indiboi.com

I’ve been a Netflix customer/member since 2003. I’ve never had much trouble with the service, I can only remember one DVD that arrived damaged.

A month ago I switched to Blu-Ray.

Almost half of my Blu-Rays are arriving damaged. There is a characteristic crack at the edge, sometimes they’re still playable, sometimes they’re not. It’s the ones that aren’t that is really the problem, because they’ll play up to about an hour into the movie and then the picture will suddenly freeze.

It’s really a shame that Netflix is ignoring the problem. It seems to me, and quite frankly I’m certain of it, that Blu-Ray discs are just not as durable (or more precisely, not as flexible) as DVDs. This apparent brittleness makes them much more prone to damage when they pass through the USPS processing machinery. The result is that very distinctive crack at the edge.

Netflix could very easily resolve the issue by putting a thicker cardboard overwrap around the disc sleeve. Gamefly does this in order to avoid damage, but I suppose it simply isn’t cost effective since Blu-Ray renters are such a small portion of the overall customer base and even then not all areas of the country seem to be effected by this cracking.

To make matters worse when trying to discuss the issue on places like avscience.com, posters not experiencing the problem are typically adversarial and prone to blame the problem on the person experiencing it and refuse to put any blame on Netflix or the USPS. Bad luck and sabotage seem to be the only possible reasons, they’re not willing to consider that if hundreds of DVDs arrive okay, but a good portion of BDs arrive damaged, that perhaps it’s the BDs that are the defining variable. They’d much rather have you believe that the actual postman (not the machinery) is somehow able to determine that it’s a Blu-Ray and they’ll break only those, leaving DVDs okay, I’m personally insulted by the behavior there. Heaven forbid anyone suggest that Blu-Ray is imperfect in some way.

In any case, it looks like my days as a Netflix customer are coming to an end. It doesn’t matter where the blame lies at this point, I’m throwing my money away renting from Netflix when nearing the majority of my BDs are unplayable. I’m even considering just returning my Blu-Ray player; the thought of using Blockbuster, even with their online service, is quite repugnant.

It started to bother me when I mentioned my code being valid xhtml 1.1, but the entries themselves may not be. I decided to fix that too, since I was off the deep end in terms of correcting things with the journal.

I went through every monthly archive from December 2000 through until this month, validating every page for xhtml 1.1. I then proceeded to correct any errors either through MySQL queries or by hand. It took several hours, but somehow I think it’s worth it, in a way. I realized that a couple little mistakes within some entries caused massive display errors for the entire page, whoops!

Yes, it’s determination, but it’s also procrastination. I think it’s useful procrastination for once though. I really need to start working on the company’s redesign project; I stalled it back in August. It’s supposed to be done, uhm… next month? I took the time to really work on my skills, so hopefully it’ll go much better than I had been expecting. :)

This morning I finished the process I started yesterday of re-categorizing all of my 2,254 entries here. I added the new ‘Jots’ category, and removed a few others that I felt could be compressed together.

I could probably do some additional compression, as the categories of ‘Blog, Journal, Sidenotes, and Jots’ are all fairly similar, but I feel there’s enough of a difference between those types of entries to warrant separate categorization. The same can also be said of the ‘Web, Code, and Tech’ categories, similar, but also distinctly different. I suppose my main driving force was that I didn’t want any entries that vaguely journal-like to be within that particular category.

I’ve had a category named ‘thepast’ for rather a long time, but I finally moved all the entries that should have been there. This particular category covers posts that discuss Davey, if you weren’t aware. There are 441 entries in ‘thepast,’ roughly twenty percent of my entries deal with him. Part of that I find a little shocking, but when you take into consideration the length of time we were together it does seem reasonable.

It was somewhat traumatic to actually read through all of those entries. I did my best to simply skim and categorize, but I found myself just reading through them anyway. The range is interesting and predictable; just getting to know him, being totally in love, breaking up, anger, sadness, and finally to where I feel now.

How I feel about Davey now is difficult to explain. During the summer we started talking to each other again, which is when he made his apology. It didn’t last too long, for reasons unknown to me, he simply vanished from the face of the planet. I assume he’s alright, but I’m just at a point where he knows that I’d talk with him (or should), and any effort to do that resides with him. I was worried about him for a while, but whatever the circumstances are I have no control over it.

He is no longer the person I was in love with, nor am I the same person. I do love him, still, but that particular future will never occur; it is the past. I do want to see him, spend a weekend together or something of that sort just to, I’m not sure why actually, but that is unlikely to ever occur. I suppose the part of me that wants to see him is the part of me that still misses him, I accept that it’s okay to miss him from time to time.

My journal has several scars from changing content management systems over the years.

The first, being the one that most annoys me, is the ridiculously high post ID numbers. This is because blogger used those weird ID numbers, and back when I ran the ‘blogger to b2′ importer those ID numbers were caught, from then on any B2 post ID was up in that insanely high range; that also includes the GM entries I also imported thereafter. I vaguely remember talking to Michel about it and I think he changed the importer script to prevent that. The damage was done for me at least, because by the time I’d talked to Michel about it I had already been using B2 for quite a while.

