Musings

I can’t help it but I love houses that look like this one. I think most building engineers and contractors would hate it but I love it.

This makes me sad, I go to a page and see this

Apparently Click2Flash has blocked some flash-stuff, it must be really interesting and important … I better click and see what it is

What can I say?? It seem that the only reason they use Flash is to create a title!!

bad, Bad, BAD

The auction site BidRivals is pure genius … if you’re the owner.

The site works like this: they have a number of products that they sell on timed auctions, to be able to bid on an action you need to buy “bids”, every time you or anyone else add a bid (raises the price with 0.10 Skr – approx 1.5 cent) the remaining time for the auction is increased with a predetermined number of seconds.

So when you see that the timer comes close to 0 seconds you press the button, raise the price with 0.10 Skr and the remaining time is increased with for example 15 seconds. Got it.

To avoid that people would miss their chance to bid (and for the owners to lose money) there is a “Bid Agent” that automatically bids on item for you (the Bid Agents seem to take a round robin turn of bidding).

This is pure genius, those involved in the bidding pays 5kr for each bid and there is no upper limit on how long an auction can continue. If you somehow manage to win an auction you’re very very happy because the final bids are quite low – you can get good stuff very cheaply – but I guess that the owners of the site are even happier!!

Let’s make a calculation based on an actual item, an iPod Touch 32 GB which costs, according to the site, 2995 Skr. It was sold for 80.70 … so if you managed to win the auction you’re very happy!!

But wait!! This means that there was 806 bids each costing 5 Skr (assuming that none of the bids were automatic to raise the price) which means that the owners of the site got 4030 Skr for selling that Touch. That’s 1035 Skr over the recommended price !!!

So instead of selling the Touch in a shop for 2995 Skr they actually sold it for 4030 Skr. Not bad !!! If I read the information on the site correctly the buyer for this made 221 bids which means that he/she spent 1105 + 80.70 = 1185.70 to get it. So I assume the buyer is happy.

And those who lost probably think that the whole thing was exciting and that they will win the next time. So everybody is happy … it’s such a good idea to get money (if you’re the owner of the site).

Another example, a Canon EOS 50 with a 18-200 lens sold for 651.90 SKr. That means 6518 bids, each costing 5 Skr. That means that the auction gave the owners 32590 Skr. The listed “recommened price”?? 13 799 SKr (this auction took 17 hours to complete)

Pure genius

One thing that MobileMe account includes is an iDisk, a “cloud”-based disk that conveniently can be mounted on your desktop. You can use it to store various files, etc. Once in while I hear the advice that “use your iDisk to backup your critical documents” and it does sound very tempting.

But, then I start to wonder where these people live. Because iDisk is too slow to be of any practical use whatsoever. A few hours ago I started an incremental backup that took more than 2.5 hours to complete – although the complete size of the files is just 385MB.

Despite knowing the answer I decided to do a quick test. I opened the iDisk in the Finder and dragged the 385MB folder to it, leaned back and waited, and waited, and waited, and then … waited a bit more. Finally, the first pixels on the progress bar were colored to show that something had been transferred. So I continued working for a while, then I looked at the estimate time remaining and decided that I didn’t want to wait 10+ hours to see this copy operation complete. So I quit the copy operation and did some calculations based on the “time remaining” value and got a transfer speed of:

9 kilobyte per second. YES, kilobyte !!!

And this number is actually better than the incremental backup I did (1.9) but that might have involved other operations than just copy … but it’s in the same region. This is just plain silly.

I used sftp to copy the same data to a server in town (can’t really be compared to sending the data to Apples servers but still … ) and got a transfer speed of:

1.2 megabyte per second

Once again, it’s not fair to compare a local copy like this to using Apples WebDAV server but it’s at least an indication that someone at Apple need to do something to improve this.

And no, it’s not just me – there are a lot of people here in Sweden with similar experiences. And it’s not a temporary thing, it’s been like this since I first started to use MobileMe (Mac.com, whatever).

I can’t say that I’m one of those persons who are constantly traveling. In fact I’m probably very modest in my travels with approximately 1 trip outside Sweden each year. That said, I have traveled with a number of different airlines – some which are really nice, some which are less nice.

