Pricechart.com ?!

Ever search for a product on the used market? Surf for hours on amazon, ebay or Craigslist for something you want?

Keep watching that price move up and down by 10-15$ a day over weeks.. then see a sudden 100$ drop and the thing keeps going..

and someday when the "price is right" and your extended budget meets the price, the order button is clicked?

Would it not be nice to have a graph of the products price from the time it was introduced into the market to the day of the search show up? just like stock prices?

That way you could do an extrapolation and take your chances?

If facebook can map out all friend routings and come up with a world map, or if google can know anything and everything about me, this should not be that difficult to do, right?

This should be real good for anyone buying a car of a certain model and make and year where they get an average selling price drop over time.. granted there will be a spread on the data based on mileage. still you should be able to see the data.

Same thing for a camera or lens or any other gizmo that has a lifespan of a few years!

Looks like Pricechart.com is not taken yet.. since I am not ready to quit my day job and take this up, feel free to if you have the time and think it is a worthy idea...

You have one potential user for the site!

If you already know a site that does that do point me towards it.

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Indignation - the rightful kind..

Well, these days there is rightful and wrongful indignation. This is a documented case of the "rightful" type!

Went to this South Indian food place and asked for the usual Rava Dosa. Got it in 3 minutes, which is a surprise, considering it usually takes at least 10 minutes to 15 minutes from order time.

Got a dosa that had a lot of Rava in it. But the batter was definitely the regular dosa batter!

Now, if you are not picky about a dosa and would consider anything round and crispy brought to you with a cup of sambar and chutney as fair game, stop reading this post. You may not be amused.

On the other hand, if you know enough about Dosa's to answer a quiz question "What is the difference betwen a Rava dosa and Plain dosa?" with anything more than "The Rava dosa has rava in it!", read on.

If you consider yourself to be the Sankara Saastri of Dosa's, this post will definitely increase your heart rate, pulse rate, stomach acid secretion rate, etc. etc. You already know that the basic ingredients in the plain dosa batter are rice, urad dal and fenugreek (vendayam) seeds while the Rava dosa is made from rice flour and rava (cream of wheat) with some green chillies, ginger, cashews, black pepper thrown in as added attractions (the additional ingredients vary widely!)

There is also the issue of fermentation. While the plain dosa batter gets its taste from leaving the batter overnight to rise (yeast action), the rava dosa batter is almost whipped up instantly with some buttermilk to help with integration!

So, if you get a rava dosa, you should not expect it to taste like a plain dosa. In other words, you should not detect the urad dal or yeast.

Now you can always tell me "so what? think you ordered a sada dosa and they put rava in it by mistake.. just eat it!". Which brings us to the "rightful" part. The average bay area restaurant charges 5 bucks for a dosa and 7 bucks for a rava dosa. The 1.5x price is usually due to the complexity and time consuming nature of the rava dosa manufacturing process, compared to the plain dosa. In effect, it is a custom order!

Now, if you throw a cup of rava in plain batter and give it to me in 3 minutes and charge me extra for it, I might ask you to put "kalpooram" in your hand and do deepa aaradhanai!!!

ps. I was at one time moderately allergic to urad dal. Which is why the choice was always a rava dosa! Not anymore..

pps. Not naming restaurant yet, because the owner is going to spot check the cook and let me know if this was really happening!

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Values and Limits

From a young age, when we were school going kids, we are taught values. Some of us can afford to forget those values. Others take those values seriously and retain them for a long time. These constant values have stood the test of time for the most part and chances are you remember them the same way your parents did when they were growing up.

Take for example the value of C, the speed of light which is 3x10^8 or N the Avogadro number which is 6.23x 10^23 or c the electron charge which is 1.6x10^-19 and many more! (What with the elections and all, you thought we were talking moral values, right? he he he )

Another important value that has newly ingratiated itself into our life now is B, the maximum limit in dollars that can be paid for a Bribe item for the kids without approval from the spouse!

The value of B is easy to remember. It is 9.99

This constant almost seems to have universal significance. (Err... in the US of A, Universal takes on a very different, localized meaning!) Almost every parent we know of that follows the two pronged approach to child rearing, seems to have converged on the same limiting value for B.

Now what is this "two pronged approach"? There is a very simple explanation.

A scientific study by Dr. Narayanöhe of the BOGUS Institute finds that at a fundamental level, there are only two control knobs available to deal with kids.

a. Bribes
b. Threats

This essentially summarizes the "two pronged approach".

There are only two variations within this approach, the study concludes:

1. Bribe first and if the bribe does not work, threaten later
2. Threaten first and use bribes as last resort

Depending on the economic situation in the household and the rebel coefficient of the kid involved, parents optimize to one of these two approaches.

Here is a Case Study. As a parent, you thought Toysrus would be a good time pass option, knowing very well that you cannot come out of the store without some spending. You have a screaming kid on the floor outside the Toysrus. Even if the kid knows that everytime you buy her something, she still goes into the default "scissor kicking and high pitched screaming" routine. Let's say she is asking for something which she will lose interest in, as soon as she gets out of the garage and goes into the house, but the value of said toy is under $9.99, you cut your losses and just buy it.

What if she wants the battery operated mini Hummer with a price tag of a few hundred dollars? Then there is the threat of her never ever getting anything from you. This is usually followed by a bribe worth, well, not more than $9.99. Case closed!

Note, there are always the borderline instance where the object at hand is worth 12.99 . The house rules clearly state that anything over the 9.99 limit needs spousal approval and a phone call is required to confirm the purchase.

Also the parents can sometimes make a sport (even a spectator sport) out of the TPA. The parent who can steer a kid from an object worth 299.99 to 19.99 then on to 9.99 and even beat that and get to 2.99 or 0.99 !!! gets bragging rights.

Tip1: (I might sound like a shampoo salesman here, but here goes) Volume, volume, volume. Kids think volume is better, at least mine do. So, if you can buy a huge ball of bubble wrap for a dollar, it is worth more than a box of Dora products with the same volume.

Tip2: Please do not share this tip with Toyrus Marketing Department or they will make Tip1 useless.

Now, what is your limit?

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