Kinda makes me want some Wheat Thins right now.
…but not too many…
Are any PEOPLE actually buying my books?!?!?!
I found this story really amusing, and not simply because I’ve witnessed a much smaller scale version of this myself with my own books being available “like new” and “used” via these resellers at prices below my own list price, too…
How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy
http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/02/bots-seized-control.html
In a world where robots will battle each other electronically for the best prices, are consumers even needed as part of that equation anymore at all???
“Come on – come at me, bro!!!”
I just love this picture I took when I was out on my walk with Cleo a little while ago. Believe it or not, I actually found this guy just hanging out in somebody’s driveway – it’s actually not the first time I’ve found a crayfish in our neighborhood, and I’m still fairly baffled because in either situation it’s not like there were any ponds or drainage ditches anywhere even remotely close by that he could’ve originated from or anything!
Very weird, and I especially enjoyed the final pose that I caught on camera – this was after a good minute and a half of Cleo trying to make nice with him by way of her mouth, so I guess I can kinda see why he might’ve been just a wee bit defensive at that point… 😯
Windows … on an iPad?!
Although admittedly my first thought upon reading about this new OnLive Desktop service that brings Windows to the iPad was something along the lines of “Who would actually want this???”, I do have to admit that it really is pretty neat technology that’s making it all happen. It boasts gigabit Internet speeds and the ability to finally view Flash on iOS, in addition to all of the popular MS Office apps that you’re used to running at the office, and the way it does all of this is not so much by actually running all of this directly on the iPad itself, but instead by giving you an app that essentially makes a remote desktop connection to a Windows machine somewhere else doing all of the real work.
Now at a mere $5/month, I’m not sure how they’re handling the licensing aspect of this, but basically OnLive has a giant server farm somewhere connected to a massive internet pipe, so all your own connect needs to handle is a video stream of your virtual desktop far, far away in server land – the actual super-fast data transfer from the Internet to your Windows desktop all takes place on their end. Same goes for any native-Windows apps that you may want to run – everything takes place in lala land, you get to run whatever your heart desires on your iPad, and through it all iOS is none the wiser!
It’s another interesting step in the direction of cloud computing, this time off-loading not only your data but nearly the entire computer to the cloud, accessible via a (relatively) thin and inexpensive front end. And granted, I’ll still be a little curious to see if it actually goes anywhere simply because as iOS and Android become more prevalent, I think Windows itself is continuing to slip, but it’s still a neat direction for computers in general to be taking. 8)
The (Sometimes) Subtle Art of Targeted Advertising…
I thought this was a really intriguing article:
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
On one hand, the analytics behind the data is kinda brilliant – the idea of building a customer profile to be able to predict specific life-changing events within a few months time is just amazing to me. It reminds me of a documentary I saw a while ago about how Walmart’s automated shipping system works because they actually take into account weather patterns to ship not only hurricane supplies like water and canned foods in preparation for upcoming storms, but also Pop-Tarts because, well, their sales data shows that people go through a lot of Pop-Tarts when there’s a hurricane bearing down on them off the coast! 🙂
On the other hand, though, I can’t necessarily overlook all of the ethical quandaries that stem from such digging – like the fact that they not only use membership cards, but also just straight up credit card purchases as a way to tie all of your sales data together (neat, in my eyes), and the idea that they also buy consumer data from other conglomerates to merge together with their own (not as neat).
And of course, the glaring issue stemmed from this particular article – what happens when a profile is built that you would’ve preferred to keep quiet due to personal reasons, or perhaps even tragedy??? The woman who starts getting coupons for her unborn baby is one story when Target predicts that she’s pregnant before she’s even told her own family, but what about in the case where somebody has a miscarriage and thus no longer wants to get those kinds of coupons? Maybe this isn’t really that big of a deal – I don’t know, because of all those Target coupon books that I’ve gotten to date, none have been filled with deals on frozen pizzas and LEGOs and video games and Pop-Tarts that would drive me to make an impromptu visit to their store!
I think part of the reason why I’m not so concerned with the overall ethical implication here, though, is that as a general rule, I honestly don’t really have a problem with targeted advertising simply because I’d much rather view ads relating to things that I personally care about than just random crap that doesn’t affect me in the slightest. I know a lot of people would throw out the notion that they don’t like having to view ads altogether, and maybe I don’t share that philosophy because I sell advertising on all of my websites and have come to accept that without them, a lot of content creators would never get paid for their work. So if I’m visiting a video game review site and they run ads pimping out a new RPG that I might actually want to play myself, that’s better in my eyes because instead running something like an ad for Raisins (*because I have a bag of raisins on my desk as I write this…) doesn’t really help either of us – I’m not going to click the ad because I have no desire to see raisin-related ads intermixed with video game reviews, and the publisher misses a click because an ad for the new Zelda game might’ve stood a better chance at gaining my attention because I actually care about that.
