I know I …

I know I linked to the Hobbit Name Generator when it first came out, but I recently took another look. I think it’s brilliant that George Bush’s hobbit name is Squinty of Simpleton.

Diet Day #1: Today I start the diet that I promised myself I would start in January. Unforseen health problems that cropped up this spring and summer prevented me from maintaining a diet and actually caused me to gain about twenty pounds. Today’s weight is 235. My goal is to lose thirty pounds by Christmas. Two meals a day and nothing to drink but water ought to do it.

Web Design Patterns. Excellent resource.

Patterns for User Interface Design.

List of NYC restaurants participating in the Fixed Price Restaurant Week from October 15-21.

My favorite Onion headline of all time: Graphic Designer’s Judgment Clouded By Desire To Use New Photoshop Plug-In

RIAA Challenge: I’ve got a bunch of MP3s on my laptop. I’d like to see the RIAA try to hack into my Powerbook G4. In fact, if they manage to do this I’ll gladly give them my MP3s. Good luck guys.

Marketing Numbskulls: You’d think that marketing people have a clue. Apparently not. Today in my email I received a promotional email from Buy.com with the title “Win a Porsche Boxster!” I thought sure, why not, I’ll enter. I then caught the little notice “Florida and New York residents are not eligible.” OK, explain to me this. Buy.com knows I am a New York resident (they have my shipping and billing address), so why did they send me and every other New York and Florida customer of theirs this email? I’m debating as to whether to report this email as spam, since it’s obviously of no use to me. The marketing schmucks at Buy.com need to buy a clue and learn to strip out ineligible customers from their customer database before spamming them with this kind of promotion.

More E-commerce Silliness: Over the years I’ve bought a number of things from Other World Computing (MacSales) and have never really had a problem. Until now. Last night I was trying to order a new hard drive for my Powerbook G4 and got all the way into the checkout process only to notice that they had my billing address as being my old address in Michigan. I looked for a long time for a way to change this info (you can change the shipping address, but not billing) and finally gave up. Today, I called them up and placed an order over the phone. I spoke with a very pleasant sales representative who explained to me that there was a limitation in their database software that prevented existing customers from changing their billing address. Huh? That’s crazy, I said. I asked the sales rep to delete my old account so I could create a new one with the same userID. My guess is that it’s not really a “database limitation” but rather the undesired side effect of patching a security hole.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at October 16, 2001 05:05 PM

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