Alright, this is sort of a gripe. So this morning I called a delivery company to set up a drop off time. Any day is fine they say. Okay, how about tomorrow morning I ask? thinking I'll just take the morning off.
"We can't guarantee the time of the delivery sir," I'm told.
"So you couldn't even tell me if it would be morning or afternoon?"
"No. The route is pre-calculated by a computer."
"Uh, ok fine, Saturday," I say and kick myself--am I really going to sit around my apartment all day Saturday waiting for a package to come down from on high? No other choice though: "the route was pre-calculated by a computer."
Wait a second. Isn't the whole point of using a computer to calculate things in the first place exactly to solve this sort of problem? Back in the days when computers weren't "precalculating" everything for us, correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't I just call somebody up and say hey can you deliver this tomorrow morning between 10 and noon? And somehow, the person on the other end--maybe it was some greasy guy sticking thumbtacks in a map on the wall and just eyeballing it--managed to approximately solve the CSP involved.
Thank goodness we got rid of that guy though, and his crappy approximate solution too. Now we have computers which can precisely optimize for distances and gallons, but obviously not for constraints involving temporal quantities, and certainly not for quantities such as how pissed off the customer is getting just thinking about all this. Seriously, Urban Express, this made me sad to be a technologist today. Please try to do better.
Update: the delivery men came to day, and put a big divet in my wall. Tada!
Posted by Alan at July 11, 2006 12:06 AMYou also have to take into account that people are lazy. We have the technology so that we can have more "free time."
Also, on a totally different note, machines/technology tend to not work correctly at times. I'm sure back in the day they didn't have "traffic jams." Although it's kind of funny to imagine.
But anyway...
...can you read this please?
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=35292662&blogID=144326339&Mytoken=C8814C08-7113-4B17-AC7991E71D8CD87770521140
Give me your honest opinion.
Posted by: Syrhea at July 14, 2006 01:46 AMI used to work for FedEx Ground. They did mostly did deliveries to businesses so they ran a nearly identical route every day. So my expertise there is of no help and I now feel stupider for having mentioned it.
Anyways. The route is probably precalculated in the morning after all of the packages are loaded into the driver's truck. Before then the route is probably unknown. What you should do is call them in the morning after the driver has presumabely left the terminal to see if you can get an ETA since the route should be calculated by now. Here's another option. Does your building have a desk clerk or do you have a trustworthy neighbor? You could probably change your delivery instructions for the package to be left with him or her. They usually don't give a shit who signs for a package.
I was pretty pissed at UPS once for not delivering a package to me. They said it was undeliverable because there was no apartment number. However there are only 4 units in my building and the names are all on the mailboxes. It wouldn't be that hard to figure out.
So yeah, that is annoying.
Posted by: Jeff L at July 14, 2006 06:15 AMHey, so the long awaited process of making some of my music accessible has finally made a breakthrough! Can you believe it? I can't. Ignore the cheesey pics and the fact that it's up on myspace please. http://www.myspace.com/bxkiddo
Posted by: Kimber at July 14, 2006 12:40 PMsyrhea: put me (stdout) on your "preferred list" or whatever so i can read that thing. but speaking of time-saving devices, i once jokingly told an older coworker he needed to get a myspace account. "i don't want my space," he goes, "i just want my time." exactly so.
jeff: my point is, optimal route-finding is an optimization problem involving spatial variables. scheduling is a csp involving temporal variables. they're really not that different in an abstract sense, so why not merge the two into one problem and solve that? answer: they're stuck with commercial software that can't.
kimber: grrr...feedback once i get a working flash plugin
Posted by: alan at July 14, 2006 09:52 PMkim: ok i have flash now, my life is complete. i liked them all but esp. "another act in the show" (is this the title?). in retrospect this may just be my piano bias at work. the panning to the right on "yellow basket" tripped me out a little, kinda sudden--but sounds like you put it through a vinyl filter, which was a nifty thing to do. on the bluegrassy sounding one you actually belt stuff out & sound most natural i think...channel that even more...my brother might have some useful advice for you in this area :)
Posted by: alan at July 15, 2006 02:38 PM