We did devise a method for correcting it, sort of. The problem was that the post ID was stored not only within the posts table, but also the comment table; fixing it would then disconnect the two. What seems like forever had past and after working on eMotif I learned how to fix the problem.

You might ask why I still have the insanely high post ID numbers, right? The little issues of permalinks, search engines, and all the other problems that radically changing the post ID would bring are the main reasons I never did change it. So, with that being enough of a discouragement, I still have the seemingly random post ID numbers, it’s also a little funny to me, because it appears I have 2.8 million posts.

When I ran all of my uber-complicated MySQL queries to convert my ’specialized’ B2 to WP, I never realized that WP has this post2cat table. I don’t really understand the purpose of it, other than to be annoying, why couldn’t the category field in the post table be sufficient?

I started noticing this really strange category error on the posts that used to be made private in the old b2 style. The error was very vague, but given the entries it appeared on I finally realized it had to do with my conversion. The only way I discovered that I could fix it was to open the post via the edit function and save it again. I realized that running queries on the posts table to change the categories wasn’t working, which didn’t make any sense. I finally, this morning, noticed the post2cat table, it was missing entries for all of those entries showing the error. During the import/conversion/upgrade from B2 to WP those particular entries had a category ID of zero; the conversion process never made entries in the post2cat table for them!

It was with that realization that I knew I’d be having tons and tons of problems with the next part of my little project. No longer could I easily, using MySQL queries, change the category of a post simply by searching the content and using that as a trigger. Obviously it is possible, but the query becomes more difficult because post IDs need to be cross-referenced, the category needs to be updated on a table completely separate. I made a decision that doing things the ‘quick’ way would require far too much time spent learning how to do it; I manually edited all 280 or so entries, opening and then saving them. Yes, it sucked.

Blogger and GM did not support categories, thus all entries were put into ‘Journal’, since it was my number ‘1′ category. This bothered me for quite a while, but changing the categories was such a time-consuming task that it didn’t bother me enough to want to do it. Enter mass category editing, I found the plugin, but using it is so painfully slow that it really isn’t quite worth it. That’s the problem when you have 1500 posts in the same category, that plugin wants to load every single one of them, and for some reason the script doesn’t stop at the number of posts you choose to display if you also choose to display a category; it needs a serious rewrite for usability.

Notice that I said usability. I should be even a bit more precise and say it needs to be more user-friendly. It takes the same query strings that WP itself takes, but this is not overtly clear; once I realized I could feed the month string it became considerably more functional for me. It very well may say that somewhere, I just didn’t notice it.

All of this highlights how critical I am of my writing now. Somewhere along the line, even though I’d always called this my journal, it really did become a journal. I did before that, actually, have a blog. Random and useless garbage was posted on a regular basis, it’s sad. I’m not condemning the format of a blog, contrary to how it appears, I am though recognizing that my style of writing has substantially changed over the years. I am clearly a better writer than I had been. I care much more about the quality of what I’m writing in contrast to the quantity of posts.

Why is all of this important? This journal is an accurate history of my life over the last five years, it is my most valuable document. I’m determined to correct mistakes I’ve made while maintaining it in the past by using the skills I now have.

It is a little bandwidth heavy, my css file alone has approximately 400 lines, but I have completed the 18th revision of indiboi.com this morning. I actually did bother to check the css layout in IE6, which I haven’t done for quite a while. There were only a couple of glitches, but with a little box model hacking those were taken care of.

Having gone through tremendous trouble to match my last b2 template to the last revision when I converted to WP, I learned quite a bit about the way it worked and it wasn’t nearly as much of a pain to do this revision.

So, taking those newly found skills, I wrote the css totally from scratch. That in and of itself isn’t too terribly amazing, since I tend to write everything out anyway, the point is that I didn’t do any borrowing, I started with a blank file and wrote the stuff in point by point (class by class, id by id, yadda, yadda).

I also took the chance to start validating for xhtml 1.1, jumping from transitional xhtml 1.0. The one little problem with that is old entries break validation, but… eh, just one of those things.

Also, as per usual, everything has been handcoded via SSH session with pico (nano). I hope you like it, not that I really care that much if you don’t (hah), but it did take a while to do, and I very much like it. :-) It really should go without saying that this is best viewed in Firefox because of the ‘neato’ css it supports, not being fanatical or anything, it works just fine in IE.

I am having a bit of a problem working out how to display the category and yearly archives. I have a rather insane level of condition checking at work, well, when compared to the ‘average’ WP installation at least. All that condition checking is making the process of styling those particular archives just a tad tricky. In relation, my css is a little wonky when the content div isn’t ‘long enough,’ the sidebar pushes over into it a bit. This rarely shows up, but it is something that needs to be fixed… somehow.