Now whether the general public is, well, in general ok with this sort of thing … that’s a little trickier to tell. My gut would be that honestly, I don’t think most people care simply because they wouldn’t even think about what’s being assumed about them behind the scenes unless you told them. And I don’t necessarily think that it’s deceptive for a store to do intelligence like this to help improve their own sales, either – it’s really just another step down the path of making the store inviting, doing market research to identify which products sell the best at which positions on shelves, how many different choices are the optimum to give a customer, and so forth. A lot of people want to criminalize the types of things that take place here, much like the efforts that go into keeping a gambler inside a casino spending money, but at the end of the day the consumer still had to step through the front doors in the first place.
Bottom line – I’m going to go grocery shopping anyways, so if Target wants to analyze my purchases and send me coupons for FREE LEGOS to get me in the door to buy other crap, then more power to ’em! 
Order of the $1.25 MILLION Stick
Amazed.
Envious.
Astonished.
I could go on, but you’re smart people so I think you probably get the point. The huge Order of the Stick Reprint Drive ended earlier today and it looks like Rich Burlew should have no problems whatsoever getting every last one of his out of print books back on shelves again, not to mention all sorts of other goodies that clearly he was just pulling out of his ass every time he heard that everyone had blown yet another one of his goals justly out of the water!
$1,254,120 from a total of 14,952 backers in 30 days.
An average of about $84/backer, $1,742/hour.
To have that kind of a dedicated readership would be, well, see previously mentioned words above. It was almost amusement in itself to watch the “community discussions” that took place in the comments sections on Kickstarter because these weren’t just people offering up a singular donation for a set prize. There was bartering for reward levels and one-upping each other and bets on how long it would take to crack $X, almost like an RPG being played out by the masses to collectively score Rich as many points as possible! At every turn when I would check, my internal dialogue would be, “Well, they’ll get to $X, but it’ll probably taper off soon and $Y is just way too much money…” and then the next day, $Y was in the rear view mirror and they were bearing down on $Z off on the horizon…
Good god, that’s A LOT of money!
Of course, as Dave Kellett pointed out interestingly enough on Twitter, we mustn’t forget that the entire $1.25 million is all taxable income, so Rich can probably plan on giving a healthy $400,000 at least back to the government in taxes. But still, talk about a problem to have! Hopefully he thought about that long before he started the actual drive, though, and took his full shipping and taxes and etc… into account to ensure that he can still make a profit. I’m sure that he would’ve had to, to be honest with you – how else could anyone even realistically do business without knowing what their true profit margins at the end of the day actually look like?
More so, though, I sincerely hope that he has a good handle on exactly how he’s going to fulfill almost 15,000 rewards because I can speak from experience that the quickest way to sour someone’s opinion is to take their money and then subsequently take forever to actually give you the thing that they promised you for your donation. I had it happen to me with another webcomic artist on Kickstarter a year or two ago – I helped to pre-pay his next book printing and then the guy took an entire year to actually ship my copy out, all the while he was selling other copies in his store and heavily promoting them on Facebook. It rubbed me the wrong way so bad that when it finally came I didn’t even care to look in it and I almost never read the strip online anymore because my mind goes back to how I wanted to help support the guy and he took advantage.
But hopefully that won’t happen with this one, though!
I have done other Kickstarter drives since and all of the rest have been exactly as promised, so I can wish Rich nothing but the best as he now attempts to tackle the undoubtedly overwhelming task of actually living up to being able to raise over a million dollars for his creative works! At a glance, the guy’s got something like 25,000 books to ship out, 9 new stories to write including 3 custom ones based on reader requests, just scads of other swag to send out as well, not to mention having grabbed the title of most successful creative Kickstarter of all-time, I’m sure a few people will want to interview him, too!
Again, though, what an awesome problem to have…
Thin Post : Quick Review, Week #6
Don’t get me wrong – I’m extremely grateful for having lost weight this week, but frankly I really have no idea how it actually happened! 😯
Between The Melting Pot for Valentine’s Day on Tuesday and then spending Friday – Sunday running around with Sara being in the hospital, I did a lot of eating out last week, so to see that despite all of that craziness my weight still dropped even just a little was an incredible sign this morning! I guess in hindsight I did still manage to get my cardio in on most days and my extra mileage probably made up for not using the elliptical, but still … whew!
Today’s Weigh-in: -0.6 pounds from last week
Net Loss for 2012: 6.4 pounds
Last Week’s Exercise:
- 5 days of cardio (21.5 miles of walking)
- 0 days of strength training 😳
Last Week’s Diet: terrible – tons of eating out, on account of the wife being sick and subsequently spending the weekend in the hospital… 😳
Last Week’s Sleep: also not great, for pretty much the same reasons!
Goals for Next Week:
- Exercise – maintain cardio, get back on track with strength training
- Diet – ramp the eating out back down
- Sleep – Ha! Errrr, I mean try again with bedtimes between 1-2am
The Simpsons #500 / The Apprentice, Season WHATEVER…
Don’t you hate it when you get yourself all geared up for watching something and then it ends up just being so-so?
