JedFonner.com

For those who don’t know, I subscribe to the Blockbuster.com movie rentals by mail. Before everyone tells me to switch to Netflix, let me say that I used to have Netflix, I agree that Netflix is the superior site and collection, but the Blockbuster coupons keep me tied to Blockbuster. Plus the fact that they often screw things up and send me MORE movies than they’re supposed to… how can I argue with that?

Until recently, I’ve resisted their many emails to me to rate movies. But I finally had some spare time on my hands and decided to rate some movies I’d watched. Unfortunately, when I clicked to rate a movie using the Blockbuster rating widget, I got sent to a blank white page that just had this at the top of the page:

{ “redirectPage”: false, “isError”: false }

Now clearly, this is a bug in their website. So I wrote to them to alert them so they could fix it. Sadly, they didn’t respond with a “Thank you we’ll get right on that”. No, instead they wrote back to say:

“I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble with our web site, Jed. Internet Explorer is the preferred browser we recommend and is what our tech team uses to test with.Other browsers such as Mozilla/Firefox, AOL/Netscape, Safari, and so forth may not be completely compatible. If you have security or privacy software running such as Norton/McAfee/AVG, then that is very likely the reason why you’re having trouble. If you aren’t sure how to allow our cookies via your software, then please contact the developer for those instructions.”

There are so many things wrong with that response I don’t know where to begin.

1. They only test with IE? Are you kidding? I work for a software company that builds web applications, and in today’s world, you HAVE to support more than one browser. And it’s not THAT hard. There are plenty of 3rd party Ajax frameworks that are cross-browser - JQuery, Dojo, Scriptaculous, etc.
2. Then they go on to contradict their first point by blaming my Virus software. Are they seriously saying that anyone with anti-virus software is going to have issues with their site, and they don’t view this as a problem?
3. Lastly, I love the instruction to “contact the developer”. Oh gee, thanks. You mean that even though all other sites work fine with my anti-virus, it must be the anti-virus maker’s issue and I should ask them how to fix it.

The correct response would have been, “Thanks for letting us know, we’ll inform our developers so they can look into it”.
Needless to say, that’s the last time I’ll be trying to rate any movies on Blockbuster.com.

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For Christmas, Nicole and I received a sweet FM transmitter for the car. This is great because Nicole’s car doesn’t have a tape deck so my tape-adapter is useless. But with the FM transmitter, I can now listen to my iPod in the car, provided I can find a free channel.

I had scoured the low frequencies (88s) and high frequencies (106s, 107s) and had found a few OK channels, but they all had some static on them, due to the presence of stations broadcasting on nearby frequencies.

Then I found Radio Locator: Unused Frequences

Radio Locator is a cool site in it’s own right, but the Unused Frequencies section is really useful. It asks for your zip code and then tells you the best unused frequencies to use for your FM transmitter. I tried it out this morning, and their top recommendation gave me great quality sound, no static. Kick ass.

So I’ve encountered my first IE vs Firefox css bug. The Photos page looks fine in Firefox, but in IE the header and body are too wide and the font is too big.

Looks bad in IE:

But looks fine in FF:

I’m sure it’s a CSS issue, so now I just need to track it down. Thank goodness for Firebug and the IE DOM Inspector. Will update once I figure it out…

Update: Same behavior in IE7 as in IE6, which sucks b/c IE7 is supposedly much more standards compliant. So looks more like my issue than some IE6 rendering bug, which means I actually have to fix it.

JedFonner.com is backup and live after a few months’ hiatus. I’ve moved to Dreamhost.com and after a brief issue (which ended up being my fault, doh), I’m super happy with my new hosted home. I’ll be writing about my setup snafu and my previous experiences with globat.com shortly.