I was trying to come up with alternate titles to “Craigslist sucks”; that was the best I could come up with.
Craigslist, as you have probably heard of, is a thriving online forum-based community which happens to include a huge classifieds as well as dating section, and supports itself by charging for job listings at a discount – something that only works because of its enormous size and readership. If you’ve ever used Craigslist, though, you were probably looking at or posting at the classifieds.
I’ve found the Craigslist listings to be, well, a bit lacking. It’s like Craigslist took the worst elements of the Internet and traditional classifieds and mushed them together – terrible pre-1997 layout and design, free and unlimited postings inviting spam, limited 10-day run with no opportunity to reorder postings, no system whatsoever to validate the user’s identity, etc.
Seems like Mr. Carnegie was onto something.
Maybe two or so weeks ago, I discovered that my mom’s new Accord didn’t come with updated maps, which are stored on a DVD in the back of the car. The dealer didn’t want anything to do with it, so our only recourse was to call up Honda and ask for a new one.
Like I wrote, I had already written one letter asking about the situation, but that didn’t prompt any response. I had been reading Dale Carnegie’s book on peer influence and interpersonal relationships, so despite the 70 years that have passed since he gave his advice, I figured I’d give it a shot and use his techniques in a second letter to Honda.
And lo, three days later I got a call from a Honda customer support manager. She was nice, gave me a bit more information on how Honda DVD’s worked, and volunteered to replace my mom’s DVD if in fact they gave her one older than what she was supposed to have.
Those who use Mozilla Firefox will know that the true power of the browser is in the form of extensions, little free programs one can download that run off the Firefox browser platform and form simple tasks like check your Gmail and block annoying popup ads.
I had to upgrade my work laptop today, though, and while the Firefox Extensions system makes downloads and installs simple, keeping one’s preferences and settings on a reinstall or even across multiple machines is a chore. If you have your browser just the way you like it, it’s going to take time to (re)find and (re)install those extensions and then manually tweak them; the configuration changes I made were done over time, so finding that one options dialog and that one check box actually takes a bit of hunting and sleuthing on my part.
As I was saying, my topic of choice was Tetris DS and I wanted to elaborate on the online system, since that’s what I’ve been playing a lot of lately.
You’re assigned a username based on your cartridge and given an initial ranking of 5000, then you play in matches where winners gain x points while losers lose x points, the amount of points exchanged is dependent on your respective rankings (e.g., if you beat a player much more highly ranked than you, you get a lot of his points, but if you beat someone lower than you you gain relatively little). Players can only choose to wait for an opponent, they cannot pick who they play against.
It is really similar to Yahoo! Games, which I’m sure anybody who reads this has heard of or tried.
Ten months ago on a whim, I went into Best Buy and bought an Nintendo DS, an investment that has repaid itself in full and then some. The little handheld has kept me occupied on long flights, long bus trips, long weekends at home, sometimes long waits while organizing for another online game.
And it works because the console features fun little games that don’t take long to play. In particular, they started this free WiFi service a few months back, and I’ve been a fan of online play ever since, especially amazing coming from such a small machine. The game I’ve been keeping myself occupied with is none other than the classic Tetris DS.
Tetris is fun and challenging to begin with, but multiplayer brings a whole other dimension to the game. We had tried a few matches in the Factset offices complete with teams, handicaps and level-changing items; great fanatic fun for all, really. Online play takes it to yet another level, where one can play against the world in the comfort of one’s bed, whilst camping in the bathroom, or trying to make packaged ramen (note: neither the game nor the noodles will tolerate pausing in the middle of their respective tasks).
More thoughts in the next post, I’ll try to keep them somewhat short to avoid glazing eyes.
So, I was taking my sweet time going home to Sacramento this weekend, having just lost track of the number of times I was stuck in traffic slowdown trying to get out of the Bay. It’s perhaps sometime in the mindless inching march of the metallic mobile orchestra that I pieced together a mundane realization – transportation in California sucks.
It’s a given that public transportation in California is pretty bare, especially when compared to the developed and mature infrastructure on the American east coast and elsewhere in the world. That’s not supposed to be a problem, though, since California is big and vast, and people here would rather drive instead; so why are our roads so poorly designed?
Ok, so that was probably a bit unfair – there are roads which are well designed, cities that are laid out pretty well and in a straight-forward manner, and I’m sure there are all sorts of challenges to be had with building public roads on the hill that is under San Francisco. Most of our roads and major highways/bridges are also over 30 years old, so chances are Caltrans didn’t think about scaling its road system to accomodate quite this many cars.
