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More free and kinda-free wireless

by | Nov 3, 2005 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, travel, Uncategorized

McCarran Airport in Las Vegas has fast free wifi.

The JW Marriott Resort in Las Vegas has a voucher-based wifi implementation – but it only blocks ports 8 (http/https) – not anything else. So if you don’t mind not having web browsing you can – hypothetically – do email (GW, POP, IMAP, SMTP), other stuff (SSH, RDP) and also things like IM. Oh well.

Zappos – a web site that works

by | Nov 1, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’ve been using Zappos for a while – it’s a great example of how a web-based service can and should work.

Here are my positive pieces:

  • if you know what you want – it’s really easy to find and buy a pair of shoes. Look at real shoes in a real shop; buy online. (Oh how traditional stores must hate that)
  • if you want to look for something new – it’s nice and clean navigation to find what you want to compare. The images of the shoes look clear and realistic. That’s good.
  • great shipping policy. Free shipping – I’m often ‘upgraded’ to 2 day priority at no cost. That’s just splendid.
  • excellent returns policy. Print out the return label online; put it on the box; arrange pickup. No cost, no hassle. Compare this to other online stores (urg – Swatch are awful for this) where they issue an RMA then make you ship the product back. Or they ship you a return document. It’s all time and hassle.
  • feedback on purchases. Just like any other successful site you can comment on the goods purchased (shoes – how much can you say about a pair?) and on the service itself.
  • purchase history. I liked those shoes so much I’ll buy some more. Or you can view what you did purchase and look for similar things.

Overall Zappos is pretty splendid.

Slow blogging week

by | Oct 31, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized, Utah

It’s been slow blogging this last week or so – it is the end of the fiscal year at Novell – and that’s been taking up a lot of my time.

There is fresh snow on the mountains – and it is freezing overnight in Utah – I’ll get some photos of the snow posted later today.

Why disaster recovery is important

by | Oct 25, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I lost a blog server.

postmark.net were a free web-based email provider.

Their homepage tells a sobering tale:

Early last week, Postmark’s repositories of user mail and account information were lost to a serious hardware failure. The resulting damage left us unable to recover any useful data, and as such, Postmark.net is shutting down. In its stead, we recommend Google’s own Google Mail service, which offers superior storage and search capacities.