Peterbe.com

I don't shop from Ocado anymore but maybe I should start doing that again. The reason I only tried it once was that I wasn't able to find as many products on their website as I needed plus if you're not a big family it often doesn't make sense to buy too much fresh food in one go.

They're cleverly keeping me in check by sending sporadic emails very rarely about changes to their features and other bits and pieces. I'd call it "spam I don't mind" and I don't get annoyed when I get them because they're so rare. And here's one that arrived the other day which I actually appreciate a lot. Basically, they've gone out of their way to improve their image on the environment to send me another email. It's well phrased, humane, well layed-out and informative.

Keep up the good work guys!

If you like Dilbert there are now a bunch of really nice widgets of different sizes that you can put into your Netvibes, MySpace, Facebook or Blogger. It's just a flash widget that shows the latest Dilbert plus an ability to see past ones. It looks very promising to me. I like the fact that these are coloured whereas the same strip on www.dilbert.com is black and white.

I did load one into my Facebook and one into my Netvibes start page but because it's flash and takes several seconds to load it slowed down my Netvibes front page so I'm kind of putting that on hold.

Clearly web services has taken off in the world of network plumbing and the higher level equivalent for non-programmers is widgets. I don't think Youtube was the first to do it but was clearly what proved it to be a working idea in the mainstream.

This time it's an e-commerce site called Comfy-Feet which seems to have been developed with Frontpage 5.0 and that doesn't surprise me at all.

I remember hearing somewhere that turnover on e-commerce and "good design" don't have any relationship. In other words, just because you're making an e-commerce site prettier doesn't mean you'll sell more. Well, I beg to differ that that rule must have some extreme exceptions.

A few quick things you immediately notice:

• Why two large Union Jack flags?
• blue text within black text making you think they're links
• no consistent layout when you drill down into various pages
• title tag doesn't even include the word "Comfy-Feet" just "Buy: Shoe Insoles, ..."
• If you add something to the cart, the click the "Back to store" button they ask you which site you want to go back to.
• I don't think a single page I clicked on was without error message in the validator

Actually, I feel a bit guilty for complaining about this site since it's probably as far from corporate as possible can be. It was one of few decent sites I even found that sells insoles with a decent range. I just hope these guys didn't pay anybody (lots of money) to work on this. If not, I'm sorry. If so, get a better web designer company next time!

I'm currently not in urgent need for one of these (in other words: I'm single) but if I wasn't this might be a really cool thing to try: The Love Mattress

How many times haven't you gone to bed tucked up close to someone warm and soft and then your arm painfully falls asleep before you do? Many! I say. This invention makes it possible to wrap your arm around and under someone without this person having to feel like sleeping on a exhaust pipe across the shoulders or neck.

I guess the only criticism against this invention is that sleeping in a snuggled up position is only a very small part of the whole sleeping (or "jumping") experience a bed attempts to make as comfortable as possible.

Anyhow, I like the cuteness of the idea enough to blog about it.

I haven't fully explored this site yet but it looks great. Some sort of blog about themed around Frank Zappa.

This site has got a great discography and lots of other misc stuff that looks worthy of some decent reading time. I also very much like the name which I guess you have to be a Zappa fan to appreciate.

I wouldn't call myself a diehard fan of Futurama but I sure as h**l love that show.

"Futurama was killed, but like some B-movie cyborg it refused to stay dead. The fans watched the 72 episodes religiously in syndication and shelled out $170 to get the entire run on DVD. So, in 2005, Fox green-lighted 16 new episodes. Cohen and Groening have reassembled many of the hundreds of writers, animators, and voice artists who'd gone on to other projects to create four DVDs of new material, including sexy robot stage shows. The first DVD hits stores on November 27, and the features will then be divided into half-hour episodes when the entire run of the series begins airing on Comedy Central next year."

I'm actually re-watching all of the previous 5 series at the moment at home and hopefully by the time I've watched it all, the new series will start to become available on DVD here in the UK (unlikely but one can hope).

I totally don't approve of what they're doing but what they're doing is totally impressive.

It's a long clip of a couple crazy couriers racing through the streets of New York crossing red lights and zebra crossings and going in the oncoming traffic lanes. Mental!

It's been a while since I last ranted about some website looking not only totally unappealing but also barely usable. This time it's called The Backyard Comedy Club and it's a quite simply, a comedy club near where I live. The sad thing about this site unlike other sites that I've criticized as being butt-ugly in the past, this one is actually quite new. The footer says "Copyright Backyard Comedy Club 2007 ©".

Maybe the intention is that the whole website is a joke. Kind of to get you in the right mood for the comedy acts.

I've always considered the "personality" test even of beauty competition such as Miss World as a chance to go away and get some food or a toilet break and it's really only the bikini event that matters. It's time to revise that now maybe. Until this clip I've always thought what the beauties say just stupid, now I'm going to consider it amusing instead.

What's South Africa got to do with it?

A lot of news sites have started publishing reviews of the new iPhone by Apple. The review I chose was the Wall Street Journal column by Walter Mossberg. It's a great review from a user experience point of view too. You start by watching the video clip which is nice and then if you're interested in more details you move on to actually read the article.

One thing I appreciated about this review was that I was able to skim the article first whilst waiting for the video to first show the ad and then do the buffering. Very practical.

Oh yeah, the phone looks pretty exciting too. Shame about the Edge and being totally stuck on ATT. Don't know what that ATT deal means in terms of getting an iPhone here in Europe.