Category: Uncategorized

Fourth Quarter Results

Happy New Year!

This is a special edition of quarterly results because it also marks the end of the year. At the end of each year I reset my web site’s counter. Last year I had 159,227 visitors to my website compared to 81,763 the previous year, almost double. Some of that was due to the big peak in June and July when the battery pack was mentioned on Make, Digg, and Hackaday. After that traffic leveled out to about 400 hits per day, higher than the 300 or so a day I had been getting before that.

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Graffiti Alternative

I’ve been pretty frustrated with my new Palm TX’s Graffiti 2 software for inputting text. With the old Graffiti I could get about 20 words per minute (a word is 5 keystrokes, including spaces). That’s a lot slower than I can type (60 wpm or so) but in a pinch it lets me write fast enough that I don’t usually forget what I’m writing about. With the new Graffiti I am getting 10 words per minute. I could probably get that up to 15 with practice, but it is still slower since some letters are now two strokes (f, i, k, t, and x) and others are easily confused like u and v. So I’m also getting lots of typos.

On the Brighthand website (kind of like iLounge for handhelds) people mentioned a program called MyKbd by Alexander Pruss. It turns the writing area into a screen of hexes, each with a letter on it. You tap the letters you want, just like on a keyboard, but he has made it faster than a keyboard by putting the most frequently used letters next to each other, optimizing it for people using a stylus. He took it further by letting you slide from one hex to an adjacent one. Naturally he put t and h next to each other so you can just slide from the t to the h and “th” appears on the screen. And e is after that so that you can write “the” with one well-placed stroke.

Some IBM engineers used computers to optimize the layout of the keys with the following result, called Metropolis:

kbd-metro.gif

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Best Buy Commissions

Lately my Amazon sales have been way down because they ran out of the most popular battery pack. Their affiliates sold them, but at higher prices and sales went way down. Best Buy was selling the same thing for $20, so I thought I should see if Best Buy had a commission program. Sure enough, they did. I went ahead and signed up but I soon realized that it was just Commission Junction with a Best Buy face on it. Like CJ, the commission was only 1% instead of the 4% minimum that Amazon gives me. They would pay once I reached $25 but that meant I would have to sell 125 $20 battery packs to ever see a payment. Since I had sold 58 of them through Amazon last quarter, I figured maybe I had a shot if I were patient. Plus I could get some additional revenue if people bought extra stuff while they were browsing Best Buy’s web page.

Oh well. I tried it for two weeks. I sent a decent stream of visitors to Best Buy’s website, with 104 clicks in 17 days, or about 6 a day. It would have been nice if that had resulted in about one sale a day, or one every other day. But during that time I got absolutely no sales. Even if I got my first sale tomorrow, that would mean only one sale every 18 days. That means it would take over six years to make $25.

I think the problem is that people don’t order stuff from Best Buy’s web page, they just go visit a store. So, once again, I gave up on that scheme and reverted to direct links. I will ask Best Buy to remove me from their service.

Missing E-mail

About a week ago I got a phone call about a problem on one of my bridges that was under construction. I took down the information and sent an e-mail to the consultant who designed the bridge asking them to analyze it and come up with a solution, keeping track of their labor so we could assess the contractor for the time they spent on the problem. I never heard anything back, so I asked again yesterday morning (thinking I should just call, but e-mail is just so easy, plus I copied his boss and the DOT project manager). The DOT guy was mad that a week had gone by with no answer, so he replied to even more people and said he wanted an answer right away. Still nothing. I called the consultant that afternoon and asked if he had gotten my e-mail. “What e-mail?” he said. I had problems in the past with their company blocking my e-mail so I asked him if he had a personal e-mail address I could send it to. He still didn’t get it. I told him I would just print it out and fax it to him.

After I faxed it, I went over the e-mail to see if I could find anything that might have flagged the mail as spam (one time I used the word “free” in a subject line and it was blocked). In the very last sentence I found the problem: I had left the “s” off of “assess”. An automatic courtesy censor had prevented my e-mails from ever leaving the building.