RFC: A new shopping-inspired, color-coded holiday: Brown Wednesday

Photo by William J. Grimes This is a picture o...

We already have:

Black Friday: Day after Thanksgiving, the start of the Christmas shopping season. This now spills into the weekend.

Pre-Black Friday: AKA, “Thanksgiving.” Yeah, people are freaking out over sales before they have finished cooking the stupid turkey.

Cyber Monday: As crazy as Black Friday, but for online sales. This year this is turning into “Cyber Week.”

Now for the new:

Brown Wednesday is the first big shipping wave from the online purchases since Thanksgiving. If you bought stuff on Black Friday, odds are you didn’t ask for Saturday shipping, so the earliest you could get them without paying an eye and a leg in shipping would be today. Expect lots of people (including myself) whining about FEDEX/UPS/USPS anxiety today.

Comments

On sleep deprivation and Incan Monkey Gods

From: Dilbert comic strip for 08/03/1992 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. I was trying to show this strip to a coworker who is dangerously toying with the harsh mistress that is Insomnia. What shocked me is how quickly I was able to look up the strip, which was published when he was just 11 years old, and two weeks before my just-out-of-college ass shipped out to US Army Basic Training.

The Black Hole

If this was a minigolf hole, you can't reach B from A. Ever. If this was a room lined with mirrors, and you lit a candle at point A, you can't see it from B, not even reflected. Update: I guess I didn't explain this all the way through. You can't reach B from A with just one stroke, there's no direct line between them, and there is no way to bounce the ball (assuming perfect conditions). Thanks to Ben for pointing this obvious error.

Add custom speed settings to your ifit map workout

Ifit.com allows you to build a workout walk/race/bike route simply by clicking on a Google Maps interface. You can then use a compatible ifit-enabled workout machine to recreate the route automatically. The problem is that the user interface still isn't final, so there are features in place that aren't exactly obvious. For example, if you create a workout your machine starts at 1 MPH, because that's the default. But how to set it to start at say, 3 MPH? Easy, just switch from map view to graph view: That button switches from the Google Maps interface to a chart that allows you to visualize and control effort: You can't change the elevation, this is fixed due to the geography that you selected. But you can drag the yellow (speed line) to change the speed of your device. What if you want to have segments at different speeds? Easy, just click and drag and it will break the line, and you can drag each segment of the line independently: ...

The Insomniac Coder

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