Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Zappos, whom I mentioned yesterday, is not the only online retailer disrupting a market that you wouldn’t initial think of as a good fit for online sales. Casper is doing it too because buying a mattress is a pain. You go to some sleezy store that is always having a sale that ends in 30 minutes, get endless upsold by a salesman who is throwing out terms you don’t understand, and then you walk away paying gobs of money and wondering if you got scammed. It’s not hard to see how this market was ripe for disruption.

If you’re in the market for a mattress, check out Casper. You get a 100 night risk-free trial, free 5-day shipping, You can read a full writeup on the company in this NYTimes article, but basically you get a high quality memory foam mattress for well under $1000. Similar mattresses can easily run double or triple that, if not more.

But augh! What if I don’t like it! No problem. Call Casper in those first 100 days and they’ll send a courier to your house to pick it up. I don’t think it’s going to be too long before we’re in the market for another mattress and I’ll be surprised if we don’t give Casper a shot. Why not?

Zappos, mostly a shoe company, is an old company in Internet time. They officially launched back in 1999 and ever since then, they have built their brand on incredible customer service and easy returns. Buying shoes online is difficult since you can’t try them on, but Zappos makes it easy: don’t like them? Return them for free for up to one year.

They’ve branched out a bit to cover some clothing and accessories, but Tyla and I have only used them for shoes. We’ve always had a positive experience. You get a huge selection and you can be sure you’ll get one that fits without paying lots of money for shipping.

Here’s a protip for you: If you use the Windows 8 Zappos app, you get FREE 1 business day shipping!

I picked this up from MattB’s recent Facebook post. It’s a Forbes article entitled “Why Don’t More People Work As Programmers?” It does an excellent job of describing what it takes to be a great programmer. Programming is not something that you can learn by taking a class or two or ten. Give it a read if you’ve got a code monkey in your life. Our profession is a mystery to a lot of people. The article won’t explain the mystery, but it might help you appreciate the complexity of the trade.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/10/31/why-dont-more-people-work-as-programmers/

The fun part of Legos for me was usually putting them together. Grabbing random pieces and building from your imagination is fun, but building an actual kit was always special. There’s a great service that I just learned about called Pley. You set up a queue from about 250 different Lego sets and for $15/month, they will send you one of the kits. When you’re done, box it back up and send it back. Then they send you the next one. And yes germophobes, they are cleaned and sanitized before they go out again.

After having multiple chunks of skin cut out of my body over the last couple years, I think about UV light pretty much whenever I’m outside. There’s an interesting article on Slate about a photographer who took video of people under UV light. You can see how different skin features like freckles absorb and reflect UV light. And after watching the video, I’ll never look at sunscreen the same way again! It works by absorbing UV light so it doesn’t reach the skin. When people put it on in the video, it looks like they are smearing black tar on themselves. You can check out the video below but the article is worth a read too.

Patreon.com lets you see who else supports the same shows as you and then you can see what other shows they support. It was via that feature that I learned about I Like To Make Stuff. I’ve been looking for a good woodworking podcast that’s in my skill range (as opposed to The Wood Whisperer which is awesome but way over my head.) I Like To Make Stuff has been very interesting and I’ve already picked up quite a few tips and tricks even for the projects that I have no interest in doing. They’re pretty short and packed with good stuff. If you like wood working, check it out.

If you use Amazon regularly, be sure to check out AmazonSmile. You choose a charity and then Amazon gives them about half a percent of the money from your purchase. There’s very little work that needs to happen on your end to give the charity a nice donation. The hardest part is just remembering to start your session from smile.amazon.com so that your purchase qualifies for the program. There are lots of charities to pick from and if you run a 501c3 organization, you can add it. For those of you affiliated with the WELS, you might be interested to note that MLC is already on the list.