Kendra Kuhl

My husband and I use Netflix for our movie rentals. The unlimited streaming has become a favorite at our house. Being technical, we have a lot of machines. We have our machines at work and the ones at home and I finally got myself a new laptop over the weekend. I went to watch a streaming video from Netflix and before the show popped up I got a message saying that 8 machines had been used to watch streaming video and to please call customer service to confirm my account wasn't being used by unauthorized parties.

So I called. The first time, I was told that my wait time was in excess of 26 minutes. I was running short on time so I hung up and figured I would call back the next day. The second time I was told that my wait time was in excess of 26 minutes (why 26 minutes by the way??) and I have been on the phone for over an hour waiting for them. The regular customer service line's hold time is less than 5 minutes. So, I had my husband call them while I wait on the hold from hell. They can't help you at the regular customer service number.

What I want to know is why? Why does it take over an hour to reset my account when it doesn't take that long to do? Why isn't there an online feature for that? Apple and Zune both have that kind of feature. I understand about piracy and needing to make sure that I didn't give my username / password to 200 of my closest friends, but COME ON!! This is ridiculous. I guess that once you are a customer, you aren't important anymore. I doubt it would take that long for me to sign up... Oh wait, I can do that online.

UPDATE: So after waiting on the phone for more than two hours, I'm informed that according to the terms of service, we are only authorized for 4 machines / year. I have already hit those four machines, so I'm screwed. I guess I won't be reinstalling any operating systems. How non customer service friendly. AND... why couldn't they just say that in their pop up? Point me to the terms of service or something...

I really wanted my controls to work the same way PageFlakes controls work by loading after the page loads. So, somebody was kind enough to point me to Matt Berseth's article on how to do just that. But, after looking at it, I realized that it wouldn't work as written for me. I use Master Pages with content pages and the '<%= this.btn.ClientID %>' part of his code wouldn't produce the results that I wanted. So, I came up with this solution.

1. Wrap your hidden button control (see Matt's article) in a div / span / paragraph with a class of "HiddenButton". This allows us to find it in the Javascript.
2. Create a javascript file with this code in it. What this does is get the element you created in step number one, finds its only child item, and then gets the id of the child. I had to replace the underscores with $ because that is the client id of the child element.

   var _isInitialLoad = true;

   function pageLoad(sender, args)
   {
       if(_isInitialLoad)
       {
           _isInitialLoad = false;
           // Go get button that needs the postback
           // Have to get parent div first
           var parentDiv = document.getElementById("HiddenButton");
           // Get child button
           var ourButton = parentDiv.getElementsByTagName("input").items(0).id; 
           // replace _ with $
           // get index of first _
           var intIndexOfMatch = ourButton.indexOf("_");
           // Loop through and get the rest of the _
           while (intIndexOfMatch != -1)
           {
               ourButton = ourButton.replace("_", "$");
               intIndexOfMatch = ourButton.indexOf("_");
           }

           //  simulate a button click by forcing the postback
           //  causing the updatepanel to update
           __doPostBack(ourButton);  
       }
   }

3. Register the javascript file from #2 with the ScriptManager used for the update panel. Or, if you want it in the content page, in the ScriptManagerProxy control.

This should work the way that Matt's article does, only you can use Master / Content pages. I didn't need the OnUpdated / OnUpdating portion of his code so I didn't recreate it. If there is something I missed or a more elegant way to accomplish this, I'm open for suggestions.

In working on a project with my husband, we decided to store a piece of user information in the user's profile. The problem I ran into came from the fact that it wouldn't be the user themself that edited that information, but the admin of the site. I needed to figure out how to edit another user's profile as the admin. It took me awhile, but I found this article from Imar Spaanjaars that explained how to do exactly what I needed. http://www.spaanjaars.com/QuickDocId.aspx?quickdoc=377 Cheers!

I stumbled across this amazing discovery earlier today. Apparently, in adding NASA images to its satellite database, Google has let the cat out of the bag. Click here and zoom in.

'Nuff said.

I figured it was apropos for my very first post to be named after the first program that most of us write (at least if you followed the books).