ClickOnChris

On Sunday afternoon Dayna and I were lucky enough to find a Nintendo Wii at Best Buy. We got the last one. The fact that they can stay in stock at Best Buy for most of a Sunday tells me that the supply is starting to catch up with demand.

The Wii seems to be a great compliment to my Xbox 360. My general impression is – lower price, worse graphics, better multiplayer experience.

I am going to start keeping a list of what I love about each console and post it up here.

Google just rolled out a new free 411 service. You can access this awesome service by dialing 1(800)GOOG-411. It prompts you for City & State, then a business name or type. After selecting the business it will connect you automatically. Never again will I have to look up the number for Little Caesers!

The service is completely automated. It uses speech recognition to figure out what you say and some text to speech processor to give you the results. The best part? I hear it uses Nuance’s Dragon engine for Speech Recognition.

Read more about this service at the following URLs

http://labs.google.com/goog411/

Ars Technica Article

This is the story of how Home Depot in Woodridge IL horribly screwed up a special order and then fixes it (sort of).

On January 9th I go into Home Depot to special order a whirlpool tub and drain. The associate tells me that the drain color I want is not available so I pick a different color. I’m told it should be in around the 16th. Cool. I plop down $1000 and leave the store.

The next day I’m doing some research and find that the drain color that I want does exist. I call up Home Depot to change my order and its no problem since the parts haven’t even shipped yet. The new drain should even be a little cheaper than the old one. Awesome!

The next Monday, January 15th, I stop in to check the status of the order and settle up the difference in price, when I find out that the original order was canceled but the change was never executed. They just sat on it for 5 days!. Furthermore, nobody is available to execute the change. I am assured that the order will be placed the following day and that it will be expedited. It won’t get here by the weekend, but it should get in early next week.

A few more days pass with a lot of unreturned phone calls and empty promises. At some point the order is actually placed. I have also placed a complaint with corporate Home Depot via their website.

The following Monday I am told that the tub was shipped on the 19th, but it won’t be in until the 30th! By this time, my complaint has finally gotten the attention of the store manager. Over the next couple of days the manager works with me to speed up delivery, and offers to take 10% off the order. The tub should arrive this Friday, the 26th, a mere 16 days after attempting to change the original order. 10% doesn’t come close to making up the lost construction time, but its better than nothing. Grrr.

Update 3/18/2007
I have received the promised refund from Home Depot. Yay.

I have never fancied myself a purveyor of social networks. They’ve always come off as a big popularity contest to me – like “lets see who has the most friends”. As I get older however I see the value in using facebook as a tool just to keep in touch with old contacts.

Like Doc from Back to the Future, I say: ” I figured – eh, what the hell?”

presenting the new, socially networked clickonchris:

There are a couple of websites out there at that syndicate Thanksgiving Day before its even thanksgiving day! Check these out, suckers!

www.blackfridayads.com

bfads.net/

As I get more comfortable with Ruby on Rails development, I have been looking to take advantage of Subversion and FastCGI – tools that are vitally important to any halfway decent rails environment. Subversion (with Capistrano) helps automate deployment, while FastCGI helps your rails web pages load quickly. At the moment, my website seems sluggish at best.

My hosting provider, Axishost , does not seem concerned about providing either of these tools to its customers. When I asked about subversion support, I got the following response:

Thanks but no thanks guys. I picked this host specifically because it advertised that it supports Ruby on Rails (and its 99.9% uptime guarantee is pretty nice). The reality seems that Axishost only partially supports Ruby on Rails. This environment is not good enough for any Rails application worth a damn.

Hi Chris, At this point there are no plans to add subversion to the servers, nor is it on schedule for the near future. If the demand increases it may become a more viable option, but at this point it is not.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you!

It was the same story regarding FastCGI

FastCGI is not installed.

Get it together Axishost

What an exciting week for the video game industry. Playstation 3 launches Friday the 17th of November, and Nintendo Wii launches Sunday the 19th of November.

I personally am still excited about the year-old XBox 360.

It will be interesting to see how these consoles sell during the holidays. The rumor is that if PS3 is not a huge success, Sony is in serious trouble.

UPDATE
At least one reviewer (NY Times) is calling PS3 the loser this year. This is not entirely surprising considering PS3’s high cost and short list of games thus far.

I am currently beginning the slow process of deploying my first Ruby on Rails application to this site to serve as a content manager. Over the next several months we will be adding some new features to the site while trying to keep it visually appealing.

My goal is to use this site to post the occasional technical article or experience. With any luck I’ll be able to draw enough traffic to get cover hosting costs from the ad revenue!

—Chris Johnson