Today, TV.com made some excellent and long overdue fixes to its submission interface and other aspects of the site. These are really great changes and hopefully a sign that the site is moving in the right direction. Let's break them down one by one:
Level 1 Users May Not Submit: I know some people aren't happy about this because they feel it's going to lead to an increase in junk submissions. But let's look at what we had before-- anyone whose level was 1 was bounced to the homepage! No error message, nothing explaining that you must be at least Level 2 to submit, just the homepage. Some of these people would come over to Technical or General Support to complain, but I get the feeling many others simply got disgusted and left the site. I'll take the new way, thanks.
Submission History Restored: How lame was it that you could only see a single page of your submission history? Very lame. Full submission history is now back in play. Check your status for any submission, sort by show or person and view any submissions made all the way back to the start of the site TV.com. Fantastic.
Checkboxes for the Import Feature (Cast/Crew): The previous Import feature was cumbersome and terrible. Now you can just use checkboxes instead of having to click and scroll, click and scroll, click and scroll. A breath of fresh air.
Emblems Restored: i don't really care too much about emblems, but it's nice to see the emblem wonkiness finally taken care of.
Trusted User Granting Restored: Editors can now once again assign Trusted Users. Very glad to see this back.
For those that don't already know, I recently got a brand-new computer system not long after I got my new monitor. This is one fantastic system. It's an HP Pavilion desktop, model #a6700y. It's a quadcore AMD Phenom 9150e at 1.80 GHz. Operating system is 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium SP3 (yeah, I know, but I really don't mind Vista too much) and it has 4 GB of memory and approximately 500 MB hard drive space.
Its Windows Experience Index rating is 3.0 out of 5.9. I know that doesn't sound like much, but the Index score rates to the lowest of all of the individual scores. Let's take a look at each of those. Processor (calculations per second) is a 5.8 out of 5.9. Memory (RAM) is a 5.9. Graphics (Desktop performance for Windows Aero) is a 3.9. Gaming graphics (3D business and gaming graphics performance) is the 3.0. And finally, Primary hard disk (Disk data transfer rate) is 5.9. So, really, the scores are generally pretty top-flight, it's just the graphics that drag it down, and I didn't buy it to be a gaming machine. I get quite enough of gaming from my Playstation 2, thank you very much. The display adapter is an NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430. I've heard that's on the lower end, but I can always upgrade it if needed.
The new computer is great. It's really quite a nice difference not having to deal with slowness while running multiple applications, or sitting for long waits, or dealing with instability in general.
Finally, some big news! I'm finally making the switch to high-speed Internet Service. I've ordered ZoomTown DSL from Cincinnati Bell. No more tiresome waits for pages to load or having to block slow-loading content or content just not loading at all. With DSL, my high speed, high power experience is finally complete. My DSL modem is on the way and the estimated delivery date is July 7 (though hopefully sooner.) And then, it's sayonara to slow dial-up! I had a bit of a problem-- I was going to order the slower "Lite" DSL for $20 a month, but when I went to the page to order, it insisted on doing a "bundle" with phone service, even though that wasn't what it said in the advertising and on the original page. I thought about pressing the issue, but decided to just go ahead and go with the $30 high-speed. It's over 5 times faster than the "lite" version, so that's really a much better deal. It'll set me back a bit, but I'll make do, and the higher speed might just help with making some money, as I'm getting pretty good at eBay.
Oh, and I've updated my profile and picture here at TV.com. Check it out if you have a moment.