Archive for the 'Wantlist' Category

BEST BUY: The Text Adventure

Published
by
Britain
on 14 Jul 08
in Funny, Unintentionally and Wantlist
. 0 Comments

I feel this Best Buy pricing phenomenon is best described in the terms of an Infocom text game:

> LOOK
You are at a Best Buy. There is a Blueshirt and 3 Memory Cards here.

> LOOK BLUESHIRT
A thin trail of spittle glistens on his chin.

> KILL BLUESHIRT
You heartless bastard.  Just look at the memory cards.

> LOOK MEMORY CARDS
They are all Sandisk SD memory cards. One is 2GB, one is 4GB, and one is 2GB Ultra High Speed. Which one is the most expensive?

> TAKE 4GB
Wrong. It’s on sale for $24.99 this week.

> TAKE 2GB ULTRA
Also wrong — it’s on sale for $19.99 this week.

> TAKE 2GB REGULAR SPEED
Hey-ooo, big spender! $26.99!

> INVENTORY
You haven’t bought it yet.

> CHECK OUT
The clerk rings you up and offers you a 3-year Protection Plan for… $26.99.

> SOUTH
You are at the exit.  There is a yellow shirt here and a gate.  The yellowshirt asks to see your receipt.

> SAY “I KNOW MY RIGHTS”
You are forcibly removed from the store.  Local police are called, refuse to arrest, but bemusedly ask you why you didn’t just show them the damned receipt.

Abort, Retry, Fail?
>IGNORE

Okay, this kind of wandered a bit, but you get the idea.

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WorldCat Wordpress Plugin

Published
by
Britain
on 31 Dec 07
in Ephemera and Wantlist
. 2 Comments

!!! WARNING !!!
January 6, 2008 — This takes any 10 or 13 digit number and URLs it.  It broke my flickr links for a few days there.  So if you’re using this with QuickPost, maybe don’t use this.  I will work on a better solution in the coming days and weeks.

We now return you to the original pitch.  -B.
Ever wanted to blog about books, but not interested in giving any money to The Website That Sells Everything?

I work in a library and I want to encourage the borrowing of books through my library and others like it. I am not the only one. It will take a little time to develop or cobble together something that will serve as a versatile and media-rich alternative to the plugins that stick splashy ads for The World’s Biggest Bookstore all over your blog. I hope to explore that in 2008.

Today, though, I got all inspired by Banas’ adaptation of his favorite WP theme to include 2.0 widgets:

If you entertain fantasies of there lurking somewhere, somewhere, a theme, widget, or addon that will spontaneously uncork the fountain of wisdom you’ve been waiting to pour out onto the internet - well, please don’t stop fantasizing on my account - but the only thing that’s going to uncork that fountain is you.

And Banas was right. So I started small, by bastardizing Daniel Coe’s ISBN to Amazon Link WP plugin. Daniel’s well-formatted code made it rather simple to change the Amazon URL his script creates to a simple WorldCat link, like the one you see here to my favorite book, Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy”: 0575061596.

It will do this with any 10 or 13-digit number. That means if you put a ten digit [i.e. US or Canadian] phone number in a blog post, it will turn it into a WorldCat link unless you put the area code in (parentheses) or something. It also means that if leading zeroes cause the number to be other than 10 or 13 digits it will probably be hosed, so count the digits.

Unfortunately, right now, this only makes links to WorldCat, a database of OCLC member libraries. WorldCat, by its membership nature, doesn’t index all the world’s libraries, but it’s a start. You could print the resulting page and take it to your local library, where a staff member will glean the knowledge they need to get the book to you.

Thanks, Daniel, for making your plugin available under the GPL.

Download it here: WorldCat Wordpress Plugin [16K ZIP file, should work OK with OneClick Install]

New Teevy

Published
by
Britain
on 29 Mar 05
in Wantlist
. 0 Comments

Well, we lasted almost nine months with no TV in the bedroom, but it was getting to be about time to be able to lie in bed and watch Curb — I mean, Trading Spaces. And so we are jumping on the LCD bandwagon — the cheapest one of its size by a country mile that, should it not quite live up to our expectations, we can actually return to a brick and mortar store over here. [We could've saved $20 and bought one from a leading online retailer, but I hate doing wholly virtual business. I once paid far too much for the first commercially available mp3-cd player, an off-off-off-brand that arrived dead.]

