[TriEmbed] Living in a tech world, in California

[Gregg Tracton]

I did this as well (8 years ago?) for limited art prints, available at
random times & always sold out within 3 minutes.

My system quick-polled every 20 seconds for the items desired by my
"clients" (other employees in my dept who paid for this service). When the
art was available, my system texted my clients, who had 5 web pages all
loaded up and ready to buy the item. Most of those 5 timed out as demand
spiked. Delays in texting lost us some buys as well; I guess blinking a
light would have worked better, if our employer had allowed that type of
device on their network.

Fun times.
-g


On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 11:30 AM Alan Wiggs PE via TriEmbed <
triembed at triembed.org> wrote:

> To all my tech geek friends,
>
>  I got this from a lawyer buddy, his nephew is in a tech area.
>
> A few years ago I looked at a Adafruit feather Huzzah project to do
> something like this.
>
>
> *From: *J
> *Subject: **From my non-engineer nephew in Palo Alto*
> *Date: *April 12, 2020 at 4:26:25 PM EDT
> *To: *
>
> Subject: He who cannot code, cannot eat
>
>
> It's become apparent that it's virtually impossible to get a curbside
> pickup time slot at any of the local grocery stores.  When one becomes
> available, it is literally snapped up within seconds.  So quickly, in fact,
> that I came to the conclusion people must be using automation.  This is
> just one more reason why it often sucks to live in the same vicinity as
> 100,000 other software engineers.
>
> So, I joined the arms race, analyzed the underlying API of the store's
> website, and wrote a program that checks for available time slots every 15
> seconds, and if any are found, reserves the first one instantly.  Then it
> turns on a light in the bedroom to alert me that I have a reservation, and
> after that I have one hour to complete the checkout.  I was walking around
> in circles in the yard last night when I saw the light come on, so I came
> in and discovered I have a time on Wednesday evening.
>
> Pity those poor suckers in Silicon Valley who don't know how to code.
> Kind of darkly funny that it has finally come to this: if you can't program
> a computer, you can take your chances with COVID, or starve, I guess.
>
>
> Be safe,
>
> Alan Wiggs
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-- 
Gregg Tracton: tired, retired & inappropriately unattired (PJ's)
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