—- Original Message —–
From: Paul Irish
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 08:47:28 -0500
To: support@reservationless-plus.com
Subject: hold music

This hold music is infuriating. It makes me want to convince the entire PM team to use a different provider.
In addition to the all-to-often marketing messages, the music choice is terrible. The wailing guitar solo is loud and conspicuous.
I think the volume of all of it could be toned down quite a bit.

Anyway, though I write this in a state of frustration, I hope this feedback is received and digested with understanding. :)

Cheers

—–Original Message—–
From: Wright, Crystal
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 9:34 AM
To: paul.irish
Cc: QCD
Subject: RE: hold music - Thread:326586

Paul thank you for your feedback, we have provided your feedback to our Marketing Department. Have a great day.

Crystal Wright Quality Supervisor

On 2/14/07, Brown, Hattie hbrown@intercall.com wrote:

Our marketing department is working to change this ASAP. The messages will rotate every 90 seconds (and be different) and the music will change out every few weeks.

Damn straight.

So it turns out that if you set up a loading spinner like this:

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<div id="spinner" style="display: none"><img src="loading.gif"/>Loading...</div>

And then show the div, the animated gif will not animate in… which browser? IE6, of course.

Solutions:

Refresh the innerHTML content (This is stupid but it works..):

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document.getElementById('spinner').style.display = '';  // show it, and then...
document.getElementById('spinner').innerHTML = document.getElementById('spinner').innerHTML;

OR

Set the animated gif as the div’s css background image instead of using the child IMG element. Perhaps:

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#spinner {
  background: url(loading.gif) no-repeat 5px 3px;
  padding-left: 20px;
}

The second solution is a little classier and is also better from a semantic POV, IMHO.

I think streaming is going to grow… even amongst the illicit media scene.

I think my viewing habits are somewhat normal for the standard p2p fiend. I download a movie from bittorrent, watch it once, then either save it to watch again (I rarely do), or delete it off my system. From a data perspective, that seems pretty inefficient.

A better idea, I believe… Develop a centralized data bank with a number of movies, tv shows and assorted media. Whenever I want, I can stream that media to my computer and watch it there. That IP system would use Peercast or some sort of bittorrent-powered distribution system to maximize performance as it scales. Of course, I still want the ability to download a file, in case I want to view it offline. This system should allow me to maintain my own file system and IA. I don’t need other people’s media mixed in with “mine”, though I sometimes will want to browse them. I haven’t yet seen a UI that offers this mine/everyone toggle inside a filesystem, but it’s completely achievable.

In addition to benefiting from having a larger potential library to use, you also shift legal responsibility, which is a nice perk, too.

I’d expect such a service to have some sort of cost associated, but given the savings of hard drive expenses, that cost is quickly justified.