So my latest labor of love is producing a podcast for my man Klark. Check out the first one over at SirDerVeener.com:

http://sirderveener.com/veenercast-episode-number-one

Note: The Microsoft Silverlight team is working to see if we can resolve this, I will report back in with the details asap.

As regular readers of this blog know, I love(d) Netfilx, I have been a happy customer since almost the beginning of the company and their streaming service moved them into a whole new stratosphere imho.

But the last 24 hours has left me feeling screwed.

It started when the latest in the never ending patches from Microsoft were installed on the computer that I have used to watch streaming Netflix movies for over a year. One of the patches involved installing IE8 which is fine, but evidently that triggered Netflix into “upgrading” my netflix player to the Silverlight version.

Of course now anything I stream from Netflix is unwatchable. Choppy video, pauses, dropped frames, you name it – total crap. So I called Netflix and in less than a minute spoke to a very nice lady in tech support that basically told me that’s just the way it is. She suggested that I buy a new computer. I asked her if I could roll the upgrade back or somehow stream the movies differently and she politely told me no, I could take it or leave it – and she was happy to cancel my account for me!

That’s not change I can believe in!

She also suggested that I contact Microsoft, yeah right lady, have you ever tried to contact Microsoft? The nice lady in the Netflix support center also said that even though I was having problems there wasn’t a widespread problem. I beg to differ:

Netflix Users Seething Over Microsoft Silverlight
Netflix takes heat over Silverlight-based player
Netflix Promises Silverlight Solution for Slow, Painful ‘Stream Load’ Issues
If anyone finds out how to opt out of Silverlight on Netflix, please post!
Netflix customers up in arms over the new Netflix Silverlight player

I could go on, but the bottom line is don’t piss on my leg and tell me that it is raining. The problem is not my computer, or my isp, or anything else on my end. The problem is that Netflix decided to go with a 3rd party’s proprietary software that is ( imho ) not ready for primetime. I have no way of knowing if it is Silverlight itself or the Netflix version – but it is much, much worse than the previous version on the Netflix player and has made the Netflix streaming service unusable for me.

Netflix has turned a long term customer and un-paid evangelist into an anti-proselytizer and an unhappy ( soon to be ) former customer.

Final note, I told the nice tech support lady that if she really thought that I was having a isolated incident that she could search Google for Netflix + Silverlight.

She told me that what she really thought was different from her job. Fair enough and Nuff’ said.

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Yes, it looks like this is the 5th “podcast” that I have done, and I have had it finished for quite a while but am just now publishing it. It is creative commons attribution licenced and would not have been made possible without these resources:

• Free Talk Live
• The Freesound Project
• The Lonely Island
• Josh Cericola
• D2 Interactive & Whanders
• The Vintage Gamer

Download: JTk’s 5th Podcast

I did a spit take today as I was watching MSNBC – they flashed one of my free themes right up there on the teevee screen.

It seems that one of the great internet pranks is using an ( old ) version on my independence day theme. So now I am forever linked with Sarah Palin – how awesome is that

While it seems that all I ever blog about is WordPress theme creation I do have other interests and one of them is music – It was great having Josh work here this summer, his dad is my musical mentor and taught me allot about playing guitar. This video is something that we created while Josh was working here:

Problem retrieving videos from provider: Bad Request

This is a video I made by cutting up the public domain classic horror film Night of the Living Dead directed by George A. Romero and produced: by Karl Hardman and Russell Streiner.

Problem retrieving videos from provider: Bad Request

This is a “demo reel” type deal that we did a few years ago. While it is not representative of the type of video that we do these days I really like it and so, I thought I would post it:

Allright! In all the confusion I thought that I had lost podcast #3 but it turns out I had just uploaded it to a strange place. So without further ado I am happy to present my best podcast to date and the last podcast to that will bare the This Damn Blog Name:

Podcast #3

It’s about 11 MB and 5:30 mintues long.

Here is another quirky mp3 that I created years ago that I am setting free:

quasiclassical.mp3 . 1:30 . 1.3 MB

The first part of it is mainly like long ooohs and then my virtual orchestra kicks in. Feel Free to do what you will with it as long as you follow the Creative Commons Attribution License.