Jun 16 2007

Finally Some Thought In The Design Process

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 3:03 am

(UK Relevant)

If BuyYourCar.co.uk is an indication of the future of online motor sales, then the traditional approach taken by other scheme, that simply used the medium of the internet as a flat extension of for sale ads in newspapers may well be over.
They have looked at the process of searching for a car from the buyer’s perspective, rather than simply the dealer’s profit margin. As an example, if you find some Used Cars you like at the site, rather than just stopping there, and drive X number of miles to the dealer, you can spend a couple of minutes checking what else the dealer has on their forecourt straight away.

Used Cars

To extend the scenario, if you find two cars that interest you, and discover that both dealers are 45 minutes away from you, in opposite directions, how would you normally decide which to visit first, if you had simply seen one box ad for each on an old fashioned site? Now, you can check the prices of the other cars at both dealers, and go to the company that has the most interesting and appropriate cars in stock. It could end up saving you a wasted journey to the other dealer, if they don’t have much in stock that grabs your attention.

When it comes to actually searching for the car you want, all bases are covered, you can specify any or all of the following : make, model, specification & price of the car, and in terms of the dealer, distance from your postcode and the type of business they are.

So, if you are in the market for a car, check out the site, before wasting any time at the flat, limited old fashioned sites.

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May 11 2007

A Scanner Darkly

Category: BooksChrisM @ 1:51 am

A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick

First off, if you have young children, and they aren’t already conversant with some of the darker sides of the world we live in, I’d want to read the book before okaying it for them.
That said, I liked this book. I had heard the PK Dick’s other books weren’t very well written, and somewhat over-hyped, so to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this novel. The main plot outline is that a narcotics undercover police officer is tasked with placing a suspect drug dealer under surveillance. No problems so far… The dealer lives in a house, and has some other drug taking friends, who the narc befriends, in an effort to get closer to his target. Quite a lot of the plot is filled with the strange, sometime funny, often poignant, occasionally miserable trails and tribulations any hard-drug addict has to go through to get his next fix.
As the reader you gradually begin to realise that something isn’t quite right with the narc vs. dealer situation. Someone isn’t who they are pretending to be…

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