When I went to Giant Eagle earlier this week, I got a two DVDs from the Redbox DVD rental machine in front of the store, as I felt like watching a movie and they only charge 1 dollar plus tax a day, which is really cheap. Sadly, one of the DVDs was so badly scratched that my drive wouldn’t even read it: After a few unsuccessful tries at spinning up the disc, it spit it right back out — though my DVD player isn’t even usually that picky about what it eats (I’ll spare you the reference to Americans and their fast food).

Sure enough, I called customer service (1-800-REDBOX3, in case you were wondering) and they apologized, marked the disc as “to be removed from circulation” and gave me two codes for free rentals in return.

So I took back the discs, and got two new ones — only to notice that one of them was, yet again, looking like somebody had used it as a coaster:

Though they gave me another replacement code, I decided to try something different to satisfy my urge for movies and TV shows: I signed up for Netflix.

The idea of finding a new movie in the mail box when I come home from work sounded appealing to me. So I already put 20 discs into the queue which, considering I have the 1-DVD-at-a-time-plan, will probably take ages to go through, but we’ll see how it goes. Another cool feature is their “watch instantly” collection, but I may blog about that some other time.

I wonder what my readers use to get to their movies? Let me know in the comments.

After I came back from Whistler, BC, I stopped by in Oregon, where I had the pleasure to be a groomsman at one of my best friends’ wedding: Justin married his Karen.

It was a lot of fun, though I didn’t imagine it being so complicated to get married in this country that you need to rehearse the day before.

Of course, the other guys wanted to set me up to catch the garter, but I got miraculously saved. Needless to say, this is the 21^st century, so it’s on youtube:

From my “exchange student” point of view, I have to say, this gave me much deeper insight into American society than any other event I attended here (and I’ve been in the US for a while). It is sad most exchange students have to miss out on this.

PS: I’ve officially worn enough pink that day to last me well through my twenties!

Al Billings has a picture of the blown transformer that caused Thursday’s power outage. That laundry truck must have ran into it really bad, considering it ripped it off its base:

I dig the Mozilla Summit Poster:

Robots!

What the heck? This morning, a laundry truck ran into the hotel’s power transformer, leaving the entire hotel out of power.

Now it’s (barely) running on emergency power (needless to say the Wifi is on that emergency power as well), while we are waiting for a replacement generator. Chances are though that due to the fantastic rock slide, it has to take the long route so that could take a while.

Good times.

Update: Since 2:30pm, the power’s back on. Yay.

There used to be a time when twitter.com spammers still made an effort to disguise the fact that they’re, well… spammers:

Subtle, really!

Update on the unlucky rock slide story: Apparently it’s going to be closed for five days, meaning we have to leave much earlier in order to take an alternative route to Vancouver.

I can’t exactly say I am looking forward to spending 7 instead of 3 hours in the bus At least I am not flying back straight to Pittsburgh on Friday, so at least it won’t be followed by another 8 hours or so of traveling.

Update: My bus was rescheduled to 3 am in the morning. Looks like I’m not going to go to bed that night and just sleep on the bus.

Update 2: Thank heaven somebody filed a bug on this: Can’t get out of Whistler — can’t be long until this gets fixed!