December 2009 Archives

I saw Avatar the weekend it came out. In 3D, of course. And it was good. Maybe even really good. Certainly the effects were amazing. As a UI designer, I was really impressed at his vision of 3D projected user interfaces. And the level of detail of everything on the alien planet was staggering. Sigourney Weaver was fantastic in her role. I loved her last line. Totally fitting of a research scientist.

But. There were problems. He nailed the design. He created his own alien language, with grammar, writing, and accent. James Cameron is known for nailing all the details. Which makes it an immense travesty that he chose the Papyrus font for the subtitles. OK, maybe it's a custom version, but the overwhelming similarity makes the origin clear. This is the best he could do? I mean, papyrus is right down there with Comic Sans as an overused, inelegant font whose use says I am a lazy, unimaginative designer who slapped this together in 20 minutes." James Cameron, you wound me, and all of the other typophiles worldwide.

The plot was a mess. Maybe not at the Star Wars prequel level, but certainly not even close to the quality of the original Star Wars movies. The bad guys are so one dimensional, that the irony of them appearing in a 3D movie did not escape me. The physics of the floating mountains was a bit too much for my suspension of disbelief. But the thing that just made me laugh out loud at the sheer lunacy was that a mechanized cyber-suit would have a proportionally sized knife attached for hand-to-hand combat. I could maybe see a blade attachment somewhere on the suit for cutting, but why require the suit to wield it in a hand just like a human? There are so many drawbacks to that design, I can't believe it made it into the movie.

Sure, it was entertaining, but I'm not rushing out to see it again.

OK, it's trite and much criticized, but 25 years ago instead of just complaining about how things are, Bob Geldoff (and Midge Ure) got off their asses and actually did something to try to improve the world as they saw it.

Gotta love the 60s slang in the lyrics. Far out, man. But the music is great.

Yes, in fact that was awesome.

Buying music is so 20th century, right? But hey, I still do it. There's a lot of good yet obscure alt rock and power pop out there, or compilations with the odd song from a favorite artist. And this music simply isn't available for digital distribution.

Amazon is a great place to go to find deals on this sort of music. The used listings can offer some really great deals on these albums. High supply and low demand pushes the price of some of these albums down to 1¢. With shipping, it works out to be $2.99. It's a lot cheaper than a new one, and even cheaper than a digital download (if it's even available). And it's cheap enough to take a bit of a chance on.

I'm also trying to clear out some of my old, unwanted albums. As I was listing them, I noticed something interesting about pricing. For all of the albums I listed, I priced it to be the cheapest one. But then if I checked back an hour later, I'd find someone had lowered their price to a penny below mine. If I lowered mine again, the same thing would happen. Repeat enough times, and it turns into a race to 1¢. Clearly they had an automated system doing the pricing. Even tying them for lowest price wasn't good enough. They wanted to be the cheapest, if only by a penny.

Now that I know the game, let me play it to my advantage. I list my album as in horrible condition: massive scratches that skipped horribly, cracked case, no booklet, etc. Sure you can buy it for 1¢, but do you really want to? Compared to my offering, the other one for 1¢ is clearly the one to buy. So someone buys it. After that copy is gone, the competition for the low price is gone. I can raise my price back up to something reasonable, and yet still be the lowest priced one in the list.

But of course I couldn't just stop there. I then realized that I could be that guy who gets the great deal on a used CD for only $2.99 shipped. All I needed to do was find a CD available by one of these shops that does automated pricing. I list my own copy of that CD for sale for 1¢ with the same unappealing comments, and wait. Sure enough, within half an hour the other seller's listing automatically drops to 1¢. I buy it, then close out my own listing.

A couple of shops that I know do this are Doolicity and  Mister Happy's. I'm sure there are others too. Hope you find some great deals out there on some great music.

Very Jellyfish-influenced power pop. Strong melody in the chorus. The falsetto is a bit forced at the top, but otherwise the song is power pop perfection. I love it.

Flamenco-style guitar, a hushed vocal in the verses, and a subtle driving beat that picks up in the chorus with more intense vocals and the backing string quarter notes. I like.

I was looking for an inexpensive USB flash drive on TigerDirect to fill out an order for free shipping. I noticed what I thought was a great deal on a 4GB one: only $9. But after I added it to my cart, I noticed the price of another item had changed. It went up by $4. Curious, I checked the TigerDirect site in a different browser.

Nearly all of the items I was looking at buying had different prices in the different browsers. The wifi networking cards were $2 more expensive, the headphones $5 cheaper... it was odd. After a bit of math, I ended up buying the cheaper cart (saving $4!).

If you do buy from TD, be sure to use Google Checkout for an additional $5 off.
 

It's a bit country, but the rhythm and chords of the piano work really well against the counterpoint of the vocals. I also like the contrast of the driving rhythm of the verse versus the more laid-back chorus.

Google kicked off a wave of desktop search utilities that produced clones from Microsoft and Yahoo, and eventually got this functionality baked into the OS. However, only the Yahoo utility was ever that useful to me. That's because you could actually set it to index all of the files on your computer, including system files, program files, hidden files, etc. These are the files I'm most interested in. Whether I'm trying to see if a particular piece of malware is on the computer, tracking down a program I installed, or looking for a file that was downloaded into a hidden Temp folder, most of my use cases involve files outside of my Documents folder.

