Darkoshi

I got my taxes done.

I made a pie with a chocolate filling. It's somewhat gooey, not what I was expecting from the photo on the box. But it's actually good, even though it also tastes oddly like it contains grape syrup mixed in with the chocolate. Based on the ingredients list, I can't imagine why. It contains alkalized cocoa, and the link I posted before indicates that the non-alkalized sort is the kind that's more likely to taste "fruity".

I also made some Waldmeister Goetterspeise which is a German jello with a unique flavor not found in the U.S. My aunt used to make it for me as a kid (with vanilla sauce on top!), and I still like it. The flavor isn't as intense as I remembered though.

I trimmed my hair a bit. It was tickling the back of my neck too much a few days ago. My torso gets itchy sometimes. When I scratch, the skin gets pinkish red, and small itchy bumps, widely scattered, appear. When I stop scratching, it goes away. I haven't figured out a cause. It's been happening for a few years now. (Of course, having written "torso" there, now a few spots on my arms and legs started itching.)

I'm over my cold, but still have a lot of phlegm. That always used to be the one of the worst parts of a cold, the weeks and weeks of snot that would only slowly diminish back to normal levels. So I did neti today for the first time in possibly 5 years. I stopped using neti around then, after reading warnings against doing neti with unsterile tap water. Well, I used tap water today, like I used to. Anything else is too much trouble. But after reading the warnings again, I may forgo the whole thing for another 5 years.

I used LJSec to delete my old protected posts from LJ, as that was something that had been on my to-do list for a while. There may not be much point in having done it, but at least it is off my list now. First, I did another import of all entries & comments from LJ over to DW, as well as a few backups of both my LJ and DW (with LJArchive), to make sure I wouldn't lose anything. The only problem with LJArchive is that imported comments don't show up with the user's LJ name like it does on the Dreamwidth pages, but rather with a generic ext_#### ID. If I have time someday, I'd like to see if I can update the utility to fix that.

A few weeks ago, I cancelled my Netflix subscription, as I was using it so rarely. Qiao has another Netflix account anyway, which I can use when I want to. He also has an Amazon Prime account for watching videos.

Last week at work, I was able to find the cause of another problem, and fix it. Well, I probably fixed more than one problem, but the last one is the one I remember. It gives me such a rush, a good feeling, being able to discover what obscure thing is making the code not work right and how to fix it, when I still don't even understand what half of the rest of the code is meant to do. I was thinking, I've been working on this same general code base, though it has undergone many transfigurations, for the past 22 years. I could spend my whole *life* working on it, and I still wouldn't understand it all, especially because it is constantly being changed. That made me think for a moment that maybe I should leave this job, just so that *whole life* part wouldn't come true. Eh. But whatever, this code or some other code, what difference. Hmm. Coming up on the end of the quarter. Wonder if they will have layoffs.

I finally watched that NetFlix DVD, Babylon 5, The Lost Tales. It was nice to see the 3 actors from the original series again, but I didn't care for the 2 stories. The presentation seemed more suited for a dull stage play - only 3 main actors for each piece, with long monologues.

The DVD's special features were more interesting to me. That's an advantage of DVDs, as streaming doesn't usually include the special features.

Included were memorials for Andreas Katsulas (who played G'Kar) and Richard Biggs (who played Stephen Franklin). I recall hearing about Katsulas' passing, but I'm not sure I had heard about Biggs'. Sad to hear. JMS included a touching reference to them in the movie, though I didn't catch the meaning till watching the memorial.
"Dr. Franklin went with G'Kar exploring beyond the rim. You know how he is. He'll take any chance to explore new territory before anyone else can get there."

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Next up on my NetFlix DVD queue: Chocolat, starring Johnny Depp. Not in the mood for that one.

The "public apology" he and his wife did for bringing their dogs in to Australia without going through quarantine, gave me a bad impression of him. He seemed so "I don't give a fuck. These rules are stupid, and I don't want to follow them so I shouldn't have to, because I'm famous."

In this Jimmy Kimmel clip, he explained they thought they had done all the necessary paperwork for the dogs. That makes it sound less bad on his part at least. Rewatching the apology, it doesn't seem quite as bad as it did before. Maybe they spoke the lines in such a grim and lifeless way not so much out of contempt, but in an attempt to keep a straight face and not giggle. Who knows.

