Yesterday I found this gem of an article on Amazon’s website. I wish I had known about it sooner. I got home, and immediately tried it out. After about 1 minute, I was watching an on-demand video on my TV, through my XBox. Before, I thought I had to go through a VGA cable directly from my laptop, which is a pain. This is much better. The quality isn’t HD; it looks to be about DVD quality. »
Watching it now. You should too. I’ll blog more on it later. »
Update: Scroll wheel broken in 3 weeks time. Today, on an impulse, I bought the Arc mouse. I needed a cordless mouse for my notebook, since unwinding my current mouse cord was losing nerd points for me. After walking through Best Buy, I saw the Arc. A beautiful, simplistic mouse that was the size of a regular mouse, yet small enough to be a notebook mouse at the same time. It doesn’t have bells and whistles, but it works. »
My digital camera sold within 24 hours. Yes, I did undercut the other sellers a lot ($20 vs. $80). I am happy. Amazon is the new Ebay. No more auctions. Just put something on Amazon for the price I want, and see what happens. »
A few months ago, my girlfriend went into a local outdoor store, Backcountry. She was looking for a certain pair of shoes that she wanted to try on. While talking with one of the employees, she mentioned that her brother worked for REI. He stopped helping her and told her that companies like that put businesses like his out of business. I was reminded of this story as I drove by their store. »
Amazon is one of my favorite companies. Not because they do everything I want, but because they are easy to use. Their site, although a little too daunting at first glance, is actually really easy to navigate and do things. Today, I decided to use Amazon to sell an old digital camera. I could have used Ebay, but Amazon has some perks that I really like. They have a great reputation. »
Inspired by Hanslemann’s tool list, and realizing that if my hard drive fails I want to have links to all the tools I need, I have started my own tool list. Check it out.. »
After months of development, one of your developers refactors a piece of code to be much better than before. In many cases, you end up with code that is no longer in use. Some people say Keep it around in case I need it but I say Delete it At first, this may seem counter-intuitive. Isn’t this gong to cause more work in case you do need that function? No. Delete it. »
Seth Godin’s latest blog post is so true. I went for a year without TV during college, I think it might be time to do it again. »
Today Mailtrust held its first all-day development conference. In my opinion, it was awesome. Not because it was great, but because it wasn’t bad. Like any first-time, there are a ton of things we can do better for future conferences, but the goal of spreading knowledge throughout the development environment was met. When I first started coding in VB6 on Webmail.us’s corporate website, I never imagined the day I would help organize a conference for all their developers (PS - That is the corporate website when I started found via archive.org. »