Techosaurus

I hate domain squatters. On my hate scale, they’re somewhere below third party parking enforcement companies/employees, and stubbing your little toe on an immovable hard object. I haven’t really had much experience with domain squatters in the past, but I have in the last few days. To go along with the blog that will replace this one, I’ve been looking into getting a new name. The new name will also be the name of the small IT consulting firm that I want to start. My first choice in a name would be Avalanche Labs. Avalanchelabs.com is currently held by domain squatters who want a whopping $1600 for the domain. Avalanche.com is currently held by a squatter who won’t respond to my emails and has no price listed. I guess after I register Avalanche Labs LLC, I could probably sue the owner of avalanchelabs.com under 15 U.S.C. § 1125 and U.S.C. § 1129, but that is so much work.

I’ve written about this before. It comes up about every time I look for a new place to live. I moved back in with my parents a while back, but unfortunately it just doesn’t jive well with my social life. No disrespect to my parents (i love them), I just need a place to call my own. This brings us to the search.

Looking for a place to live in Utah county sucks because no good search tools exist. The closest thing I had to a good search tool was KSL Classifieds. Unfortunately, they’ve replaced their homes section of the site with some service called Rentler. It’s pretty clear that Rentler has put quite a bit of money into their site design, but unfortunately it’s clear that Rentler lacks a good UX developer. There are a number of glaring issues that make searching a bane:

1. There are no text summaries on the main search results page.
   This by far is the biggest problem I have with Rentler. Really, the first two sentences of the description are all I need to make a quick yes/no decision on a property. Normally because these first two sentences include important key phrases like, “women only” (obviously that’s a no, because I have a penis), “BYU Approved” (no), and “shared room” (no). Instead of being able to blaze through hundreds of ads in a few minutes, I have to click on each one, load a whole new page and then click another link to get a full summary. That’s just shit UX design.
2. No result sorting in any way.
   Seriously? What in the hell were they thinking? The default (and only available) search sorting is price high-to-low. I like to view my ads from the newest to oldest posting. The new ones are more likely to be open (and actually relevant). Furthermore, I don’t know a single person who thinks to themselves, “Ah yes, I’d like to search in the very tip top of my price range.” When I set price ranges, the high is the absolute most I would want to spend… aka the last resort. Absolutely not the first thing I want to see.
3. Hope you didn’t want to select a price range smaller than $400:

Really, I could write a better site than this in under a week. Node.js would be the server side, couchdb for the database, UI would be all AJAXy (and actually usable), and it would have a RESTy JSON API.

I’m an IT major. Well… I’m an arrogant IT major. I feel like I already know everything for this degree. Because of that, I’ve been avoiding the entry level classes for as long as possible. Well, I’m a senior now, so it’s time to get those entry level classes finished up. The more I take the low level 101-esque clases, the more I see a disturbing trend. These classes don’t teach you any IT fundamentals. In fact, they would probably be more appropriately titled: How to give your boss a reach around.

The reasoning here is that you don’t actually learn anything about computers. You learn marketing/business terms that vaguely relate to computers only in that computers are so pervasive, anything can be related to computers.

If I wanted to be in marketing / business, I would take a class in marketing or business. Me? I want to learn about computers. I would so much rather see IT 101 all about setting up Linux VMs, familiarizing with various unix flavors, gaining some windows sysadmin skills (policies, etc) or learning about low level computing concepts. Instead, what you’re getting is the definition of B2B, and tips on how to suck up to management.

Note: I’m not opposed to having a business class or two required for my degree. That’s a-okay… but make me take a business class.

So I have a bike. It’s a mountain bike. I enjoy riding it quite a bit in the mountains, but around town it’s kind of a pain. The bike weighs like 50 pounds so it adds a lot to what my legs have to move. On top of that, it’s full suspension. Although full suspension is cool and makes bumps less bumpy, it takes about half the power out of your stroke. So when I’m trying the 100% up hill course home, I end up looking like I’ve run a marathon at my destination.

To solve this problem I’ve decided to buy a new bike. A road bike. One that doesn’t include shock absorbers, has small tires instead of 2″ wide tires, and will be light enough to pick up with one finger. My budget is $1000 and under (preferably around $700). Right now I have no clue what bike to get. I was looking at the Trek 7.1 FX, but i really want drop bars and more road geometry. This bike is never going to leave the road. I took a look at Trek’s “Town” section on their website but all of the bikes there are fixies. I just don’t want a fixie. 50+% of my ride is up hill and it just won’t work out on a fixie. I need gears! So now I’m at square one, I have no clue what bike to get.

Maybe I’ll go into the bike store and just see what they recommend.