Ezra Goldschlager’s posterous

Ezra Goldschlager’s posterous

Ezra Goldschlager  //  Salt Lake City, the Great State of Utah
youllbehappy.com
youtube.com/ninjathepup
and @superbulence on twitter

 
Jan 25 / 12:09am

LinkedIn: What've you done for me lately?

by Ezra Goldschlager
Recently I've had a renewed interest in LinkedIn. I'm not sure why,
but it's happened. I'm curious about the system as a whole, in terms
of its concrete worth to members. I have an entirely unscientific
poll with a laughably tiny sample size going on here:
http://polls.linkedin.com/p/74858/ktpso ... If you're a LinkedIn
member, please pop over and vote.

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Jan 16 / 9:27pm

Inversion

by Ezra Goldschlager

As a relatively new resident to Salt Lake City, I hadn't yet heard the term or known of the phenomenon "inversion" when one day I awoke thinking it was snowing outside, only to realize that it was not snowing but instead the local area was immersed in some sort of white, non-foggy haze.  I later learned that this is basically all of the pollution in the area being prevented from escaping upwards, because of pressure/wind barrier that is particular to parts of the world with specific geographies.  Rumor has it next time it snows, this "inversion" will lift.  It's been 2+ weeks without snow now, and everyone is starting to get antsy for a storm.  

I'm told that if I were to drive about 15 or 20 minutes up the mountains, I would clear the inversion and it would be a bright & sunny experience.  I would also be able to look down and see the smoggy cloud just sitting over the valley that is SLC.

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Jan 3 / 5:36pm

Plink

by Ezra Goldschlager
Why is it that an XL sweater can be shunk down to a child's size small
if laundered improperly, but we have no way to get it back to its
original size? I mean, it's not like there is any less physical
material there. I propose that we call this process of getting stuff
back to its original size "to plink" (unshrink is too unwieldy), and
get some people working on it ASAP.

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Dec 1 / 3:08pm

Holiday spirit

by Ezra Goldschlager

Free 2Hr parking in downtown SLC

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Nov 12 / 2:26pm

On the lawn at the Super 8

by Ezra Goldschlager

via tweetie

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Nov 3 / 10:52am
by Ezra Goldschlager

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Nov 3 / 6:08am

What to hear on the interstate?

by Ezra Goldschlager

Road trip!   Next week I will be taking the '97 Land Cruiser and will add a few thousand miles to its current log of 126,000, while heading from New York to Salt Lake City.  Ninja will be riding limo-style in the back seat in his Ruff Rider doggie seat belt, likely with his paw resting on the window sill most of the way.

This will be my longest drive yet.  I have done NYC to Atlanta but with a number of vacation-y stops along the way.  This time we are purely driving to move from one place to another.

I have been building up my library of audio books to keep me entertained during the drive.  Here's my current list, in no particular order:

The Copper Bracelet (Multiple authors)
SuperFreakonomics (Levitt & Dubner)
The Lakota Way (Marshall)
The Anatomy of Peace (Arbinger Institute)
iWoz (Wozniak and Smith)
The Art of Mindful Living (Thich Nhat Hahn)

These are all unabridged so we have 100+ hours of listening, and I like having a buffer well beyond the travel time (knock on wood) just in case I'm not in the mood for something or just don't like a particular book.  I have linked to the Amazon pages above, but the Audiobooks are all from Audible.com (I believe now owned by Amazon, anyway), and you can get to the Audible downloads through the Amazon pages.

Any suggestions regarding where to start?  I have just listened to a bit of iWoz and so far it's light, breezy and cheerful, and a bit of Writing Down the Bones, listening to which makes me feel like I'm having office hours with a wise college professor in a well-worn coffee shop.

Alright, more from the road!  (Or perhaps sooner)

EDIT:

P.S.  On the subject of Audiobooks, if you want a real treat, listen to John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise in audiobook format.  Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton do a performance that is more performance-art than book-reading.  It's not 100% hilarious the whole way through, but it's quite an experience and an exhibition of the limitless nature of the audiobook format.  In finding the preceding link, I noticed that they finally released the sequel, More Information Than You Require in audiobook format, and I will be downloading that now and adding it to my list.

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Oct 28 / 3:06pm

The weakness in Amazon's review system

by Ezra Goldschlager

Amazon.com is usually the first place I'll check to gauge consumer sentiment about a particular product.  The review system is fine, and some people seem to rate every single item they've ever owned or have even just heard of, and I think it's usually a good place to get a broad spectrum of opinions.  One major weakness is that Amazon does not allow a reviewer to change his or her "star" rating of the product after posting the review.  Reviewers are able to edit old reviews to the extent of even deleting the entire thing and writing something new, but the star rating remains untouchable.  I doubt many reviewers ever want to change a star rating on a review they've written, but it would be really great if the option existed.  For example, I wrote a review of a car jumper pack, and gave it five stars after the product performed exceptionally well in its first three months of use.  But later, when the product died a few days after the warranty period, I wanted to go back and adjust the five stars down a bit.  I was able to add an update to the text portion of the review, but the 5 stars remain and are figured into the average rating that displays when a user is in "browse" mode.  This issue can be particularly impactful on sales of niche products, since sometimes there are fewer than a handful of reviews.  If a shopper decides to sort by average rating, he or she may never see a good product that has had a bad review that the reviewer later changed.  If I hadn't already known of it and had a high opinion of it, I would've skipped right over the Intel DP55KG motherboard, which currently sits with an average rating of 2 stars.  Nevermind the fact that the sole reviewer had updated her review to state that a problem had been fixed and that (s)he now thought highly of the board.  (The reviewer wrote:  " ... This raises my star rating to 4-5 stars for this product. (Wish Amazon would allow edits of the star rating as well as the text)").  

 

This seems like a no-brainer.  Is there some reason why reviewers should not be able to change star ratings, if they are  allowed to change the entire text of a review, wholesale and without any notation?

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