A little while back, I wrote about Netflix “Watch Now”, the movie streaming service from Netflix. Today, I was finally able to test it out, as my account had it activated (how, I’m not quite sure—the tab just appeared). Overall, I was fairly impressed: my thoughts on the good and bad follow:

The Good

• Generous viewing time – For every $1 you spend on Netflix each month, you get 1 hour of online viewing. This means that I get 15 hours per month that I can watch movies online—not bad! There’s even a potential for bonus time.
• Good video quality – For streaming video, the quality was quite good. I had no problems with skipping, although the soundtrack was a little off during portions of the movie (Word Wars is what I watched)
• Quick and easy installation – To get the player running, it took at most five minutes—I fired up Internet Explorer (which unfortunately is the only supported browser at the moment) and Netflix installed everything for me. The only little blip was that Windows Media Player had to be upgraded, but that was as simple as pressing “Upgrade”.
• Easy to use player – The video player was dead easy to operate—play, pause, fast forward—all of the basic controls you need.

The Bad

• Limited selection – At the moment, only 13 of the 156 movies in my queue were available to be viewed online and, with the exception of Word Wars, they were all fairly old. I’m sure this will improve with time, but at the moment, it’s a little disappointing.
• No advanced features – I was unable to find any way to display subtitles, and there certainly weren’t any special features—just the movie.
• No auto-resume – Unless I’m mistaken, there is no way to resume a movie where you left off. For instance, I watched a few minutes of the movie and then exited. It would have been nice if it restarted right where I left off, but instead, it went back to beginning. Annoying, but not terrible.
• Only supported on Windows in Internet Explorer – This is a real downer, but hopefully they’re working on other systems/browsers. I really don’t like opening up IE any more than I have to.

The Ugly

• Watch Now crashed my browser twice, and I had to reboot my system. – When I started the movie, I exited out once or twice, to see what would happen. The second time, I had to force quit IE, and open it back up again. The movie still wouldn’t play, so I had to do a reboot. After that, everything went fine, but it didn’t leave the best first impression.

I’m really interested to see how this service plays out—it could either be a huge flop or a big success. I think that, as long as newer movies are released this way, it will take off. Otherwise, I don’t see it gaining widespread use.

I was pretty impressed with the Academy Awards in general tonight: Ellen DeGeneres did a great job hosting, the in between acts were interesting (the Snakes on a Plane silhouette was classic), and, well, Jack Black and Will Ferrell did a duet—need I say any more? A few comments on the winners (and losers):

• I have to see West Bank Story. The tagline says it all: “A little singing, a little dancing, a lot of hummus.” Unfortunately, Netflix does not have it (yet), but I’m hoping they’ll have it available soon.
• Hollywood loves Al Gore. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but it seems like no matter what he did, whether presenting or accepting awards, the audience loved it. An Inconvenient Truth won both of the categories it was nominated for.
• Even if you have a 3 out of 5 chance of winning, it’s not a guarantee. Somehow, despite having three songs nominated, Dreamgirls failed to win Best Song, to, you guessed it, a song from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
• Rags-to-riches stories are in. Between Forest Whitaker of The Last King of Scotland and Jennifer Hudson of Dreamgirls, we got our share of impossible childhood dreams coming true. But, I guess every year there’s always a story like that.
• It’s too bad most of the movies aren’t on DVD yet. Because of my limited mobility without a car here, I haven’t been able to get to the movie theater very much, so I wasn’t able to see many of the films that were nominated (and also because of the insane prices charged for tickets). Since most of my movie watching is through Netflix, it would have been nice to get some of the films on DVD before they won the awards.

Not much more to say than that other than congratulations to Martin Scorsese; he certainly deserved the award. For more coverage, Wikipedia, naturally, is the place to go.

