Shipping packages and the Japanese service industry
Today I noticed this article about how shipping services are done in the US. I understand and totally agree with the sentiment. It’s the same problem any time someone needs to actually come out to your home for anything: e.g. cable installation. “Yeah we’ll be out there sometime between 8 am and 4 pm. Have fun taking a day off of work and waiting for us.”
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I will now consider Priceline emails as spam…
… except of course any involving requests I’ve made.
One of the rules for not being considered a spammer is to let people unsubscribe from your mailing list. I have tried to unsubscribe from Priceline’s list(s) three times now (a generous allowance only because I actually signed up with them). From now on, every unsolicited email I get from them is going to be marked as spam.
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Price Wars on Amazon Marketplace
I came up with a technique for making money off of school books on amazon. Find a recent book that you have for which a used version doesn’t go below a nice price. So let’s say people are selling it for $40 used. I’ve noticed that if you try to price war with them, they often lower their prices to match you. You can lower your price to say $20. The risk is that someone comes and snaps up your book for $20 which is bad (you might want to gradually lower it). But if they don’t and another seller lowers theirs to 19.95, you can immediately buy their book, put yours back up to $40 and then sell their book later when you get it.
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Summorum Pontificum
The new Pope has indicated that some old style masses are now okay to celebrate again as Catholic mass.
From Wikipedia:
Pope Benedict released the document after “much reflection, numerous consultations, and prayer.” In the document itself, he stated that the Tridentine Mass and other pre-Conciliar forms of the sacraments were “never abrogated” and that “a priest does not require any permission” to celebrate them. The Pope authorized celebration of a Tridentine Mass in parishes on Sundays and feasts where such a desire “exists stably,” along with weddings, funerals, baptism, penance, and the Anointing of the Sick. However, only the diocesan bishop may administer Confirmation according to the pre-Conciliar Pontifical.
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Hippy Games
After playing Blacman, here are a couple of games that will help you become more diplomatic and probably politically correct.
The first one is A Force More Powerful which is a strategy game in which you use diplomacy in order to avoid conflicts. Unfortunately, I bet this kind of thing doesn’t sell very well and it does come at about $20. Maybe after a while you’ll find it in the discount bin at your local tech store. See the rest of this entry…
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OpenSVN
I was off in some corner of the world wide web when I found OpenSVN. It’s a free service provided by some students in Taiwan to host subversion repositories. It’s a good solution for people who don’t want to set up a repository locally, and they say it is supported with RAID to ensure that your files won’t get lost. See the rest of this entry…
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How to become a Hacker
This is nothing new. But I think it needs to be posted from time to time on the net to remind people the culture of being a hacker in the free software/open source sense.
The tutorial is here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
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Spamming Google Maps
This was on slashdot a while ago:
An anonymous reader writes “Google organized a flyover of Sydney, Australia last Friday for Australia Day. The images taken on the day will be posted to Google Maps in a few weeks. A number of dotcoms spent hours making huge signs that would be visible from the air. It will be interesting to see whether Google will repeat the event in other cities. If they do, get prepared early. What sign would you make?”
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