It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Author: Scott (Page 27 of 104)

Day 293: overnight

December 1, 2009 / / 0 Comments

So I signed up to be a Zappos VIP today, even though I’ve never bought anything on Zappos before.  Why?  Because it was free and it means that I get free overnight shipping for life (or, as they put it, until the cows come home).

It also means I get to shop at http://vip.zappos.com instead of the pedestrian and oh-so-2008 regular website.

But free overnight shipping?  Having been on the paying end of overnight shipping (last holiday season, when we had to mail out some gift cards at the last minute to some of Katie’s relatives), I can tell you that the actual fee for such an extravagance is absurd.

Especially considering how much 2-day shipping costs.  Guaranteeing something anywhere in the country (even within the same state!) tomorrow is 5 times as expensive as guaranteeing it in two days because urgency is expensive.

Letting the postal service do its thing and take however long is necessary for a first-class smallish package?  I can usually get something from San Francisco to New York in about 3 days anyway, for less than the cost of a Big Mac.

So, the moral of the story is: if you’re planning on mailing something to someone for the holidays, don’t procrastinate!  If you actually leave it until the very last minute, those $20 gift cards you’re sending to Aunt Myrtle overnight will actually cost you $40 to get them there by Christmas morning.

Day 292: trustnet

November 30, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I’ve written about trust before, but I wanted to briefly talk about trust in this new age we live in on the omnipresent (and perhaps least trustworthy) medium of our day and age: the internet.

There’s a certain amount of stock you can put into the learned body language and life experience of social interactions.  When I meet someone for the first time, look into their eyes, listen to their voice, shake their hand – there’s a certain amount of trust that can be gained by these action alone.  There’s a bit of social bonding that occurs that instills a trustworthiness in a person.

This, of course, is impossible in the wilds of the Internet, a land where you’re lucky to get more than a concocted screenname and a picture of an animated cat.

For me, the best measure of trust on the Internet turns out to be the old-fashioned one: knowing the person in “real life.”  This is a luxury in some cases; I can’t personally get to know every online vendor I buy from.

So the Internet has built its primary trust foundation instead on brand recognition.  I trust Amazon with my credit card information because so many other people do (and, once I’ve ordered a few times, based on past experience).  I trust an email from a corporate email account because I know that people can’t just buy email accounts with the @ea.com tacked onto the end of it.  I trust Wikipedia to be a somewhat reliable fact-checking source because so many other people use it when they seek knowledge.

Rarely in real life would we be comfortable place our trust in something primarily because it has the popular vote.  We try to find recommendations from friends, references from previous buyers/employers, our gut when we meet the person.  On the Internet, we simply plug into the hive mind and trust the crowd.

Is that any less reliable or any more dangerous?  Or is it just a different way to judge who and what to trust, no better, no worse?

Day 291: flashforward

November 29, 2009 / / 0 Comments

After that depressing end to the Steeler game today, Katie and I caught up on the last couple FlashForward episodes that we missed.  While the show itself is a nice LOST replacement until 2010 rolls around, I find the premise pretty intriguing.

Barring all the grisly death and disaster that the blackout caused, what would life be like if we had a brief flash of our future?  What if we saw a relatively true vision of what we were doing for a little over 2 minutes on April 29th?

There’s an interesting facet of human nature that the show portrays through several characters, and that’s the fact that by even being given a small glimpse of the future, the future has already changed.  There are people throwing parties on April 29th because the date was significant due to the flash forwards.  There are chance meetings that are already written because of the flash forwards.

There is a set of future events that are opened up as possibilities by the simple fact that the future has been seen.  This idea is fascinating to think about.

Of course, equally interesting is the simple question of what I personally would expect to see in my flash forward.  Most of our lives are relatively simple; I assume my flash forward wouldn’t involve people trying to kill me or seeing people I had presumed dead.  But I would get to see my baby, which would be rewarding enough for me.

Would seeing that future change my daily actions?  Would I try to drive towards that future?  Let it manifest itself?  See if I could change it?  It’d certainly be a fascinating conversation topic for the next six months.

Day 290: long in the tooth

November 28, 2009 / / 0 Comments

You know what I like? Idioms.

Idioms separate the native speakers from those that learned English from a book or in a classroom.  Idioms are often illogical and fly in the face of reason, but they stick around because of their sheer charm.

If a person could live like an idiom, what a world this would be.

You know what I enjoy more than idioms?  Foreign people who use idioms slightly incorrectly or too often, because they’ve just learned them and want to show off their knowledge of the language.

I enjoy this partially out of the complex linguistic niche that idioms fill and how hard it is to describe when learning English.  But I think I also enjoy it partially because I wish I could use idioms that often, that I could get away with it.  As it is, I’m relegated to using them only when they are one of the most popular (“let’s call it a day”) or in the rare occasion when I want to sound obtuse (“long in the tooth”).  How I wish I could sprinkle them in conversation as if I had just learned them, beaming with pride and satisfaction for mastering a complex turn of phrase.

When all is said and done, though, I’m all talk and no cider anyway.

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