Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens turns 50 today. Whoah.
Month: August 2002
Serving Sara Not Doing Well
The critics are giving Serving Sara a hard time. Really, I can’t say that I’m surprised — sure, it stars Bruce “This is my boom stick” Campbell, but I still thought it looked pretty bad from the trailers.
Washington Post: As a child, I thought pure hell meant eternal agony in the flames of Satan. Now I know it’s looking down at your watch and realizing Serving Sara isn't even halfway through.
Spliced Wire: Seeing several hundred movies a year as I do, every once in a while I’ll come across one so insufferably inept from beginning to end that it’s actually hard to review, simply because I don’t know where to begin.
Ouch. But, you thought that was bad? MetaCritic — which generates a composite score from many reviewers — gave The Adventures of Pluto Nash a 4 out of 100. Yikes.
New York Daily News: Eddie Murphy's latest comedy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, takes place in the year 2087, which is about the earliest he can hope to be forgiven.
New York Post: So unremittingly awful that labeling it a dog probably constitutes cruelty to canines.
Usability with Contingency Design
New Architect Magazine has an article that they call “Making Mistakes Well” on offering contingency plans to increase revenue:
LandsEnd.com decided it could do more than just display the typical “out of stock” message for unavailable items. Instead, the site now presents an inventory alert feature that tells shoppers when an item will be available, offers to send email notification when the item arrives, and shows shoppers similar items that are available immediately. The conversion rate at LandsEnd.com is 11 percent, one of the highest among online apparel retailers. Site creators say that this sort of dedication to the customer is a major reason why.
37 Signals also has a white paper on contingency design.
Plextor CDR Drives
My 4x CDR drive has been broken for some time now (several months, at least). And, now that I have the means, I’d like to replace it.
I have my eye on Plextor drives, as they have an excellent reputation. Normally, I’d get SCSI for sure, but Plextor’s IDE drives are actually faster (12x for SCSI vs 40x for IDE). And, with the buffer-underrun prevention technologies today, IDE is not such a disadvantage that it used to be.
So, back to Plextor. They have a 40x CDR drive (IDE), but also a 20x CDR drive that can also read DVDs (IDE). I already have a DVD drive in my box, but DVD-read capability could still be handy for when I build my new box, as I would likely use a few of the parts from my current box. On the other hand, the “non-DVD” drive can write at 40x, which is twice as fast as the other drive (in due fairness, it only works out to a 3-minute burn vs a 4-minute burn).
At this point, I’m leaning a bit towards the 20x CDR / 12x DVD-read drive, if only for longevity :-/. Any suggestions on which I should get?
First Day
Today was my first day at my new job. MapBlast said that it’d take about 45 mins to get there; so I allotted an hour for travel-time (and got there right on time).
It turns out that I have an office, and my PC has dual 21" monitors. However, the IT guy spent most of the day configuring the software and hardware on my box, so I didn’t get much done. It was an interesting day.