Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I just got the following in my email from Text Link Ads:

Important Advertising Script Update

We have made an imporant update to our TLA publisher code. […] Note: This will not become common practice. Periodic code updates are not in the works, but this is something that we do need you to do this time.

Curious to know what had changed, I diffed the files:

echo "<li style=\"margin: 0; float: left; clear: none; width: 100%; padding: 0; display: inline;\"><span style=\"width: 100%; padding: 3px; display: block; margin: 0; font-size: 12px; color: #000000;\">".$arr_xml[’BeforeText’][$i]." <a style=\"color: #000000; font-size: 12px;\" href=\"".$arr_xml[’URL’][$i]."\">".$arr_xml[’Text’][$i]."</a> ".$arr_xml[’AfterText’][$i]."</span></li>\n";

Yep–they changed the styling for who knows what reason.

I was looking at PSP games for the PSP I never play on Overstock out of pure curiosity and I came across the following HOT DEAL:

That’s right–Overstock wants to sell me a game at a 28% markup over list price. Wow. The same game is going for $29.99 on Amazon: Astonishia Story. OK, so it’s a pricing error of some sort or another–no big deal right?

That’s not true. From a technology perspective, if you see any of these kinds of basic errors, where even a single product can sell for more than list, you know that Overstock’s IT infrastructure has serious data integrity problems. They’re either not checking their system against itself for inconsistencies, not checking external data against internal data, or some combination of the above. Either way, it’s a big problem that directly affects the customer experience.

Coup in Thailand, PM overthrown by military, news totally spotty!

iTunes 7 introduced a new way to manage your iPod, which looks like this:

Unfortunately, in distinguishing media types on your iPod, it lumps all video content into the “other” category, which is a big mistake in my opinion. Their UI should actually look like this:

That’s right–we need to use green for videos, and add it to the bottom bar. Fitting another option in there for a critical media type should not have been left out of iTunes!

It’s well known that drinking inordinate amounts of tea–green tea, especially–leads to a egregious lifespan. Heavy tea drinkers in Japan died 26% less than those that didn’t drink green tea. Could you ever think that 绿茶 could be the secret to eternal life? Tea drinkers are immortal.

Procrastinate by Mikef

My favorite brand of common consumer tea right now is Tazo, a Starbucks tea brand. It’s delicious, flavourful, and light. Besides boosting their earnings reports and ready-to-go drinks marketshare, Starbucks is probably saving lives with their delicious tea. Yum.

I am in no way affiliated with Starbucks or Tazo and was not compensated in any way to write this. I just love their tea!