Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

UPDATE: Erin tells me that she just got an email from Netflix, saying that due to feedback, profiles will NOT be removed, whew!

Erin and I use Netflix and we’ve each got our own queue so that she can get her movies and I can get mine. Actually, I even have two queues for myself - one for movies and one for TV shows.  Erin got an email from Netflix yesterday:

“We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature
that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account,
effective September 1, 2008.”

…..

“While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change
will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our
customers.”

I’m trying to think how removing an incredibly useful feature helps them improve the website? To me, managing separate profiles seems like something that many households would use to manage different movie tastes. On top of that, if you DON’T need separate profiles, just don’t use it.

I’m guessing what they meant is: “this change will help us save money.”

I did my second triathlon last Saturday morning in New Brighton. The weather wasn’t bad like last years, but being that it was early June the water isn’t warm yet in the lakes. The temperature was around 65 degrees and the triathlon web site said that wetsuits were “recommended, but not required.” I don’t own a wetsuit and I wasn’t about to buy one the week before a triathlon, never having used one, so I decided to tough it out.

I was NOT prepared for how cold 65 degree water feels. It’s unbelievable. I got into the water about five minutes before starting to get used to the cold,  and it shocked me. I couldn’t breathe and I was SERIOUSLY considering just walking out, getting my stuff, and leaving. It was that cold. But, I had made Erin get up before six on a Saturday morning, and I had also recently bought a bike for this purpose, so I figured I better stay.

The swim was absolutely horrible. It took me nearly thirty minutes to swim a half mile (that’s real slow). The bike was fourteen miles and went much better, but my lack of training was showing during the run as my legs were weak. I had to stop and walk several times.

But, I finished and that’s fine by me.  I knew I was going to get a crappy time as soon as I started,  so that wasn’t a shock. My final time was 1:56 I think. The winner’s time was something like 1:01 which just blows my mind. In the time that it took me to do the bike, this guy could nearly complete the whole triathlon.

(Erin thinks I look like a big dork in this one. I have no idea why I’m smiling, I’m NOT happy

Erin and I have had a list of restaurants that we want to try out for a long time now; Erin just recently added dozens of restaurants to the list, all in the Twin Cities area.

She also had the good idea to blog about our experiences as we try out each restaurant on the list, so you can follow along if you’re interested in food in Minneapolis/St. Paul. We recently added our reviews of the 331 Club in NE Mpls, and Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown near the U of M.

We Got Served: http://wegotserved.blogspot.com

Check it out!

My desktop computer at home took a shit on me on Monday night when we got back from NYC. I tried to fire it up and got a blue screen with “STOP 0×000000000001″ (or some other hex number) in white letters. Since I got the machine about 5 years ago from General Nanosystems, I figured it was an appropriate time to get a new one.

The WAF on a new computer was initially very low, but after the initial shock Erin is usually very accommodating of my geek purchases. I’m not much for buying a bleeding edge computer, rather I like to get the best bang for the buck while also making sure the machine will last several years.

I’m thinking a Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of ram (which will become 3 when I salvage one of the gigs from the current machine), dual 160 gig hard drives, and a modest video card that supports dual monitors. My two 15″ lcd displays are good enough for me, so I don’t need any monitor. I’m not a gamer at all so I don’t need a badass video card or sound card.

The biggest decision is actually what OS I’ll be using. I had Vista on the current desktop before it bit the bullet, but I had some problems, specifically with my FreeAgent drive and other usb devices. Not being able to use my usb devices is reason enough for me to go back to XP, but I might be willing to give Vista another chance with some newer hardware, I don’t know.

I won’t be getting said machine for a couple weeks, so I have some time to hem and haw about it.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, I fixed the existing computer by removing a bad ram chip, so now I can’t justify buying a new one I also fixed the usb device issues by removing a 4 port usb PCI card that I had installed. So now the computer is actuall pretty usable.

Over a year ago I mentioned that I had decided to start training for a triathlon. Last month I finally did one, the St. Paul Triathlon. It was really shitty weather that day, I had to be there about 6:30 am and it was ~60 degrees and raining, which made the swim that much worse.

I finished in 1:48, which was below my target of two hours. The nice thing is that since I did really poorly in the swim and bike, theres plenty of room for improvement next time

Once again its been about three weeks since I last posted. I haven’t really felt like doing much geek stuff this summer so far which kind of reduces the blog fodder.

I did start a new job this week, at MinuteClinic headquarters in downtown Minneapolis. I’m part of their internal software development team, and on my first day I was already waist deep in a project. Leaving Magenic was a tough decision, but this seemed like a fun opportunity to try out, so here I am.

I also have another beer brewing, Honey Steam, that should be ready in about a week, so that’ll give me something else to talk about as well.

Enjoy your weekend

I went and saw the Arctic Monkeys on Monday night at First Avenue downtown. The show was pretty good, their equipment was setup very well, I didn’t need to wear earplugs like I normally do.

