Years ago I got a chuckle out of Google Maps directions from New York to London, which showed jumping off a shipping dock and swimming to the motherland. Sadly, this demonstration of machines underestimating the capability of man is no longer available at Google Maps. However, today I learned that Kayak.com was clearly not intended for international (non US) travelers. That is unless I’m just not familiar with the 37 hour layovers typical on a routine flight from Beijing to Bangalore.

God help us all when the day comes that we are no longer able to insert our own reason and intellect into the processes of machines. Every day that passes, we get one day closer to the year 2505 where the predictions of the movie “Idiocracy” will inevitably come true. At least then, no one will have the intellect capable of inserting into the reasoning of the machine. That is unless a certain someone by the name of Not Sure awakes from his 500 year cryofreeze. Then we’ll all witness the pinnacle of insanity, like in the scene were “Not Sure” is assigned his identity tatoo.

But Windows 7 is definitely a major improvement. I just logged into my old XP partition, and the first thing it did was tell me that I had unused icons on the desktop. I have zero icons on my desktop.

Why is it that some text cannot be copied in iOS devices? It’s really frustrating and you should fix it.

There are two extremes in software engineering release cycle philosophy. Both can be attributed to killing products, even ones with really high inherent potential. The first extreme is a company whose engineering team assures restless consumers that they need to wait patiently for products and its updates until every last line of code is polished and tested. The software takes so long to release that no one is left waiting when it finally does. The other extreme is an engineering team that sets an agressive release date, and just dumps whatever pile of crap they have on their customers on that date. The Blockbuster Movie Pass team falls into that second category. Blockbuster Movie Pass is now available, with an very nice list of features and an equally dizzying array of oddities, bugs, and outright disasters.

It’s no secret that there are hoards of people foaming at the mouth for at home video entertainment. Blockbuster has been pushing a disc by mail service for years, but was dominated by Netflix. This is no surprise since Blockbuster had just spent 5 years throwing proverbial dung in the form of late fees and deaf ears at their customers… so there’s that… but also, Netflix was like the wild west of movies. They seemed to break all of the rules for movie rental, which excited people. They were extremely customer oriented. I remember the first disc that I added with a “very long wait,” which stayed at the top of my list for over 2 weeks. During that time, Netflix sent me more discs than my plan allotted to help ease the pain of patience. At the end of my experience with Netflix, however, discs would sit at the top of my list for months with no apology, explanation or retribution (probably punishment for always looking for movies with a long wait to put at the top of my queue; there’s a really good psychology experiment in there somewhere). Certainly not least is Netflix streaming, which was mostly awesome because it was free, but also because it worked flawlessly.

Enter: Dish’s acquisition of fledgling Blockbuster.

Blockbuster Movie Pass is the step child of Blockbuster’s standard disc by mail service and it’s new father, Dish Network. Blockbuster has strangely opted to keep its old disc by mail service, and start a new one through Dish. Dish and Blockbuster have taken the, “it’s awesome because it’s free” approach, including a streaming service at no additional charge. For 10 dollars, you get the (1) disc by mail, including in-store trade in, blu-ray, game rentals, and streaming video through Dish set-top receivers. You also get 10 free movie channels on your Dish account, no rental release waiting period, and a really nice array of new releases in the streaming catalog. Netflix cannot compete with these features. Oh wait, yes they can… they just choose not to because they don’t care about their customers anymore.

