Wednesday, February 20, 2008
xo news - you get it when i do:
From: service@laptopgiving.org
Sent: 2008.02.20 18:30:25 Eastern Standard Time
Subj: Update On Your XO Laptop
Dear Donor,
We wanted to update you on the status of your XO laptop.
Our production schedule is still on track and we expect to deliver your laptop by the middle part to end of March. Your donation is in queue and ready for shipment as soon as we receive additional laptops.
You can continue to check on your order status at www.laptopgiving.org.
If you have any other questions regarding your XO laptop, please do feel free to reply to this email or contact our Donor Services team at 1-800-201-7144.
Thank you again for your patience and understanding.
Sincerely,
OLPC Donor Services
so why send me stuff when nothing has changed ? are we that short on attention span ? this is how all their bad g1g1 pr trouble started in the first place.
i often do the same thing when i'm not sure that something i'm trying to communicate is getting across. i start to repeat myself, elaborate on the topic, try to put things a different way, etc. bad habit. it could also be my reaction to what are bad listening habits in others. i think people get used to those bad habits in each other. i sometimes get odd reactions when i do that "active listening" thing, giving feedback on what i just heard. no acks/nacks in the world, it's all open loop comms. not good.
annoying things about google web history rss:
- if you spend time visiting pages on one site, the rss contains only the last page visited on that site before another web site page gets recorded;
- page titles aren't always recorded; and often a site's homepage title is recorded for all pages in that site;
- i can isolate various types of searches, but i can't exclude them to only get "browsing" history;
- google books items have unusable links;
- using the <guid/> element for non-standard purposes.
looking at the google.com/history list itself, i can understand how the first & third item occur, but that rss needs help. i wonder if it would make sense to populate <description/> with something from a page's meta tags, or something else from within google's infobase.
while i'm picking on google rss feeds, their "my library" feed:
- needs item <pubdate/>. it can't be there because they don't record the time when you add an item to your list.
- would also be nice to have isbn's someplace, so that these feeds could be mashed up with amazon data, for example.
- and this feed's item <guid/>s are funky too.
- should add one's notes, personal reviews and tags ("labels" - come on guys, everyone calls them tags).
would be better off just generating my own feed from their book list export xml, since it has some (not all) of the above data.
item & feed authorship is another funky item. i suppose with books it needs to be the book's author(s), but for browsing history there's nothing that makes sense. unless there's item annotations being kept someplace, in which case these could be added to <description/>, and the author is the annotator. as for the feeds themselves, google needs to pull itself out of the attribution besides "generator".
i realize that there's a lot of different ways to go with these things, but some of this seems pretty basic. and they're google, fer chrissakes.
no, i'm not talking about the avalanche in my living room. i just (re)discovered google book search, and its companion "my library" feature. looks to me like a decent alternative to accumulating interesting book links in my amazon wishlist (beware - 3mb page!). my brother john does a bit of this too.
the main drawback is that amazon is far richer in information, and i can also use their links to generate income. however, the purpose is a better fit with google. google books also has some fairly extensive excerpts of these books online, even some of the ones no longer available from amazon.
i went ahead and tried to import my entire amazon wishlist into "my library", and it reported 4 duplicates and 13 failures (no book found) out of 365 (?) total. not bad. of course, i already had a full extract of my wishlist data, so pulling out all the isbn's was simple.
then i looked at the "my library" rss feed (another nice feature). discovered it was showing the books i had added farthest back. uh-oh - apparently the import feature treats the items farther down in the list as most recent, the opposite of the order i had (most recent first). easy enough to re-sort, and re-import in the other order - but how do i get rid of 348 entries ? there's no way to clear the list.
so i futzed around with automating it, but for the item delete function google is looking for an authentication cookie. rather than messing with making system.net.webrequest have cookies, i just generated a page with a button for each item, in a way that bypassed the item deletion confirmation, and used that. i could have used some client-side script and automated the items on that page, but i can hit "tab-enter" 350 times faster than i could have programmed it, especially since i don't expect to repeat this. sure, something ajax-y would be better. never did figure out how to do posts instead of gets that way (needed in this case to do book deletes without needing confirmation of each deletion).
ok, a lot of fooling around for not much, i admit. still, it's interesting to check out. but what originally caught my eye was their landing page, with its random selection of various items. that's what really sucked me in. i started just refreshing the page and then opening whatever looked interesting (as anyone following my browsing history may have noticed ;-)).
just one more bibliophile resource to add to the list. interesting how books are surviving the electronic information age. i still run into the project gutenberg site now and then, and it looks like they have audio books now.
and another good resource: www.ibiblio.org. man, haven't been around there in ages either.
oh god, i'm swamped - time to start shutting things down.
bummer - noticed that the history rss links google generates for viewing google books don't resolve to anything useful. google books is beta, but google web history is not. they still have lots of details to attend to in their products.
(reminder to self: need to update my website for pointers to the stuff from the last few days. yeah, self gets stuck with all the work.)