Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

How are we doing? - Fill out this survey!
April 22, 2005

I have purchased things at several places lately that have attached little “Win $10,000! Complete our survey!” notices to the bottoms of their receipts. What’s the deal with everyone wanting to know how lousy their service is? Are they actually going to do anythig about it?

I have received these receipt-borne customer surveys from Rite-Aid, TGIFriday’s, Home Depot, Donatos, CVS, and Staples, just to name a few. Some of them I bothered to fill out. Others I just throw away. Am I really throwing potential winnings down the drain? Have you heard of anyone actually winning one of these things?

And is the information you provide to these companies useful? There’s only one way to find out – take a survey about this site!

Dawn of the Almost Dead
April 21, 2005

I was pretty tired last night before bed. Berta and I stayed up a little too late. Somewhere near the end there I was rambling on to her, trying to explain the vagaries of the javascript in my autosave plugin for WordPress. She stared at me, listening, but I could tell that she was too tired to absorb any of it.

I think I just needed to tell someone what I had been working on, and poor Berta was available. When we’re 70, she’ll just walk away in the middle of my talking, assuming I’ll continue talking aloud to myself. I’m surprised she doesn’t do that now, really.

Flash Filter Plus and AsySound
April 21, 2005

I had mentioned this plugin a while ago, but never released it. It’s a small plugin that makes it easy to insert single MP3 files directly into your posts via a little Flash player.

Basically, you just copy up and activate the plugin, the put the URL of the MP3 file inside of brackets (those are the square ones) in your post. When you do, you get this:

Building on WordPress with Dojo - Kill me now
April 20, 2005

A project I’m currently messing with for WordPress has me delving more deeply into the XmlHttpRequest arena looking for something standard and well-maintained that I won’t have to tweak to incorporate. Matt suggested I try Dojo for this purpose. After speding a little more time looking it over, I was impressed enough with the workings of the library to attempt a test project (yet another WordPress plugin) using Dojo to do transparent server commuincations from the browser. This is that story.

Before I continue, note that I have been working completely on my own on this for less than 24 hours. These are initial unedited impressions of the whole toolkit, which I find (when I do finally get it working the way I want) should work marvelously for what I want to do. I haven’t bothered to contact the developers (yet) nor have I tried to read through all of the weightier (code-wise) mailing list archives. I don’t want to get on anyone’s bad side (particularly the Dojo devs) for saying bad things about anything, so I want to say explicitly that this is my story, as daft as I might have been following the path I did, and not a conclusion about how good/bad anything is. Your mileage will vary as a result of not following in the path of my own stupidity. Learn from my experience and avoid suffering.