On one of my printers, I’ve only printed 3 black and white pages in three months. And it’s not as though I haven’t used it (the color count is quite a bit higher).
Even Xerox did a double-take on that one. The billing web site did the rough equivalent of saying “you’ve got to be kidding.” (Ok, so it said “value is outside of historical range”, but in computer-speak, that’s roughly the same thing.)
Last night, because Christine and I weren’t having much success coming up with an activity for our date night, we decided to list a bunch of old books (30, all told) on Amazon Marketplace.
We’d done this before, and have had good success selling them — it helps that we’re both coming from library backgrounds, and the idea of dog-earing a page makes us shudder, never mind the absurdity of taking a pen or a highlighter to a book.
Well, late August is apparently the time to be listing books, especially school books, because within five minutes of entering them, we got an E-Mail saying that one of them had sold.
Ten minutes later, so had another.
Less than an hour later, the unopened DVD set, which we expected to go first*, sold.
By morning, so had a fourth, and a fifth did before lunch.
We’re up to six sold books out of thirty in the first 24 hours. So, if you have any old school books that you want to sell, now’s the time to do it!
* Every year for the past few years, one of my relatives sends me a DVD set of a different popular TV show for Christmas. I appreciate the thought, but my total TV consumption for an entire year is usually less than what you’ll find on one of those DVD sets.
Last year, it was a season of Seinfeld, so I figured it might be worth listing on Amazon, and I’d get something else instead. To our surprise, it had sold by the next morning, and at a pretty good price. So, given that, we were curious if this set (of Everybody Loves Raymond) would go as quickly, since it wasn’t near Christmas any more.
The largest section of my codebase is devoted to the parsing of mailing lists. It would be a rather small portion of the overall code if people were consistent, but people are anything but consistent when it comes to how they organize their mailing lists.
For example, the first time that most people get an international address on their list, their system breaks down, because they don’t have a “country” column. The strange thing is that it doesn’t occur to most people to just add a country column, and put the name of the country in that column.
What most people do is move the city, state/province, and postal code to the “street 2” line (if they have one), and put the country in the city or zip column. If they don’t have a “street 2”, then the city, state/province, and postal code end up in the city column (best case), and country ends up in the zip column.
Then you come across the educated folks who know that in a variety of countries (e.g. Germany), the numeric postal code comes before the city, rather than after. In that case, as a favor to whoever’s doing their mailings, they put the postal code in the city column, the city in the state column, and the country in the zip code column. That way, you can still merge “City State Zip” in that order, and it shows up more or less properly.
Except that my code knows about various countries’ address formats, and already does that swap, with the result that, in this case, the country would end up in the middle of the address.
Sorting all of that out and getting things back in the right fields involves no small bit of code, especially when all of this is being done automatically, and I’ve become a whole lot more familiar with the postal quirks of dozens of countries over the past few years as a result. :-)
Oh, and don’t get me started on the people who know that in Chinese, you write the address from most-general to most-specific, instead of the other way around. (You don’t do that for Chinese addresses that are written in English, but most people, if they know the former, don’t know the latter.) When the name of the person who’s receiving the letter shows up in the zip code column, all hope is lost.
Still, most of the time, the software is able to import mailing lists without a hitch, nowadays. I’m quite proud of it, all told.
And yet, there’s still the occasional list that causes the program to die a horrible death. Such as the one that came in yesterday, which has a first name, spouse, and last name field (which I’m ready for — take first, add “and” and spouse, and append last).
In this list, when the person listed churches, he put the entire name of the pastor in the first name field, which also isn’t that big a deal, and the software can cope with it — split out the words in the first name field and apply them to title, last, and suffix based on patterns established by many tens of thousands of other addresses. Apply the “and spouse” rule after that.
Unfortunately, he then put the entire name of the associate pastor in the spouse field, which just doesn’t work, even beyond the mental imagery associated with that choice of columns. And never mind that some of the names are going to run off the edge of the envelope (e.g. when several members of the missions committee are listed as the last name).
Alas, some things still need to be done by hand.
For any of you who are planning on writing a web-based shopping cart tool, here are two basic tips to keep in mind:
When giving a shipping estimate, asking for state and zip code is redundant. It’s okay to have both fields, but if someone (like me) puts in the zip code, don’t give an error saying that you also need the state. Because you don’t. And be absolutely sure not to just return the user to the page without giving any sort of error at all.
When someone clicks “Add to Cart”, without entering a quantity, you can safely assume that the quantity is 1. An alert box saying “The following errors were found: — please enter a valid quantity before you add this item to the shopping cart” is something of a turn-off.
Bonus point:
People considering buying something off of a web site generally want to know what the item costs. Most web sites, if they include pricing information but don’t have free shipping, don’t actually tell you what the item really costs until you get 75% of the way through the buying process. You get bonus points for having the total cost right on the page with the item’s description.
Just ask for the shipping zip code, and provide a link for internationals or fancy shipping. Store said zip code in a cookie, and always display the ground rate on the page, giving the potential customer the option to view different rates using some sort of clickable popup.
From a student who went to a conference in South Korea this summer:
One of my favorite memories this summer was trying one of the famous dishes from South Korea, Kimchee. It is basically rotten cabbage that is buried in the ground for a year and then cooked with really spicy sauce.
Since I have my own servers, and am a network geek, I’ve had very little incentive to use a service like Gmail, or (shudder) Hotmail over the years. There’s something to be said about having 100GB of disk space, fully-scriptable filters, unlimited aliases, and so on.
But, one feature of the free webmail providers that I have wanted occasionally, lately, is the “Report as Spam” button for unwanted corporate mail. Not the random junk from zombie computers. I’m talking about the companies (like, for example, everyone’s favorite we-shoot-gerbils-out-of-cannons company from the .com era) who insist on sending me monthly E-Mails offering their current back-to-school promotions even though I haven’t ordered from them in over four years.
Not that I can’t (or don’t) filter most of it out, but it actually has ramifications when you hit that button on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and others. And when companies find out that they’re suddenly getting a 25% or more bounce rate from an E-Mail campaign because a couple of these giant providers has blocked them, it should hopefully produce some changes in their marketing practices. Maybe they should go back to using gerbils.
I just made a hotel reservation for July 20th, 2008. I feel somewhat silly planning ahead that far, but the rate was $50 cheaper (per night!) than if I were just ordering a month ahead, and I didn’t even need to pay in advance.
OSCON 2008, here I come! Eventually. :-)
