Nica's Blog
Yet another unfocused blogTuesday, December 23, 2008
Money is not Evil
Some of you are thinking about picking up a gift card as a last minute Christmas gift. Before you do that, whey don't you consider money as a gift. That's right, cold cash, or a check. There is nothing evil about it. People like money. Money makes people happy. You want to make people happy don't you? In so many cultures it's OK to give a cash gift. You can put it in a pretty envelope. You can write a little poem to go with it. Personally I would like it if people gave me cash instead of gift cards.
Simply put, gift cards are for suckers. You take $20.00 of perfectly good cash which can be spent anywhere in the country, then you convert it to $20.00 which can only be spent in a certain boutique. Some people give gift cards because they don't want their miserly friend to simply put it in her retirement account, or have their nerd friend buy another video game, so you give them gift cards for Starbucks and JCrew. How about simply giving the money and a little note saying something like "Please buy yourself a nice sweater. You look so nice in sweaters. Send me a picture when you get your sweater." See, that's not so hard, is it?
Simply put, gift cards are for suckers. You take $20.00 of perfectly good cash which can be spent anywhere in the country, then you convert it to $20.00 which can only be spent in a certain boutique. Some people give gift cards because they don't want their miserly friend to simply put it in her retirement account, or have their nerd friend buy another video game, so you give them gift cards for Starbucks and JCrew. How about simply giving the money and a little note saying something like "Please buy yourself a nice sweater. You look so nice in sweaters. Send me a picture when you get your sweater." See, that's not so hard, is it?
posted by monica # 8:47 PM
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Chrome: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Cloud
Say it's not true. The browser wars all over again? Well, we won't know for some time, but I am writing my blogger post in Chrome, and Firefox has slowly, but surely been eating away at IE's dominance. Much to my own surprise Opera is still a going concern. To be honest, I could never make up my mind whether I preferred Firefox or IE, and I have a feeling I won't have a huge preference between Firefox, IE, and Chrome ... but I will use Chrome, because it's new and therefore nifty. It feels about the same as Firefox. As a matter of fact there really isn't much difference between the three browsers. Seriously, there isn't.
Chrome does have some things that are nice. The user can type pretty much anything into the "address bar" and get some useful suggestions. The address bar is really a search bar. And the fact that you can drag a tab out of the browser window and then have two instances of the browser running side-by-side is sort of neat. The browser also creates thumbnails of the sites the user browses the most, which could be convenient, or a little embarrassing. I already have fleshbot on my New Tab pages.
Rumour is that where Chrome is going to be really important is for Google's mobile OS "Android". I for one would love Google to create a good mobile web browser. Web browsers for phones are just not quite what they should be. I love browsing on my phone nevertheless, but if they could make a good mobile web browsers, Google will earn my long lasting love. Desktop browsers are "good enough". Mobile browsers are annoying at best, painful on average, and unusable at worst.
Labels: Browsers, Cloud Computing, Google
posted by monica # 7:05 PM
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