Using my patented customer research method [googling "{manufacturer} sucks"], I found only one complaint — dealing with the manufacturer’s customer service, and if I have any problems with the set I’ll just take it back to the local Costco store. Case closed. Time to check order status again.

A New Camera

Published
by
Britain
on 5 Jan 05
in Wantlist
. 0 Comments

At Costco tonight, noticed that the successor model to our faithful Olympus D-40ZOOM camera [the one that powered britainandabbey.com] runs $199.

We are unfortunately compelled to search for a new camera. Last year in the Bahamas, the D-40 lost its shutter button and the little ring around said button that controls optical zoom. After a few months of operating the camera with either no zooming or minimal zooming activated by sticking a sharp implement in the ring area and working the lever, I finally bought a replacement button/ring assembly from Olympus parts and installed it. At some point during this process I screwed up the sensor for the card door, so now the camera thinks the door is always open. I called Olympus about them fixing it: $179 plus shipping.

The D-580 costs $199 at Costco and about the same online. The advantage of buying from Costco is that if this happens again I can return the darn thing, in six months or three years [Costco's return policy is endearingly liberal].

[8/9/5: Comments closed to thwart spammers. This is by far the most comment-spammed item on the site.]

Canada Shopping List [Partial]

Published
by
Britain
on 30 Jun 04
in Wantlist
. 0 Comments
  • Preparation H “with Bio-Dyne”: Conan O’Brien’s secret wrinkle weapon, with a sinister-named yeast derived additive deemed too freakin’ awesome for American patoots
  • Smirnoff Ice: Canadian version contains vodka instead of malt liquor — smoother and stronger
  • 1990 NES Game Genie: initially available only in Canada because of Nintendo’s legal machinations
  • WWE Pay-Per-Views in Movie Theaters: Okay, you can watch them in some US theaters now, but this trend started in Canada.
  • Pepsi Max: In Canada, they [used to] sell a Pepsi that was, like, one-third Aspartame and one-third less calories. Sort of the precursor to today’s Pepsi Edge. They still apparently sell P-Max overseas.
  • A Beer with Lance Storm: well, of course

Sound Bwoy Chilling

Published
by
Britain
on 29 Jun 04
in Wantlist
. 0 Comments

Ben & Jerry’s and PSU are using soundwaves to freeze ice cream in storage. The linked article estimates that the technology will be available for homes in 5-10 years. Sounds good to me, I’d love to be able to decrease my reliance on chemicals. This cell-phone-sperm-damage thing has me seriously spooked in general.

Honda Power Generators

Published
by
Britain
on 18 Jun 04
in Wantlist
. 0 Comments

…get the thumbs-up from Kevin Kelly.

Awesome new tool.

Published
by
Britain
on 12 Jun 04
in Wantlist
. 0 Comments

In the course of researching the Slansky book for that little Reagan rant, I discovered that OCLC is presently open-testing a solution much like the thing I asked for back in January: a search of all its member libraries’ collections. You search for a book on Google [author, title did it for me] and look for the result called “Find in a Library” [the OCLC site says they are working with Google to get the “Find in a Library” results listed at or near the top]. So I posted about it on MeFi, because that’s what it’s for, and someone else chimed in with this, which is also brilliant and not subject to possible discontinuation at the end of the month.

Someday I want [us all] to be these people.

Published
by
Britain
on 3 Jun 04
in Wantlist
. 0 Comments

I hope I don’t have to fight the local power monopoly over it, but I admire very much the idea of being not just self-sufficient, but providing more power to others. After all, the sun is shining on us whether we soak it up or not.

King of T-Shirts

Published
by
Britain
on 3 Jun 04
in Wantlist
. 0 Comments

In the featured photo in this blog post, Moby is seen wearing a t-shirt that appears to read “King of Fools Drunken Style Kung-Fu.” It is an homage to the classic New Japan Pro Wrestling shirt.

Still trying to figure out what King of Fools is. I assume some kind of band. Google searches reveal a blog called King of Fools dot com, but he doesn’t sell merch [and he doesn’t seem like the puro type anyway], as well as a Christian band called delirious who released an album called King of Fools and who sell a variety of cool Union-Jack inspired merch, but no New Japan knockoffs.

I am thinking King of Fools is one of those Christian indie bands that Dave would have played on his radio show BAKK N THA D-A-I-Y-E. Especially since the last words of the liner notes of every Moby disc are “Thanks to Christ.” But your guess is as good as mines.