Moving Servers

Brought the Beast back home today: the Dell PowerEdge 1600SC server that houses www.keithbluestone.com, www.sbluestone.com, and a few other sites. It had been at my mom's place since I moved to Baltimore, subsisting on a decent diet of SpeakEasy ADSL at 3Mb down and 768K up (~$100/mo). I found that I could upgrade my home Internet (Comcast residential, ~$50/mo) to Comcast Business (6 Mb down, 768K up) with a static IP for only $30 more per month, saving me about $70/mo and doubling my download bandwidth.

So today I redirected the DNS mapping via www.GoDaddy.com, brought the server over, fired it up, assigned it a local static TCP/IP address, opened up port 80/HTTP on the firewall to let internet traffic through to it, and rebooted. Bam -- worked perfectly the first time.

The Beast is a purebred production server: housed in a solid black Dell case, running SCSI plus mirrored 180 GB RAID drives on Windows Server 2003 and SharePoint Services 2003. No Microsoft Office; no special video cards or drivers; no pretty themes; just a server. And I have never had a problem with it in the three years it's been up.

The Joy of Click

Ahhh... I discovered the joy of one-click ordering on Amazon. Now before you scold me -- "it's been around for years, you fool" -- how many of you have actually used it? I always figured I was fine reviewing my orders and checking out the regular way.

But recently I became an Amazon Prime member. Amazon Prime is a program that gives you free two-day shipping on most products, and only $4 for overnight shipping (talk about instant gratification!) for a yearly fee of about $70. I subscribed partly because they offered me a free two-month trial in early December, when -- surprise -- I had a lot of gift plans. I also wanted to perform a social experiment on myself: would my shopping behavior change at all because I could order anything overnight for just $4?

So tonight, four months later, I was looking for a gift for my sister on Amazon... and found an electric water kettle for myself. Out of a sudden curiosity, and before I could think twice, I clicked Order with One-Click. How would they ship it? Would I be charged extra for anything? To my surprise and delight, they had placed the order as two-day (no shipping charge) and used all my saved preferences to ship it to my home.

I had a wave of euphoria come over me as a I realized that with one click I had ordered something shipped to me -- with no extra shipping charge, from a merchant as reputable as Amazon. Now one-click after the decision to buy had been reached, I could have the product shipped to me. What genius...

Of Mice and Market Justice

I was searching for a wireless optical mouse on Amazon, and I found that my item was out of stock, but was available on z-Shops. On z-Shops, Amazon has implemented an eBay-style dialog between buyers and sellers, with feedback scores and merchant ratings. (An indication that we measure the things we're really interested in.)

In the Amazon system more than in the eBay system, at least at first glance, there is a more lengthy dialog between the buyers and the sellers. Could this be a byproduct of Amazon's allowing longer-length responses? It would be interesting to know -- this would be an example of social process constrained by technology.

There were certainly more lengthy and detailed complaints. For example: "RUN FROM THIS SELLER! I HAVE PURCHASE A CAMCORDER FOR $1000 AND IM STILL WAITING FOR IT! I ASK FOR A REFUND BUT THE SELLER WONT SEND IT OR EVEN ANSWER MY EMAILS!"

This was followed by an equally lengthly and detailed answer: "1st - This customer is referring to a sale that took place outside Amazon.com. 2nd - This buyer is misrepresenting the sale. The buyer received new camcorders but still dissatisfied. Upon return of items, demanded refund, then camcorders, then refund, then camcorders....back and forth."

It occurred to me that what we need at this time is a trusted arbiter - someone or some authority who acts in a fair and balanced way to resolve the dispute. It would be trivial for a dedicated ombudsman to request records and other justification to clear the issue up witha ruling. Stretch goal: Make the documents public and allow people to vote (non-binding) -- a true jury of peers. Overwhelming public disagreement with "verdicts" could trigger a re-opening of the decision -- a second opinion for example.

On an unrelated note: Why don't dishwashers allow you to fill them up with liquid soap, then automatically figure out the minimal amount of soap to use? What design genius at Whirlpool missed this feature?

First Post: Amsterdam

This is my first real post... This is a shot I took of a canal in Amsterdam. I published it to this blog from Picasa. (Highly recommended picture management software.)