Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Discovered the history library in Firefox 3 (History > Show all history) after needing more detail than the history sidebar provided—it did what I needed. Completed a survey for HR Simplified (www.mypretax.com), which manages our pre-tax transit reimbursement plan, provided this feedback: "I think my most common tasks should appear on the page I see after I log in. I need to see 6 months of claim history, and I need to be able to submit up to 3 claims. You can use AJAX for the claims submission so that the entire page doesn't need to refresh. Please store my type, amount, and description choices when making a claim (either in a cookie or serverside) so that I don't have to reselect these choices each month. You can even prepopulate one or more claim dates by predicting the dates that I am likely to claim. Essentially, bring as many of the common tasks to the page that appears after logging in. For other less frequent tasks, you can link to them at the bottom. Your site is organized based on how HR Simplified sees the data, not based on how your customers want to see the data. e.g., I have a tab called Info—when I click it, I see "no documents found"—why? Stuff like this just wastes my time. Your site also contains obvious errors—my "flex summary" (what does "flex summary" mean?) contains dates in the year 2099—all the plan year dates say 2099/12/31! This reduces my trust in your ability to handle data properly. Your website is also extraordinarily slow on most of my visits. (No other sites I visit are this slow, so I know it's not my connection.) Please make it faster. Lastly, the site isn't very pretty to look at. It would be nice for it to look prettier, but not required." In checking snail mail today, I noticed two misdelivered items. Both were the correct house number but one was for Santiago Street and the other was for 28th Avenue. USPS = FAIL due to inaccuracy. I shredded the documents since this has happened before and we reported it in the past so I don't think the problem is correctable. People who live in the Sunset: beware your USPS mail is unreliable. Took photos of things to sell. Prepared images. Dinner at home with Patrick: winter stew over mashed potatoes. Housesitting tasks at Joseph and Michael's with Patrick. Patrick introduced me to some of Joseph's training equipment. Afterwards we stopped at Mitchell's ice cream. Patrick got a single scoop of grasshopper pie with hot fudge. I got one scoop of new york cherry and one scoop of cinnamon snap (cinnamon ice cream with gingersnap cookies) in a waffle cone. $8.70 total. More image prep and web work for it. Uploaded photos to Flickr.