Netflix is a great idea, and it sure can beat the heck out of dealing with the exceedingly surly employees at Movie Madness, our local independent video rental spot. But you need to be warned: they are going downhill. Over the past year, their service has degraded in a measurable way.

For example, we received a broken disc in the mail on November 22nd. We immediately went online and requested a replacement, a process they insist is nearly instant. Two business days later, they claim to have shipped the disc. Over a week has gone by, and the disc still has not arrived. In fact, it typically takes over a week to get another movie after you send one back. You really need to factor this in when you weigh the benefits of such a service.

Tellingly, their website will not even let you complain about slow delivery unless they claim to have shipped it more than one week ago, and regardless of your concerns, it is virtually impossible to email an actual person. Compare the reality of their service to the Netflix ad that we received in the mail yesterday. This ad proudly proclaims free delivery in about 1 business day. Really! One business day? So I called them up and asked if we could switch to the plan where you get the movies in one business day, cause that would be way better than the plan we seem to be on.

Netflix had no comment.

I received an e-mail from Harper’s Magazine today encouraging me to renew my subscription that ends in 6 months. They gave 3 reasons. The first?

You won’t receive another annoying renewal notice again this year.

Is this a threat?

About two weeks before my thesis defense, I began the process of improving my presentation style and learned quite a bit about presentations in a short amount of time. A couple lessons stood out.

First, watch great presenters. I watched countless presentations by Steve Jobs during this time (this SNL skit doesn’t quite count as practice, but is funny nonetheless).

Similarly, if you have the choice, choose Apple’s Keynote over Power-Point, if only for the graphically pleasing templates. I believe an analogy can be drawn between these two programs and the presentation styles of their company CEO’s, as described in Presentation Zen: Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic.

Finally, the most frightening aspect: Minimize the content on your slides to short bullet points (no paragraphs). Remember, this is frightening for everyone! Presentation Zen notes:

For most presenters a crowded slide is a crutch, or at least a security blanket. The thought of allowing the screen to become completely empty is scaring. Now all eyes are on you.

I’d love to hear more!

Evan Williams, of Blogger and Odeo fame, has posted a list of Ten Rules for Web Startups which is just excellent. Many of the ideas I have tried to express on here before, and indeed, they would translate very well into many kinds of businesses.

Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do.

Years ago I read a book on Flash that contained a tip that has probably saved me days or even weeks of time. I want to share it with you. This tip seems specially helpful to creative types who use computers.

Every time you use a menu command, notice that it often has its keyboard shortcut listed next to it. For example, I am using the Safari web browser, and the menu command to Make Text Bigger is Command-plus. If you use that program a lot (and I use Safari all day long), the next time you pull down that menu, stop. Rather than selecting the menu item, force yourself to close the menu and type the keyboard command. Do that every time you go to the menu. Do that for every program you use for more than a couple hours a week.

Before long, you will find yourself working much, much faster. As a bonus, you will notice that a great many programs share the same keyboard shortcuts!

Nathan Torkington is running a series of articles on the O’Reilly Radar called Burn In: How Alpha Geeks Got Into Computers. I am not really what you would call an Alpha Geek, nor was I asked to write one of the articles, but I felt inspired to write one anyway. So I am sharing it with you here.

We always had computers around our house. Growing up in the Seventies, my father would often bring home spare parts from DEC or 3M… 8 inch floppy drives, acoustic coupler modems, tiny displays. We assembled a Heathkit computer at one point. Had lots of fun with soldering irons.

When I was about 10, we got an Atari 400, and upgraded it to an 800 soon afterwards. For some reason I got to keep the Atari 400 in my bedroom, feeling like the luckiest kid in the world (a two computer household!!). I had received a pretty neat electronics science kit for Christmas that year, which had a lot of wires, a light sensor, lots of stuff like that. I figured out how to take apart one of the Atari joysticks and wire it up to the science kit, and wrote a BASIC program to tell me when it was raining (two wires out the window), when it was daytime (from the light sensor), and it would even blank the screen when a parent opened my bedroom door (again, two wires).

Our school system acquired Apple II+ systems, but could only outfit one full classroom, and even then each computer had to be shared between two students. In 6th Grade, our big project was to create a movie of some sort in Apple BASIC. Not an easy feat. I spent days storyboarding our movie on graph paper, turning each bit of animation into DATA command after DATA command. The movie was called Death in the Computer Lab and involved a relatively realistic rendition of our teacher being violently murdered, her head rolling out the door as the class period ended. A model student.

Eventually we moved up to an Atari 520ST, even getting a hard drive larger than the computer itself at one point. I dutifully ran a BBS during the evening hours, just for the sake of doing so. Before long I discovered the Internet, after realizing that the University of Minnesota provided free accounts to all students. Though still in High School myself, I found that you simply had to visit the University on registration day and grab a bunch of receipts out of the trash. The login was the student’s name, the password was their Student ID. Sssh!

My first impression of the Internet was that it was a kind of vast BBS running on a bizarre system called UNIX. The BBS systems at the time had email and message boards, much like you see today, but usually were limited to one user at a time. I could hardly believe my eyes when I discovered the talk command, and later, IRC. Could all these people really be using the system at the same time? Amazing! And the sheer number of sites out there already, even in the early Nineties, was overwhelming.

For several years the Internet seemed only available via command line interfaces and Gopher, but then along came graphical browsers and Linux. I was spending some time with a friend in Rolla, Missouri, and they had all of O’Reilly’s X Window books, which I poured over. I felt it was time to contribute something back to the Linux community, so I penned the X Window User HOWTO, based heavily on the O’Reilly books. I found X Window endlessly fascinating, with many tricks and hacks still nearly impossible to do on modern desktop systems.

Linux continued to be my system of choice until I started working on a monthly video show in Portland. I assembled the first show or two using Adobe Premiere and it drove me crazy. A friend demonstrated Final Cut Pro on his Mac, which was running an early version of OS X. I was very impressed with the software and the new interface, which I hadn’t really seen before. Then, just to show off, he opened the Terminal, and started showing me how it was actually running BSD UNIX underneath. Photoshop and UNIX in an affordable package? I was hooked.

When creating a website, I’d like to consider myself a co-collaborator in an online art project. Yet, a fine line exists, as websites are often commissioned to gain exposure and/or sell. Recently, I viewed two powerful films that lend their own inspiration on passion, creativity and industry.

The first is DIG!, chronicling The Brian Jonestown Massacre and the The Dandy Warhols. At its heart, DIG! is about musicians? choices between art and industry, which unfold over seven years of filming.

Second is In the Realms of the Unreal about outsider artist Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor, who’s 15,000-page novel is a “wonderland of imagination” and was only discovered after his death.

Others…?

Something that I have always loved about the Mac interface is the way that a bit of text will actually shrink slightly in an attempt to fit in a confined space. It has been a feature since long before OS X, and if you are not looking for it, you might not notice it at all.

For example, open iPhoto or iTunes on a Mac. The left side of the window lists your groupings or categories, and you can grab the vertical bar separating the listing on the left from the rest of the window. Drag the bar slowly towards the text, and notice that the lines of text will shrink just a little bit before they concatenate themselves with some dots at the end. It is as if they are giving you a bit of wiggle room with the interface.