Daily Movement

regarding Windows-based Treo coming, this kind of pisses me off cause i just spent $ on a now obsolete platform, but then again, wince made economic sense back in 1998/1999 since who wants to learn another API once you’ve invested in windows. WinCE just wasn’t ready back then which is why I was a palm loyalist even though I asserted that WinCE would win. It’s funny that PalmOne and PalmSource went through so much spin-off, buy-back, spin-off, until now. 3com must have made out well avoiding all that hassle and just getting the money from the spin off.

I did wind up trying to write some cellphone aware code for the Treo 650, but the cobalt environment they were pushing didn’t exist on the Treo 650 and the Treo 600 cell support in garnet wasn’t on the Treo 650 either, so I wound up having to get the Treo specific SDK for garnet which had a lot of handspring headers. And then when I did finally build against these headers and run on the actual hardware (not an emulator – which doesn’t exist for the Treo 650 anyway, only cobalt), it wouldn’t even open up the phone library correctly.

Such a waste.

and looking at the e-mail traffic on the palm dev forumsbluetooth [RSS], emulator [RSS], palm-dev [RSS]these folks are just hating life on bluetooth, on the emulator, and i’d guess pretty much everything else Treo.

I’m glad they’ve made this first step. I’ll probably make my first step too soon which will be to get a WinCE based Treo once they figure out which cellular provider they’re going to cut the sweet deal with.

But once I’ve been forced to think about a WinCE phone device, I may as well shop the whole market to see if there’s anything better than the Palm… watch out.

This is hilarious.

I search for “fuji premium plus” glossy longevity on google because i want to find some info on the cheap consumer paper that i’ve been using.

On a small set of 11 results, I look at #4 and find this page which in summary has the right keywords – if you count the ads. There isn’t a cached version of the page either – which is kind of suspicious. The crawled site could have tricked google by feeding it different content, or the site could respond to referrers from google with different content than folks who come in straight, which in fact it does along with a couple of google ads.

It might make sense that google didn’t keep a cached copy of the page because it looks like search results – but why wouldn’t it cache a copy? Maybe because of the meta http-equiv 60 second refresh? Still, it seems like the game of serving back search content with irrelevant marketing messages to referrer searches has been around a while and it’s easy to check if straight-through-page != referrer-through-page.

I wonder if the reason why these sites aren’t filtered out is that they also tend to be high users of the google’s adwords revenue generating service? And so, relevance in this way, would be an unprofitable move for google.

Is it any wonder that albertsons will be – i am assuming that they can’t fight the market reality – selling itself off?

According to the article here, they have a lot of competition, and suffered from a 20 week strike last year.

But more importantly, I think, since then they haven’t improved what matters to customers, so they won’t gain or even retain any customers. I found myself shopping at albertson’s yesterday because of its familiar location, and then reminded myself, “Why did I come here again? I usually choose go to Safeway”

The local albertson’s has a total of two checkers at peak hours and usually only one most of the other times of day. The store itself still has 8 or 9 fully equipped checkstands. It also has 4 self-service check-out terminals where there’s a line due to the software locking up waiting for a checker to come over and reset it, and due to shoppers just being entertained by the animated graphics.

I’m sure they could sell a lot more food if they could get customers out of the store faster.

I think what happened after the strike is that they put in automated terminals to protect against future labor disputes, while also laying off workers to control costs. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of a downward spiral, since with less workers to help customers, the customers get fed up and go elsewhere, causing revenues to drop again.

Along the lines of simplifying processes, such as “using one big file”, why use 43 folders if most of your work is done in non-paper (electronic) form? It makes you look at an empty folder almost every day, except on the two or three days a month when a bill is due and a check needs to be written, for example.

Why not just 12 folders, one for each month of the year? Bills and things that have to be checked sometime roughly in that month (like a rebate receipt or a health care reimbursement that should have completed) rather than on a particular exact day are dropped in the folder for that month.

Folder is checked periodically (say each Monday).

The amount in folder should be small anyway since we’re doing most of our work electronically, right? So it’s low effort to scan through entire month worth of stuff each time.

Now, don’t you all go registering 12folders.com at once now…