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This Month's Topics
Find-a-Human
Woot.com
File Extension Master List

Find-a-Human

Don't you just love those phone menu trees? No, you don't want to open an account, close an account, change your address, or make a payment. All you want to do is talk to a person and get an answer to a quick question. Go to https://www.quickbase.com/db/bam6rdiey and see if the company you are trying to reach is on the list. It's far from complete, but it's a start and there's a mechanism for making new entries. So if you figure out how to bust out of the phone menu tree and reach a human for a company not on the list, you can add it.

Woot.com

This is a "Wish-I'd-thought-of-that" story. Woot.com sells one item every 24 hours. That's right, their total sales catalog consists of one item and that item changes every 24 hours. You can't buy yesterday's item today or today's item tomorrow. Frequently they run out of inventory before the day is ended; then you can't buy anything from them until the next day (unless they declare a Woot-off...). Their sales day starts and ends at midnight.

Sounds crazy? Welcome to another crazy web idea that's making money for someone. One of the fun things about the web is that crazy ideas often work. Woot.com's initial reason for existence was to unload excess inventory. The company that started it had a number of items in inventory that weren't selling, so they decided to build a website where they could dump them. The one-item-per-day idea was just whimsy at the time.

On another whim, they added a feature that, in retrospect, transformed the site: a user forum. Soon, the two main features of the site -- the one-item-per-day sales and the user forum -- created a new use for the site. Woot.com became an instant focus group for new products. Put your product up on Woot.com for 24 hours and before that 24 hours is up, you'll know exactly how buyers feel about it. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal article that featured Woot.com, representatives of companies putting products up on Woot.com camp there for the critical hours between midnight and early morning of the sales day to get the first returns, reply to questions in the forum, and generally find out if they have a winner.

Do you have a crazy idea you want to try on the web? It costs less than you might think, and you might just hit the jackpot like Woot.com.

File Extension Master List

Have you ever come across a file with an extension you did not recognize? For non-techies or Mac users, the extension is the group of letters and/or numbers (usually 3) following the period after a filename. So, for example, a Word file would be filename.doc, where the .doc indicates it's a Word file. Knowing what that extension means can often tell you if a file could be a threat to your system or not.

The definitive list of file extensions can be found at http://www.filext.com/. Bet you didn't know that a .fbi file extension indicates a Total Annihilation Main Unit Definition file. Ok, you probably didn't need to know that, but this list can sometimes be useful to help you decide whether to delete a file or open it.

Incidentally, we found this bit of information in a free (non-techie) newsletter we get that we like a lot. It's called This Is True, and it's a weekly newsletter with strange but true stories from various (sometimes obscure) news sources. It only takes a few minutes to read each week but adds a little fun to the day when it arrives. It's written by a fellow named Randy Cassingham. He has a paid version also -- the paid version has more stories and omits a few text ads in the free version. You can see some excerpts and sign up at http://www.thisistrue.com/. And like most good newsletters, he has an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every issue so you can drop your subscription if you ever want to without much effort.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

Want to see back issues of this newsletter? Go to http://www.cyberartisans.com/newsletter and select an issue.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers
jspencer@cyberartisans.com
http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110