Big music project related to an upcoming Dogsharks cartoon, completing a film festival bumper, fleshing out an augmented reality project for a Burlington VT art show. Oh and follow up with all the awesome people I met at the Blogworld conference.

G

When I get a scratched disc from Netflix (which has been the case for me in 3 out of the last 4 discs), I typically just watch through the rest of the film, hoping I didn’t miss too much. If the scratch is halfway through the movie it isn’t like I’m going to just stop there, fill out the Netflix scratched disc form, and then finish watching the movie in a couple days.

When you report a scratched disk to Netflix, they give you the following options:

• Send a replacement copy of the same movie.
• Don’t send me anything I’m fine.

The problem, of course, is that I’m not a satisfied customer and sending me the same movie isn’t going to me make me satisfied either.

Seems to me the offer that Netflix makes to people who report scratched disks has little to no value. There’s no reason to report a scratched disk because they’re only going to give you what you already saw but you’ll have to wait a few days. I’ll continue to report scratched disks to them so that other people won’t have the same bad experience I did.

I guess Netflix has successfully outsourced customer service to the customer.

Related articles

• Craig Newmark: “Customer service is public service” (huffingtonpost.com)
• Netflix Fills New Chief Service and DVD Operations Officer Position (readwriteweb.com)
• Netflix Customer Service Wows Me Again (life.firelace.com)

My main iPod tether is the 12″ PowerBook which doesn’t sport USB 2.0 which means I can’t update this rig beyond iTunes 7.4 without disabling the ability to connect my iPod to my PowerBook. I wrote previously one why I hacked the iPod Touch if you need more gory details.

The long-form is that I’m caught in that crossfire of wanting a truly portable mostly-creative machine (something His Steveness did deliver today) and also keeping a powerhouse machine (for the renders and the jobs that clients will just let me do my way). The real stickler is the “personal media” and the meaning/value behind the worklife/lifelife conundrum. Probably another post in there somewhere.

Anyway. No way in hell in hell I’m giving up my Pigshooter just to pay 20 bucks to have google triangulate me on a map. I bet it doesn’t work for shit in Vermont anyway.

But had Apple done this two months ago (and also not invalidated my 12″ Powerbook’s USB slots for syncing my iPod Touch) I would never have hacked it in the first place.

But ultimately, the thing to look for in a social bookmarker is search right? Every browser I’ve used (starting just after Lynx) has a bookmark feature built in. Bookmarking itself is pretty useless. But retrieval, now there’s something. What if I bookmark stuff all the time and want to see all my bookmarks that have to do with media, film, and business? Looking in my bookmark pile is pretty useless. And Magnolia’s search tool is ummm… bad.

Enter Nsyght. Nsyght.com searches all of your bookmarks in Magnolia (i.e. bookmarks that you thought worthy of adding to their collection; you will have to authorize the exchange of information but it’s very painless compared to say, getting Facebook to take your latest twitter and make it your profile).

Also, it was pretty easy to configure Nsyght as one of my options in Websearch for my iPod Touch. So that was an even bigger bonus.

If you’re a Magnolia user, give Nsyght a whirl as your Magnolia search tool. Find what you already found.

include info about how to make custom site searches via google using site:{sitename}

For the past few years, Rax has filled that void for me; the perfect computer-brain to mash-up with my whatever-input-I-have-handy funtimes. You know, load up some funkay bass, put it through that wackjob AU effect thinger and then go to town with your Nostromo right? Right? Bueller? Anyway.

For the past year or so or maybe longer even… Rax fell on hard times. You see, the folks who made Rax also made another app. This other app was wildly successful and truly required their attention (the app in question is the very very kick-ass and broad-market-appealable ComicLife, but for now, gnash your teeth with me, even if just to humor me). And so, our dear friend Rax… was homeless.

But, being much beloved, Rax found a new home. A home which you can read about in the latest installment of N0D3 Outbound: Rax Finds a Home.

