well, actually I love preventing trash from entering into landfills. how? thanks to these amazing organizations in new york city!

• LES ecology center – electronic waste drives
• Park Slope Food Co-op – plastic recycling – New York city only recycles #1 and #2 bottle shaped plastic – the rest is sorted and thrown in landfills, but the co-op collects yogurt cups, take out containers, etc for recycling
• grownyc – compost collection & clothing & textile recycling

ok…going to stop “researching” on the web. 4 stops, one day = cleaner apartment

• The best way to browse for currently in stock missoni items is to go to the missoni for target brand page which by default is sorted by best-seller. This pretty much should sorts all of the out of stock to the end. Note, the stock seems to change with some frequency because the pillow I purchased is now out of stock, but they now have this gorgeous silk scarf! must resist another purchase!)
• Actually, now that I think about it…if you’re looking to buy stuff from any “[insert designer here] for target”, patient and tired of looking at the ridiculously high prices on ebay, then just wait until right before the 90 day return period expires…which is now! I’m sure a ton of this stuff is going to come right back in stock!

Ok, so I’ve been totally under a rock. In fact, at this point, I’m pretty sure a friend of mine already has the pillow I ended up purchasing and showed it to me when I’ve been at her house, but again, I’ve been under a rock. But I had to buy some baby gifts, had some items in my shopping cart, and was browsing as I am wont to do in order to reach the free shipping threshold… And I found this…the color!

missoni for target crib quilt
So, at that point, I was like, who is Missoni?! (yes, under a rock, remember?) Where can I get more of this?! So I searched for “missoni” on the target website, and got all of these out of stock products all scattered throughout my search results. Grr!

And that’s when I started down the rabbit hole of learning about the recent target.com redesign, the 4+ multiple hour outages after the new platform was launched, and who was involved in the project (HUGE = creative, SapientNitro as the main consulting company + others, building on IBM Websphere + Endeca, via adage). Lots of fun!

Suggestions for the target.com e-commerce team:

1. Yes, inventory is tricky, but get the out of stock products off your site, or figure out a better way to hide them (if you know they’re going to end up being returned because scalpers (or resellers, or whatever they’re called…i hope they paid a high restocking fee!), couldn’t sell it on ebay). I know they didn’t just go out of stock because I was on your site a few days ago, so unfortunately, it’s not because you just ran out of inventory. Just tweak the endeca queries to exclude items with both the “not sold in stores” and out of stock online attributes. Or update incrementally. Or maybe it’s not that simple, but your stock levels seem to be indexing pretty frequently so just pull them out if they’re not available. Or if you don’t want people to get confused because something was in stock 15 minutes ago and now isn’t, sort them to the end, even when sorting by relevance – because out of stock items just aren’t relevant to someone who is trying to buy stuff from you…
   
2. Sku detail: finding more of the same brand is REALLY hard. Why is the breadcrumb relegated to the upper right hand corner in super tiny font? I’d love to know how many eyes make their way there.
3. Probably a data issue, but once your type ahead offers up “Missoni for Target” (with way too long a delay, IMHO), you’re brought to a results page that does not include items that do not have the whole phrase in its description (like the “Missoni Passione Cosmetic Pencil Case”)
4. Where’s the brand dimension? I couldn’t filter down to the Missoni brand when I started wondering how many “mission style” furniture products i was going to have to skip over
5. It drives me nuts that there is no “jump to” in the search results. Or perhaps I just rely on it like a crutch when the search results themselves seem to have no rhyme or reason…

I could keep going, but I imagine other people are being paid money to do that who will deliver this advice with much more tact. Anyway, here’s the pillow I got.
Cute right? I thought it was even pricey at $30 (i’ve never bought a throw pillow…ever), but it’s there to remind me that I really need to buy a couch…

TER-RA-BL-AH

Also, KEXP leaving new york makes me sadder than a storycorps story (i keep imagining little vignettes of how it came to be, and there is no happy ending)

Of course, it probably also means that I will now be donating money to 4 NPR stations, one of which is on the other side of the country…

and today, randomly, while doing taxes, i decided to search the latest news while again my phone force closed (the g1 is lovely, but really showing its age), and there are now TWO upcoming android 5-row keyboard phones coming out!

1. the t-mobile sidekick 4g!  of course, they have replaced the comma key with a dedicated smiley button for those super tween texters (i mean, there is a dedicated “<3″ key!), but I seriously miss that keyboard.

2. the droid 3. i have to admit, i’m a little less enthralled by this keyboard (i mean, why not use the alt key mappings for the number row), and there’s no space between each key, etc. but at least they added a row. i figure it’s an iterative process…maybe they’ll get it right in the droid 4!

“You guys act like girls when it comes to phones. “I want a pretty one” “I want one with sparkles and is scratch and sniff” BLAH BLAH. The G1 is one of the manliest phones there is. It is plain and brute. So is this. I’m sure you can buy a sequence kit so you can make in sparkle more.”

via G2 slide mechanism revealed | DroidDog Android Blog.

but why did they only give it 4 rows of keys!  blah