What’s your favorite word? And why? What, in your opinion, is the strangest, or most useful, or ridiculously specific word in all of the English language?

Don’t be shy — tell us the word you can’t stop obsessing over, the one you make sure to use at least once in every party conversation, the word that gets stuck in your head like the song lyric you can’t quite place but can’t stop humming.

My first thought, I’m almost embarrassed to admit, was “justice”, but I think they want something more offbeat.

Deadline for submissions is Jan. 5, 2009.

What’s your favorite word?

(Via Schneier)

Or consider the (likely more useful) RFID Blocking Wallet and the RFID Blocking Passport Billfold.

Did you know that there are people out there who specially target paranoids?

Update: pointers to interesting techno-toys welcomed.

Meanwhile, the price differences between different PC products are remarkable. Basic consumer electronics accessories such as a 2-GB SD memory card vary in price around the world by up to 100%, while prices for premium PC components vary by 10-30%. Cost for a Core 2 Duo E6850 processor or a GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card was very much balanced, while the Coolermaster power supply or the Zalman CPU cooler showed large pricing differences. We selected products that are available almost everywhere, and we took the average price of the four cheapest etailers to get a solid number.

We found that France is rather expensive, especially if compared to Germany, which is next door. The United States is at the other end of the pricing spectrum, as most products are less expensive there.

It does not make sense to order hardware in a foreign country, or to buy large amounts of hardware when you travel. One the one hand, shipping cost will eat up all cost advantages. On the other hand, you’ll have to pay custom duties or an import turnover tax for many products. The only exception is the purchase of inexpensive products, as consumers in different countries can often buy goods abroad that remain below a certain price level without having to pay duty charges.

Interesting to read, though, that rather than write me off as a waste of marketing money, the catalog industry wants to ignore my preferences and keep sending them. According to Business Week, a Direct Marketing Association honcho e-mailed all members to pull up the drawbridge:

How did they respond? Some—mostly outdoorsy brands like L.L. Bean and Lands’ End (SHLD)—made soothing noises. Others blew off the Web site (and subsequently, the people declining their catalogs), and have done nothing with the names. Still, despite being less than three months old, Catalog Choice has managed to spook an industry. Consider the Nov. 29 e-mail from the Direct Marketing Assn. Bearing the subject line “JUST SAY NO,” it warned retailers that Catalog Choice’s “priority is to eliminate catalogs as a marketing medium. It is not in your interest to further their efforts!”

Charming, isn’t it. More at the Catalog Choice Blog. If you want the view from the (relatively) enlightened wing of the marketers, check out MineThatData Blog.

Their prices were not that good compared to newegg.com, four out of five of their staff were unhelpful or ignorant (but the fifth was usually great), and in fact for the past several years I only bought stuff there in emergencies.

But emergencies happen, and it was nice to know there was a place you could go if you had to. It was also nice to test stuff like keyboards and mice which are hard to buy sight unseen. And the remaindered software bin wasn’t bad. I’ll miss it.

Yes, in NY or on the west coast there are lots of other alternatives, but here not so much. We do have a Tiger Direct outlet, but its selection is quirky, and it’s a much longer drive from here.

Wouldn’t you like to live in a world in which this sort of customer experience wasn’t amazingly excepitonal?

The new modem was promised for Saturday. They swore up and down that they do Saturday delivery. Since the last time a modem died it also died on a Thursday and I had to wait until Monday, I didn’t believe them, except I sort of did, because I wanted to.

But it was a lie.

The modem arrived today, not Saturday (and I only just got home and haven’t the energy to try to install it). But that’s not all. The nice phone person promised — promised! — that it would be the same Westell brand model I had before, assuring me that of their modems it was the best. The box has a Netopia modem in it.

To round out the story, the old modem has decided it liked its rest and is working again.

The warranty replacement requires me to send back my old modem, so I can’t just keep the new one as a spare.

Or, there’s the Miami version, the Cuban coffee:

As is well known, most mattresses sold in the US are made in a small number of factories. In order to make comparison shopping hard, the mattress provide “unique” product lines to each major retailer. By making minor adjustments to the fabric or something and changing the (almost inevitably ridiculous) model names they sell under, Sealy and the like make price comparison shopping impossible. And they allow each possessor of a ‘unique’ line to make price-matching guarantees that they know are meaningless since no one else carries goods with the same name.

That’s why I’m glad there is a Mattress Comparison Index which (says it) tells you which silly name is comparable to which other silly name.

Even armed with this information there is still a lot of product out there and field testing these things is both ridiculous and not particularly informative. It’s easy to dismiss many mattresses as too soft or too hard, but that leaves a large range of choices, about none of which I feel confident about how they will feel in a year.

I wanted to illustrate this with a picture of Li’l Abner in his role a professional mattress tester, but while I could find some of him, there were none of him at work, which somehow seems fitting.

Incidentally, I was surprised to learn that professional mattress testers really exist!