I came across this article recently, which includes an Excel spreadsheet for analyzing your own Netflix usage.
The problem is that Excel v.X for Mac likes to paste tab delimited data into multiple columns (as it well should). The original sheet was written to parse the data out of a single column based upon character position. That’s clever if you don’t have it separated. It’s a lot more work though.
I made my own clone for Mac users. There are far fewer instructions built into the sheet though because I’m lazy. The first three values in the analysis section can be set as seen fit. To input your data, select the cell just below “Shipped” and paste after copying out of the email you get from Netflix when you request the full history. Make sure that the fourth column is filled in with the formula as far down as your data goes.
Download the sheet and try it out.
Just when I was getting ready to drop Bloglines for NewsGator because it will soon have NetNewsWire syncing, Google released its own RSS reader.
I’m going to check it out soon, but unfortunately, I can’t share anything now because its OPML import facilities aren’t working for me.
I noticed Orkut was listed in part of Google’s services once you’ve logged in with a username. A new Google service? I must try it out!
Unfortunately, it’s invitation only. If you’ve got an account, please invite me.
Please?
A recent Digg submission listed disposable email services. It’s a great idea especially now that spam can overrun your inbox.
I don’t use any of those services personally. I recently made a domain and when I sign up at a new site, I use the name of the service in the email. When I start to receive spam at that address, I have a good idea of who sold my address (though it’s not perfect). Mike takes it a step further. My only qualm with Mike’s method is that because you use a hash, you need to record which hashes match up with what services.
However, not everyone is so blessed to own their own domain name. Given, you can probably get one fairly cheaply, but why bother if you can do the same with a free email service? I’m not talking about any of the ones from the article. I’m talking about Gmail (I have plenty of invites).
A severely under-advertised but useful feature is its “+” email function. You can use username@gmail.com as everyone knows, but did you know that username+alias@gmail.com also works? “alias” isn’t literal either. You can plug anything in there. You can use my technique to track who might be spamming you. If you start to receive a lot of spam on a particular alias, you can make a filter that will automatically move it to the trash, or if you’re feeling malicious, you could also forward that mail back to the original service.
.Mac has disposable email aliases, but you can only have 5 at a time and they need to be defined ahead of time. That’s far too limiting in my opinion. While it may help reduce spam, you can’t effectively track the source.