The Australian requirements for bringing in a dog from the U.S. require: 5 vet visits over a period of at least 5 and a half months prior to arrival for several blood tests and vaccinations, including external tick treatments even if no ticks are present, plus 2 government office visits for paperwork, and booking a stay in an Australian quarantine facility for a minimum of 10 days. That's quite daunting. Is it overkill, though? Not for me to decide.

From Depp's manner in other videos, I wouldn't be surprised to hear he has a drug or drinking problem. I can believe he might throw a cell-phone at his wife while he was drunk or high.

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Next up on the DVD queue: Happy Feet.
Yeah, maybe.

Next up: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, because my brother once said it was his favorite movie. But after reading the Wikipedia page, I'm moving it to the bottom of my list.

Next up: Ghost in the Shell

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3 items in my streaming queue ("My List") say that they're only available until tomorrow. My list seems a lot shorter than it used to be. I bet a lot of items I had on it became unavailable for streaming in the meantime, and were automatically removed. Dang it. Those items might still be available by DVD, but since they're no longer displayed, I don't remember what they were.

When browsing DVDs, some items show up with a "Play" (streaming) button, but without a button for adding the item to my steaming list. The workaround is to click Play and then to click Back - then the "+ My List" button gets displayed. But I suppose now it's better to just add the DVD to my DVD queue, as there it displays the Play button anyway. If the DVD becomes unavailable, I think it then gets moved to the "Saved/Unavailable" section. Whereas if I add the item to my streaming list, it might later disappear from there without a trace.

The NetFlix site is harder to use than it used to be. When I log in, the main page shows a movie clip in the back-ground, slowing my computer down and making it hard for me to select the links. (Yeah, some day I'll finish switching over to the newer faster laptop.)

I get a lot of page errors too.
Enter a search term and click search. Often get: "The page isn't redirecting properly". Apparently a cookie problem, but my browser is already set to save cookies until I close the browser.
Find an item; click "Add to DVD queue". Get: "There was a problem adding this title to your queue". But it turns out to have added it to the queue in spite of the error message.

Well golly, I just made it through the last episode. During the closing credits, I got a message that my streaming quota was used up.

As part of my $4.99 Netflix plan, which I'm quite pleased with, I get 5 hours of streaming and 2 DVDs per month (one at a time). This plan is grandfathered and not available to new customers. I've had this plan since 2006 - it started out as $5.99 per month, and was actually *reduced* to $4.99 in 2007 (that was a nice surprise, and made me feel good about Netflix). In fact, there used to only be 2 hours of streaming, but at some point it was increased to 5.

I never understood what the hoopla was about Netflix's increased rates in 2011, as the $4.99 plan's rate was never increased. I was lucky in that..

Today, I thought my minutes would run out before finishing the last episode, and had considered upgrading to the unlimited streaming plan. But now there isn't an overriding reason to do so. In a few days a new month will start. Next week I'll be working again, and won't have much time for watching movies.

In order to get both unlimited streaming and still get DVDs, the minimum price is now $7.99 + $7.99 = $15.98 / month. That really doesn't seem worth it, considering that normally I don't watch much.

[afterthought: If we wanted unlimited streaming plus DVDs, it would actually be cheapest for Qiao to sign up for the unlimited streaming plan under his name, and for me to keep the grandfathered plan under mine.]

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On another note, it seems some scenes were cut from the Queer As Folk series. One Netflix commenter mentioned this. Also, yesterday I had watched a 10 minute clip of the series that was posted to YouTube (dubbed in Spanish) and one of those scenes was missing from what Netflix showed. [edited to add: Oops, nevermind. That was the U.S. version.] I wonder how much of the original content was cut, and why?

Reading some more comments, it seems the music was changed too, and supposedly isn't nearly as good as the original. What a pity. Now I wish I had bought the UK DVDs and watched them instead. But now that I've seen most of it, watching it all over again wouldn't hold my interest much.

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Whoa!? There's going to be a season 4 of Downton Abbey! I like the show, but it seems to keep going on and on... why does that series get ~8 episodes per season, while Sherlock only gets 3?

On this page:

http://www.votenative.com/songsingle.cfm

you can listen to a nice song by Jennifer Kreisberg. You can also listen to many other songs on the site and cast your votes (for free) in various categories for the Native American Music Awards.

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Netflix has come out with "instant online viewing" where as a subscriber you automatically get a certain number of hours worth of movies you can watch online each month. For no extra cost. It's that latter part that makes it seem so cool - as nice as when they reduced the cost of my subscription out of the blue a while back. It says they have 4000 movies and TV episodes available.