Much has been said about Netflix’s lousy selection of movies, and I suppose it’s true. However, I think only the extremely myopic could fail to notice one thing: Netflix is the only big player in the streaming movie business that isn’t gouging its customers.

I pay $8 a month for access to thousands of movies. Sure, they’re not all A-Listers, but that eight bucks I pay grants me 24-hour access to watch all or part of each of them whenever I want without restriction. That’s a good deal.

For comparison, I paid Amazon Video on Demand over $35 just in the last two months to watch just a handfull of movies and have had to watch the ones I “paid for” within 48 hours. That’s a bad deal, and here’s why:

Streaming a movie over a wire costs a lot less than producing and shipping a DVD or a Bluray. Managing the bits over a wire is probably less than one tenth as expensive, but it could be much lower. Even if you want to quibble with my math, which is obviously not the result of an exhaustive statistical analysis, you have to see that bits over a wire changes the scenario in profound ways.

The streaming method allows for no possible way for damage to be done to the movie. That means a great deal of the risk inherent in managing physical products simply evaporates.

One of my favorite industry terms is, “shrinkage.” It basically means theft, but it also covers fraud and error. And it’s a huge problem in retail. According to a study Ernst & Young conducted, U.S. Retailers lost approximately $31 Billion to shrinkage in 2002. The term is evocative, I think. One can easily see the usefulness of the notion of physical inventory shrinking without being properly paid for. With digital goods, there is no shrinkage. Even if “theft” occurs, the inventory never shrinks.

The cost of housing all those physical copies, the rent on the building, the cost of driving them around, the long chain of production facilities needed to produce and package the disk: all gone.

No longer does this business require that the popularity of certain movies be forecast; nor does this business ever have to account for the losses involved in purchasing too many or too few copies to match the poorly predicted demand.

Because digital storage and delivery shifts the distribution related limits into the elastic realm of virtual servers, whoever has the bandwidth to connect can watch the movie. Limits to the number of people who can be served have effectively vanished.

The concept of a timed rental arose out of a proprietor’s need to get the movie back so as to rent it again. If any one client kept the physical copy too long it would directly jeopardize the transaction’s profitability; hence the “late fee.” This simply does not apply to a digital copy of a movie. It makes no difference at all how long the purchaser takes to consume a digital product. The proprietor can distribute without limits. Amazon and others expect you will not realize this. They assume you will obediently pay for a limitation imposed by the failings of a physical good on a completely unaffected digital one. And so far, it seems they are right.

They would be wrong and this would be obvious to you, probably, if it weren’t for the memory of the old way of doing things still fresh in your mind. It is so hard to move beyond our habits. But if you could, you would see that such a fee makes about as much sense as a “convenience fee” on show tickets that no longer burden the distributor with the cost of printing or shipping. Oh yeah, we’re getting screwed all over the place.

So maybe one or more of the movies I list below will help you set aside your burning desire to consume the latest that Hollywood has to offer, while patronizing one of the few big companies not aggressively trying to screw you sideways.

Everything Must Go
Being John Malkovich
Persona
Pi
Memento
Chinatown
A Clockwork Orange
Following
Videodrome
The Others
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Skeleton Key
The Game
Donnie Darko
Revolver
Snatch
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Cypher
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
The Way of the Gun
The Grifters
The Crying Game
Midnight Express
Bad Boys
Shutter Island

Pushed a bunch of changes to the live site this morning (Friday) that weren’t supposed to go until Monday. Woops! Fortunately, I use Git and Git rocks!

First, to undo the changes I typed ‘git revert’ and the SHA of the commit in question. (I think I could have just done ‘git reset --soft HEAD^’ if it weren’t for the fact that I had already done another commit by the time I was informed of my mistake.) Now my working directory is back to the way it was before that commit (but preserving the one that came after).

Then I moved those files onto the live server, undoing my error. Whew! Pretty painless.

Now my working directory or branch is ahead of ‘origin/master’ by 1 commit, and I want to bring back those changes so that I can push them Monday like I’m supposed to. I type ‘git reset --hard origin/master’ and I’m back, like magic.

Thank you, Git developers.

How could these guys have steered me wrong?

China is the place I always imagined I would end up if I simply started digging straight down and didn’t stop. I developed this conviction with the help of those stalwart researchers at Looney Tunes University (I seem to recall professors Fudd and Bunny demonstrating quite clearly how this was the case). But it turns out the actual spot is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean about a thousand miles south east of Madagascar.

See for yourself at freemaptools.com.

We hope it will look something like this.

We just endured our first quote from a paver salesman, and it was pretty awful. Pushy, aggressively ingratiating, and he could not stop talking about how great his company is and how he never loses a sale. And the price: hoo boy. We weren’t expecting this to be cheap, but wow those were some big numbers. I wish he could have just emailed them to us; enduring a second visit was a chore. As his mood changed from bubbly to maudlin (“I really thought I was going to make a sale today.” he said sadly), all I could think about was getting him out of our house.

We may go with stamped concrete, too. Although we haven’t gotten any quotes for that yet, we expect it to be cheaper.

Here’s the sketchup file.

The Humble Bundle returns with games from Frozenbyte, an independent game development company.

I don’t actually have time to play games much these days, but I love supporting DRM-free software. For my $50 (I picked the amount!) I got not only the games themselves, which I can download from their servers as many times as I need for whichever of three operating systems I need, but also the games’ soundtracks are included as folders of MP3s. And the tracks, all written by Ari Pulkkinen, are quite good.

To: Sean Camden
From: Doctor #2 MD
Received: 04/14/2011 5:39 PM

Sean,

I would make an appointment. Just as an aside, the email system should be used only if you can wait 24-48 hours for a response. It is not for more urgent needs.

Hope that helps

Doctor #2.

Which is interesting, since I can’t actually find anywhere on the site that says “Only use this if you can wait one or two days for a response.” It says, “Send nonurgent health questions to your doctor’s office.”

I’m unsatisfied with this. I want the interface to work. If the doctor is in, it should not say that he is out. And in the event that it reports things incorrectly, I would like the doctors to accept responsibility for their organization’s system and apologize for my inconvenience. And if I can’t expect what in my opinion is a modicum of service, then why am I paying so dearly for it? Shouldn’t this level of sloppy service be easily achieved by some socialist healthcare system?

Head Cold, 11 days
To: Doctor #2 MD
From: Sean Camden
Sent: 04/14/2011 1:47 PM

Should I be trying to infer something from your lack of response?

Head cold, 10 days
To: Doctor #2 MD
From: Sean Camden
Sent: 04/13/2011 11:49 AM

It’s been going on since Sunday the 3rd and my left ear hasn’t unplugged for any notable length of time. Doctor #1 still shows as being ‘out of office.’

Head Cold, 10 days
To: Doctor #1 MD
From: Sean Camden
Sent: 04/13/2011 11:36 AM

I came down with this Sunday of last week and it has not improved by any notable amount. Any new advice?

P.S. I really don’t blame you for being confused. The patient-facing interface of [this web based messaging system] is a train-wreck of unintuitive design, so I expect the doctor-facing side must be at least as bad. You still appear to be “out of office.” Of course, maybe you really are out of office and you simply neglected to mention that in your last email.

Here’s what all that wood looks like in Sketchup.

Here’s the Sketchup file: recovered-wood.skp