Before Christmas Amazon had the "gold box" recommendation thing
They've had it for years. I started seeing it several years ago, and always like to click through it for cheap thrills. It was very funny to see the stuff that they would try to sell me. The one thing I did get was a Silpat (look it up) for about half off. After a while it started to look like a lot of the things might be closeouts or overstock.
I haven't seen the Gold Box for a while, but it may be something you only see when you shop on amazon a lot.
As long as they display ads that are no more obtrusive than in the print versions I don't bother trying to block them. The things that are annoying: - things that create new windows (pop-up/under) - things that block the content I'm trying to look at until I find someplace to click it away - things that display a big full window ad in which I have to find a "skip this ad" link before I can see the stuff I'm looking for.
If they simply flow text around the ads (that stay within their defined boundaries-- I don't care if they move), that's just fine, and if they're relevant to something I'm looking for I might even click them. Sometimes I even seek them out when I'm actively shopping.
Print media providers have managed to sell large volumes of ads for a long time without having a "pay-per-click" feature, and will eventually find a way to make that work on the web without being annoying.
Only the bad worms get fed to the ducks- the worms that don't get along with the others and are destructive to the community. The death penalty for the most vicious among them. The good worms get little private condos, and large supplies of coffee grounds (their favorite food). I'd make them little chaise lounges to sit in the sun, but then they'd dry out.
Some papers already have the newspaper ads in them, they just aren't as obvious as the ones that go tumbling and flying out of the paper version.
The LA times has a link in the sidebar on the left where you can view the actual newspaper ads, and they're sorted by category. I can't always guess which category a store will fall into, but they do have the full ads, so if I want to see the Fry's ad or the Big 5 ad, it's easy enough. They just need to make it more obvious and easier to do on impulse without being annoying.
We have a worm bin that we use outside (warm year round) but could just as well keep inside if we needed to. They also advertise them for use by fisherman for a steady supply of cheap worms, and we sometimes give some worms to the ducks for a tasty snack (they're wild about worms).
It's also a great way to get rid of the shredded mail that you don't want to put on the curb (things that have credit card numbers, SSN, etc)-- generally after you empty a layer you want to mix bedding with the organic waste. Bedding can be shredded coconut husks, newspaper, or mail that's shredded and moistened slightly. It disappears into the compost.
Yeah, I'm in LA, too, but have also lived in Detroit and Boston (also have good club scenes). The biggest places I'll go for shows are theaters (like the Wiltern) -- they tend to have pretty good sound, and aren't overwhelmingly large. One of the best shows I ever saw was Nick Lowe in a ~3000 seat theater that had only about 50 people in it. He didn't care, and had a great time, and it rubbed off on the "crowd".
Sometimes the music is shitty (sometimes really bad) but if the promoter is any good and you like one of the bands, you'll probably like at least one other of the bands on the bill. And it's good to get exposed to all types of stuff. I have a similar deal where I sometimes am working with one of the bands and get in free. It gets me out more.
Despite not liking big shows, I'm actually contemplating going to Coachella because I have to get my Gram Rabbit live fix regularly. I've been wearing out the CD. Plus they claim if you see them out in the desert it will all make sense...
Part of the failing business model is the price structure-- why should a back catalog CD, where production costs have been long since paid for, cost $20 (not unusual for CDs by an artist that has steady long term sales), when you can get DVDs of more recent things for less (even things that sell in comparable numbers). Even cheesy bad movies generally cost quite a lot more to make than 13 to 15 songs for a CD.
The cost of CD production is low-- I've done CD runs for conference proceedings and it can be done cheap, even in numbers on the order of 1000 units, including printing on the CDs, printing on the jackets, cases, etc. The distribution channels (and thus costs) are pretty similar for both.
Small bands often manage to sell CDs at their shows for $10, and probably aren't losing money on them (they may not be making much, either, because they may have a lot of unsold discs)
Some of us are even old (well, not that old), many years out of grad school, and still do fun stuff on friday and saturday nights (and sometimes even mondays and thursdays).
I, too, tend to hear new music in clubs-- usually if I'm going to see one band I'll show up early enough/stay late enough to hear some of the others. If I like them I'll buy their CDs right there, from them. I've discovered some of my favorite bands that way.
