The Charlotte Observer has announced many of the participants in college football bowl games, some 198,000 years in advance. Strangely enough, many of the teams are the same as will be in bowls this year. In any case, you ought to be able to secure pretty good odds with that sort of lead time. Enjoy.
This week, Cringely talks about how Wal-Mart could use their massive store count (nearing 4000) as platforms from which they could launch WiMax service, effectively blanketing the country with high-speed wireless data services, and in so doing, bring in another $50 billion or so in revenue.
I think this is a sweet idea. I mentioned a similar tactic a few months ago when I decided that they needed to offer mail services. I've since expanded this idea to conclude that Wal-Mart could pretty easily compete with most package services (DHL, FedEx, UPS). Imagine if you could walk into Wal-Mart, do your shopping, then run through a shipping lane that would allow you to have those packages delivered to your family across the country. Especially important at this time of year, and it wouldn't cost Wal-Mart much, as they don't actually have to ship that package - they could just transfer goods frome one store to another, shuffling nothing more than paperwork.
Of course, offering a shipping service for other packages would be pretty cool too, and likely could be done pretty easily. All those trucks that deliver stuff to stores surely have enough room that they could handle a few extra packages in them. Not to mention that if you're using Wal-Mart as your depot for these packages, you get people into the store to pick it up and you end up selling them something else! They could probably offer shipping services for free, or charge a bit more if you'd like home delivery. Roughly equivalent to an advertising-based model, where you get ads with the otherwise free version, or you pay a bit more not to be bothered. Wish I had a distribution network and a few thousand locations across the country.
After talking more with Seth (who has his own plugin for counting entries in sub-categories), it appears that <$MTCategoryCount$> includes both draft entries and published ones.
Did anyone read the headline of this article and not think about Beavis and Butt-head? I might expect this from some places, but National Geographic? Who would have thought?
I've fretted about this enough, so I'm going to write the entry. You see, it really, really, really bothers me that we went to the ABC Islands, but the way in which we toured the islands makes it nigh-impossible to write about them in the correct order. Yet if they aren't in order, then they are, well, out of order, and I think that I've finally decided that that bothers me even more. So on we go.
Bonaire was really the third of the three islands we visited on the trip, but was our first destination country. As I mentioned previously, you have to actually stay somewhere for a night before they've really admitted you to the country, and we hadn't done that yet.
When I first saw the news that Froogle was offering shopping lists, I thought it was way cool. I added a book to mine. While using it, however, I see three problems.
First of all is the link to get to the list. Namely, I like the Amazon format better. No email address to expose to the world. Even if I didn't mind my email address existing on the web for all to see, I don't know that I want to give it out to everyone - even a GMail account that I rarely use. While you can enter a secondary address in your Google account, you can't use it to access your list. I tried. That's a dumb feature, since they have it in your account. And you can set up different accounts, but I've got enough accounts already, so no thanks. They could also let you use your account name instead of the email address when referencing your list. I can sign on with just my account name, without specifying my email address. But using it in the shoppinglist doesn't seem to work (at least right now).
There is also a problem that the list is only good for a single item from a single vendor. For instance, the book I picked out, I selected from Wal-Mart. That particular item (the one from Wal-Mart) is on my list. Meanwhile, all sorts of other providers could carry the book (and they do), perhaps for a cheaper price (I didn't check that). For speciality items that only come from one provider, it's not an issue. But for books, DVDs and the like, I'd much prefer to be able to enter an ISBN number or UPC code or something, and let Google show all possible options.
The final problem I have is with shipping. All of the results surely offer shipping, as that's necessary with e-commerce. But not everyone who stumbles across my list will have my address. At Amazon, my address is built into the list. People simply pick from the list and order it and it's shipped to me. They don't need to know where I live. Not that it's a huge secret or anything, as I'm not that difficult to find. But it simply isn't included in the Froogle lists. For people who know you well (and presumably where you live), it's not much of an issue. And I can even see that someone could look to see what you want then go out and buy it and give it to you as a present. But for those who would like to send a quasi-anonymous gift, as is the case with many lists used on the web, it simply doesn't work. Sorry, Google. You're close, but no cigar this time around.
That last post reminded me of one of my pet peeves, and specifically how I was reminded of it over and over again last week while we were at Disneyland. While we were wandering through Tomorrowland, we passed the Buzz Lightyear-themed eatery. The place apparently also hosts a show or two. There's no problem with that. The problem is with the tagline. It reads Lightyear's Above the Rest.
I see two options. Either the folks who created the signage don't understand how to use the apostrophe or they do understand it and figured people wouldn't get the reference unless they spelled it out.
Option 1: Some moron thought that the plural of lightyear is lightyear's. Not the case. The plural is lightyears (no apostrophe). I don't know why people don't get this, but the apostrophe denotes possession - as in belonging to Lightyear. Not the case here. They seem to be going for a play on words, and they miss.
Option 2: Another use of the apostrophe is within contractions. When you drop letters, you use the apostrophe. Witness can and not, which contracts to can't. Perhaps they are thinking that Lightyear is would contract to Lightyear's, which I could handle, but it seems to demean the wordplay, as if they have to point it out to you so that you'll get it.
In the end, I suspect that it was just someone who didn't understand. Rather than the quite catchy Lightyears Above the Rest, they had to screw it up with an uneccessary apostrophe. You'd think Disney could afford better.
I admit, I've posted a few. That sentence just made me think of Frank Sinatra. Can't imagine he'd ever sing about Quizilla. Nonetheless, he isn't the point of this post. The point is that I really don't like 'em. I haven't looked, but I've posted a number of quizzes. Did one just recently about political affiliation if that's your sort of thing. But generally, I could live happily if I never saw another one so long as I live.
Luckily, an online comic seems to address each and every quiz that I've ever seen. I must say that I rarely read online-only comics, but with this bit and the other bit that I also enjoyed, I'm thinking that perhaps I should delve a little deeper. Thanks to Three-Star Dave for the pointer. Please note that my link goes to the Dork Tower site, which seems a little slow. His link goes elsewhere, so if you're getting pokey results, try it instead.
I decided to do some cleanup around the place and get rid of some old directories and the like. I think I kept everything so that it's functional, but if you find anything that's not where you expect it to be, or if you see anything strange, please let me know. Thanks!
I figured that it was time I got caught up on some travel info. Way back in June (the 17th, to be precise), Denise and I took a trip to the ABC Islands. Where are these islands, you may ask? They are just off the coast of South America, and the three islands aren't particularly related - they are, in fact, three separate countries - but they do have a nifty naming mnemonic. Specifically, their names are alphabetical, right at the top of the chart: Aruba is A, Bonaire is B and Curacao is C. We visited all three.
