S1dd - My Other Blog..

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.