Live shows in small clubs are also just way more fun than big concerts. The bands interact with the audience, you can chat with them and/or their friends who are selling the CDs and merchandise. Way more pleasant than going to big arenas.
How do you tell bad bits of html from good bits? As long as there are links, it's possible to phish. Some of the phishers use fairly obviously bad urls if you read as plain text, but if you let them display their image and link it's a faked Sunbank link (or somefink).
The easiest thing is to turn off html, turn off display of inline images, and turn on display of full headers.
People (and companies) send way too much garbage as html or attachments that would be just fine as text. I got into the habit of using text as much as possible when working on a proposal with a bunch of astronomers who don't use MSOffice except at gunpoint. It works great, especially if you use things like sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation.
For me it's a matter of making it part of the routine. I've been biking to work for so long (through several cities and jobs) that it seems weird to drive to work. The only time I drive to work is if I'm taking a bike to ride somewhere else afterward. The commuting got me into more serious riding and racing.
It's really got to be something that you enjoy doing and want to do anyway. If you want to do it, you can make the time.
And sometimes it's pretty comparable. Occasionally in LA I've had to drive to meetings in the morning where it would have been much faster to pedal (I'm a pretty strong cyclist, but even if I weren't it would be comparable and more pleasant). From my house to downtown LA is more than an hour at rush hour by car, but I could probably do it in less than 45 minutes on a bike. In group it would be a lot less than 45 minutes.
One option that I've seen people use occasionally is to drive partway and bike partway-- find a safe parking spot about 10 miles from the workplace, and bike the last 10 miles (or whatever is comfortable). Or park about 20 minutes by foot away-- even a brisk walk like that twice a day can help a lot. Especially if it breaks up what would otherwise be 15 hours sitting on your butt.
but it's a risk you accept in return for high availability when needed-- once in a while you get one that only lasts to the next shop with umbrellas. When they're priced disposably you just get a new one.
Yeah, I'm in an bike club that uses yahoo for it's membership mailing list-- it's apparently one of the appeals of the club, even the the S/N ratio is pretty low most of the time. For a long time I automatically sorted the list to trash, but other people apparently join just for the list.
I also use yahoo for domains (I have a small number and it was convenient way back when competitive registrars were just coming into existence), but am in the process of switching because their customer service isn't very good (answered a question that I didn't ask, while NetSol got it right the first time, and already had a process in place to solve it), and they have the "extra-double-secret" password that I can never remember and takes a phone call to a number that never gets answered to reset it.
Customers can tell when product is crap. Why sell it to them fast
Because it's raining and they want to stay dry.
People in New York City generally don't carry umbrellas, and when it starts to rain there are suddenly cheap umbrellas for sale cheap everywhere. They're good for maybe one rainstorm (a gust of wind will shred them), but they'll generally function as an umbrella for sufficient time for most users.
Sure, you could sell really nice, high quality umbrellas at a price commensurate with the quality, but why would anyone buy them? Next time it rains they're unlikely to have it handy, and need to buy another one anyway. The expensive, high quality umbrella may be an engineering marvel, but it's useless if it's not in your hand when it's raining. People want cheap crappy umbrellas to keep them dry while the rain is coming down, and the makers and sellers recognize that.
Quality, cost, and schedule are all engineering parameters, and they're weighted differently in different situations. Ignore that at your peril.
But the U.S. Government still requires all RFP submissions in Word
Depends on the branch you're dealing with (and sometimes the office within the branch). I've sometimes had to submit stuff as searchable PDF (no MSOffice docs accepted).
All I ever want is more screen. I want to have a zillion docs open all over the desktop and just turn my head to see them.
I want to eliminate paper-- paper files don't put themselves back in the right place when you close them- they just sit there like a lump on your desk. Why can't they file themselves?
I'd even be happy with a 4pi display that only worked in my office because it has a big helmet mount for now, but the HUD version on small glasses or a retina projector would be nice in the long run.
and a 4pi steradian display map that has both a sensor to see which way your head is looking and a separate scroll device so that you can rotate any part of the display into view.
