December 2005 – woowoowoo

a two movie weekend

I’m not a big moviegoer, but circumstances saw me visit the wonderful Nova Cinema twice this weekend.

First up was “The Constant Gardener“. I’ll admit to not being that keen to see this one. I found the book so sad that I thought it would spoil my enjoyment of the movie. Sure, the movie was sad, but the story was so sympathetically reproduced that I’d still say it was well worth seeing. The real positive was the colour and music of Africa that the medium of film could bring to the story. Excellent!

Walk the Line, the movie. Next up was a preview session of “Walk the Line” – the Johnny Cash story. Now, I’m a bit of a fan of Johnny Cash. Along with “Hard Day’s Night” and a Louis Armstrong record, Johnny Cash was the only other artist I remember from my family’s LP collection. I grew up with these songs.

Obviously, I enjoyed it! It was great. A story about the extraordinary forces that helped shape his life and talent. Some of the historical detail was new to me, but one of the most impressive ‘forces’ in Johnny’s life was June Carter. She must have been a force to be reckoned with… and Reese Witherspoon did a fantastic job of the part. I believe she sang her own part in the music too. Respect!

measuremap : stats made easy

A couple of weeks back, I got my invitation to join the alpha test of measuremap. This was exciting, because I’d seen Jeff Veen give us a little preview talk about it at we05. It looked very nice then, so I was keen to get into it.

It is the nature of statistics tools that you need to build up some stats before they’re any use, so it was a week or so before I could really try out the tools. Once there were some figures to work with (albeit the feeble figures from this humble blog!), I could get a feel for where measuremap sits in the market place.

Well, actually, that’s pretty clear. This is stats reporting for the masses. I can take an apache log file and filter it and gather information, eventually boiling the lines of text to a simple, easily understood graphic. Measuremap does this (for blogs) with a single click. I have several clients who simply glaze over when they view even the relatively user-friendly AW-Stats pages on their sites, but I can imagine them not only understanding measuremap, but playing around with it… making comparisons and learning about the patterns of their visitors. That’s got to be a good thing!

Elegant, fun statistics: bet you never thought you’d see those three words in a sentence! If it’s screen grabs you want, go check out flickr.

auction stupidity

I get a laugh out of online auctions. Lots of people seem to add the words ‘online’ and ‘auction’ together and come up with = bargain! wrong!!

Take this auction (no longer online) by traditional auction house Gray Edsell Timms at GraysOnline. It’s an auction of the hottest electronic toy around – iPods. Current models too, about 10 Video, 13 Nano/4G and a lonely 1Gb Shuffle.

The auction still has two days to go, but the top bid for each item type (not each item – yet!) comfortably exceeds the cost of buying the product new from the Apple website. It’s not immediately obvious, because GraysOnline charge a 12.5% ‘buyers premium’ (whatever that is!) and $12 delivery. So by the time you bid $169 for the shuffle (as ‘K.M’ from Epping NSW already has!) and add the extras, it has cost you $202. Apple have it for $199 – free delivery. Duh!

The top bid for a Nano already totals $16 more than the Apple Store!

I’ll be watching this auction with interest and I’ll report back with the final prices. Should be worth a laugh!

OK, here’s the update

As the auction closes it’s got even sillier than before. Someone has bid $204 for the Shuffle which will cost them a total of $241.50, that’s $42 dollars more than if they bought it from Apple!

iPod Nano price at Apple Australia 2005-11-02 Now, here is a screen grab of the current Nano price at Apple Australia. So, you wouldn’t want to bid more than $309 (do the maths) at Grays, would you? Well, that’s exactly what 13 people did today, one of the bids will end up costing $45 more than the retail price… yay! fools and money 🙂

There was less interest in the 60Gb Video model, two people actually beat the retail price by $5, another five got a price equal to retail, while few nongs paid up to $27 more than retail. I just love it!