Thursday, April 30, 2009

CinemaNow is still around!

I'd been wanting to see the movie Wall-E for awhile now. I missed it in the theaters, and have yet to see it. A lot of the reason for that is that we don't rent DVD's anymore, or buy them for that matter. What's the point in buying something that you might watch once, then never watch again? What I wanted to do was rent a movie download over the internet, but lately, that hasn't been too easy.

My favorite site for renting and downloading movies was MovieLink. Unfortunately it was bought out by Blockbuster, and although they claim to have incorporated it as it was, it's just not the same. Blockbuster has a pathetic lineup of movies available for download and they're just not worth it. My next choice I looked into was Netflix. I really don't want to deal with another monthly subscription though, and apparently you can't actually download movies to watch later, you have to watch them as streaming movies, and I really don't like that. So, I googled for any other choices out there and what showed up in the search? Cinemanow! I'd been a registered member there way back in 2005 and 2006, but frankly, I didn't even know they were still around. I went there and sure enough, they were still running, not only that, they've got a surprisingly big library of hit movies including a lot of new releases that have just recently come out.

I wanted to rent Wall-E, and sure enough they had it available for download, unlike Blockbuster who only had it available as a rent-by-mail item. I needed to be logged in though and figured I'd have to re-register. I took a chance though and tried to sign-in with what I was pretty sure used to be my username and password. Lo and behold it logged me in and still had my user history intact! I couldn't believe it, I hadn't even rented from there since July of 2006! I rented Wall-E and tried to start downloading it and found out that I needed to have some software installed called media-manager. So I started installing it and unfortunately it tried downloading the movie as soon as it thought media-manager was installed even though it hadn't finished yet. Long story shortened, it messed up the download and Cinemanow thought that I'd successfully downloaded it and wouldn't let me re-download it.

At this point, I was a little irked since I'd already paid my $3.99 for the movie. My only options were to either forget it and quit, or call Cinmeanow's customer service number. Now, I've had a lot of bad experiences with customer service phone calls in the past, so I wasn't looking forward to that option. I decided to try it anyway. Wow! Was I ever surprised. My call was answered in under one minute by a courteous, English speaking American citizen. I don't remember her name, (and I wish I did), but within a couple of minutes she had my account brought up and walked me through everything without any problems whatsoever. She wound up giving me a promotional code for a free rental so that I could re-download the movie. This was the best customer service I believe I've ever received over the phone. I told her so and she said that I'd made her night!

So I want to give a big shout out about Cinemanow and anyone reading this should go register and rent a few movies from them. A great website like that should get plenty of traffic that way they won't go the way of the dinosaur and leave us with nothing but a couple of ugly, lame sites for renting movies!

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Chrysler readying for bankruptsy?

MSNBC is reporting that according to a New York Times report, the Treasury Department is readying to file bankruptcy for Chrysler. Now, aren't we all glad about those billions of dollars that were given" to Chrysler so that bankruptcy wouldn't be necessary?! Gee, maybe they should have just been left alone to file bankruptcy in the first place, and save we taxpayers a few billion dollars.

Antarctic ice increasing, not melting away....

I've been hearing this now for the past month, the Antarctic is not melting away, it's actually increasing in size. Those behind the global warming agenda have been skewing the numbers to convince people that global warming is the direst threat ever to face mankind. Well, the numbers just don't add up. Check out this STORY at Information Liberation.

Hopefully the truth will find it's way into the mainstream consciousness so that we'll stop reacting to these doomsayers, and start being pro-active.

Animal intelligence

This is something I've believed in for years, but mainstream media and scientists have refused to accede to the realities set in front of them. There has been evidence for years that animals are much more intelligent than we've been led to believe. I found this very interesting article on the subject earlier today at Information Liberation

I think many people refuse to see animals as intelligent because it opens a whole host of questions that "the bible" can't adequately answer.

Turn off the News;

I just did the best thing I could to alleviate stress and make my life better...I turned off the news. Why listen to it. It's just a bunch of propaganda being spewed out based on what the corporations and the government want us to believe. Global warming, who to be afraid of today, weather that can't be predicted more than 12 hours in advance....it's all just a bunch of hooey. That's right, I said hooey!

Friday, April 17, 2009

Pepsi Throwback


I'm sitting here in the living room watching Primeval on the Sci-fi channel and enjoying a 20 ounce bottle of Pepsi Throwback. Haven't heard of Pepsi Throwback yet? Pepsi is "temporarily" making some of their classic products like Pepsi and Mountain Dew with the classic formulas from the 60's and 70's that made them famous. Basically speaking, they've taken out the HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) that we've been forced to use as a sweetener in just about everything for the past 30 plus years and gone back to using natural sugar as the sweetener.

I can definitely say it has a "crisper" taste to it than I'm used to, and that's a good thing! It doesn't taste as "syrupy" as I've come to expect Pepsi to taste. Unfortunately this is only supposed to last for a few months, unless maybe enough people cry out that this is so much better, Pepsi will be forced to shelve the old corn syrup and keep giving us the good stuff!