Having studies a couple languages before I was eager to give these a try. What I loved about it was a complete disregard for grammar, rules, syntax and all the other stuff you learned in 7th grade (i.e. all the stuff you were quizzed on about 12 years after you learned to effectively communicate in your native language).

I had a great time and learned some truly functional language skills before I arrived in Japan even though I screwed up the order for my last few lessons in my iPod Shuffle for learning on the plane. My biggest regret was that the unit on learning how to ask what to call something was something I didn’t get to until late in my stay. This was due mostly to my a) not getting through my lessons entirely before I left and b) mis-ordering the lessons on my iPod Shuffle.

If you want to learn quickly how to communicate in a language. Pimsleur. It rules.

But just for grins I’m going to suggest a potential improvement: Summed Portable Playlists.

Ok so my name is academic but that doesn’t matter. Apple’s team of word junkies will come up with a better name.What matters is that Summed Portable Playlists takes two (or maybe more) playlists and adds (err … sums) them to a portable device for later playback.
Case study:

I’m currently learning Japanese. I’m using the Pimsleur method because it rocks. Sure I won’t be able to read, but I’ll be able to speak it. And that’s the fun part anyway. I take my Pimsleur CDs and burn them to iTunes. I like to keep two or three Japanese lessons on my Shuffle at all times. The rest of the device I want filled with music.

A Summed Portable Playlist would take X number of tracks from playlist 1 (in our case, 3 tracks from my Japanese Lessons playlist) and add them to Fill-the-rest-of-the-device-with-5-star-music playlist. Then load up my shuffle.

My explanation is probably more complicated than required. Once my Summed Portable Playlist is developed, from then on I can pretty much just plug in my Shuffle and have the machine do the work. I don’t have to manage it. Which is my goal: I don’t want to manage iTunes or my iPod. I just want to hear what I want.

This feature works well for:

People who:

• Store music in iTunes
• Make frequent use of their portable device
• Have a few specific files they want on their portable always (i.e. audiobooks, podcasts, language lessons, news, favorite band/songs/genre/length/etc/ad naseum)
• Want the remainder of their portable device filled with different content (i.e. different content from that listed in the previous point)
• Are geek enough set up playlists for the two preceding points.

Current Workaround:

The current method of achieving the proposed functionality:

1. Develop playlist for music I want on my iPod (in my case, rated 4 or 5 and hasn’t been played in the last two weeks). Set this playlist for Autofill. Once done, never need to think about this step.
2. Do a search for “Pims” in my library or develop a second playlist for content I want on my iPod and navigate to said playlist. You need to do this step and all following steps every time you sync.
3. Plug in my Shuffle
4. Drag the tracks from item 2 above onto the Shuffle icon.
5. Drag the tracks which were dragged in item 4 above to the top of the playlist for easier navigation (and to start your day with your lesson/podcast/etc).
6. Click Autofill (which is already set up for grabbing songs from item 1 above).

I should note that, as cumbersome as that looks… it’s not the end of the world. The suggestion of Summed Portable Playlists is an incremental, icing-on-the-cake sort of thing. For people like me (who have two different contexts for their portable device such as learning+listening) it is a killer app. But perhaps this demographic isn’t enough to drive an industry. And certainly the by-a-wide-margin leader wouldn’t need to invest in this sort of development. Would I switch to portable audio content delivery service that offers the feature? Certainly, because it would save me a lot of time and hassle.

Developing a mechanism for Summed Portable Playlists would replace the above 6 steps with:

1. Set rules for Summed Portable Playlist (in our example: 3 tracks from playlist 1 + fill the iPod with playlist 2). This step is a one time investment.
2. Plug in iPod
3. Click Autofill

Anytime a process can be reduced in half (or 2/5 as the situation above) then there’s hope for a competitive advantage. Making the case to the consumer is the job of the companies that have a stake in this business. In the above situation, we’re looking at a market demographic of people that learn, like to optimize systems, have disposable income for portable digital audio players, time to consider their audio collections, and desire for finer control of their audio intake than is currently offered.