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I have more than 100 “Available” movies in my queue and here is what CS says in an email

Since you have fewer than 10 “Available” movies in queue, we may wait an extra day or two to ensure we’re always shipping the titles you want most.

To ensure consistency in shipping, we recommend keeping 10 or more available movies in your Queue. You can also set your preferences for shipments based on speed vs. Queue order. Go to My Account; Manage Account Settings; and choose Speed vs. Queue ship preferences. We’ll ship your next movies within 1 to 2 business days once your queue meets our recommendation

While Netflix has started shipping on Saturdays, Blockbuster has mostly stopped shipping on Mondays. In my experience, if I return all three movies on Friday/Saturday, one may or may not ship on Monday, one or two ship on Tuesday and one ships even later. I’ll update in future posts if selecting “Speed” changes this stupidity.

If an item is checked in on a weekend (including Friday) the next expected business day for a new shipment would fall on the following Tuesday with limited shipments on Monday.

To ensure consistent, prompt shipments please keep 15 or more “available” titles at the top of your queue.

Blockbuster recently updated the Queue options ending a longstanding complaint about the requirement to have available movies at the top of your queue.

But now their store return system is busted. I exchanged an online rental for a  store rental. I returned the store rental the next day. 30 hours later the disc is still in my queue.

So I click the report button, and what I get is a notification to call the store.

So I call the store and their system says I returned the movie yesterday and also have a 1$ credit for returning it in one day.

Anyway I sent in a complaint to Blockbuster both on twitter and via their Customer service contact.

I’ll update this post when I get a response. But I’m sure this is a throttling method where they don’t want you to get discs very fast. I was hoping to test that that the “Speed” option really works and I run into this. I would switch to Netflix in a heartbeat if they didn’t charge extra for Bluray and I would stop hearing complaints about new movies not shipping to heavy users. At least Netflix doesn’t lie about throttling. They are intentionally vague but at least they admit it. Unlike BB, which just comes up with lame excuses.

Update: Blockbuster online customer service already responded (in less than two hours) that they have cleared the movie from my queue and  I got the usual free rental coupon that I get every time I complain about Blockbuster screw-ups. An interesting thing in the email that the rep sent me is this

For consistent and prompt shipments, please keep 15 or more “available” titles at the top of your queue.

That totally sucks

Update: (Sat Oct 24) The Speed option is bogus. To test the speed option I put some future and long wait releases in the top 15 in my queue. That still didn’t cause anything to ship on Friday (previous movie returned to store Wednesday, system glitch caused it to be marked as returned on Thurdsay after complaining). And if the limited shipments on Monday is true, I’ll have to wait at least 2, maybe three  business days for the next movie to ship.

Update: Somehow my update to this post got lost? I got a call from BB customer service on Oct 26/27 after complaining about this problem on Twitter. It seems that the speed issue is now fixed. Since then I’ve seen my movies ship on time until now. So if you see no more updates to this BB has fixed the issue.

Here are trailers for movies coming soon that I want to see. I’ll wait for them to come on DVD/BluRay but for moviegoers, here are a lot of trailers in one place.

The Box

The Fourth Kind

The Men Who Stare at Goats

2012

Planet 51

Twilight: New Moon

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Old Dogs

Transylmania

Avatar (Teaser Trailer)

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Sherlock Holmes

I’ll keep making more posts with more trailers as the weeks go by. Until then enjoy

I only watch the movie. I don’t watch bonus features, commentaries etc. at all so my reviews will not contain anything about those.

The disc directly went to the movie menu, didn’t force any trailers on me. The special features were on a second disc.

The movie was very good but not as good as the first one. It was exactly what you expect lots of robots, explosions, action etc. The CGI is great and looks fantastic on Blu-Ray. There is always so much happening on the screen that even if there were any CGI flaws you wouldn’t notice them.

The movie was 2 hours 26 minutes approx which was a bit much. They could have skipped or at the minimum skimped on the romance. Don’t go looking for plot holes, great acting or some such. That’s not what the movie is about. Just enjoy the action and the great effects. I really liked the effects during the little slow motion action thrown in. A transformer taking human form was a bad idea.

I rented the disc from Blockbuster and it included an ad for GM cars, but it contained none of the Transformers cars except the Camaro. Which is a shame. GM took a really long time to launch the Camaro after the first transformers movie and it seems will not be launching the Trax. The Spark comes in 2011 to America. The Trax and The Spark are the autobot twins.  The Corvette Stingray that looks so much better than the current corvette will also probably never hit the market. GM, what is wrong with you? Maybe next time you can have the cars at the dealer lots the day the next Transformers comes out and handout fliers at the theater along with tickets to go check out the cars.

Anyway, the countdown to Transformers 3, which comes out July, 2011 is now on.

Click here to watch in 1080P (requires Quicktime)

Ahan is now 7 months old and it is time to follow up with an update of what we needed in the next three months after my first post about the first three months.

Sleep

We really didn’t need anything extra for sleep. And if you are afraid like we were of trying the cry it out to get your baby to sleep through the night, don’t be! Just do it.

Changing

Furniture

Hmm, no additions to furniture either.

Basics

Travel

We still haven’t done much travel with Ahan. Look out for for the 9 month update for more.

Feeding

Bath

Nothing extra need for bath time here so far.

Playtime

Misc

If I think of anything else that I missed, I’ll update the list above.

My last few posts about Blockbuster have all been complaints. I’ve often reached a point where I wanted to just cancel and move to NetFlix because of stupid policies at Blockbuster such as delays in shipping of as much as 4 days if you don’t have 15 available movies at the top of your queue and excuses about distribution center problems etc.

But I just heard from BlockbusterCC on twitter that sometime this month, BB will give us the option of speed vs priority. Here is the exact quote

BlockbusterCC Thanks for the inqry. We are rolling out new options sometime 10/2009. U will have the option to ship by q order or by speed

What keeps me away from Netflix is no in-store exchanges/coupons etc. and they charge an extra 4$ for Blu-Ray on their three at a time plan. Also there are as many people complaining about Netflix throttling, which I will definitely face as a heavy user. It seems Netflix throttling is much worse than BB.

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.

I’m considering replacing my dying PC that I got in 2000. I spared no expense then to build a fancy rig with the latest processor and graphics card of the time. Now 9 years later the thing still works but is in dire need for replacement.

I no longer need the latest and greatest just a basic machine and I just found the perfect device today – ASRock’s Ion 330-BD. It is still not on the market and I can’t find a release date anywhere. Hopefully sometime soon.

iBookDB
The Night Gardener
George Pelecanos
Preview

iBookDB
One Foot in the Grave (Night Huntress, Book 2)
Jeaniene Frost

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.