The Simpsons was ok – not terrible, but certainly not hilarious, either. And I know the running joke is that The Simpsons has already done everything, but the plot of the family getting kicked out of Springfield lost point from me right off the bat simply because all I could think about was the movie from a few years ago … which I loved. Not to mention, the little tagline at the end about waiting before rushing to the Internet to say how bad it was? Would’ve been a lot funnier if it hadn’t been partially true. 🙁
As for The Celebrity Apprentice – I mean, I know in my heart at this point I pretty much only watch this show as a guilty pleasure because most of the celebrities are actually better known and are/were more successful than Trump himself, plus just the way he carries himself is so over the top full of himself. Like I’ve said in seasons past, the core problem with this show vs. the regular people version is there’s no reason for Gene FUCKING Simmons to give a shit what Donald Trump thinks about him!
Plus, I didn’t really like that George Takei was getting crap right off the bat.
Also, I think the fact that one of their 18 chosen participants was willing to quit after a single episode continues to speak volumes about it getting tougher and tougher to find celebrities to be on the show.
Don’t get me wrong – I wrote last month about some of the celebs in particular who I was interested to see and I’ll still keep watching just for my own indulgences, but man this show’s days gotta be numbered here soon, one would think after watching a riveting, two-hour premiere about the exciting world of running a sandwich shop in New York City.
Hospital Time != Fun Time
So I haven’t posted recently because the last couple of days have been kinda crazy…
Friday afternoon I ended up taking my wife into the ER because in addition to fighting being sick for the last couple of weeks, today she started having heart palpitations and it understandably kinda freaked her out. We probably sat there for over 4 hours before even seeing a doctor, but then after a few hours in the actual ER they ended up admitting her for the weekend because they wanted to run a bunch of other tests and help get her nausea under control, just to be sure.
I was finally able to bring her back home this afternoon, and ultimately it was really a weird mix of emotions over the weekend because ironically enough, it was probably the longest amount of time that I’ve really spent with her in a while! In between running all around to get food and ice cream because hospital food sucks, we watched movies and TV and played some games back and forth on our phones in real-time that we normally play a turn at a time here and there, but at the end of the evening when the time came for me to head on back home to take care of Cleo and everything there, it really hit me of how much I didn’t like having to leave my wife there in that cold and lonely hospital all by herself.
Granted, I know that it was realistically a little easier for her because it’s the hospital where she works at, so not only is she otherwise there everyday anyways and knows a bunch of the people there, but most of the night crew that were on her floor actually worked for her last year before she moved to another department! So I’m sure that more or less she was fine, but in some respects it actually reminded me of the night before our wedding – we had all gone out for our rehearsal dinner and then spent some time drinking afterwards, and when she was ready for bed I went up with her to say goodnight (because we followed that goofy tradition of sleeping separately that night).
I remember it hitting me really hard just having to say that short goodbye then, too, and at the time it might’ve helped me to write better vows because that’s exactly what I went to do when I went back to my own room … but I guess it’s just weird how some of those types of moments hit you harder than others do. We can not see each other all day and if I’m working late she might even be getting ready for bed when I get home sometimes, and yet it doesn’t phase me because I’m still coming back to the same bed as her … eventually. But I definitely didn’t like the feeling of leaving her behind, so to speak – and I don’t know if part of it was maybe being around so many sick and dying people and having that floating in the back of my head, as unlikely as it honestly was…
Nonetheless, despite the house being absolutely a mess and completely out of food, it’s good to have both of us back home again. I’ll probably try to start tackling random stuff around the house again tomorrow, but tonight I’m kinda just looking forward to sitting back, relaxing with my not-hospitalized-wife, and watching the 500th episode of The Simpsons. Anything else after that is just gravy.
Web video is here to stay!
I find myself continuing to regularly be amazed by the quality of new web shows that I stumble onto on a regular basis. Considering that the “production crew” for these shows is typically a fraction of any regular television broadcast, if not simply the host and one guy behind the camera, if I worked on one of those regular, old school TV shows, I myself would be getting a little nervous!
Correction: *I* myself would probably say to hell with the big, overhead production and get a few of my friends together to do a show all by ourselves, but that’s just me… 😉
Nevertheless, I thought I’d take this otherwise drab Thursday evening to share a few of the newer online shows that I’ve been enjoying lately.
The Point – A political round table hosted by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks – kind of like Real Time with Bill Maher, but slightly less cynical.
SciShow – A really fun and informative show about … SCIENCE!!! This guy reminds me a lot of Bill Nye, and the show is beautifully produced – I’m honestly not sure why it’s not on the Discovery channel already.
My Drunk Kitchen – So Hannah drinks, but at least she’s a funny drunk, and also sometimes food even happens along the way…
CheckPoint – Weekly commentary and gentle prodding on video game news – I like it because despite barely having time to play, I still get about 85% of their jokes!