At the recommendation of Netflix Customer Support I emailed HackingNetflix.com with a picture of my laundry room, wallpapered in Netflix envelopes. They posted it for the world to see! Many thanks to Netflix for being the best service I’ve ever paid for and something I truly enjoy.

Streaming Netflix for PS3 discs arrive in the mail, which makes this the second best day in the year. (my birthday, of course, is the best day of the year) I use my Playstation and Netflix far more than I watch Cable TV, so today is like the day I am liberated from the Cable company. Huge!

The result of my wallpaper making it on HackingNetflix.com is an example of how Netflix rocks: I mentioned in the email hackingnetflix.com posted that I share my plan with my daughter. She had returned “Little Miss Sunshine” without the red envelope so I tossed it in with another and mailed it. Then I told her to go clean her room so this wouldn’t happen again. lol. She brought me not only the red envelope but also a DVD labeled “Little Miss Sunshine”
“Oh No! What did we mail to Netflix?” Sims3.

I called right away and talked to a really nice girl who said it was no problem and happens once a day. They’d email me when they’d sorted it out. While we were on the phone I told her about the room I’m wallpapering.

Later that day I received this email:

Hi, Thanks for calling Netflix today! Everyone in our customer service center loved what I told them about you wall-papering your laundry room with the Netflix envelope flaps!  May I recommend that you take a picture and send it to hackingnetflix@gmail.com  I’m pretty sure it would be posted on a well-known Netflix blog (not run by Netflix)!  Just a thought Thank you for being a loyal Netflix customer!

The next morning, I got an email saying they found my daughter’s SIM3 and had sent it. Where I live Netflix is an every other day turnaround. It’s awesome! I feel like I have a huge library of movies but Netflix keeps them safe for me over there in Netflix land.

Thanks HackingNetflix.com for posting my wallpaper. I expect it’ll be a year before the room is done.

[Primer, 3M spray adhesive, Envelope, Polyurethane]

My game has improved. My friend and I played three days in a row, ending in yesterday’s personal best.

Saturday +11

Sunday +9

Monday +4 on 18 holes!!! Woohoo. I held even until hole 12 and then things fell apart a bit, ending with four over par.

Can’t say it was just the vibrant history, ancient culture and pervasive religion that I found so overwhelmingly attractive. Nearly stunned with amazement at every turn Thailand was instantly a part of my composition for better and for worse… like a pre-arranged marriage I had little choice as I was consumed by it all and carry the memory at the front of my thinking.

I believe I could live there for a spell… Thailand makes me wish life were longer.. or that I could do it again.. so I would have time to have both lives.

I guess it’s like that… maybe if I didn’t have such a full and rich life and have so many good and healthy life experiences, I would pack up a few essentials and go to Thailand in a heartbeat.. and never look back because I would have found home.

I truly felt a sense of home while I was there and even today it’s difficult to understand other than to believe in past lives… or a interconnectedness of all. How else could someone born of German and English decent in Manhattan, raised in a sheltered conservative American town on the opposite side of the globe walk off an airplane in Bangkok and fully know and realize on a personal level, that he was comfortably home?

So here we are 18 months later. Just yesterday I had a new Thai dish that was better than ever. I thought… I can’t imagine eating Thai food every meal. I couldn’t do without Captain Crunch and Sugar Pops.

I was with a Thai girl for a while and she was always spicing things up with too many ingredients. Like my simple 3 eggs and 2 slices of cheese omelet which I love that quickly became the base of some wild mess, turning shades of red and green and tasting like Thai food.

I’m glad of my diversity, being able to enjoy Raisin Bran and then Pad Kra Prow with equal enthusiasm. I need them both. Most of all, I think I want a Thai girlfriend though I’ve put no effort into meeting anyone for ages. (… the rest of my life wouldn’t be long enough to praise her inherit beauty let alone merge our conditioning from opposite end of the world.) I know it’s true when I travel the world and still gravitate toward Asian eyes. They say the eyes are the window to the soul… That’s good because one of my friends has such dark eyes I don’t really see much when I stare. lol. How will I find… not worried since if it’s meant to be it will happen no matter where I am physically located. I haven’t prayed for anything since my father was in a coma from a heart attack. He did miraculously recover. I wonder if I owe The Great Mysterious for that?

Work is good, I bought a new house in the mountains as a home improvement project. I have to fly there. That vacation area is a separate world from New York City so I don’t dare imagine how foreign it would be to a Thai visitor… though I welcome you to visit me when you come to America.

Good fortune to you all and good luck holding a perspective that keeps you happy, healthy and wealthy.

Just look at the dark cloud of Caddisflies over this Pine tree. Perhaps my favorite photograph this week on the beautiful Missouri River in Central Montana (South of Great Falls and North of Helena)

Read more about Trichoptera at Wikipedia.

On the Missouri River from Craig to Cascade, Montana.

[View with PicLens]

The iPhone is a wobbly device without a dedicated shutter release button. Pushing the touchscreen ‘capture’ button counters the balance of the device in your hand causing the camera to move at capture and most pics are blurred. Check this site and you’ll see I can hold a camera still and capture beautiful images, even with a 2MP camera phone.

Here are a few images from my travel to Reno, taken with my iPhone 3GS.

Delta Airlines messed up the flights so badly that I spent the first night in Los Angeles and barely got to Reno the next day on a standby flight. Ironic that Walmart can ship me something at 8pm from Texas and it gets to my house 10am the next day but Delta can’t deliver a human in two days.

Wait, lets look at that statement again!

I paid $600 for a ride to Reno, Nevada and got there 22 hours later, spending a night at an L.A. Westin.

I paid $30 for next day shipping (approx. same travel distance) and the parcel arrived 12 hours later. Watching the tracking info showed this parcel never stopped due to airline issues.

Reno is a seething pit of malaise. In the highest rent district buildings were abandoned and dilapidated. A view from our hotel room showed telltale signs an abandoned hotel across the street is “Hotel Squatter”.

At night, the consensus among guest in our hotel was, stay inside. Unafraid of common and uncommon criminals; my experience outside our hotel ‘compound’ was depressingly ugly.

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Since Thanksgiving Day 2008, I saved all my Netflix envelopes. On Independence Day, 2009 I decided I had about enough to get started and glued them to the wall with spray-on adhesive.

There were enough Netflix envelopes to do around the corner above the washing machine. I’ve started the ceiling and I’ll update you when I’ve finished. It looks really cool already and I’ve got quite a few more envelopes to apply.

[Method to the madness: painted the 'greenboard' with sealing primer, used 3M spray adhesive, then a clear coat of spray-on polyurethane over the paper until I figure out the best clear product to effectively seal the moisture-prone paper.]

comments are welcome.

I caught some awesome pics tonight. 120 of them made it hard to choose just one to share. ok, here are some more ~

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