A tale of pizza shops – then and now

When I was in college (early to mid 1980s), I remember that Domino’s Pizza’s big selling point was “Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free”. I did not eat a lot of Domino’s, or have much pizza delivered, but I saw a lot of their ads. I don’t remember ever getting a pizza in more than 30 minutes. Another watchword was “don’t order without a coupon”. Paying full price was a pretty significant hit. Every pizza I ever got from Domino’s had a sheet of coupons glued to the top of the box, and I saved those for my future purchases. It wasn’t the greatest pizza, but it was fast. 

Now, fast forward to today’s Domino’s Pizza. In my town, there is one Domino’s, along with Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, Papa Murphy’s, and a local chain, Abby’s Pizza. You can see that we are covered pretty well for pizza, and that they are all doing well. I have seen 6 cars at a time at Little Caesars waiting to get their “Hot and Ready” pizza. Anyway, this summer we have been taking advantage of ordering Domino’s Pizza online and picking it up at the store. The average order time is 20-25 minutes. Every time I have picked up pizza, and been there long enough for them to answer a phone order, they tell the person that it is a two hour wait for delivery. And some people still order the pizza! So much for fast delivery. The coupon rule is still a good one. The online site tells me how much I am saving versus the regular price (almost 50% most of the time). When someone walks up to order pizza, and doesn’t have a coupon, the “specials” that the employee tells the customer are considerably more expensive than ordering online. Oh well…some things never change. From my observations, most of the orders are online for takeout. 

As a cross-check, I got some pizza from Abby’s Pizza this past week (the local chain). Before they started accepting online orders, you either had to go there or call ahead. Sometimes, I had to call up to 10 times before I could get someone on the phone (kept getting a busy signal). They are a pretty popular pizza place, and could always use a few more employees. After making my online order, I headed over to the restaurant. Their standard time for pizza orders is “ready in 30 minutes”. The pizza was ready within 30 minutes, but I had to wait for them to make a sandwich. While I waited, the next four people to come to the counter were all picking up online orders. Yep – online ordering is the current wave, all right. 

I added another example OPML file to the OPML Includes demo app (a subscription list from Ton Zijlstra). He had an include of another OPML file which appears to render correctly. I tried a second file from Ton that had a “circular include”, that one seemed to have a problem, so I removed it for further analysis.

Resources for writing

In organizing information for use, writing skills can be particularly helpful, especially in trying to summarize topics. Here are some resources I recently came across:

How To Make Notes and Write by Dan Allosso and S. F. Allosso – Learn to make effective notes on sources and your interpretations, then turn those into clear and compelling output. This link is to a website version of the book, an ePub version can also be downloaded.

The Documentation System from Divio – A theory of documentation composed of four types (tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation) with excellent explanation of the differences and examples on how to create these four types of documentation effectively.

When Dave Winer wrote about his recent trip to Utopia Bagels, I decided to take a look at Portland and Salem (Oregon) to see if there were any bagel shops of note, and found this Eater.com list of Portland shops, and one shop in Salem. Yummy times ahead!

Resources for explainers

In an earlier post, I mentioned work that Jay Rosen and his Studio 20 journalism program did in 2010-2011 on the subject of explainers (a form of journalism that provides the essential background knowledge necessary to follow events in the news). Here are links that I did not include in the post:

PressThink: National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News – Jay Rosen’s initial post about the “Giant Pool of Money” podcast that helped explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, contains analysis of why it was excellent, and pointers to explainers (2008) 

PressThink: John Ashcroft: National Explainer – why US Attorney General John Ashcroft felt justified in only talking to television news, and not print news (2003)

PressThink: Normalizing Trump (2017)

Explainer.net: The Explainer Awards, a look at the best explainers on the net (2011)

Resources for organizing information

I have compiled some links on how to better organize information:

Lifehack.org – Use the LATCH principle (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, or Hierarchy), Mind Mapping, Create Lists, Create Collections, Place Priority on Key Information

The Visual Communication Guy – Gives examples of using the LATCH principle listed above

UXPin – How to Organize Information Effectively: What You Can Learn From Information Architecture 

  • Create systems for classification, labeling, navigation and search
  • Information architecture is affected by content, context, and user
  • Article continues by providing more specific example

ASBMB.org – How to gather and organize information

  • Describes a method to assist someone performing research to write an academic paper

A talk between two users

I had a great discussion today with Frank McPherson about OPML, OPML includes, my OPML Includes test app, and our joint experiment in using drummer.this.how to show included files. We agreed that to view updates in drummer.this.how for an OPML file that includes another OPML file, the master OPML file has to be opened in Drummer and refreshed to see updates. In my test app, when a user goes to the app URL, they will get the latest updates for all included files. This will also occur each time the test app is refreshed in the browser.

Another subject we discussed was how a user could know if updates had been made to one of the OPML files. The JSON object for the included OPML files contains the lastModified element from the head of the OPML file, so this date/time could be displayed like in the drummer.this.how app for any or all of the included OPML files. Frank wrote about having each top-level headline as an item in a RSS feed (one way to provide notification of changes). I could envision an app that could look at changes in an OPML file and create some kind of item using the namespace feature in RSS. It is an area worth exploring.

I also spent some time today looking at Dave Winer’s update to the outlineBrowser toolkit. I downloaded his personal site repo and set up a test site using my Oregon elections OPML file, and the rendering/navigation looked good. I am going to work on trying to incorporate these latest changes into my OPML Includes test app.

Continuing experiments with OPML files

I reviewed Frank McPherson’s OPML experiment file, and saw that he suspected that updates to included files would not be visible unless the file was re-opened in Drummer. I decided to give this a test by adding another heading in my test file with some more text, then reloaded Frank’s test file. I did not see the new content. Next, I added Frank’s OPML file being viewed with drummer.this.how to my OPML Includes test app, and was pleased to see that I could view all of the new text in my test file. Another good result from this test is that the OPML Includes app was able to read the content of Frank’s file as an include file, and of my test file, so includes within an include file are brought in using the includes feature of opmlPackage. Excellent!

What to do when Fitbit Versa is too dim

My Fitbit Versa has been dim for a long time, so recently I decided to figure out if I could change settings, or if I needed a new Fitbit Versa. My initial search turned up a lot of hits basically saying to bring up the Settings app on the Fitbit Versa and change the brightness. When I tried that, I found the selection was disabled – what’s up with that? I then found this thread on the Fitbit community, found my solution 10 comments down on the thread:

My Brightness setting was dimmed out. I found I had “Sleep Mode” on. When I turned off “Sleep Mode” I was able to change the brightness of the Versa screen. I turned on a set schedule for sleep mode brightness that is separate from “Sleep Mode”. By turning on “Sleep Mode”, that means “Sleep Mode” is always ON (and dim) until you turn “Sleep Mode” off. 

That was the ticket!