Having not found any useful information on the topic, I created a stub for interstitial suspension on Wikipedia.
I can’t wait for next year’s presentation on “How to Use One Piece of Toilet Paper”.
About Christopher Price
Christopher Price is an innovative IT leader with 17-years experience directing business transformation within complex businesses and growing technology-driven organizations. Christopher is able to envision and articulate IT's role in enabling and driving innovation, competitive differentiation, customer loyalty and efficiency for the company. Currently seeking opportunities to join a highly effective leadership team. More about Christopher | Let's start the conversation...
May 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Coffee Math
I happened upon the interesting formula below while reading about cooking thermometers. I understand that fountain drinks are even more profitable.
Great Coffee = Great Profits
One location
Buys coffee at $14.00 per pound
Using 4 ounces to brew a 64 ounce pot
Serving an 8 ounce cup
32 cups per pound of coffee
At 100 cups per day, with 50 refills at no charge
Selling each cup at $1.95At 54 cents per cup COGS, you profit $44,484.38 in one year
Can you afford NOT to serve delicious coffee?
What sort of “coffee” can you easily add to your business?
May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment
How to Reduce and Optimize PNG Images
Let me start by stating:
- I’m not a web-designer.
- I’m a hack at Photoshop.
- I’ve fumbled with Pixelmator and Acorn.
- If your working in Windows, I can’t help you.
I build a lot of web site concepts and write a fair number of blog posts. Regardless of which I’m working on, I like my sites to look good and open quickly. The key to both of these goals is to use nice screen-optimized images.
If you just take the picture you snapped with the 8 megapixel camera in your new iPhone and upload it to your site, it may look great, but the file size will be gigantic. Large images load slowly and that will annoy your visitors.
What’s the problem?
Large image sizes allow you to print large photos. According to the handy Design215 Megapixels Chart, a photo taken by an 8 megapixel camera has a pixel resolution of 3264×2448 and will look very nice when printed as an 8×10 inch photo at 300ppi (pixels per inch). What does that mean? It means your image will look nice when printed. The more megapixels, the more you can enlarge the printed photo without it looking pixelated or blurry.
Meh. 113KB Pie.
The thing is, most computer screens only display 72ppi, which would, if my math is correct, display your 8 megapixel image at around 42×32 inches. That is considerably bigger than my monitor, or for that matter, my dining room table. This is a ridiculous size, of course, so you will probably specify that WordPress (or whatever) constrain the image to fit on a normal web page at, say, 300×219 pixels. What happens to all that extra detail and size? Nothing. Your site visitors will have to load your entire giant image yet it will display the same as if it were a less detailed, much smaller image.
Why not just use a less detailed smaller image in the first place?
Because that doesn’t make you want to buy a new camera. Sorry, I mean, great idea! Here is what you do: [Read more...]
March 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Invisible
We live in an age when being invisible takes some creativity.
March 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Fora vs Forums
The Vicissitudes of the Latin Plural in English:
A plural gains acceptance as a singular because language is always changing to suit the comfort of the people who speak it.
Ergo, Forums.
See also:
appendices/appendixes
encyclopediae*/encyclopedias
indices/indexes
agenda/agendas
memoranda/memorandums
hippopotami/hippopotamuses
stigma/stigmas
octopi/octopuses
* Interesting: My spellchecker approved all of the above words except for the correct form, “encyclopediae”.
January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment
How to Disable Twitter URL Shortening
In short: You can’t.
Recently, Twitter has started automatically converting all URL links in tweets (i.e. twitter messages) into 20 character “shortened” links. For example, if you send the message: “http://ChristopherPrice.com is awesome!” everyone will actually see something like: “http://t.co/IzKOWFnE is awesome!” Both links will go to the same place, but the shortened one is, in effect, cloaked. (Go ahead, try it.)
Shortened URLs are very handy sometimes, especially within the confines of a 140-character tweet. Additionally, you can convert a super-long, column-wrapping link into something you can email to the team and avoid the concern that Outlook will break the link.
There are times, however, when transparently sharing a URL is not only appropriate, but also important. Like when one is trying to develop a website’s brand. Or maybe an author believes (correctly, IMO) that fully disclosing a real link will provide some additional level of trust with readers. After all, in many cases, you really have no idea where a shortened URL is going to send you. On some devices, merely visiting a “bad” website can be harmful. That won’t happen too many times before increasingly suspicious people stop clicking on shortened links altogether. [Read more...]
January 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Domain-Specific Redirects in WordPress Multisite
How to write an htaccess call to handle an entire mapped domain on WordPress Multisite.
Warning: This post has a pretty high geek factor.
You’ve been warned.
Since Otto (@ottodestruct) fixed the wordpress permalink issue in WordPress 3.3, when I moved christopherprice.com to a different WP install, I decided to eliminate the /%year%/ portion of the permalinks he recommended previously.
Since it is very bad for SEO to have previously ranked pages just disappear and show up at different URLs, I needed to set up a 301 redirect (permanent) instruction for each old URL to each new URL. For example:
http://domain.com/2011/post/ should now redirect all visitors (including Google spiders) to http://domain.com/post/.
January 18, 2012 By 2 Comments
When Calling 800 Numbers: THIS IS THE LAW
I received an email (see below) from someone I know well with the Subject line: When Calling 800 #’s: THIS IS THE LAW.[sic]. Putting aside the xenophobic tone of the message, I thought I’d take a 10 minute break and amuse myself with a quick mental analysis of the likelihood of the proposed technique based on what I know about business strategy and call center operations.
Some people enjoy puzzles or sudoku, I like to explore possibilities. The sender thought enough of my thoughts to send it on to the folks he forwarded the message to, so maybe someone else will find it interesting too. Below is my reply, followed by the original email:
The premise: There is a law that requires non-US based phone agents to transfer callers to a US-based agent upon request. [Read more...]
December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
How To Directly Copy Files Between the Buffalo LinkStation and a USB Drive
I own a Buffalo LinkStation LS-CHL NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. It basically gives your home network a network disk like the one you probably have at the office. Super easy: Just plug it to the network and to a power outlet and you’re good to go. One of the many* great things about the LinkStation is you can attach an external drive to it to expand your disk space.
I had a 300GB file (a backup of an old laptop) I wanted to move from the LinkStation to an attached USB drive. Since they both appear in the Finder (i.e. Windows Explorer) I just grabbed the file from one drive to the other and it started copying as expected. Wait, remaining time 17 hours? There has got to be a better way. And there is… [Read more...]
