I’ve been trying to watch more of my Netflix rentals to get more value out of my plan. I’ve been every-other-movie-ing new releases and classics/favorites in my queue so that I get a mix of new movies I want to see, and older movies I either missed or want to see again. Right now, the only movie I have is Ray – the others were mailed back earlier this week.

I got an email yesterday that both of my next movies had shipped and would arrive around Tuesday. It seemed like it took them a long time to process my last returns and mail the next movies. But when I checked the mail today, both movies were in the box. I never get that fast a Netflix turnaround, considering my movies come from St. Louis. I couldn’t find any identification on the envelopes where the movies came from, but they sure got here quickly. I wonder if the mail was fast or the email notices were late. (If the emails were late, they were sent from Netflix late – there weren’t any holdups in our mail system.)

Too good to pass up. Be sure to watch the trailer, and then go buy me lots of dark chocolate M&M’s (in stores now!)

M&M’s chocolate M-pire

(I liked how all the M&Ms were in costume for the Star Wars characters, but Yoda was just a green M&M.)

More data mining….

Last week, I discovered Netflix can email you a history of all the movies you’ve rented, and when they were checked out and checked in. I thought, “Neat, I can use this to tell how many movies I’ve rented and what my average rental time for a movie is.” So I started writing a parser. Tonight, I’ve been working on adapting that parser to the web so other people can run stats on their Netflix histories.

You can see an example of what it does here. The sample is just a small subset of my history. I’ve run it on the full thing, and I know my average turnaround time is about 27 days and each movie over my entire history with Netflix has cost me just under $7. I know the shortest turnaround time from Champaign to St. Louis, even if I watch them as soon as I get them and put them in the mail the next day is 7 days. Pathetic, eh?

What I hope to accomplish by this parser is a better understanding of how I use Netflix, and hopefully increase my usage of it to make it more economical (the more movies I rent per month, the more value I get out of it.) I guess another fun thing to do would be to compare my rental ‘out’ times to what it would cost me to do the exact same thing with Blockbuster and see if Netflix, Blockbuster online, or Blockbuster traditional rentals (with or without late fees,) would be a better deal for me.

If you are a Netflix subscriber and want to help me test it, or think it should have new stats/features, please let me know. The only “bug” I’m aware of at this time is it assumes a 3-out plan. I should fix that to either figure out how many movies you have out by the history, or prompt the user. I’ll probably clean it up a bit and lure some of the Netflix bloggers to it and see what they think.

Geeky, but cool? Fun, and useful? I can live with that.

Thunderstorms in January are an odd thing. It shouldn’t be pouring down rain and thundering and lightning-ing when it’s 35 degrees out. If the rain turns to snow, I’m turning on Lewis Black.[1] The storms are making the power in the house flicker. This is the second time in as many days I’ve had power problems.

Yesterday morning, around 8am, I woke up to a BOOM, then a click, and then silence. I don’t know what happened, but it took all the power away. I figured it was just a momentary thing. If I laid in bed long enough, the power would come back on, and I could snooze the radio again and sleep a little longer. But it didn’t come back on. And the UPS in the other room’s beeping was more annoying than the alarm clock, so I got up to check things out.

It’s sad that the one day I get up early for work, and have time for coffee, I can’t make it because there’s no power.[2]

So, I scraped together as many candles as I could, and showered by candle light. That’s really odd. Can’t say I’ve done that before. I got cleaned up pretty quickly and was on my way to work in no time — the house is boring without electricity. As I was leaving the driveway (after manually raising the garage door, then going back through the house, struggling to get it to shut all the way, yadda yadda) I saw an AmerenIP truck nearby. I guess they noticed. When I got home that evening, I learned the power had been out for about 5 hours before it turned back on. Too bad it couldn’t have silently gone out; I could have used the extra hours of sleep.

The grad school application stuff is going in the mail tomorrow. Wish me luck.

The Illini are still playing well. We play tomorrow night at Assembly Hall and try to continue our 16-and-oh run. ESPN tonight was going on and on about how the Illini are coming to Wisconsin later this month, and Dukie V has penciled it “Upset City.” I really wish he wasn’t calling that game — he can be such a blowhole when he’s not stroking his beloved ACC. I agree the Illini will need all their wits about them. Wisconsin has the longest winning streak at home (37 games as of tonight.) Let’s try to end that.

I’m behind on reading on all the good things to come out of CES. I wish I could have gone; maybe next year. I did see Apple released their flash-based iPod today. I only need one more referral to get a TiVo iPod, and I’m close to getting that. I would still consider getting the Shuffle iPod, if Cstores is selling them at a discount. I’m better off putting my money into a new desktop at home so I can play with TiVoToGo, whenever I finally get it.

[1] BTW, Matt told me the big angry man is touring and coming to STL and CHI in the coming weeks. Anyone want to go?

[2] Bonus points to you if you thought of running the coffee maker off the UPS. I didn’t realize that at the time, but I had just woken up.