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Monday, April 03, 2006
March Madness, Amazon, Aero Glass
- On March 16th and 17th, SourceGear
product sales were 61% lower than the average sales for the rest of
March. Is it just a coincidence that the first round of the NCAA
basketball tournament was televised during those days? I think not.
- Friday evening I saw my book on the shelf at Barnes and
Noble here in Champaign. Like most highly anticipated events, the moment
was rather anticlimactic. It didn't make sense to buy it. So I left. :-)
- Amazon.com tries really hard to customize itself for me,
but the harder it tries, the more obvious it is when it falls short:
- It constantly offers me Rachael Ray's latest cookbook. I
have purchased exactly one Rachael Ray cookbook in my life. I bought it
during the month of December (the same month where Christmas usually
falls). I bought it through my sister's Amazon wish list. There are
clues here. Amazon should be able to figure out that my interest in
Rachael Ray cookbooks is exactly the same as my interest in Harlequin
romance novels.
- When I'm looking at the page for my own
book, Amazon can't connect the dots. It knows my name. It knows the
name of the author of the book currently on my screen. But it doesn't
ask me if I'm the same person. Becoming an Author has confirmed for me
that much of the mystique of writing a book is silly. When I finish this
blog entry I'm going to walk across the street and get some coffee.
Nobody in the coffee shop will be able to tell that I've written a book.
In fact, the only person or thing on this planet which should be
able to recognize me as an author is Amazon, but it won't do it. I'm not
expecting people in the coffee shop to be in awe of me, but a little mock
reverence from this stupid overgrown Perl script would seem quite
appropriate.
- SourceGear Vault was one of the first shrinkwrap products
built with C# and Windows Forms. We were very early adopters. Just four
years later, it feels strange to say that we're sticking with these "tried
and true" technologies even though newer stuff is on the horizon. It just
won't make sense to rewrite
Vault with WPF just to make everything prettier. Still, being an early
adopter is fun. Over the weekend I bought a PC and installed Windows
Vista build 5308. Aero Glass looks really nice.
- Time for some coffee...
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