Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Normally I use Firefox, except for the few sites that require it, like Netflix for "Watch It Now". Although I'm always a little irked to be forced to use IE, usually the sites are pretty straightforward about the requirement. However, recently, I've come across what appears to be a little more subversive behavior on the part of Microsoft. The Women's group that is part of my neighborhood association set up a website a few months back on Windows Live Spaces. I've been regularly checking it for news about the neighborhood. A few weeks ago, instead of the normal page, I started getting a log in screen. At first I thought they had messed something up when doing an update to the site, but after asking them about it, we figured out that the log in screen only appeared in Firefox and that the site worked just fine in IE.

Screen captures after the break. Read more...

Dear Blockbuster,

It's not me, it's you. I really liked you, but you just seemed to stop caring. Today's phone call was the last straw, as soon as I can copy my queue to Netflix I'll be gone. Here is what happened.

I've been fairly happily using the Blockbuster service for a while now. I really liked that I could return movies to the store and get free in-store rentals in return. Plus, they automatically cleared the queue when returned to the store, shaving at least a day off of the ship time for my next movie. I returned my last three movies to the store on 7/23. I received one movie in the mail to replace it on the 7/26. By 7/30, I started to wonder where my other two movies were, so I went to check my queue. I had over 70 movies in my queue, about half of which were available. Since I've been with Blockbuster, I have quite a few movies that are Long Wait or Very Long Wait such that these have started to accumulate at the top of my queue. Read more...