Ok, so Movie Pass sounds amazing, but there’s a lot more to the story than a bunch of marketing bullet points. Movie Pass streaming is done through Dish’s instant video mechanism, which is confusing enough as it stood before the marriage to Blockbuster. Now, however, it’s just a disaster. I find myself browsing through a strange mix of standard Dish rental material and free Movie Pass material. Not just the rental items, but also the menus confuse me to no end. And don’t even think about searching or being recommended an item. Both are non-existent features… Movie Pass customers will be missing the Netflix interface dearly. Then, after sorting through a pile of the good the bad and the ugly, you’ve chosen a movie! Congratulations! Now it’s time to press play… wait… what’s this? I have to wait an hour and half to watch it?! Why… does a monkey need to put the disc in the blu-ray player back at HQ? Then, the humour begins as you watch the timer jump from an hour to mere seconds, and then back and forth again. After some gyration, the timer magically reaches zero in just a few seconds, and you can now watch your film. Well… at least the first 10 seconds… then you can buffer up some more video. Movie Pass streaming is as bad as YouTube *if not worse*. You can even pause it to allow that buffer indicator to beef up for a few minutes before allowing it to proceed, just like YouTube. Unlike YouTube, however, you’ll soon realize that there is no correlation between your buffered video and the constant interruption to allow for more buffering. It’s as if, at any point, if it has been detected that more video is consumed than downloaded, then it matters not that you have an hour buffered; the stream must be paused to be sure that the end of that buffer is not reached! Note that I have a 12Mpbs internet connection (cable), and I can count on one hand the number of times my HD playback of Netflix had to pause for buffering. Netflix didn’t just do a really good job with their streaming interface… they MASTERED it. Especially through the Roku, which I’ve used for over a year now.

The disc by mail service isn’t immune to problems either. Mostly, this is due to the fact that their old service continues on to this day. It’s nearly identical in nature, but each service has it’s own strange restrictions and pricing structure. Prepare to be confused when you bring your disc to a brick and mortar store… almost as confused as the guy behind the counter. Movie Pass customers will be frustrated by the old guard of Blockbuster tools, like their iOS app which manages the disc queue and only works for the non-Movie Pass service. Additionally, if you go to Blockbuster’s website, you’ll find that you cannot reach the Movie Pass portal. To do this, you’ll need to first go to Dish’s website, and click through their own special links. Instead of having a single framework with different plans, pricing and restrictions, Blockbuster opted for two entirely different architectures with entirely separate interfaces. If you’ve seen the job-search website commercials with the monkeys burning cash in the boardroom, then you can imagine what Blockbuster’s team must look like (and based on the revenue chart in that same commercial, that very well may have been filmed at Blockbuster HQ).

Blockbuster Movie Pass is poised to amaze. Let’s just hope they’ve learned their lessons from their evil past.

[Update 11/9/11]: Just learned that when you “rent” a streaming movie, it actually stores the entire movie, just like a DVR’ed event. You just can’t get to the movie from your normal DVR events. This makes the streaming thing a lot more useful than I had thought. It’s still ridiculously slow, but at least you can come back to the saved events later and not have to wait for them to download.

But for every hateful program, there is a peaceful resolution. For several months now, my iPhone 4 has been causing iTunes to freeze at *nearly* the very moment I plug it into my MacBook. I have flirted with letting this problem escalate to my breaking point (when iOS 5 is jailbroken, if I can’t update my phone, I’ll lose my mind). So, in an effort to resolve this problem without UN peacekeeping operations in Cupertino, I sat down with my MacBook and my iPhone this afternoon for a series of peace talks. Here is what I learned.

This problem is not a new problem. People of all races and genders experience this problem, which is good, because I don’t like racist software. People with all varieties of iOS devices have this problem. iPods, iPhones, iPads, and iMicrowaves (it was my idea, Apple, and I’ll expect royalties if you steal it), have caused iTunes to freeze for generations. There are so many forums and threads on this matter, with speculation on the cause or resolution ranging from the seasons and tidal patterns to the arrangement of the furniture within 30 feet of the phone, but one common thread rings throughout: this problem is universally frustrating.

This problem has no actual resolution. You will break your phone and get a new one: problem solved. Or you will wait for a magical iTunes update: problem *might* be solved.

This problem is work-around-able-ish. Here is a list of possible workarounds that others have touted, and that you can try to solve the problem, each of which hold water in my humble opinion.

1. Try stopping whatever song your iOS device is currently playing (iPod app keeps songs in “paused” state, which some say is the cause of their problem).
2. Try just waiting overnight for your system to finish whatever it’s doing.
3. Try throwing your iPhone at the wall.
4. Try  shutting down iTunes before plugging in your phone.
5. Try re-installing iTunes.

And the one that worked for me: none of the above. Just try browsing around in your phone while iTunes is currently frozen. I actually saw mine come back to life when I was checking my disk usage in “Settings”. It is at that moment, when things magically begin to work, without reason or cause, that dead developers get their wings.