Sorry, at least with the businesses I have a choice. With a government entity there is usually no accountability. A government will fine and penalize an abusive corporation but they will NEVER do that to themselves.
Unless the business is a regional monopoly with legislators in its pockets. Or even not a monopoly but has legislators in its pockets. How many big biz execs are we seeing under indictment? And those are just the high profile ones where the gov't thinks they have enough evidence to win. Big businesses are no more accountable than the gov't, and in many cases are less so.
With the gov't everyone owns a single share, and the accountability is at the ballot box. With local gov't, the accountability is 24/7 because the constituents know where you live, what your phone number is, where you go out to eat, who you had dinner with last night, etc. The smaller the gov't entity the more accountability there often is (if the constituents care at all).
For turn based stuff, the Combat Mission series from Battlefront is an awesome WWII squad level game. It's a combination of turn-based and realtime, where each player puts in orders for the various units, and they get executed simultaneously (using a tactical AI to resolve things that happen on time scales less than a minute) and displayed as movies that each player can view from different angles.
It uses keyboard and mouse, but doesn't require any sort of high speed coordination of commands.
In a similar vein there was a story about a young girl of who noticed that the sea had gone "all funny"
Yeah, a friend of mine grew up on Hawaii (and is half Hawaiian) and learned several things at a very young age:
1) how to swim like a fish 2) never turn your back on the sea-- it can reach up and grab you (I've known more than a few people who went as tourists, ignored this rule, and gone from standing on some rocks to being bashed hard against them in the water in an instant) 3) if the sea does something weird, go the other way to high ground fast.
Evocam is great. My only complaint is that the new version only works with 10.3, and the computer I want to use it on is an ancient Wallstreet with a firewire PCMCIA card. It's running the old Evocam now (under OS 9), but the new version has various features that would be nice to have.
I use it to watch the pets in the yard. I set the motion sensor to be pretty sensitive, and when they move around it posts to my web page, where I can watch them from work.
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Before Christmas Amazon had the "gold box" recommendation thing
They've had it for years. I started seeing it several years ago, and always like to click through it for cheap thrills. It was very funny to see the stuff that they would try to sell me. The one thing I did get was a Silpat (look it up) for about half off. After a while it started to look like a lot of the things might be closeouts or overstock.
I haven't seen the Gold Box for a while, but it may be something you only see when you shop on amazon a lot.
As long as they display ads that are no more obtrusive than in the print versions I don't bother trying to block them. The things that are annoying:
- things that create new windows (pop-up/under)
- things that block the content I'm trying to look at until I find someplace to click it away
- things that display a big full window ad in which I have to find a "skip this ad" link before I can see the stuff I'm looking for.
If they simply flow text around the ads (that stay within their defined boundaries-- I don't care if they move), that's just fine, and if they're relevant to something I'm looking for I might even click them. Sometimes I even seek them out when I'm actively shopping.
Print media providers have managed to sell large volumes of ads for a long time without having a "pay-per-click" feature, and will eventually find a way to make that work on the web without being annoying.
Only the bad worms get fed to the ducks- the worms that don't get along with the others and are destructive to the community. The death penalty for the most vicious among them. The good worms get little private condos, and large supplies of coffee grounds (their favorite food). I'd make them little chaise lounges to sit in the sun, but then they'd dry out.
Some papers already have the newspaper ads in them, they just aren't as obvious as the ones that go tumbling and flying out of the paper version.
The LA times has a link in the sidebar on the left where you can view the actual newspaper ads, and they're sorted by category. I can't always guess which category a store will fall into, but they do have the full ads, so if I want to see the Fry's ad or the Big 5 ad, it's easy enough. They just need to make it more obvious and easier to do on impulse without being annoying.
We have a worm bin that we use outside (warm year round) but could just as well keep inside if we needed to. They also advertise them for use by fisherman for a steady supply of cheap worms, and we sometimes give some worms to the ducks for a tasty snack (they're wild about worms).
It's also a great way to get rid of the shredded mail that you don't want to put on the curb (things that have credit card numbers, SSN, etc)-- generally after you empty a layer you want to mix bedding with the organic waste. Bedding can be shredded coconut husks, newspaper, or mail that's shredded and moistened slightly. It disappears into the compost.
