I think I am developing a crush on America’s first lady. Michelle Obama is more compelling than her husband. He’s good, but she’s utterly fascinating.

Is this a joke?

This is in contrast to if you report a disc problem or look at your queue after you return a few disks. In those instances, the “At Home” portion of your queue adds or swaps a few lines to say “[Movie Title]: Shipping Soon.” With a Bonus Rental, no line is added until the next day or so, when they actually ship the disk out.

I called to query Netflix about this and they were gracious enough to send me another disk, but now I have an extra disk on top of my requested bonus disk. I don’t mind, but if any Netflix business-folk come across this, I’m not trying to scam your customer service folks – I just couldn’t figure out your Bonus Rental UI!

Thus, I bring to you a non-comprehensive listing of things I love that are new to Firefox 3, in no particular order.

• OS X-consistent window chrome theme
• Aqua form controls and buttons
• The Awesome Bar (this cannot be overemphasized enough)
• Overall speed and performance increases
• Quartz font-rendering on OS X, bringing with it OS consistent font smoothing!

Things that I love in Firefox 3, but where credit deserves to go somewhere else:

• AdBlock Plus

Things that I wish were in Firefox 3, but sadly aren’t:

• Text responds to CMD-CTRL-D for the dictionary pop-up (bug 301451)
• In-browser PDF Reader plugin (no, Adobe’s plugin does not work)

Try a sneak peek of Firefox 3 right now by downloading a release candidate build. As always with pre-releases, the intent is to figure out what significant but unknown bugs are before general release, so if this idea makes you squeamish you should probably avoid it for now.

Setup process takes about 30 minutes, depending on how many devices you have, and it involves a few reboots of the remote. The breadth of their remote database is rather impressive, and it’s nice to see it seamlessly integrate with my cable box and TV.

Now what would a discussion of a Logitech product be without complaining about Logitech software? Let’s get the positives out of the way first: the software does what it advertises and it does it pretty well, without crashing or anything bizarre like that. It does work, and doesn’t give you too much hassle while doing it. The interface is pretty streamlined and leans very heavily on the Wizard side. It does have drivers available for OS X, and they seem to be updated reasonably frequently. It is a separate package from the keyboard/mouse drivers.

That being said, the software has some negatives. It is pretty pokey and slow – not unbearably slow but noticeably slow. For example, UI elements don’t respond instantly to clicks or interactions, they take about tens of milliseconds to act. Doesn’t sound like much but you feel it as you go along. Most of your interactions seem to take place on a server – not much data is located on your HD but this does add a bit to that sluggish feel. This has the added benefit of being fairly well up to date with remote codes.

Best case for having a universal remote connect to your computer: no more hunting for driver codes and enduring weird keypress procedures in order to program something. Rarely going through that dog and pony show for all the driver codes and discovering that none of them worked.

I can say unequivocally that the Logitech Harmony software uses the Mozilla Gecko engine. How do I know this? Because the software does something really dumb and creates a very Firefox/Gecko-esque profile in the home directory with complete disregard for OS X platform standards. A folder named “browser – Logitech” is created in ~, instead of the much more sensible location of ~/Library/Application Support or ~/Library/Preferences, where it is hidden away from the user. Honestly, how often am I going to be poking around the preferences folder for my Harmony updater?

The software also creates a folder in your home directory (~) simply called “Logitech.” Best as I can tell, this contains further preferences and remote settings data that aren’t part of the browser component. Again, something better off living in ~/Library/Application Support/Logitech Harmony or something like that. In case anyone at Logitech ever reads this: THESE ARE STUPID LOCATIONS FOR YOUR PREFERENCE DIRECTORIES.

What’s more, this directory is created with the privileges 777 for some bizarre reason, and owned by root. In my own home directory! Why?! For those of you who don’t know, 777 means that everyone on your computer has read, write, and execute privileges on this directory. Since it’s in your home directory, it’s not likely to be a problem, but it’s still stupid.

By comparison to this Logitech package, the Logitech Control Center for keyboards and mice seems downright awesome. Don’t even get me started on how useless SetPoint is for Windows.

In the end, I do like the remote. The hardware is well designed and once it’s all set up, the remote works really well. The software fulfills its job just fine, but it’s really poorly designed and effectively shits in your home directory in OS X. I didn’t try it on Windows, but I have a feeling they do the same thing in My Documents. Yet again, Logitech can’t seem to pull off more than a C+ effort when it comes to making Mac drivers.

Final call: I’d still recommend it for someone looking for a really neat universal remote that puts almost all other universal remotes to shame, but with reservations about the drivers.

Logitech Harmony 550 Universal Remote on Amazon.com

It’s not that funny of a show (contrary to the show name, it’s two comedian guests who do most of the talking) to begin with really. What’s more, if you look at the audience in the background while the comedians are delivering their bits, it doesn’t seem like the audience is really reacting all that much. As in, there’s no where near the amount of hooting, hollering, or even laughing compared to what’s playing back on the audio.

Anyone else notice something like that?