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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
In yesterday's NZ Herald, there was an article asking: What was your experience with online retail store Ferrit?.
The responses came thick and fast and were mostly negative, unfortunately.
Until today, Ferrit was a kind of online portal for a number of smaller retail shops who were able sell to customers via the Ferrit site. Today Ferrit is no more, and by the looks of things, nobody is desperately worried.
Ferrit's demise isn't even the result of anything recessional. By the look of the responses that came to the NZ Herald, Ferrit's gone down the tubes because it never really took off, because it was ill-conceived in the first instance, because Telecom was its owner, because, because, because. Nobody seems to have liked it.
What I most disliked about it were the terrible TV ads, which featured a young man who apparently had no life outside of his bedroom and who nattered away in a poncy voice about all the wonderful things he could buy on Ferit. God alone knows who it was supposed to appeal to, but I can't imagine it appealing to very many. At best, it reminded people about Ferrit's existence - if they cared.
Ferrit sold everything that the old department stores sold: sports gifts, clothing, babywear, electronics, food, health care, toys, the lot. Unfortunately so does The Warehouse, and it does it at much better prices - and is not only online, but also very big in the main centres as bricks and mortar.
Ferrit tried to come out of nowhere, and offered nothing particularly special. One of the gripes of the people responding to the Herald was that the prices were the same as in general retail stores, and there was postage on top.
But perhaps the biggest gripe was that it belonged to Telecom, and unfortunately Telecom has had increasingly bad press over the last decade, with its cavalier attitude to its customers, charging the earth while making millions for its shareholders.
Incidentally, one of the major NZ magazines had - or used to have - a page devoted to The Ferrit. It was a particularly nasty gossip page, mostly about the people in Auckland who had a bit of cash. Maybe Ferrit just wasn't the best name for the site in the first place.
The ferrit picture is by colalowe
If your house is anything like mine, you’ll have at least a half dozen remotes hanging around the place. I’ve got one beside me here, for the CD player, but there’s another for a different CD player in the main lounge, as well as a remote for the heat pump.
A second remote for the other heat pump (though the remotes are interchangeable) is in my wife’s sitting room, along with a remote for the DVD player, one for the TV, one for the video player, and one other sundry one whose purpose I can’t recall at the moment.
My daughter who lives upstairs has her own remotes.
My mother used to have a universal remote, but it wasn’t very good. And the problem with universals is that they’re just as easily lost down the back of a couch as any of the other remotes.
Now take this a step further and consider the person building a ‘smart home.’ You thought your problems with remotes were annoying. Consider the smart home owner who has to contend with remotes for the garage door, the lights, the alarms, the home theater seating and a host of other possibilities.
At present all these components might get installed in a new home without being able to talk to each other. Getting out of the house of a morning would become a nightmare, let alone trying to get back in again when you can’t find the remote that controls the security system, and consequently the front door won’t open.
Apparently Nokia are working on a solution to all this. The aim is to be able to control all the smart home features from a mobile phone. (Just don’t drop the phone down the toilet, or the drain, or the back seat of a car.) Web browsers will also have a role to play.
Nokia will set up a control centre based on an open Linux platform. This should let various companies develop their own systems ‘on top’ of the platform, unifying and integrating it at the same time. The aim is to have a seamless system that lets things be added (or subtracted) without difficulty, and without having to figure out where you’ve put the latest remote you’ve just acquired.
I didn't use to have much time for digital cameras, being the old-fashioned person I am - sometimes!
We had an excellent still camera that belonged originally to my wife. When she decided to go digital, I took it over, and shot a number of decent photos on it, including one of a strange long-tailed insect that appeared outside our front door one day. Apparently this creature was some kind of wasp, but I'd never seen anything like it before.
The only way I could show you that photo is by going through the slightly tedious process of scanning it into my computer and then downloading it to this post. But I'm too lazy tonight, and too sore to do anything too energetic.
I also shot a number of photos of various murals around Dunedin, where I live. This was a few years back, and already some of these murals have vanished. These I did scan into the computer, and then uploaded to flickr.com. You can see some of them here.
But I've taken more photos of murals recently - on my wife's former digital camera (!) She's not using it at present because it's too slow when she wants to take something fast. However, we took it with us to the UK last year, and shot hundreds of photos (famous buildings don't tend to move very much).
Because we had our laptop with us, we could upload them as went, wipe the photos off the camera, and start again. The great advantage of the digital.
Having discovered the value of a digital, it's unlikely I'll go back to the old still camera. I'm sure if I was a purist, I'd stick with the latter, but I'm not. I might be slow to catch up, but catch up I do, and here's a digital photo I took, to prove it!
This was taken early one morning as I walked to work. It shows St Matthew's Church spire enshrouded by scaffolding, and the green netting they use to ensure safety for the workers - and pedestrians. What I liked about it was the way the sun gave a rather magical silhouette.
And the only reason I got this shot (and several similar ones) is that I had this little digital camera stuck in my backpack. It's small enough to cart around and have handy for just such occasions. Unfortunately, the old still camera was never anywhere near as portable.
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