I have a ques­tion for all you vend­ing machine design­ers out there. Why the long wait for change?

You feed 2 bucks into the bill accep­tor and punch in the let­ter C and the num­ber 4 for the 20oz Diet Dr. Pep­per. You watch as the as a lit­tle bucket on an arm moves smoothly up and over until it stops under the appro­pri­ate slot. The row of bot­tles is pushed for­ward, forc­ing the front one off the ledge where it drops the 6″ into the bucket. The arm then glides over to the left and then (in this case) drops down until top edge of the bucket catches on the ledge above the dis­pens­ing chute. This allows the Diet Dr. Pep­per to slide down into hold­ing area and then rests for a sec­ond until the round plex­i­glass door rotates 180° until the drink is exposed and you can pick it out. With your selected drink now in your hand, the round door rotates back seal­ing off the dis­pens­ing area. A few sec­onds later 75¢ in change plops down one quar­ter at a time. Elapsed time between pick­ing a selec­tion and receiv­ing the change is prob­a­bly 30 seconds.

The only thing I can think of for mak­ing you wait is so that your atten­tion is not diverted from watch­ing the nifty dis­pens­ing dance.

We have been two at a time Net­flix­ers since way back when. A cou­ple years ago they threw in stream­ing from the cloud for FREE. At first they lim­ited the amount of time you were allot­ted by how many DVDs your plan allowed, then they bumped it to unlim­ited stream­ing (still FREE.)

Today I received an email from the fine folks at Netflix:

Dear Brian,

We are sep­a­rat­ing unlim­ited DVDs by mail and unlim­ited stream­ing into two sep­a­rate plans to bet­ter reflect the costs of each. Now our mem­bers have a choice: a stream­ing only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.

Your cur­rent $14.99 a month mem­ber­ship for unlim­ited stream­ing and unlim­ited DVDs will be split into 2 dis­tinct plans:

Plan 1: Unlim­ited Stream­ing (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlim­ited DVDs, 2 out at-a-time (no stream­ing) for $11.99 a month

From $15 to $20 on Sep­tem­ber 1 for the same thing, that is a 33% increase. The folks that were in it at 1 DVD and unlim­ited stream­ing got zapped for even more, they are going from $10 to $16 or 60%.

Our 2 DVDs were sep­a­rated into 1 for TV shows and 1 for movies. But we are run­ning out of TV shows we want to watch, Law & Order (The Mother Ship) is the last one and while we are only on Sea­son 8 of 20, #8 is the last one avail­able on DVD. The rest are tied up with exclu­sive rerun deals with cable TV. So today I went ahead and changed our plan from 2 to 1 DVD at a time and kept the stream­ing por­tion. Even with the down­grade in ser­vice it will still cost us a buck more when the price goes up in September.

I’m going to see just how much we stream per month, which is mostly me on the lap­top watch­ing stuff that wouldn’t appeal to Donna. Maybe we will just drop the stream­ing alto­gether and go back to get­ting 2 DVDs at a time for the $12.

I think if they eased up the price, in what I call The How To Boil Frog Method, it wouldn’t have been too bad and maybe not have inflamed users like me into doing some­thing rash. After all, how much does it cost per month for HBO? $20?

The back deck project is fin­ished for all inten­sive pur­poses. I have to try one thing and if it works out, there may be about an hour of stain­ing left to do.

Sat­ur­day morn­ing we got an early start to beat the heat. Donna and friend Joan went for a walk and I went out to put the top trim boards on the rail­ing around the deck. I didn’t buy any screws because I had a bunch of 1–5/8″ deck screws left over from a long ago project. The first thing I did was to drill pilot holes in the already cut to length and shape boards. I used the old boards as a guide to get the right amount of holes but made sure I was slightly off so as to not try and use an old hole for the new screw.

I grabbed my old screws and instantly thought they are too light in color com­pared to the dark brown (Brazil­ian Wal­nut) deck­ing boards I had pur­chased at Home Depot. But I opted to try a cou­ple to see if they would be that notice­able after they were sunk in the piece of deck­ing. Two screws were all it took to real­ize that they didn’t get hid­den enough and really stood out.

So I drove the 1 mile over to Home Depot to buy some darker screws. They had on the shelves screws in gray, for­est green, sil­ver, tan and my best option choice — brown. I took my 1lb. box of brown com­pos­ite deck screws home and tried a few. I started the first two in the holes of the pre­vi­ously tried tan left­over screws. Not bad, but they will have to do con­sid­er­ing what my options were. The third screw I tried, in a vir­gin hole, went down and stopped with he head above the board before spin­ning use­lessly stripped. I tried one more with the same results. I backed out the 1–5/8″ screws, tossed them back in the box they came out of and drove back to Home Depot to return them.

This time I bought 2–1/2″ screws. The color selec­tion was the same, so I took them home in the same brown color. Wouldn’t you think that a store that sold two kinds of com­pos­ite deck boards, both in a dark brown shade, would carry dark brown com­pos­ite deck screws? The 2–1/2″ screw heads sunk in just fine while hold­ing down the top boards, but they were about a 1/4″ too long for out­side trim boards and they stuck out a bit from the bot­tom. Once I finally got going, I fin­ished the job in about an hour. The one pound box turned out to hold just the right amount for my job as there were only three screws left over.

When I opened the sec­ond 1lb. plas­tic box, right there on top, was a brochure show­ing all the vari­a­tions of the Grip Rite Prime Guard Plus com­pos­ite deck screws. The sec­ond color illus­trated was dark brown and it would have been a per­fect match. To add insult to injury, they also offer it in a #8 x 2″ long ver­sion that would have been the per­fect size. So I guess in 20 years when the com­pos­ite boards need replac­ing I’ll pre-order my screws.