Last week I had the opportunity to travel with US Air on 6 different flights, this was the first time I traveled with US Air and hopefully the last. I was amazed, of those 6 flight the crew on 5 were quite unfriendly and looked like we were disturbing them during work (they all looked angry) – some of my friends heard comments from the crew to other passengers that were quite unfriendly and you got the general feeling that you should be privileged that you were allowed to fly with them.

On the 6 hour flight across the US they didn’t offer any kind of free snacks, across the atlantic (8 hours) there was one movie (with bad sound and bad picture) that was shown to everyone (no individual video screens) – I don’t even remember when that happened the last time.

OK, in todays economic situation I don’t expect much, but this …it was actually very nice to get onboard the SAS plane for the final flight home – no free sodas or snacks but on a 50 min flight I don’t expect that – with a crew that was friendly and nice.

Next time I’ll make sure that I’m not traveling with US Air.

This is one side of my friends cell phone

Note the headset symbol and the button below it, apparently the button has something to do with the headset … unfortunately not, my friend tells me that pressing the button causes the phone to reset. I can’t really understand why they put a headset symbol that close to the reset button.

I don’t know if it’s just me or if things have started to change recently, for me it looks like more and more people spend their time just repeating information that other have created instead of adding some information of their own.

I’ll explain: I subscribe to a fairly large number of feeds, follow people on twitter (both using the follow function and through feeds), have a friendfeed account etc. Why? Simply because I’m an information junkie and it’s so much easier to consume than to produce — but even I am starting to get fed up with this. The reason is simply that a large part of the info I see is something that I’ve seen 1-2-3-4 times before.

What happens is typically that some web company launches a new service that is in private beta but is “the next big thing”. Immediately some well known person writes a blog post with some information – perhaps even an early hands-on review – this is just fine … but then something interesting happens: others start blogging about this but doesn’t add any opinion just a link to the original post, then there are posts that links to the post that links to original, etc, etc. All without adding any information. And now when Twitter is becoming more and more popular it becomes even worse: there is a tweet that link to the original post, a retweet, a retweet of the retweet etc.

Especially sad to see is the tweets that have a link (which is shortened so you don’t really see where it links to) that links to a web page that just contains a link to the original … and a huge number of ads.

I’m not against linking or referring to other people content … but please add some information so it makes it worth reading your tweet/post — don’t just try to increase the number of hits.

If you just want to link to something consider using a service like digg, delicious instead.

I’ve just been reading a research paper and I agree on much of what was being said in it. But it took me several times before I managed to read it … why? Simply because the authors style of writing made him come across as an asshole that was just complaining on others in a very condescending way. It was really difficult trying to avoid getting upset and finish the paper.

Lesson learned: if you want to send people a message, avoid sounding like an asshole !!!

Kirk McElhearn lists a number of good enhancements that audiobooks should get, although I admit that I rarely listen to non-fiction books (it could be that source code doesn’t work well as audio ). But I’m not sure that this is correct:

Audible does have chapter breaks in its files (at least they show up on iPods; I’m not sure about other MP3 players), but these breaks are set at the ends of the original CDs, not the actual chapters of books. So you can skip ahead to the beginning of the next (virtual) CD, or go back to the beginning of the current CD, but not to the beginning of a chapter if you missed part of it. For that, you need to scrub back and try and find where the chapter starts.

I’m currently listening to Ben Bovas “Voyagers” and there the length of each chapter ranges from 8:27 to 30+ minutes. Similarly “Right Ho, Jeeves” by Wodehouse ranges between 28 to 48 minutes. Ken Follets “The Pillars of Earth” have chapter sections that are between 15 to 50 minutes (I only checked 1 of the 5 files that the book is divided into).

I admit that I haven’t actually checked to see that these chapter sections corresponds to book chapters but at least it seem to apply to “Voyagers” and “The Pillars of Earth”.

But agree completely that you get a completely different experience when listening to a book compared to reading it. In fact audiobooks are the reason why I’ve started to “read” books again, I’ve been in a phase in my life where I’ve had little time to sit down and read. But audiobooks have made it possible for me to take advantage of the time I spend in the car (I bought extra iPod support), on the bus, while waiting in line or walking downtown. The only drawback is that it’s almost impossible for me to lay down on my bed and listen, I always go to sleep