I was going to go and visit a friend in Bristol for this weekend, but I heard yesterday that a close friend of hers died a couple of days ago. She’s come down to London to be with them, and I met her in Hampstead for a drink this afternoon.
Mere days after I finally convinced my boss to sign a deal with Amazon rather than with the rather appalling IBS, I read this:
Wired [Online Prices Not Created Equal]:
“Amazon apparently offers good discounts to new users, then once they get the person hooked and coming back to their site again and again, they play with the prices to make more money,” wrote one angry poster in the online forum DVD Talk.A number of other posters in the same forum fumed about prices varying wildly for the same DVDs, depending on whether the surfer accessed Amazon from his own computer or someone else’s. Several angry Amazon customers emailed complaints to Wired News.
Amazon.com acknowledged that it’s been presenting different prices to different customers in its DVD store, but denied that it does so on the basis of any past purchasing behavior at Amazon.
The article goes on to argue that targetted pricing could be the way of the future, with people who are more likely to pay more for a product being put in a position where those are the only prices they are offered – and with this happening often without their knowledge. This so clearly has the potential to be horribly immoral that I can’t think that it will work – people will protest or governments / fair trade associations will intervene. But in the meantime I think this is a matter for protest: Equal Rights to Fair Prices!
So I decided to send Mark a message through AIM even though it was clear that he wasn’t there. I was just interested in the kind of message he might leave. He’s such a charmer:
“i’m at school. Stinkbadger, if you IMed to say you loved me, thanks babe, i love you too. Stinkbadger, if you IMed to say you hate me, fuck you jerk! and if you IMed just to talk, man up, and pick one of the two choices above, deal? see ya this afternoon around 3:00.”
Yesterday, Katy went on holiday, and left her site under the awesome government of Meg, Luke and Nick (of Corny fame). The new design is extremely entertaining – which reminds me – I told Dan of Daily Doozer infamy that I’d build something for him… I must get around to that over the next couple of weeks.
What else has been going on? Erm. The new timeout.com site is rapidly approaching launch – it’s on the net at the moment, but I doubt you’ll be able to find it. After work last night (I left at 8pm) I went for dinner with Meg, this bloke called Ian and this other bloke called Frank at this club thing down a back-alley off St Martins Lane. I don’t think Ian or Frank have websites, which I fear makes them approximately 2/3rds of a person. The food and company was great. Nice time had – although I fear I now know a little too much about the internal working of AOL and LineOne.
So I’ve been now on holiday for approximately forty-five minutes (if one considers that that’s when I would have arrived at work this morning), and I have already been rung with questions. I can only assume that they are doing it to try and make me feel useful.
There are some increasingly strange people lurking on what used to be the Nexus over on barbelith.com – quite how I’m supposed to respond to this without looking like a complete egotist is beyond me. Thanks, guys!
I have just had a long conversation with my boss of bosses about work and life and holiday time. He’s been really reassuring and nice and helpful, which means that I just have more to think about now than I did before, if I’m completely honest, but at least I’m less tense.
The most satisfying part of the whole shebang is that he (I fear with nervousness in his heart) practically insisted that I take a couple of weeks off work starting after work tomorrow. I think I’m going to be off from the seventh until the nineteenth, during which time I plan to visit Bristol, get cable television, work on my sites, clean my bedroom and sort out the weird thing that seems to be growing on the bottom of my feet.
Every so often I forget that notsosoft has a Scary MegCam Archive. On those days, the world is grey and depressing. And then I remember that it’s there and look long and hard. And then I can’t stop laughing! For months!
Am I the only person to have read Freud around here? I mean – really?!
Mark:
“from a dream about honey bees on a school playground: kerry showing off his pirate sword took from a monkey bar. be careful, i told him, you’re going to stab someone with that sword of yours. kerry, c’mon, put the sword down, we’ll play dodge ball! honestly! kerry!“of course kerry stabs me with his sword while running to play dodgeball. i woke up, with the most incredible stomach ache.”
It was my father’s birthday on Friday, and I bought him this book on the history of the twentieth century, but I haven’t had time to send it to him yet, which makes me feel completely appalling – and indeed is pretty unforgiveable. The thing is, I pretty much know that whatever I buy him will be pretty much wrong. If he wants something he buys it himself, and he doesn’t really seem to have any particular “general interests” that a present can easily cater for.
I asked him what he wanted for Christmas one year, and he said that he’d like fifty Bic biros. So I bought him fifty Bic biros. He seemed as happy with them as anything else I’d ever bought him…
I’ve only made him smile genuinely once with a birthday present, which was for his fiftieth and contained fifty presents – from a bean bag frog to a vibro-massage kit. But although he smiled at the time, I don’t think any of the gifts were ever used again. In the end, I think my brother stole the frog, which we decided to call Wilbur. He got a hole in him in the end. All the beans fell out.