Archive for December, 2007

Dell and the environment: green is out, brown is in

[UPDATE: December 03, 2008 @ 5:11pm EST]
Dell has responded to this post. I like the outcome!

I have been meaning to write about this for a while, and today was the last straw.

The company I work for orders all of their computers from dell. About 4 months ago we started receiving random Adobe Acrobat Standard CDs & licenses for free with every single computer that we purchase. We did not request these CDs. At first, they came inside of the box with the computer. Soon, they started arriving in a padded envelope. After that, they began arriving in their own box, complete with paper padding, and a padded envelope. We have received well over 100 of these.

Today, a new shipment of computers came in (just 6), and we got 6 boxes, filled with packaging materials, a padded envelope, and a single Adobe Acrobat Standard. What shocked me, and added fuel to the fire, was that the boxes have now gotten bigger. A single Adobe Acrobat CD, in a DVD sized case, nows comes in a box that measures 10×19x10, complete with padding & padded envelope!

Please see photos below (the newest, largest box can be seen at the bottom of the pile):

Boxes & Packaging
Dell Boxes

Contents of the above boxes
Adobe CDs

Dell is being more BROWN and less GREEN with this method of packaging. They should be more environmentally conscious when it comes to shipping things. I wonder how much extra it cost to ship out those boxes, with packaging, and padded envelope.

eBurl.net - Short eBay URLs, and More!

I recently began working on a project called eBurl. eBurl is a resource for shortening those long, ugly, confusing eBay URLs into something short, portable, and friendly! eBurl creates random, short URLs (such as tinyURL), or custom, short URLs. The site also keeps track of keywords, clicks, and other statistics.

The ultimate goal of eBurl is to provide sellers a resource for creating friendly URLs (eBurls) to their stores/auctions and supplying the sellers with detailed statistics about these eBurls, such as: Number of clicks, where the clicks came from, popularity of eBurl compared to others, and graphs detailing other information pertaining to the eBurl.

eBurl can also be used by non-sellers to simply share items that they have found on eBay, but with a much more compact, easy to use, URL.

A standard eBay URL looks something like this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/TwitTV-com-awesome-typo-domain_
W0QQitemZ110200121711QQihZ001QQcategoryZ11153QQss
PageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This is the eBurl for that same auction:
http://eburl.net/twittv

There will also be an RSS feed of the popular eBurls for all the enjoy :)

SO check out www.eBurl.net, test it out, and have fun!