Where everyone knows your name. Or not.

Rec'd a piece of junk mail from The Old Mill, a restaurant in my hometown of Westminster MA.

Staples. It's (not) easy.

Staples has an app. All God's children have an app.
The Staples app purports to let us do things, except the things that seem obvious.
Each time I buy something at Staples, I can't find my card, the loyalty card that enables coupons and discounts. .I provide them with my phone number. They look up the card and apply the credit, if anything, to my purchase.
This last time, I thought I'd be clever. The app lets me store my Staples reward card. I did so.
When I went to check out at the store, I hold up the app, displaying the barcode and number.

The clerk looks at my phone and then enters my number by hand because their scanner cannot pick up the barcode stored on their app.
One less reason to use their app on the way to one less reason to shop at Staples.

At the Mall with Apple and Microsoft

We've seen this before, but it seems worse now. On a winter's Saturday, a trip to the Natick Mall showed two very different retail experiences.

The Apple Store is lively with people of all ages. The further into the store you go, the more customers will you see, excitedly playing with, learning about, and buying stuff.

The Microsoft Store employees outnumber the customers. The liveliest place is not in the store, but out front, where a two-year-old girl is dancing to the big XBox video.

It's no wonder that Apple, with but a sliver of the desktop computing market share, is worth twice what Microsoft is worth.

Vox tells you all you need to know about Common Core

Vox sez:

What’s actually in the Common Core?

The Common Core is a list of things students should know and know how to do at each grade level in math and language arts. The language arts standards include expectations for writing, speaking, and reading both fiction and nonfiction.

But, as we know, a picture is worth a lot of words.

Attention to detail may not be their Forte

Forte.net is a payment-processing service that handles web, mobile, and other types of online payments.
Their website has a nice stock photograph of a diverse group of people, each with their own blurb about why Forte is cool.  Each person has an imagemap associated with his or her picture. Move your mouse over a person's image and a speech balloon pops up. It's a clever bit of Javascript.
As with any service, you want to pay attention to the fine print. In this case, Michelle might quarrel with her designation as a guy.

WISE Learning and Technology Blog: January 2015

Some thoughts about things via my WISE Learning and Technology Blog: January 2015

Happy 19th Birthday, Krista

Krista, with Joe, late 90s

Happy 10th Birthday, Cassie