I didn’t know. The United States Postal Service sports its very own Netflix drop box.

Almost dedicated – Netflix does share the box with postcards – I discovered the drop-off at San Francisco’s Union Square, downstairs, inside Macy’s Post Office.

Without further checks elsewhere, I’d like to assume a string of other USPS locations have followed suit.

Hey, had Netflix competitor Blockbuster been hipper to trends, it might have long been the popular brick-and-mortar video chain and not a young and disruptive DVD mail-order service to get that accomplished.

Of course, Blockbuster is on the auctioning block while Netflix is anything but.

Based on Netflix’s consumer cloud, here’s an early 21st century innovator that convinced someone inside what just might be the country’s largest 20th century bureaucracy to carve out room inside its legacy facilities. Not bad!

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The Domain Name System (DNS) doesn’t get the respect it deserves.  It’s a remarkably robust and massively distributed database comprised of a global network of servers constantly updating each other as to the mapping of human-readable domain names (such as digitalmissive.com) to machine-readable IP addresses.

It’s also arguably the glue holding this whole internet contraption of ours together.

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After a whole (vacation) week worth of back-issue reading through stacks of geek magazines and industry reports, here’s a couple of consumer digital connectivity statistics I thought worth sharing.

Each item individually may not be much news. But in aggregate, these developments provide pretty impressive guidance we are well on our way to moving from an already not-too-shabby megabit society to one a thousand fold faster.

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Astronaut, restaurant critic, world-class rock guitarist, independent technology/new media blogger – there are a lot of fun jobs out there. Add to that list engineer/developer at Ar Drone, the french company behind the “Parrot”, the first iOS-controlled “quadricoptor”.  Although a prototype was shown at this year’s CES, the device has just hit the US market this month.

We’re not much for gadgets-for-gadgets’-sake here at digitalmissive – but this thing, if it works as well as it seems to, looks like a pretty OK way to waste $300.

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I too have been on a beach holiday this summer.  In keeping with our transatlantic bent here at digitalmissive, though, my beach holiday was on the lovely island of Hiddensee in the Baltic Sea – where there’s not only no mobile data coverage to be had, there are also no cars to be had.

There are plenty of bikes, though – so we went for a ride on day one and ended up riding by this beautiful meadow (most of the island’s uninhabited and devoted to a national park/nature preserve).

Not that we’ve been reduced to posting vacation pictures here on digitalmissive, but rather to illustrate a point…

What was the first thing I thought of  as I rode by?

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