel is a fantasy piece mixed with a historical fiction and a dash of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. For good measure, sprinkle in “Pride and Prejudice” in small amounts for more British flavor and “Frankenstein” for mood moments. At the beginning of the tale we are introduced to a rather boring gentleman who is keen on restoring Magic to Britain. However, he is a scholarly type and the reader must get used to this tale told with many footnotes, and with discourses about theoretical magic. “Practical Magic” is also performed fortunately and the novel begins to take off.

Though the title mentions two men, we first follow one before ever becoming introduced to the other. The relationship between the men is believable in my opinion (having known scholarly / academic types myself). That relationship in place, what makes me think of this book as a page turner in is the terrific depiction of fairies and the land of Faerie. It is spooky, creepy, scary, and untrustworthy and through certain turns in the book we find out just how extreme all of those adjectives can be.

Overall my reaction to the book is a mixture of the feelings I get when reading good Literature (I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in English) and of reading an adult fairy tale (hence my Grimm reference vs Disney-fied fairy stories). I thought the work to be quite original and the detail in the world reminded me of Tolkien who also made use of footnotes to recall the extensive world he had created.

Supposedly the book is 800 pages long. The copy I read is 782 pages. I would have liked to have read more. As far as I can tell the book has been having successful sales so I believe I will get that chance.

The very last choice is the World’s Tallest Man.

The main pic in my climbing set of pics of Jan 16th (me with my arms out on top of Balance Rockwas featured on the homepage of Zoto. Thanks kordless!

Flickrzen Someone’s gone through the trouble of going through flickr and choosing a “best of”.

Though I’ve been using the internet for quite some time now, I’ve only started seriously looking into blogs fairly recently. I’ve come upon a few blogging tools where the mix of practicality and the community factor is quite intriguing.

Some tools which strive to mix usefulness with community are: flickr, zoto, 43 Things and delicious.

Flickr and Zoto are photo hosting places both in the Beta stage. They are designed to make it easy to post photos to blogs. The other thing they do is act as social desitinations in and of themselves. Flickr appears to be current leader in terms of popularity. For both services, when you upload your photos you “tag” them and can then be found by other members who want to see pictures of “California” for instance. You can also leave comments and make “contacts” with out of people.

43 Things is a “New Years Resolutions” type place which asks “What do you want to do with your life?” and then proceeds to show you how many other people want to do that same thing. You can then comment on your goal or on the goals of others to offer them encouragement. In some ways I see this a big Jennie Craig type place where a peer support group helps you accomplish things.

Delicious is a web bookmark tool. On the functional side of things, it’s a handy way to keep your bookmarks accessible from any internet enabled computer. On the sociological side of things, it again shows you who else has bookmarked the same page, letting you then explore what else that person has. You can also browse “tags” to see for instance what’s new in the “geek” category.

Well today my boyfriend is out there digging with the rest of the Search and Rescue folks. The reality is that often times, the “rescue” part of their title is less frequent than the “Search” portion. It seems folks pretty much know the missing people are dead, but it’s mainly a cultural reason to find them, for closure for the families and to put other folk at ease that they will not find bodies years from now.

The video of the slide showed how fast and sudden this slide was. So devasting. And yet, this tragedy multiplied has happened and is happening, in Asia.