Quote
Posted by mobile in Uncategorized on September 29th, 2009
“We are what we do repeatedly” – Aristotle
dealing with car dealers
Been car shopping lately, and learned a couple of valuable lessons about dealing with car dealers.
- Car dealers are a strange species of human.
- Car dealers selling Audis generally aren’t interested in selling you their car
When #1 and #2 combine, you’ve got a pretty bad shopping experience at hand. Mind you, some of this is more true for car dealers than private parties. Private parties can be a mixed bag, but I’ve had better luck going down that road lately.
General car shopping tips:
- You don’t have to tell a dealer anything: you don’t have to reveal your price point in mind (”price is not a factor, the right car is”), you don’t have to reveal your purchase time frame (”when I find the right car, I’ll pull the trigger”), you don’t have to give them your contact details (”do you have a card? I’ll call you”)
- A lot of car buying is about finding bargaining chips: Study the car and identify the options, trim levels, bells and whistles. Know them. Identify the subset you care about, the set you need to have, the ones you can live without. Don’t let the car dealer spend too much time talking about what the car has; be sure to identify all things it doesn’t have (even pre-negotiation). Some of the non-Audi car dealers who have Audis on the lot have no knowledge of the configurations, and this can be an advantage.
- Understand the prevailing price range: this is a multi-dimensional study involving geography, year, mileage and options. After a looking at it for a while, you should be familiar with what an ‘06 in the east coast with 20,000 miles should be worth. You should be using Excel with formulas and sorts.
- Nobody buys at KBB: nearly all deals are done 2~3k under KBB price. KBB is based on sales transactions too, mind you.
- Tools like TrueCar are more useful. Most of the Tier-1 auto websites pull KBB data so don’t be mislead.
- Don’t ignore your gut. If something feels off, think about it.
Beginning multi-threading
Posted by ani in programming on April 25th, 2009
I challenged myself to write a multi-threaded app this week (yes, I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t done a lot of this before).
I must say that it went really well. If you’re looking for a great guide to writing multi-threaded applications, have a look at this free e-book entitled “Threading in C#“. One of the best finds ever. Also check out my Delicious feed, I’ve bookmarked a number of really good resources on this topic too.
clickTAGs and FlashVars: everything you ever wanted to know
Posted by ani in programming, tech, web on April 16th, 2009
For folks in the online ad space, clickTAGs are a familiar sight. However, you’d be surprised how many people are unaware of how it actually works. I’ll try and summarize that here.
- Flash-based ads are .swf files that need to be loaded onto an HTML page.
- The most common way to add external objects like .swf files into an HTML page is by using the object-embed tag combination.
- Usually, data parameters need to be passed to the .swf file (like variable information or redirect URLs for click tracking).
- This is accomplished through the concept of FlashVars (aka. “flash variables”).
- One of these FlashVars is a parameter called clickTAG, a standard variable name used by most ad creatives to identify a click tracking redirect URL.
- Why use a redirect URL for click tracking? If the ad clicked-through to the destination URL (say, www.acura.com), the ad servers that loaded that Flash ad would never know if the user actually clicked on the ad. To get around this, most ad servers have all clicks route through them first, before 302‘ing to the destination page.
One of the limitations of clickTAG, I’ve realized, is that it can mangle a long query string. Since Flash delimits multiple flash variables through an ampersand (the & character), it can get in the way of passing a long query string as the redirect URL. That is to say, if you were trying to do something like:
<embed src="my_movie.swf" flashvars="clickTAG=http://www.mywebsite.com/redirect?data1=100&data2=200&data3=300">
Flash would interpret the flashvars as 3 variable-data pairs:
clickTAGas"http://www.mywebsite.com/redirect?data1=100"data2as200data3as300
Instead of clickTAG being set as the URL with the query string.
viewing shared calendars in outlook web access
This bugged me a lot today, but I finally figured it out.
Once you’re logged into OWA, go to this URL:
https://outlook.server.com/owa/user@domain/?cmd=contents&f=Calendar
I believe this works only for Outlook 2007.
boom
Posted by ani in Uncategorized on April 5th, 2009
Love the drum rolls on this song: Won’t Get Fooled Again (YouTube)
Update: “Special Edition” also available
taking the plunge
I decided to order my drums today. Yamaha’s DT Explorer with accessories from MusiciansBuy (has anyone used them? they seem okay on BizRate).
Anyway, the package includes:
- Yamaha DT Explorer electronic drum kit (YouTube video)
- Drum stool (a.k.a. “throne”)
- Sennheiser headphones (I was eyeing good headphones for a while now)
- Drum sticks (my third pair!)
It set me back $700 but I told myself it was a good deal because I didn’t have to pay for:
- Shipping
- Sales tax (!)
If you’re in the market for an electronic drum set, and if you’re a beginner, it looks like Yamaha is the way to go. A serious drummer could grow out of these in a year and a half, but at the rate I’m going, its going to last me a while 
That said, if you have more than a grand to spend, I hear the Roland kits have a lot of features that would keep a drummer busy for a while.
Special thanks to Ed for pointing me to this great deal.
Thoughts from US autos
Fast Company has a great story on redoing the US auto industry. I think it is applicable to the economy in general.
Some quotes:
“If you can’t figure out what makes your product special, then it’s probably not special.”
- Mike Hughes, creative director @ The Martin Agency
“The seismic shift from manufacturing to services has not only changes the composition of our GDP, but also changed our national mindset toward work. We no longer celebrate the way things get made. We are more interested in the way things get bought.”
- Mike Rowe, “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe” on Discovery
rypan on my sxsw adventures
(2:29:32 PM) rypan: not going to lie….
(2:29:40 PM) rypan: i was like…ani tweets at all the parties
(2:29:40 PM) rypan: but
(2:29:44 PM) rypan: where are the NERD tweets