UPDATE: Here’s the Jack Black and Will Ferrell bit (unceremoniously stolen from YouTube):

I’m sorry if things have been slow around here—I’ve been working hard on a new design. Hopefully in another week or so, it will be ready to go live. In the meantime, here are a couple of interesting places I’ve been online recently:

• RIAA lists top 25 universities handing out piracy notices – Lehigh, unfortunately, didn’t make the list, but UMass (where a good number of my friends go) just barely missed the top 5 at #6. Congrats!
• Amazing 3D Photos – these photos are made from moving the background back and forth very quickly—real cool stuff!
• Bleikamp.com – Just found this blog recently—some interesting web-related stuff to be found
• WordPress Source/Functions – This has proven extremely valuable in creating a couple of plugins for the redesign.
• Bowler picks up a ridiculous two-lane spare – This is just nuts—you have to see it to believe it (via kottke)

So that’s pretty much it—last week was rough, as I had three midterms, but spring break is only a week away, so I have that to look forward to.

To finish things up, here’s a preview of the new design:

Uggh—so I made a pretty significant typo in the instructions for Better Stats Insertion 0.1. Essentially, I made it so it would not work if you followed the directions. I said to insert the following tag:

<?php if ( function_exists( 'bsi_include' ) ) { bsi_include(); } ?>

And, basically, bsi_include() is a non-existant function. It should be the following:

<?php if ( function_exists( 'bsi_insert' ) ) { bsi_insert(); } ?>

I apologize for any confusion this may have caused, but if you download the latest version (0.2 at the time of this writing), it will fix the instructions.

Ah, spring training! Yesterday, Red Sox pitchers and catchers reported and did some workouts—no actual pitching yet. I’m really looking forward to this season—we made an excellent pickup in Daisuke Matsuzaka (pictured to the left), and with Papelbon in the rotation, our starting pitching should be very strong this season. Although there’s no clear closer just yet, I think the bullpen has enough talent that it shouldn’t be a problem filling the hole.

If nothing else, this season will certainly be exciting as ever, and hopefully we’ll actually be able to make the playoffs this year after last season’s disappointing finish.

Alright, so maybe you’re getting a little sick of this, but I wrote another WordPress plugin. This time, it’s for inserting your stat tracking code. I noticed that just putting the code straight into my footer resulted in 404 and preview pages being tracked, so I quickly whipped together a plugin to solve the problem, and here it is. Check out the plugin page for more info.

Wow—these Ford Mustang billboards are awesome. Apparently, they’re made of a certain material that blurs the background, no matter the conditions. Very cool, and definitely non intrusive.

Also, some people are just idiots. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

In the process of redesigning this site (which will hopefully be up sometime soon), I realized I had no good way to exclude certain categories from being displayed on the front page, feeds, or in archives. So, naturally, I threw together my own plugin to do the duty. Ultimate Category Excluder allows you to quickly and easily exclude categories from your main page, archives, or feeds. For more information, check out the plugin page. This is a beta plugin, so be sure to check back for any new updates.

Tonight’s episode of Lost was certainly exciting and a good start to the new episodes. After the first six aired back in the fall, I was a little worried that the producers had lost their touch. Thankfully, I was wrong. With “Not in Portland,” the seventh episode of the season, they brought back the old Lost formula, and they were able to answer a few questions as well. Good stuff all around—I’m definitely looking forward to next week.

My friend Paul is taking a math class this semester called “Math in Different Cultures.” (Yeah, ridiculous, isn’t it?) And today he claimed that our way of numbers is flawed with the following example:

Three men decided to split the cost of a hotel room. The hotel manager gave them a price of $30. The men split the bill evenly, each paying $10, and retired to their room.

However, the manager realized that it was a Wednesday night, which meant the hotel had a special: rooms were only $25. He had overcharged them $5!

He promptly called the bellboy, gave him five one-dollar bills and told him to return it to the men. When the bellboy explained the situation to the men, they were so pleased at the honesty of the establishment that they promptly tipped the bellboy $2 of the $5 he had returned and each kept $1 for himself.

The Problem: Each of the three men ended up paying $9 (their original $10, minus $1 back) totalling $27, plus $2 for the bellboy makes $29. Where did the extra dollar go?

Once you’ve thought about this one, check out the solution.