phaithful

I probably experienced the biggest waste of my life tonight. I've been messing around with Amazon's S3 service and in doing so, I stumbled across another service that Amazon has called the Mechanical Turk. The basic premise is: there are certain tasks that computers can't do but humans can do very easily. So for each repetitive task you can make a few cents. If the task is hard then you make more, if the task is easy... well you make less.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon provides this lengthy explanation of where the term Mechanical Turk comes from an yaddie yaddie yaddie... Of course I didn't want to read all that so I skip down to the line that says
"One of the best ways to understand Amazon Mechanical Turk is to complete a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) and see what the experience is like."

My Attempts at Human Intelligence Tasks

I'm an idiot so I sign up and try out a few. I filled out some 1 question demographic questions at $0.02 a pop. That took me about 5 minutes and I answered about 15 questions... Then I took a few surveys for $0.20 a pop which took about 10 minutes each. Then I scoured the web to find "Magic Blogs" that had a Google PageRank of 3 or more which took about half an hour to find 4 @ a rate of $0.16 each. Surprisingly there aren't too many well ranking blogs solely on the topic of magic tricks.

So if you calculate it... YIKES!!!!

• Time: 5 minutes Wage: 15 Questions x $0.02 = $0.30
• Time: 30 minutes Wage: 3 Surveys x $0.20 = $0.60
• Time: 30 minutes Wage: 4 Magic Blogs + Contact info x $0.16 = $0.64
• Total Time: 65 minutes, Total Wage: $1.54.

OMG!!!! That's $1.42 / hour. Talk about a waste of life. Even wasting away my life watching YouTube is more valuable than that... at least I get some joy out of YouTube. I know, in some countries $1.42 / hour could feed a whole village, and I sympathize with those people... but even that U.S. [insert crappiest job you can think of] worker gets paid five times (5x) as much.

Well now I know, if I ever need a mundane tasks to be performed, I can find some suckers on the Mechanical Turk. I want the last hour of my life back.....

So I just bought a new pair of kicks because my old tennies were completely busted. I needed something that was going to be comfortable, stylish, but not too flashy. My old shoes were a pair of white and blue K-Swiss with a reversible tongue. It was time for a change and since my work place is pretty chill, "fashion sneakers" are totally acceptable.

I picked up these new 'Unlisted's for $60 delivered. Well within budget!

Endless.com Review: An Amazon.com Shoe Store

Normally I don't buy shoes online because I end up at sites like Zappos or Shoes.com (a Brown Shoe Company). These sites are terrible in my opinion. Although they have a wide selection of shoes, there's just too much on the website to figure out where I should go to just browse for shoes. It's not like I know exactly what brand I want to buy. Why can't they just make shoe shopping simple? This is 2007 not 2001.... helloooooooo!!!!

So I read a blog post a while back about Amazon launching a new website just for shoes called Endless.com. Just checking it out briefly for the first time, I was already browsing around without much effort at all. Of course for the first 3 - 5 minutes I just clicked on things, and then I started to explore the left rail navigation.

Ahhhhh... The Simple Left Navigation

First I select "fashion sneakers", and the selection of shoes fades out and fades back in with my selection. I'm still on the same webpage, *AJAX love*.

Then I select my shoe size, and again the pictures of the shoes on the page fades in and out refining the number of shoes that are available.

Then I used the price slider to select the price range I'm willing to pay for my new pair of kicks. I'm not looking for 'Air Force Ones' so I'll stick to under $99. I can't see paying more than $100 for shoes, but to each his own.

Now I did skip over a few things like, Category (e.g. lace-up, slip-on, velcro), Brand, Color Family, and Width. But I didn't really care about those. In the end I was left with a selection of 177 shoes. On page 5, I found what I was looking for...

Unlisted Men's Royal Court Street Casual Shoes

The cool thing here is that, not only do you get 6 different views of the shoe, you also can zoom in and see the details of the shoe. I'm not talking about some crappy zoom where you click on the picture and they just give you the same picture but 25% bigger. The zoom here is slick. Just mouse over the section of the shoe you want to see and it appears in the box to the right. You can see very fine detail, exactly what I need. I never want to buy shoes online because I never know what kind of quality I'll be getting. The shoes always look good in pictures but when you look at it up close... they're always jenky or got something wack about it.

I Bought on the Very First Visit!

I was completely sold. Normally I take my time to look around and comparison shop. But I saw everything I needed to see, I was getting a great price. Their differentiating sales pitch is the "Free Overnight Shipping" (for a limited time they are giving $5 back) which is always a plus, but it looks like their competition has caught on and is doing it as well. I know it's an Amazon store so the customer service and return policy are excellent. Lastly, since I have an Amazon.com account, check out was a breeze. I didn't have to re-input all my information again, because it just pulled it from the Amazon back end. SWEET!!!

I received a nicely packaged box at my doorstep the very next day with my new pair of kicks. I'm recommending Endless.com and I would definitely use Endless.com again.