 Friday, 2 January 2004
 Update thy Wish List
Friendly reminder: Now's a good time to review your Amazon Wish List (or any others you have) and take off anything you've received (or bought for yourself over the last year). Amazon doesn't seem to automatically remove items purchased for you.
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BUY.COM is my site of choice, though I buy only books there. Books are nearly ALWAYS less than Amazon or B&N -- sometimes only by pennies, but cheaper nonetheless. Best feature is frequent free shipping so all the more reason. [enough of all the promoting, you'd think I get a kickback (which I don't)]. My point is that Buy.com's gift list auto elimates items purchased. Though it doesn't read minds...my significant other's family selected items from the list -- only they purchased from Amazon! To each his/her own. And I still got what I wanted!!
Depending on how much you're buying you can do
much better at www.alldirect.com where the
prices are dollars (often several) less than
amazon. Most items are 38% off of cover price.
The downsides: free shipping doesn't
kick in until $99. Sometimes they are out of
an item and they don't do back orders.
They don't have small press books. (But
neither does buy.com, it appears.)
And the
web site is kind of clunky. And of course no
frills like wish lists. I've also found
overstocks.com to be competitive with flat
rate shipping, but more variable in pricing.
(Some items are 42% off cover price.)
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Site News, Job News So! It's a new year, and I really need to renew this weblog. This last year was probably my lightest-posting twelve-month period ever since I started over six years ago.
But I'm optimistic that the site will improve drastically, and here's why: my status quo is changing, back to something like it was when I was a much better weblogger. Having made a living as an independent consultant since late 1999, I'm going back into the workforce as a Software Engineer for a local firm at the intersection of information systems and politics (which makes it right up my alley). I'm excited about working with a team of smart people again, and will leak more details as I feel like it.
(I'm still interested in the occasional consulting project; my schedule will just be less flexible.)
I was much better at maintaining a frequent update schedule back when I was able to do it after a full day's work; it's my plan to get back to posting at least thrice a week, hopefully more.
I also want to put down a fresh coat of paint on this site, but realistically that won't happen for a few months.
And speaking of politics, I've been following the various campaigns closely and writing about them elsewhere much more consistently than I've been posting here. Anyone interested in my thoughts on the upcoming elections, e-mail me and I may slide you the URL.
3 comment(s)
Congrats on the new job -- I hope it is going well!
uh-oh, something about the Iowa caucus results seem to have sent your new resolve into a tailspin... nothing in ten days!! we miss you!
Nah, it's just a period of adjustment to the new job
combined with some other loose ends
combined with all those fascinating political stories out there.
More soon.
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O'Reilly 2004 Wishes Lots of cool technoodling here:
O'Reilly Network: My Wired News Wishes for 2004 [Dec. 31, 2003] (via Backup Brain)
I wish that Apple would take the best practices of the individual iApps, and make them consistent across the whole suite. For example, why does iTunes support Rendezvous for local area sharing, but iPhoto does not?...
I wish that the USPTO would make it a requirement that any software patent application be accompanied by source code that demonstrates the invention in question. The original tradeoff in the patent system was that you gave up your trade secrets -- teaching everyone else how to do your invention -- in exchange for a limited monopoly on your invention. This one stroke would restore some balance to the patent system, since it would force companies to choose between real disclosure and patent protection, rather than having their cake and eating it too.
I wish that applications that manage contact information (from Outlook to Palm organizers and cell phones to Apple's Address Book) would stop making Roach Motels, and make it easy and consistent to share data. There's usually export and import, but it has all kinds of selective lacunae designed to keep the user locked in...
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Why can't iPhoto stream albums over the web? While I understand the pickle that Apple was in that caused them to close the door on the iTunes feature that allowed streaming of mp3s (I wish they hadn't), I think this would also be really useful for iPhoto. I'd love to have my mom easily stream iPhotos from my computer, rather than me having to upload them to a webpage (which is much more cumbersome) or email them to her. And it must be easier to do this with photos than with audio.
-Chris
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