Tralfaz

Day: July 3, 2013

  • Grocery Store Observations

    This afternoon I did a little shopping for the holiday feast tomorrow, and I got to observe some prime high quality behavior.

    First, how hard is it to put your damn shopping cart in one of the little corrals that they provide?  Seriously, there are at least three per row of cars, but alas, it is too damn far for most people to put them where they are out of the way of other shoppers.  There must have been 40 carts strewn all over the parking lot, not in the pens provided.

    Second, I don’t care if your significant other is just running in for a minute, but it is NOT cool to park and idle your big assed truck or SUV in the firelane in front of the store.  There were 4 of them today.

    Third, there is plenty of steak. You don’t have to push and shove to get ahead of people at the meat counter. There is plenty of Mayonnaise, so you don’t have to block the condiments with your cart while you are trying to choose between the full fat, the canola oil version (yuck) or the reduced fat version.

    I am sure I will have a few more posts about the insanity that grocery shopping brings out in people.

  • Google Analytics weirdness

    I have a few websites, and I have all of them (except this one) in my Google Analytics account.  I don’t obsessively watch it, but I keep track of trends.

    My main site, Tralfaz, I run on Joomla! which does a pretty good job of internally monitoring the page visits. I find that on days where I make a new post, I typically get 100  – 130 page views of that (mostly from the Product Management community). But Google analytics usually only tell me that 15 – 20 page views happened.  I don’t do aggressive SEO, but I do set the meta data and the tags to help the search engines find my content (and they do, most of my visits are not return visitors).

    Then yesterday, I put up a new post.  It quickly had 100 page views, and today I went to check on my analytics graphs, and wow, it spiked.  It is almost identical to what Joomla! tells me that page views was. I wonder if this will continue? (I am not hopeful)

    My last month on tralfaz.org
    My last month on tralfaz.org

    I suspect that google fiddles with the metrics to try to convince me to buy adwords, and to promote my site.  But since I run this for fun, and am not looking to commercialize it, the entreaties to use their tools to increase traffic fall on deaf ears.

  • More on life with the Nexus 7

    I have been trying really hard to use my Nexus 7 as my tablet and media consumption device. In general, it is a worthy competitor to the iOS based iPad’s, but there are some notable differences.

    1) The built in Safari “Reader” function is something I use heavily. If you are unfamiliar with it, it takes a web page, strips out all the marginal things, formats it in larger, more legible text, and makes it easy to read.  This is built in and “free”.  On a PC, it is not a big deal, as I usually have plenty of screen resolution, but even on a tablet, it is nice to have a clean copy to read without distraction. I have not found a good replacement in Chrome yet. Why won’t Google replicate this awesome feature?

    2) Google can’t help but fucking with their applications. I guess the drive to “Google+”-ify everything is a top down directive. What it means though is that they have pretty much ruined the Gmail application in the stock Android.  It has avatars of the people, linked to their profile, which isn’t terrible, but it takes up valuable screen real estate on a device that has limited space to begin with. Yes, I could set up all my Gmail accounts on the “other” email software, but then I lose the goodness of the Google integration (like Apple, it “just works”)

    3) (Again) The auto-brightness feature is pretty funked up.  When I read in bed, it is constantly adjusting the intensity, making appear to flicker.  Google needs to tune that control feedback loop to make it less sensistive.

    4) It eats battery.  I am charging it every other day, where with my generation 2 iPad, I could often go 4 – 6 days of normal use before I needed to plug it in. I am not even listening to music, or doing much streaming, just reading my ebooks, or playing solitaire.

    But, all in all, it has been a not too unpleasant experience.  I am still not looking to give up my iOS devices, but I have a new appreciation for the Android ecosystem.