There are a few problems with Yahoo! Desktop Search, tho. They stopped supporting it years ago, pushing people who want updates and support to pay a 3rd party. Second, it actually was overkill for what I needed, indexing the contents of all files rather than just the file names. Finally, it doesn't work very well on Win7. It crashes a lot.

I recently discovered Everything, and it's perfect for my needs. It only indexes the file name, but it does so for every file on your computer. It's wicked fast. And it works great on Win7. This utility has an official spot on my "core Windows apps and utilities."

Here's a song I really like that I bet most readers haven't heard before. Nice variation between soft and hard, and a great chord progression in the bridge at 2'59"

Soldier's daughter
Did your daddy,
   did your daddy hurt you?
Did he make you feel bad?
Did he poison your views,
   with the water he was raised on?

I'm probably just overreacting, but Facebook made some changes to their default privacy settings that seem a bit too self-serving. They are trying to "encourage" users to open up their information so that it can be seen by anyone on the internet, including search engines.

That's not so bad. I'm savvy enough that I know how to set things back to private. I'm sure 80% of users don't, and probably don't care.

But what's really annoying is the stuff you can't control. With this change, your home town, pages you're a fan of, friends list, and a host of other items are default public and there's nothing you can do about it. So I'm in the process of clearing out as much of this data as I can. If companies and brands notice an exodus of people "un-fanning" their pages, now you know why.

More info on this change from the EFF.

iPhone app developers occasionally drop the price of their app to generate more interest. Of course the most interesting price is free. The app shopper web site is a nice, comprehensive good list. If you're looking for something new for your iToy, check it out.

I suppose it was about 10 years ago when I told Amazon to close down my account. There was news of them storing and sharing personal data inappropriately, and I got all indignant and exercised my power as a consumer. Yeah! Take that, big corporation! Maybe now you'll learn how to treat customers.

Well, it turns out Amazon does know how to treat customers. Granted, I've had my share of issues with them over the years, but overall they continue to impress me. While they don't always have the best price out there, they do a lot of the time. And when they don't it's pretty darn close. If you didn't shop around and just bought from Amazon, odds are you'd be doing pretty well. Even in a category you know nothing about, if you sort by best-selling (the default) or user ratings, you'll find some pretty good options. (Still, I always check any purchase against eBay and Google Products before buying; you never know…)

Plus the free shipping is simply genius. I know I tend to buy more stuff because shipping is "free". Even though we all know it's baked into the cost of the item. That's ok. Psychologically it works better for me this way. And with Amazon doing it, it puts tons of competitive pressure on the little guys to do the same. In the past week I bought an $8 USB flash drive and a $17 motherboard from smaller shops, and both had free shipping. Love it.

Amazon has even gotten better with the returns process. I did 2 returns over the past year. The first they had me use a pre-paid shipping label. They ended up charging me for the shipping, but it was using the Amazon negotiated rate, so it was really low. And the convenience of not having to go through a whole 'nother transaction was great. The other time I had to pay up front, but they reimbursed me. Apparently they were doing a "free shipping both ways" trial taking a page from Zappos' book.

Amazon Marketplace is great, as both a buyer and seller. I've sold a bunch of books and CDs over the years. The cut they take is definitely steeper than eBay, but it's a lot more convenient. And I've found the liquidity of the market to be a lot higher. You can sell an item faster and for a higher price on Amazon than on eBay.

Amazon MP3 is still my favorite place to buy music. They were the first big player to go DRM-free, and they are the only one to offer 256kbps, as far as I know.

And of course their affiliate program was the first and is still one of the best ways for an average person to earn a little cash on the web (in addition to Google AdSense). I use Amazon affiliate links for the majority of my product and service reviews on Rated Best. It's making me enough money to cover the cost of the domain and hosting.

While I don't use it, the Amazon Web Services have also been a trendsetter in the cloud computing space, and they are enabling a lot of small web startups to bootstrap and not worry about IT infrastructure or scaling.

Lest you think I'm a fan boy, I should point out that I've never had an Amazon credit card, and only signed up for Prime once as a free trial. I don't own a Kindle (and don't plan on buying one), and I think the Gold Box and other time sensitive deals are just BS to get people to buy stuff they really don't need.

That said, overall they have an amazing selection, great prices, good customer experience, and free shipping. And that's why I keep coming back.

Yesterday I bought an item from Amazon that was $24.33. The cutoff for free shipping is $25. So I used the Amazon Filler Finder site to add an 80¢ book to the order, bringing the total to $25.03 and qualifying me for free shipping.

Today, I got an email telling me the items will be shipped separately. Now that's really inefficient, especially considering I didn't really want the book. I only ordered it to get free shipping.

What I want is the ability to round up to free shipping. Let me just pay the extra 77¢ without actually buying anything else. It reduces consumerism (buying crap I don't really need), and eliminates the waste of shipping something that isn't wanted. The rounded up cash could either help subsidize the free shipping program. Or—for bonus PR points—it could be given to a non-profit of my choice.

(Oddly enough, the item I bought yesterday for $24.33 now costs $25.23 today. Hmmm.)