J5’s Blog

Short Ciruit is being remade!!!  Johnny 5 is alive once again on the big screen.

Awhile ago I signed up for Blockbuster.com. At 21 or so dollars a month for three movies out at a time and the ability to return them for movies at the store up the road it just fit my lifestyle. Even when they alerted me that they were changing the plan where they restricted it to 5 in store exchanges or I could pay $4 extra dollars a month for the same unlimited service I was getting I felt it was still a fair deal. The key there was they notified me and gave me the option to pay my current level or opt-in to pay extra.

This time however they have alerted me that they are raising the price by $10 (a whopping 40% or so increase) a month which goes into effect automatically in my next billing cycle. I now hold a service that was once competitive with Netflix but now seems to keep increasing in costs every couple of months or so. What is really interesting is the pricing on their website doesn’t seem that bad (though they have gotten rid of the unlimited exchange option). I have to wonder if that is an unmarked introductory price.

I can appreciate that the program may have been an ill conceived marketing ploy that has been losing Blockbuster a lot of money but then I would have been happy to move to a more restricted plan had this happen just once and they canceled the unlimited plan then (I did move to the higher cost plan the first time). The fact that they did it a second time just has me looking over my shoulder for the next increase. So the value is gone and I will be leaving Blockbuster.com at the end of this billing cycle. Perhaps I’ll start up with Netflix again or just get outside more. I did just join a gym after all.

• Met Princess Sirindhorn of Thailand on Friday while helping out Walter Bender give an update presentation on the OLPC project. It was a great honor for me, being of Thai decent.
• Drove down to New York for one of my best friend’s graduation party. He just graduated from Art school and has a job with a company down in Atlanta, GA which does a lot of animation work for shows on the Cartoon Network.
• Saw my first grade teacher, Mrs. Donahue at the party and told her she was the best teacher I knew. It is true. Where other teacher got fed up with me she could focus me and make me feel like I could achieve great things. I went to summer school with Mrs. Donahue because the principal thought my handwriting was atrocious. It still is, but look at me now. We discussed the first grade teacher who replaced her. A mean old Nun who you could hear yelling at kids and slapping rulers from down the hall. I knew a person who had her as a teacher. That person’s life didn’t turn out so well. Not making any concrete correlations but I see what I see.
• Went to a one o’clock am showing of Knocked Up. It had some funny parts but the whole premise was just sad. Too heavy a subject to make a comedy out of. Most of the interactions between characters just seemed like they wouldn’t play out that way in the real world. Not that a movie has to be plausible to be good but this one just delved into some serious subject matter where it would seem to be important to keep some sort of connect with reality. In the end I just wasn’t able to relate to any of the characters.
• Drove back to MA at 4:00 am. It was pretty cool to see the sun rise over the horizon just as I crossed from CT to MA. It did blind me for a bit which was not cool, but I got home safe.