According to the sample image above from the USCIS, you will get a green card that is valid for one day if you were born in 1920 and looked like the picture above when you applied. That would easily be 50+ years. But you may draw your own conclusions, after all the recipient is from Utopia 
Since Blockbuster started its new policy of not shipping new movies until you return your in store rentals, things have been much better. Movies shipped as soon as I dropped my discs back in the mail. But this week blockbuster is back to it’s usual tricks of not shipping. Generally when I returned all my movies together, Blockbuster would ship at least one movie instantly. But this time not a single movie shipped for two days.
As usual I have complained and as usual they will probably reply back with some lame excuse about keeping lots of “Available” movies at the top of the queue. I have more than 500 movies in my queue and many of the top ones are alwyas available.
Update on Aug 29: No movies have shipped yet. That is 4 days of no shipments!! Here is what Blockbuster has to say about it:
I sincerely apologize that we have yet to ship the next available titles from your queue.
We are aware that some customers who receive DVDs from our Richmond distribution center have recently experienced a slow-down with their check-ins and shipments. This is in line with the system enhancement that is in place to better provide quality service to our customers such as you. We are addressing this situation and it will be corrected as quickly as possible.
I also see that some of the movies at the top of your queue are on a “Short Wait” and “DVD Releases” status. We want to send you the movies that are most important to you as reflected by the priority you’ve set in your queue. If your top selections do not show an “Available” status and you have fewer than 15 “Available” movies in queue, a shipment may be skipped.
I would recommend keeping more than 15 “Available” titles at the top of your queue at all times. Once you take a few moments to do so, I’m certain you’ll see something shipped by the end of the next business day.
Since we value you as our customer, I would like to offer you 2 extra e-coupons good for free movie/discounted game rentals. Just click the link and print them which you may redeem at any participating Blockbuster store. You can expect a separate e-mail within 24-48 hours. We recommend to please check your spam or junk folder as well.
We appreciate your patience and understanding.
Should you have further questions, please let me know.
So I emailed back saying that it is ridiculous that I’m expected to constantly monitor my queue and their stupid system can’t just send me the first available movie form my queue. Here is what I got back:
I understand your concern about the movies availability and managing your queue. I also understand your inquiry about your e-coupons.
In line with our system enhancement that is currently on going, we really recommend that you keep more available titles on top and consistently monitor your queue. Once we are done with our upgrade, we will ship whatever “Available” titles eventhough it is not at the top of your selections.
In the meantime, we appreciate your patience and understanding while we work towards serving you better.
Your e-coupon was sent thru a separate e-mail. I suggest that you also check your spam or bulk folders. Some e-mail providers will not allow e-mails to your inbox unless you previously approve and set it up.
Should there be anything else, please let me know.
So now I have to keep on checking that the titles at the top of my queue are available or not and never get new releases from Blockbuster the day they release.
These are examles of the iBookDB Book Information widget. They are aligned by putting them in divs. To align left I used
<div style=”float:left; margin-right:10px;”></div>
and to align right, I used
<div style=”float:right; margin-left:10px;”></div>
You can adjust the margins to your liking. Have fun using these widgets. For more information or help on using them email contact@ibookdb.net
You can find this widget in the Plugins directory under Plugins->Add New by searching for Internet Book Database
For books that have Previews, if you would like the preview to appear on page like on the one in this post, you need to install GreyBox.
This blog had a PR of 3 a while back. One day I got an offer to put some links from a company called ZTMC and they would pay me monthly for posting those links. I never expected this blog to make any money so I agreed and posted the links. A few months went by and suddenly ZTMC cancelled my subscription. I discovered that the PR of this site went from 3 to 0. I can’t say for sure that it was caused by the Ads but it is very likely. I saw another posting online reporting a similar case and also Google’s terms and conditions frown upon paid links.
I found this interesting quote from Microsoft:
Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.
The Whitehouse recently announced a new program for getting feedback from people on what they really want. You can visit the site at http://opengov.ideascale.com/ and vote on other ideas or add your own.
I went through many pages of the site and it turns out that half the people want to make marijuana legal and the other half want to see Obama’s birth certificate.
I got an email at 9:42pm yesterday from Blockbuster informing me of changes in my plan:
We hope you’re enjoying BLOCKBUSTER Total Access™!
There are some changes to our subscription plan lineup that introduce a new pricing structure and new plans which limit the number of in-store exchanges.
As a result, your current plan will no be longer be available at the current price.
(Unlimited Online DVDs up to 3 at a time plus unlimited in-store exchanges each month for $17.99)
We’d like to extend you a new plan that includes Unlimited Online DVDs 3 at a time plus up to 5 free* in-store exchanges for $17.99.
In addition, exclusively for BLOCKBUSTER Total Access customers, we have introduced in-store movie rentals for $1.99* per movie should you need more than the in-store exchanges included in your plan.
Your new plan will go into effect on your regular monthly billing date following August 31, 2007. If we don’t hear from you by August 31, 2007, we will automatically move you to the new BLOCKBUSTER Total Access plan referenced below as “Your New Plan”.
So they did hear from me. I emailed than that I was disappointed and can’t trust Blockbuster anymore if they reduce benefits on the best option they had so far and I would like to keep my plan at the same price as an existing customer. This is bullcrap, emailing people on Friday night, probably when they are most likely to miss the email. More discussion on this at fatwallet. When they announced the new pricing, they did seem to say that existing customers would get to keep their plans
You would think that a net giant like Yahoo! would test out it’s pages in various browsers before making stuff live. I have been meaning to blog about this for a while but forgot about it until I visited Yahoo! movies again a couple of weekends ago to check local listings for Transformers. I have blogged before about Yahoo!’s half baked attempts at changing user interfaces.
Well here is what the top bar at Yahoo! Movies looks like in Opera:
and here is what it looks like in Safari:
Not only that, it has been over 6 months since they updated the front page but the changes have not yet trickled down to the rest of the Yahoo! movies site. It seems that Yahoo! has been at upgrading the user interface badly at other places too. Check out the complaints people had when the new Yahoo! TV launched.
Yahoo! added to streaming quotes to Yahoo! Finance and I didn’t even know it until a few days back I opened it in Firefox. A lot of sites implement this same functionality e.g. MarketWatch, which is not even a technology company like Yahoo! and they got it right. It is completely shameful for a company like Yahoo! to have such a brain-dead implementation of something that probably takes one guy a few hours to program.
That said, Yahoo! Finance is a wonderful resource but they do need to get their act together. They seem to be really incompetent in implementing new technology as a tech company. If it wasn’t for Harold Maass, whose column I read everyday and the mimf contest, I would have probably already switched to some other finance site.
Update: Does Yahoo! use it’s own UI Library?? It seems to support a lot of browsers.
I just downloaded the new Safari For Windows and the first thing I noticed was that it was blindingly fast.
But that is where my liking for the Browser ended. Fonts looked like crap (click on the screenshot for a larger version). So I go into the settings and there are three options for Font Smoothing and all three are bad. Next I hit maximize and Safari maximises across both the screens of my dual monitor. There is no way to maximize it to one because the usual NVidia buttons are absent from the Safari window thanks to Safari not using Native Windows controls. This was no surprise to me because that is how Apple works (e.g. Quicktime and Itunes). And most annoyingly – the scroll wheel on the mouse doesn’t work. Hopefully some of this will be resolved when the browser is out of beta??
An avid Opera user, Safari gives me no real reason to switch or even consider it as an alternative browser. It does make it convenient to test sites on Safari without a Mac however.
