Category: looky

something cool I found on the internets

Adventures in NetFlix

looky

There is a MT plugin for NetFlix. Actually there are two- one which shows your NetFlix queue (sort of useful, if a little exhibitionistic) and another which shows your reviews of various movies, complete with stars.

So, I checked it out- using Lil’ Dy’s NetFlix account I rated a few movies. NetFlix also has a Recommendations function, which takes your ratings and uses them to recommend other movies you might like. However since I hadn’t rated enough, I had no recommendations. So I rated some more.

And some more.

Now I have something liek 200 reviewed movies- and still no Recommendations. I show this to ShaColby and he showed me what it does- all his recommendations were movies he hated but hadn’t reviewd yet. So, whatever!

Back to the task at hand- installing this NetFlix thingy. A couple of issues:

  • It doesn’t have an image of the movie. Just the title. Okaaaay…. maybe I could write a hybrid NetFlix / Amazon MT tag and call it “Consumer Whore.”

  • Turns out the NetFlix plugin isn’t even consuming a web service- it is actually a hack written by the guy who is one half of SixApart, which actully sucks in the entire NetFlix page using a session ID (a cookie), which in turn is copied from the URL when surfing the site in person. This is not sexy.

Why oh why doesn’t NetFlix have cool web services available for consumption like Amazon does? I need more cool information source crap to automatically hook into my blog!

My War With CJ

looky

Man I really want a “Six-dollar Burger” from Carl’s Jr. today… those things are great. I’ve been craving one for a while.

The problem is that every time I even get close to a Carl’s Jr., I think of their irritating “don’t be a chicken” ad campaign promoting their stupid chicken sandwich. Those commercials just piss me off; this kind of macho posturing is ridiculous anywhere and I sure as hell don’t want to deal with it from a fast-food company.

Experiments with the African mail

looky

I’m trying to send a comic book to Primrose, who is in the Peace Corps in Togo. However, as comic books go, it’s a big one- it’s the collected version of Box Office Poison, a character-driven “reality” comic book about 20-somethings living their bohemian lives in New York. It’s pretty good, but it is basically a complete soap opera… so the collected edition is pretty thick- 3 inches at least.

The thing about sending packages to Africa is they almost never get there. If your package looks valuable, it will get opened and stolen and sold. If not, it might just get forgotten. Primrose warned us not to send us anything worth stealing, but she sure would like some comics. So here’s hoping it makes it to her! UPS wanted over $100 to send it air mail, so I think it’s going by the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

In a related story, danh and some friends mailed a 30 pound box of comics and candy to Pakistan- danh took special care to black out all the scandalous scenes in the comics Pakistani censors might object to. They paid over $100 to ship it… it’s now three years later and it never got there.

Not that it has to be on a different continent to get lost in the mail- Once I mailed Rachel a bunch of Hate graphic novels at work, but I addressed them to an alias she was using at the time. She had forgotten to tell the receptionist about this… poof! About $60 in comics lost forever. She even went to the lost & found but they had completely vanished.