After playing for a little over an hour, the band left the stage and the crowd starting cheering for an encore. About 30 seconds later the lights came on and the crew was taking the stuff off the stage. I think that was the first time I’ve ever seen a band NOT come back for an encore. Its not like the crowd was cheering or didn’t like them.

When the lights came back on, people were kind of looking around like “seriously?”. It was strange.

Has anyone else seen them on their tour? Was there an encore at your show?

We got back from Mexico last night (finally) after a Minnesota snowstorm had Erin and I convinced that we’d have to stay in Cancun for the night.

We had a really good time, you can check out pictures on flickr: Playa del Carmen 2007. The snowstorm ensured that I would have a nice greeting for me this morning:

This is a view from the back of my house towards the street. Not exactly the transition that I was looking for, and I spent over an hour clearing the snow from our driveway. There was so much of it that I had to ditch the snowblower and start shoveling. You can see that our house (on the left) is very close to our neighbor’s, so I can’t blow the snow to either side, its gotta go forward or backwards. This makes it difficult to use the snowblower, and it makes shoveling even worse, because I have to get a shovel full of snow, then carry it to the front yard or back yard.
Heres another shot from the front yard towards the back of the driveway:

My Dad would tell me to quit whining, but his driveway is half as long and he can blow the snow to either side. Although he does enjoy getting up to snowblow his driveway, and then the neighbor’s driveway (before they get out there), as a little “joke” on the neighbors.

This post from Jason Bock reminded me that I never followed up on my Amazon S3 backup plan.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was ditching JungleDisk to use S3Drive because it didn’t cache the files locally, and it mirrored my file structure with no encryption which makes it convenient to use.

After trying to backup my files with S3 Drive, I’ve now made the switch back to JungleDisk, primarily because the file transfer speeds with S3Drive were horrendous (~2k/sec).  At those speeds doing a backup of all our pictures would have taken days upon days.

JungleDisk has also had a couple releases since then and made some improvements.  I also turned the cache down to 100MB, so while its still caching files, its not going to eat away my hard drive while I’m backing stuff up, and they’ve said they are considering an option to turn off the cache completely.

And, while the encryption of my files is less convenient in the sense that I now need JungleDisk to read my S3 files, its not a bad trade off to make considering that my files are more secure.

So my setup is: JungleDisk to interface with S3 account and Robocopy to actually manage the backup process.  Heres my robocopy command line setup too, with some options that work best for me:

set defaults=/MIR /XD “My Music” /XA:H /R:1 /W:2 /Z /V /XO /SEC /COPY:D /XX

robocopy.exe “PATH_TO_BACKUP” “DESTINATION_OF_BACKUP” %defaults% /LOG:LOG_FILE_PATH

/MIR - This tells Robocopy to mirror the file structure
/XD “My Music” - Excludes the “My Music” directory
/XA:H - Excludes hidden files
/R:1 - Allows for 1 retry of failed transfers
/W:2 - When retrying, wait for 2 seconds before starting again
/Z - Copy files in restartable mode to account for network glitches
/V - Turn on verbose logging
/XO - Excludes “older” files, so files that haven’t changed since the last backup won’t be transferred.
/SEC - Copy files with security
/COPY:D - Copy only file data, not other attributes
/XX - Excludes “extras”, this will delete files from S3 if they don’t exist locally

You can find a great list of all robocopy parameters here.

Way back when Netflix released a huge dataset for their competition, I got to thinking about ratings systems like the one Netflix has for movies that you rent.

You can log into Netflix and begin browsing movies and rate movies that that you like or dislike. For instance, I gave “The ‘Burbs” four out of five stars. Based on your ratings, netflix can better recommend movies that you might like.

A similar ratings system exists on the Yahoo Music player. As songs are playing you can rate them 1-4 stars or click on the “no smoking” sign which indicates that the song sucks really bad and you never want to hear it again (of course, there are ways that Yahoo will queue it up for you again, as I’ve heard “drops of jupiter” several times even though it makes my ears bleed).

I like the idea of these ratings systems because I’ve found a lot of music/movies that I like based on the recommendations of Yahoo and Netflix. What I don’t like about these ratings systems  is that they have too many options.

I nearly always end up rating songs at 3 out of 4 stars on Yahoo (if I rate it at all), and I think this is my thought process:

1. I like this song, what should I rate it?
2. Well, its not the BEST song ever, so its not a 4
3. On the other hand, I like the song, and a 2 seems like a bad rating
4. I’ll go with a 3

At least to me, theres no reason to have any other option besides “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down”, either I like the movie/song or I don’t. Digg got this part right on their site, you either “digg” a story, or you don’t, simple as that.  I would think that simplifying the ratings system would make the recommendation engine a little easier too, since they don’t have to account for different “levels” of how much you like something.

As an aside, when I first started using the Yahoo music engine, I found that there was some way to change the rating system from a 4 star to a 0 - 100 system. 0 - 100??!?!  “Gosh, I don’t know, is this song a 33 or a 34?”. Give me a break.