Testing adding a bookmark to Pinboard from my site.
Year: 2020
MapWatching Class Action Park, a documentary about Action Park in Vernon NJ. Makes me feel good I survived it, as some of these things were much scarier than I remember as a child. Of course, I avoided the really scary rides.
Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)Just the same way that VC-backed rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft offload corporate cost centers and burdens onto their employees (which they’d otherwise like to call independent contractors), most customer service phone trees are meant to save time for their paid employees while offloading …
I can’t speak for every company, but as someone who has worked in a Call Center, the purpose of phone trees is not to offload the burden onto the caller. It is to route the caller to the right people. Everyone who answers the phone at an organization isn’t identically skilled. If you press 0, as so many people do, you could end up going to someone who isn’t qualified to do what you want, which means a poor experience or being transferred again. So, phone trees have callers do the work of telling the company what you want. Now, from your description, it sounds like their setup could use some improvement. I’ve been involved in the past in discussions to change the one at my employer based on the data we have on usage as well as feedback from the employees on how people are confusing the options.
Simple Location for WordPress 4.1.12 Released
A new version of Simple Location is out. Version 4.1.12 has many under the hood tweaks/fixes, and only one major user facing feature, a redo of the caching system. The caching system is used by the weather system to avoid poling for the weather on every refresh. There is now a setting in each widget to set the cache frequency. I recommend at least 300 seconds(5 minutes). The weather won’t change that much, and if you are using an API key, this will reduce, assuming your site gets 1 visit per second, requests from 86400 to only 288 times a time.
I did try to implement trip support in this version, but due to issues, I have pushed that off to rethink.
Continuing my periodic chore of uploading all Indiewebcamp videos to archive.org, just uploaded all of the videos I could find from IWC Nuremberg 2018. Because…why not?
Amtrak
53
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Departs: LOR
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Arrives: SFA
Simple Location 4.2.0 Released
Simple Location version 4.2.0 has been released. In edition to several under the hood improvements, such as standardizing units of measurement for the various weather providers and adding new optional parameters, it introduces the option of a custom and a fallback weather provider. The custom provider allows you to specify custom stations at designated URLs. The stations should return a json object with latitude and longitude as well as any provided weather properties as identified in the system. I’d love it if people implemented this simple json file and allowed others to pull weather data from them.
I built this feature for myself. Using my own weather data when possible has been a desire of mine. Now, my website is set to compare my location to that of the custom stations I’ve designated, in this case two under my control. If I am close, it will use that data. If not, it will go to the fallback provider. The same fallback can be set for regional providers, like the US National Weather service and the Met Office, in case you wander into untracked territory.
The functionality also works for the weather in my sidebar, where you’ll see additional parameters such as the readings from my particulate sensors and any sensors I add in the future.
In my bedroom on the Autotrain…they are putting the train together. After that, we get into Sanford FL just before 9am tomorrow.
I like this much better than a coach seat.