I've been trying out the Netflix streaming-only service, mostly using a Wii to display on the TV. It doesn't have everything I'd like to see (many titles are still available only through their DVDs), but it's got plenty to keep me (and the family) busy.
The web site says I can put my account on hold while I'm on vacation, so I did that while we were away. I expected it to work like my newspaper subscription: while I'm away, I don't get those papers, and I don't get charged for them. Seems fair, and I'm glad the newspaper business works this way.
When we got back, I checked my account, and the billing date hadn't changed. A little bit of googling didn't clarify how they handle it, so I called customer support.
Turns out, for streaming only, it doesn't have any effect. You can put it on hold all you want, and they still bill you on the next scheduled date. It's completely pointless.
Well, not quite. After a discussion with the customer service agent, I learned that if you have a hold that crosses the billing date, billing is delayed until it restarts. So if your vacation is conveniently scheduled across a billing date, you might get partial credit for you. But that seems like an odd policy (although it's sort of obvious about how that's easy to implement in the code for the billing system).
I had a nice discussion with the customer service agent about it. She both explained the situation and took notes on my comments about it, which is far better than most phone customer service usually goes.
Turns out the Netflix “Contact Us” page is also rather confusing. The first few links, such as “Questions about a charge?” take you back to your account information page, which is where I started. Only the final link “Call Customer Service,” actually gets you to something that resembles actual contact. So the information is there, but it's concealed by things that may be helpful, but are not actually “contacting us.”
Bottom line: don't bother with vacation holds on streaming Netflix, unless you're going to be away on your billing date. Or unless they change the policy, so keep an eye on that.
Found this out after a bit of Googling, so I'm recording it for posterity here, too:
Suppose you've got a group in the Mac address book for sending emails, and suppose that some of the members have more than one email address. Which one gets used for sending the emails?
To choose (which you can do separately for each group), select Edit->Edit Distribution List from the Address Book menu. Select the group, then choose the email address you want for each member, if the right one isn't already shown in bold. You can select only one per person.
It also turns out that to do this after adding a new group, you have to restart Address Book. Not obvious, but good to know. Thanks to "RT11 Guru" in the Apple forums.
Oh, and apparently none of this works for smart groups. Maybe they are not quite so smart yet.
At the library the other day, I happened across Speculative Horizons, a short fantasy anthology edited by Patrick St-Denis. St-Denis blogs at “Pat's Fantasy Hotlist”. The book includes original short stories by Brian Ruckley, Hal Duncan, Tobias S. Buckell, C. S. Friedman, and L. E. Modesitt, Jr. The lead-off story, “Soul Mate,” by C. S. Friedman sets the tone of short but unexpected twists for the collection. It was thoroughly engaging, and most of the stories linger in the memory, whether you like it or not.
According to Facebook, I've got quite a few “friends”. If you asked me to write down a list of friends, I wouldn't have nearly so many. I know all of my Facebook friends, and I've even met most of them in person. But Facebook distorts the meaning of the word now, making it sound like there's are relationships that don't really exist.
I'm not the first person to make that observation, of course–not by a long shot. In fact, recently I was listening to an interview with an author making the case that we should revive the term “acquaintance” for our Facebook and other online friends (with the exception, naturally, of our real friends). (I wish I could remember the interviewer and author, but the names continue to escape me.)
The problem is that “acquaintance” sounds so formal. “My Facebook acquaintances” doesn't roll off the tongue, much less the fingertips texting a tweet.
So let's call them ‘quaints'. It sounds almost the same, only shorter. And it works in all the common Facebook usages:
“I've got a lot of Facebook quaints now.”
“Why don't you quaint me on Facebook?”
“She unquainted him after they broke up.”
So, if we know each other, quaint me on Facebook.
Just passed 50,000 words on a novel for National Novel Writing Month. It's not done, and it might not ever be. It's a lot of fun–you should try it next year.
On occasion, I need to convert Excel files to CSV for parsing by other programs. A little Googling turned up a script from Jason Garber posted here. I'm including it here because it's (1) short, and (2) I had to tweak it a tiny bit for Excel 2008:
# Convert Excel files to CSV.
# Original from http://jasongarber.com/articles/2007/06/23/convert-excel-to-csv/
# Minor modification for Excel 2008 dictionary to use "CSV file format" instead
# of "CSV" in the save command.
set theFolder to choose folder with prompt "Choose the folder that contains your Excel files"
tell application "Finder" to set theFiles to (files of theFolder)
set fileCount to count theFiles
repeat with i from 1 to fileCount
set fName to text 1 thru -5 of ((name of item i of theFiles) as text)
if ((name of item i of theFiles) as text) ends with ".xls" then
set tName to (theFolder as text) & fName & ".csv"
tell application "Microsoft Excel"
activate
open (item i of theFiles) as text
save fName in tName as CSV file format
close active workbook without saving
end tell
end if
end repeat
There's a "Starbucks dead zone" west of Boston, almost centered on the DoubleTree Hotel in Waltham. You can see it on Google Maps. When I looked at the search, point A in Waltham is a bookstore with a cafe that serves Starbucks coffee, not an actual Starbucks store. If you look closely, you can see the other matching dots around the west, in Bedford, Concord, Sudbury, Wayland, and Wellesley. It's not a perfect circle, but it's a nice ring.
On a story tonight about large serving sizes of cheap food, NBC noted that the average dinner plate has gone from 9" in diameter in the 1960s to 12" today, "or 33% larger". But, from a food point of view, it's area that matters, and a 12" plate is 77% larger in area than a 9" plate (because area grows as the square of the radius).
My business uses Paycycle, owned by Intuit, for processing payroll. But Turbotax, made by Intuit, can't import W-2 data from Intuit.
What's up with that?
Then again, Turbotax data import this year isn't impressive. It crashes downloading from one brokerage, and gets mangled names for securities on another one.
Like many of you, I've written code for web sites. How hard is it to remove spaces and hyphens in credit card numbers and phone numbers? Usually, it's a one-line regexp. And some test cases. Don't forget the test cases.
People make measurably fewer mistakes when they can punctuate long number strings. It's easy enough for us to let them do it.