Yeah, I'm in LA, too, but have also lived in Detroit and Boston (also have good club scenes). The biggest places I'll go for shows are theaters (like the Wiltern) -- they tend to have pretty good sound, and aren't overwhelmingly large. One of the best shows I ever saw was Nick Lowe in a ~3000 seat theater that had only about 50 people in it. He didn't care, and had a great time, and it rubbed off on the "crowd".
Sometimes the music is shitty (sometimes really bad) but if the promoter is any good and you like one of the bands, you'll probably like at least one other of the bands on the bill. And it's good to get exposed to all types of stuff. I have a similar deal where I sometimes am working with one of the bands and get in free. It gets me out more.
Despite not liking big shows, I'm actually contemplating going to Coachella because I have to get my Gram Rabbit live fix regularly. I've been wearing out the CD. Plus they claim if you see them out in the desert it will all make sense...
Part of the failing business model is the price structure-- why should a back catalog CD, where production costs have been long since paid for, cost $20 (not unusual for CDs by an artist that has steady long term sales), when you can get DVDs of more recent things for less (even things that sell in comparable numbers). Even cheesy bad movies generally cost quite a lot more to make than 13 to 15 songs for a CD.
The cost of CD production is low-- I've done CD runs for conference proceedings and it can be done cheap, even in numbers on the order of 1000 units, including printing on the CDs, printing on the jackets, cases, etc. The distribution channels (and thus costs) are pretty similar for both.
Small bands often manage to sell CDs at their shows for $10, and probably aren't losing money on them (they may not be making much, either, because they may have a lot of unsold discs)
Saves you from having to go through all the trouble of paying for iTunes.
plus you can get them in whatever format or bitrate you want...
Some of us are even old (well, not that old), many years out of grad school, and still do fun stuff on friday and saturday nights (and sometimes even mondays and thursdays).
I, too, tend to hear new music in clubs-- usually if I'm going to see one band I'll show up early enough/stay late enough to hear some of the others. If I like them I'll buy their CDs right there, from them. I've discovered some of my favorite bands that way.
Live shows in small clubs are also just way more fun than big concerts. The bands interact with the audience, you can chat with them and/or their friends who are selling the CDs and merchandise. Way more pleasant than going to big arenas.
How do you tell bad bits of html from good bits? As long as there are links, it's possible to phish. Some of the phishers use fairly obviously bad urls if you read as plain text, but if you let them display their image and link it's a faked Sunbank link (or somefink).
The easiest thing is to turn off html, turn off display of inline images, and turn on display of full headers.
People (and companies) send way too much garbage as html or attachments that would be just fine as text. I got into the habit of using text as much as possible when working on a proposal with a bunch of astronomers who don't use MSOffice except at gunpoint. It works great, especially if you use things like sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation.
For me it's a matter of making it part of the routine. I've been biking to work for so long (through several cities and jobs) that it seems weird to drive to work. The only time I drive to work is if I'm taking a bike to ride somewhere else afterward. The commuting got me into more serious riding and racing.
It's really got to be something that you enjoy doing and want to do anyway. If you want to do it, you can make the time.
3 hours by car is frequently more by bicycle
And sometimes it's pretty comparable. Occasionally in LA I've had to drive to meetings in the morning where it would have been much faster to pedal (I'm a pretty strong cyclist, but even if I weren't it would be comparable and more pleasant). From my house to downtown LA is more than an hour at rush hour by car, but I could probably do it in less than 45 minutes on a bike. In group it would be a lot less than 45 minutes.
One option that I've seen people use occasionally is to drive partway and bike partway-- find a safe parking spot about 10 miles from the workplace, and bike the last 10 miles (or whatever is comfortable). Or park about 20 minutes by foot away-- even a brisk walk like that twice a day can help a lot. Especially if it breaks up what would otherwise be 15 hours sitting on your butt.
but it's a risk you accept in return for high availability when needed-- once in a while you get one that only lasts to the next shop with umbrellas. When they're priced disposably you just get a new one.
Yeah, I'm in an bike club that uses yahoo for it's membership mailing list-- it's apparently one of the appeals of the club, even the the S/N ratio is pretty low most of the time. For a long time I automatically sorted the list to trash, but other people apparently join just for the list.
