I ♥ The Internet

Decorated the cubical for the holidays today and even Captain Jack Sparrow got into the spirit. Remind me tomorrow to tell you about Dead Man’s Chest and overstock dot com.

I own about 48 DVDs of movies I love, movies that I could watch over and over again. Trouble is I hardly ever watch them again after the first time when the shrink wrap came off. If I have a spare couple hours and think, “Hey let’s watch a movie!” I’ll open the cabinet and start looking at titles to pick a flick, then as I look at the box I watch the whole movie in my head in about 15 seconds, well, I guess I don’t have to watch that one. Pick up the next box, fast forward the movie, put it back. I never get to put one in the player. I think what would work though is one of those 200 disc changers where I could have it play a movie at random, once it got going I know I would enjoy the movie.

I have about 48 movies in my Netflix rental queue. Whenever I add a movie it goes to the bottom of the queue. I could move it to the top, but that would displace movies that are already there and most likely they got to the top by slowly percolating up as I watched the ones ahead of them. I really want to see most of the movies that are in the queue about equally, so its kind of hard for me to pick which ones to see first. Somewhere a while back I took the time to mix the genres up so I wouldn’t have a bunch of the same kind of movie back to back. One comedy, one drama, one sci-fi, one independent, repeat. But over time my careful mix has become scrambled again. What I need is a Netflix Queue Randomizer. I wrote to customer service to ask if they though maybe they could add that to the queue page. The response was typical customer service, “Thanks for your interest. We will hand your idea over to the development team for further study. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Searched for Netflix Queue Randomizer with Google and got a bunch of hits. I found four different ways to accomplish my goal; 1) a script for Greasemonkey, 2) a script that you just copy into the address bar while on the queue page, 3) a small executable file that you could download and 4) a bookmarklet. I used the address bar script a couple of times to really shake things up for now, but I got the bookmarklet one all ready to try next. I ♥ the Internet.

Oh, yeah, I finally washed the Florida bugs off the front of the car. To make it even I washed the whole rest of the car too.