Commuter Podcasts

When I use public transit to commute from Vancouver to Portland, I could nap.. or I could fill my head with other things, such as podcast content. It's a 40 minute ride in the morning (provided that I hop on a bus before 7am) and an hour ride home (if I leave downtown Portland at 4pm), of course this is the inflexibility of the express bus that C-Tran (Vancouver) has; however, with the plague of humanity outside, transit travel is bit disrupted with travel times. I aim for podcasts that are about 30 mins to an hour long. I typically listen to business podcasts in the morning, and something fiction/sci fi/horror in the afternoon. It's likely that Android smartphones have the function as well as iPhones, but with the Podcasts app, I can download podcast episodes and then just listen on the go without having to rely on cellular data for podcast listening when away from wifi. Links are to the show's website, if one exists.

Non-fiction, less than 30 mins:

• Indicator by Planet Money
• Planet Money
• The Journal (by WSJ and Stitcher)
• Negotiations Ninja
• StoryCorps

Non-fiction, 30 mins to an hour:

• Slate's Negotiation Academy: Negotiate Anything
• Hidden Brain
• How I Built This w/ Guy Raz
• Freakonomics Radio
• Special Operations Medical Journal (field medicine)

Non-fiction, about an hour or longer:

• Tactical Breakdown (this features Canadian law enforcement)

Fiction, 30 mins to an hour:

• Levar Burton Reads (sci fi/fantasy)
• Penumbra (sci fi/fantasy)

A side note: If you have financial or company data on your phone, don't connect to public wifi even if your bus or train has it. Just saying. Better be safe than sorry after the fact.

The Online Brand Experience

Domino's has been running a lot of web ads for their Order 2 or more $5.99 per item coupon special; though, there appears to be a lot of mistakes in how their ecommerce engine is currently setup. Though, it could also just be user error. While adding items to a future order, the pricing and item descriptions are wrong. Well, the 8-piece chicken wings is showing up as a 4-piece menu item on the cart checkout screen. Is it 4 or 8 pieces? Maybe in an earlier incarnation of their online menu it was a 4-piece menu add-on item and nobody told the design team that the offer is for eight pieces. In fact, if you were to increase the order size for chicken wings, the base number of pieces is eight. Makes no sense at all.

Here is a screenshot:

2020-07-14 Screen Shot of Domino's Cart Checkout

Once you add the second item, the menu has a prompt that asks if you want to add a 3rd item for $5.99. Well. I don't know about your math skills, but $6.99 is a 15% price hike from $5.99.

Also, your second (or nth) item cannot be another pizza. This is sad because two medium 2-topping pizzas for $12 would be a total steal, I mean, a good deal.