I also use yahoo for domains (I have a small number and it was convenient way back when competitive registrars were just coming into existence), but am in the process of switching because their customer service isn't very good (answered a question that I didn't ask, while NetSol got it right the first time, and already had a process in place to solve it), and they have the "extra-double-secret" password that I can never remember and takes a phone call to a number that never gets answered to reset it.
Customers can tell when product is crap. Why sell it to them fast
Because it's raining and they want to stay dry.
People in New York City generally don't carry umbrellas, and when it starts to rain there are suddenly cheap umbrellas for sale cheap everywhere. They're good for maybe one rainstorm (a gust of wind will shred them), but they'll generally function as an umbrella for sufficient time for most users.
Sure, you could sell really nice, high quality umbrellas at a price commensurate with the quality, but why would anyone buy them? Next time it rains they're unlikely to have it handy, and need to buy another one anyway. The expensive, high quality umbrella may be an engineering marvel, but it's useless if it's not in your hand when it's raining. People want cheap crappy umbrellas to keep them dry while the rain is coming down, and the makers and sellers recognize that.
Quality, cost, and schedule are all engineering parameters, and they're weighted differently in different situations. Ignore that at your peril.
This country has turned into a Kurt Vonnegut novel.
More like a Kafka story or novel.
But the U.S. Government still requires all RFP submissions in Word
Depends on the branch you're dealing with (and sometimes the office within the branch). I've sometimes had to submit stuff as searchable PDF (no MSOffice docs accepted).
All I ever want is more screen. I want to have a zillion docs open all over the desktop and just turn my head to see them.
I want to eliminate paper-- paper files don't put themselves back in the right place when you close them- they just sit there like a lump on your desk. Why can't they file themselves?
I'd even be happy with a 4pi display that only worked in my office because it has a big helmet mount for now, but the HUD version on small glasses or a retina projector would be nice in the long run.
and a 4pi steradian display map that has both a sensor to see which way your head is looking and a separate scroll device so that you can rotate any part of the display into view.
Sorry, at least with the businesses I have a choice. With a government entity there is usually no accountability. A government will fine and penalize an abusive corporation but they will NEVER do that to themselves.
Unless the business is a regional monopoly with legislators in its pockets. Or even not a monopoly but has legislators in its pockets. How many big biz execs are we seeing under indictment? And those are just the high profile ones where the gov't thinks they have enough evidence to win. Big businesses are no more accountable than the gov't, and in many cases are less so.
With the gov't everyone owns a single share, and the accountability is at the ballot box. With local gov't, the accountability is 24/7 because the constituents know where you live, what your phone number is, where you go out to eat, who you had dinner with last night, etc. The smaller the gov't entity the more accountability there often is (if the constituents care at all).
...the US government. Try looking up "arpanet".
And that's been an absolute disaster-- they didn't anticipate all the spam in my email.
For turn based stuff, the Combat Mission series from Battlefront is an awesome WWII squad level game. It's a combination of turn-based and realtime, where each player puts in orders for the various units, and they get executed simultaneously (using a tactical AI to resolve things that happen on time scales less than a minute) and displayed as movies that each player can view from different angles. It uses keyboard and mouse, but doesn't require any sort of high speed coordination of commands.
In a similar vein there was a story about a young girl of who noticed that the sea had gone "all funny"
Yeah, a friend of mine grew up on Hawaii (and is half Hawaiian) and learned several things at a very young age:
1) how to swim like a fish
2) never turn your back on the sea-- it can reach up and grab you (I've known more than a few people who went as tourists, ignored this rule, and gone from standing on some rocks to being bashed hard against them in the water in an instant)
3) if the sea does something weird, go the other way to high ground fast.
Evocam is great. My only complaint is that the new version only works with 10.3, and the computer I want to use it on is an ancient Wallstreet with a firewire PCMCIA card. It's running the old Evocam now (under OS 9), but the new version has various features that would be nice to have.
I use it to watch the pets in the yard. I set the motion sensor to be pretty sensitive, and when they move around it posts to my web page, where I can watch them from work.
and it would double as a nifty popcorn popper for burying your friends houses