Recently I wanted to buy some new shoes. I had ordered some shoes from a place called zappos.com, and was thrilled with the experience: they had a good price on the shoes I wanted, and shipping was free – and my shoes showed up in two days. I have friends who had similarly positive experiences from ordering from zappos.com, so I didn’t think twice about where to go when I needed some new shoes. Yes, needed.
So I ordered my shoes, and got a good price. Then a few minutes later, I noticed that they have a 110% Price Protection Policy. I looked around and quickly found the same shoes somewhere else for about $12 cheaper. So I called zappos.com, and the helpful customer service representative gave me $14, and even upgraded my shipping to two day. The call took about five minutes…no red tape, fine print or the like.
It’s always worthy of note when a company “gets” customer service.
I was recently summoned to serve as a juror in the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska, in the Roman L. Hruska U.S. Courthouse here in Omaha. I was originally scheduled to start on April 4th, but earlier this week, they called me and said that the judge wanted to get the case underway and wanted us to come in early (April 1). Rather than the response I should have given (“Sorry, I have already scheduled something for that day, had I known that was the day I would need to start, I could have kept my schedule open”), I agreed to come in. Here is what the experience was like.
Here are a few points that I think many investors did not notice. The company has no acquisition targets; it’s a clear leader in its market; its balance sheet can self-finance up to three times its capacity…
…blah blah. Think about what a company does before you invest in them.
Before the iPod Shuffle came out, I had a vision for the iPod. I thought it would be useful if it included a main unit with large capacity, but had a small part of it that would clip off when on the go. The technology for playing the music, as well as the controls – like the iPod shuffle controls –, could go on the small unit. I hadn’t envisioned eliminating the display from the small unit though.
If you are a Movable Type blogging customer of FatCow such as myself, you have (or will) likely experienced some annoying problems after their upgrades. In addition to having to change your perl path to FatCow’s new perl path, you will also need to change your “Local Site Path” under Movable Type’s “Weblog Config.” To find out what your new path is, run “mt-check.cgi” in your Movable Type directory, and peep the “Current working directory.” I was getting this error message before I changed this:
mkdir /u: Permission denied at /home/users/web/b194/moo.kadavy/mt-blog/lib/MT/FileMgr Local.pm line 104
Hopefully that helps someone who is having a similar problem
These updates are annoying the hell out of me. I have always liked how simple FatCow is. I sure hope this doesn’t change that. Hopefully they will be upgrading their Perl Modules, because they don’t have many of the ones that are needed to run alot of the good Movable Type Plug-ins. The most amusing glitch is how fucked my stats are. I find it hard to believe that 226 people in the world know who Saul Bass is, much less that there have been that many people who have searched for Saul Bass this month, and much less that they have all come to my site. Also, judging by the number of comments I get, I’m thinking I don’t quite get 5,000 visits a day…especially not after having (allegedly) no visitors the first two weeks of February.
Computer lingo is full of metaphors for the physical world. You have a “desktop,” “trash,” “wallpaper,” “folders” and you “surf” the “web.” We have created a world which mimics the physical world to make the transition to computer use easier.
But sometimes, excessive computer use can have us doing strange things when we’re in the “real” world. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders is experiencing this problem. Apparently, he uses Markdown, which enables him to write his posts in a unique sort of textual shorthand that converts into valid XHTML. He uses it so much, that when he is writing in the physical world, he is now making asterisks instead of dots when writing a bulleted list, among other less-efficient annoyances.
This reminded me of some frightening symptoms of Techfluenza I have had in the past. The first time I experienced this problem, I was organizing a file cabinet for CDs of Architectural project images. They were stacking units, and I wanted my Inbox to stay on top, so as I was writing the label for the Inbox, I began to place an exclamation point before “Inbox” so it would read “!Inbox” (for those unfamiliar with this practice, placing an exclamation point at the beginning of a file or folder name will ensure that it will remain at the top of the list of your file browser). Another time I was struck with Techfluenza, was when I was building my carpet sample rug. I was trying different configurations, and changed the tiles around, but decided I wanted them back the way they were before. So, as I summoned my “undo” command, I embarrassingly (if you can be embarrassed when you’re alone) realized I was not in Photoshop.
I don’t spend enough time in the physical world to have more examples. Do you have any?
I can’t take it anymore. Yet another ingenius post by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com. I hate to be a blogger that just points out stuff that other bloggers say, but Hugh consistently amazes me. Read gapingvoid every day…especially if you are in traditional Advertising or Marketing. Then you will understand why you are about to be squashed like a bug.
The article explains how to set up a weblog like this: “Anybody can do it. If you’re technically savvy, you can create a Web page for your blog that’s based in your own machine. It’s not easy – there aren’t any places to click or windows to open, just long strings of computer commands.” Huh? In all fairness, they do go on to mention blogger.com.
Then there is the blogs that they link to in the article. I get the feeling they didn’t spend very much time scouring the internet for the best in Omaha blogs. Kenneth Ross’s blog is a pretty decent representation of what a blog is, but Cathie English’s blog hasn’t been updated in over nine months! Jitterblogs.org opens to an excessively prominent disclaimer, which links to another page, which links to five blogs, two of which have zero posts, one that has one post (from five months ago), and another that also hasn’t been updated in five months. Certainly, simply by clicking on “Omaha” in someone’s blogger profile, they would have stumbled upon the hub of Omaha-based blogging.
