Category: Internet (Page 28 of 40)

I am always appreciative of a company with a touch of wit. Example: Virgin Atlantic, which inflects all its materials with a touch of sass, thanks to iconoclastic owner Richard Branson (although I don’t love their current copywriter, but that’s neither here nor there).

My new kick is over at Google, where user notifications let the mind wander.

Peer into an empty junk mail folder on Gmail: “Hooray, no spam here!”

Trying to get driving directions to Puerto Rico on Google Maps delivers this apology: “We currently only support road-based driving directions.” Makes you think twice, in a good way.

And don’t forget the I’m Feeling Lucky button, a cute act of hubris in 1999 that has come to stand for all things Google in 2005. Keep up the smirking work.

This morning I swung by my local Cafe Metro on the way to work. While paying for my breakfast, I noticed a flyer on the counter:

COOL CLICK SPECIAL

Cool.

Ordering lunch online? Not worth the effort. But two bucks off? When I’m still adjusting to $9 midtown lunches? Cheapskate heaven.

This morning I swung by my local Cafe Metro on the way to work. While paying for my breakfast, I noticed a flyer on the counter:

COOL CLICK SPECIAL

Cool.

Ordering lunch online? Not worth the effort. But two bucks off? When I’m still adjusting to $9 midtown lunches? Cheapskate heaven.

I went to the Cafe Metro website and efficiently browsed their offerings. (I never quite figured out what *L soup is, but other than that, I had no trouble navigating or reading my options.) The shopping cart worked well, the menu was comprehensive, and a few minutes later, my order was placed. I even splurged on a piece of carrot cake to celebrate the $2 discount.

I placed the order at 1:30. The next available pickup time was 1:50. A little long, I thought, but my fault for waiting this late to order lunch. Next time I’ll ramp up quicker.

At 1:33 my phone rang.

“Hi, David, this is Cafe Metro calling.”

“Hi, how are you?”

“Good, thanks. But I’m afraid we’re out of carrot cake today.”

We settled on a black and white cookie, and I hung up the phone thoroughly impressed—instant turnaround and instant, hands-on customer service to go with my online order.

Consider me hooked, even after the discount code expires. Cafe Metro makes some great salads….

Update: When I got to Cafe Metro, my order was waiting in the back of the store, nice and hot, credit card receipt printed and awaiting a signature. Nice and easy.

Meet Blog the Caveman. Too great.

I find it interesting that Yahoo prompts me to re-enter my password when I go into Yahoo Mail, but has no problem accepting my cookie alone to display all the details of my financial portfolio.

Monday marks six years of writing Ideapad.

Fellow IA and weblogger Victor Lombardi attended a class at NYU Stern the other day and found it intriguing that no one was using laptops in class.

Let me tell you why.

Fellow IA and weblogger Victor Lombardi attended a class at NYU Stern the other day and found it intriguing that no one was using laptops in class.

Victor now knows why I chose Stern for my MBA. (Well, besides the quality of teaching and the location and the reputation and the good brownies at lunch.) NYU Stern specifically suggests students not bring laptops to class, as they get in the way of discourse and teacher-student interaction.

I’ve encountered this several times at Stern, from the admissions staff who mentioned it to me to the statistics professor (statistics!) who requested we leave our computers at home. In Stern’s collaborative, discussion-oriented courses, burying one’s head in a laptop undermines the sociological aspect that makes a good business-school education—or any education, for that matter—truly powerful.

When was the last time someone spent an hour on a computer engaged in a discussion without clicking into an extraneous application or checking email or sending an instant message? Computers embrace multi-tasking, continually diverting the mind. Educational lectures, on the other hand, hope to dedicate one’s focus, and at business school they intend to foster contemplation and debate. Burying one’s head in a computer is an easy way of ignoring all of that.

I personally know how it feels to be absorbed by a computer, and I prefer to not bring mine to class. (In the courses I have taken where professors encouraged computer use, like decision models and corporate finance, I felt the waxing and waning of my own attention.) Watching myself and my peers occasionally use their laptops in a lecture, I see what is lost: full attention, an interest in discussion, and so forth. It creates drag and diminishes the power of the session.

Columbia Business School prides itself on pervasive Internet access, and Stern itself has wifi all over the school. But being wired isn’t what business school is about. Open-minded, face-to-face human interaction: that’s where the action is. And where the laptops aren’t.

I joined MediaPost today, after years of reading, because I was curious what membership got me.

The answer: three newsletter-style emails in the past five hours, none of which I requested to receive.

Logging into the site to turn off my feeds, I discovered that signing up for the site registered me for fifteen daily and weekly emails, all of which are opt-out. (screenshot)

I wonder how long it will be before I have to turn off the email address I used, once it’s sold to the lowest bidder and turned into a spam receptacle.

Alamo Rental Cars’ email opt-out confirmation concludes with, “We’re going to miss you!” Caught me off guard and made me smile.

I don’t recall opting to be on their mailing list, but that’s another story.

Courtesy RSS Digest. Looks good in the Javascript example below, although it needs customizing.

Linguistic question of the day: is photobloggers pronounced FO-to-blog-gerz, to match the way the words photo and bloggers were meshed together, or is it pronounced fuh-TOB-log-gerz, to match photographers?

Paging Peter Merholz….