Author: Ashley Bischoff

Usability with Contingency Design

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

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

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

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

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

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.

Oatmeal?

Ashley Bischoff11 Comments

Over the years, I’ve read some good things about oatmeal and health, so I figured that I’d look into it. As it turns out, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually had oatmeal, so I’m not sure if it tastes any good :-/. How is it?

On the other hand, I try to eat relatively healthily and exercise anyway; so, if the verdict is that oatmeal is gross, then I won’t feel bad about not eating it ;).

alex.numJobs++

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I am once again employed! I’ll be doing front-end web coding at Steamatic in Fort Worth, and I start on Monday.

Steamatic is a privately-owned business — they have an arm that deals with franchised carpet-cleaning, and another (BMS Cat) that deals with large-scale catastrophe clean-up such as plane crashes and WTC-like clean-up.

PS: Mike, I knew I should have defined NUMJOBS as a constant ;).