Sunday, August 24, 2008

MiT book, little tiny victories

My goal for today, besides all the normal Sunday chores, was to have the text for senior #1's book done and also to figure out how much paper I'd need. I didn't quite get the text done, but I made some progress. I did, however, figure out the paper needs, and as it happens, I have just the right amount of paper on hand to finish the text block of this book. Which means I can start trimming right away (like tonight), and start on the inkjet printed portion of the book tomorrow, while I continue to work on the text. I will need to put in another order for Rives BFK tomorrow, I'll most likely need them for books #3 and #4.

In the mean time, I have a BIG question...

Why aren't lost & found pets web sites run more like dating web sites?

Not that I've used a dating web site, but wouldn't that make some sense? Rather than the, what seems to be, standard method of allowing the user to input a few key features, and then some dumb search algorithm is applied where you either get back a big badly matched & badly sorted list of possible matches, or no matches at all. (I mean, on one site, I entered "long hair" as the keywords that must be matched, and the first 5 results it returned were all short hair cats!)

Hear ye, hear ye, you with ambition and web application skills — we need a lost & found pets web site that knows how to apply SMART matching heuristics and return the results in a NICELY SORTED LIST!

No, I haven't lost my pet, but a rather sad, skinny, sick looking cat seems to have decided my neighbor Don is just the ticket he/she needs. My neighbor Don has other ideas (like putting it in a carrier and bringing it over to my house!). We were talking about what to do with the cat when I decided to try some online searches.

And I must say it's a sad state of things we have here.

Maybe one of those dating web sites can start a pet matching subsidiary?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And here I thought you secretly want another kitty. Well, I guess if the kitty showed up while we were there, you'll probably end up with it.

Shumei

why did you try the matching site, for people, I mean?

fingerstothebone said...

I said I did NOT try the people matching site, although I've read about how they work (about the matching algorithms).

Michael5000 said...

There's your niche! You'll be rich!! RICH!!!