Receipt for a Donut

As Mitch Hedberg used to say, "I don't need a receipt for a donut. I give you money and you give me the donut, end of transaction." This is so true, until you're traveling on business. Then you need a receipt for every last donut, steak, copy expense, and shuttle ride.

If you're anything like me, you get credit card offers in your mailbox daily. I have no need or want for another credit card. I'd change my tune in a heartbeat if a credit card company could solve my receipt problem. I don't want receipts, ever. I want a record of my purchase, sure, but I don't want that record to be a 2x6" piece of weak paper with survey offers printed on the bottom. What I want is Visa or Mastercard to build a transaction culture that allows merchants to email me PDFs or XML of my purchase information.

Do you realize how easy this would make filling out your expense report for business travel? Everyone hates expense reports. We only fill them out because if we don't, we don't get our money back. I can't stand tracking 4 days worth of crumpled paper so I can manually transfer the data to an Excel spreadsheet. I always lose one, they're hard to read, and they're just wasteful.

The Life Takes Visa commercials love to show people flowing through a shop, swiping cards and getting on with things. But you never see a receipt in those commercials. Maybe they've already built this magical receipt email system and forgot to tell us. The technicals have to be simple. They have an account number that is tied to my name, physical address, and many times, my email address. Get some nice business to business web services going and the data can flow to me. This won't be free to build, but you can build it with the money you save on receipt paper and wasted sales while the minimum wage cashier pounds on the jammed printer.

BTW, this isn't my first set of thoughts on receipts. I've complained about them before.

Edit: I forgot to mention that some retailers are already jumping on this. Apple retail stores have "line busting" handheld computers that allow you to buy equipment right on the store floor. They'll then email your receipt to the account in your Apple ID. This is slick, but I'd still like something that applies across all merchants.

Cue It

A big thanks to Matt for leaving a comment on my old Chaptify post. To answer Matt's question, yes I did spend some time working on some code to convert .cue files to ChapterTool input. However, it isn't anything I'm all that proud of, at least not yet. This might make me dust it off and work some more.

Until then, check out Matt's online utility to do the .cue->XML conversion. I threw some .cue files at it and it seems to work well.

Art of the Playlist

Just like a good album, a good playlist can be a work of art in itself. The playlist can create a mood, not only in the selected tracks, but the order of them. One of the downsides of today's track by track world is that listening to your music at complete random can be less than pleasing. A D'n'B track can lead in to classical, followed by a comedy set. Ugg. Luckily, the playlist is there to make things better.

I've found that some of my playlists become as loved as albums from favorite artists. I also find that listening to someone else's playlist can open doors for me. To that regard, here are a couple of playlists of mine for you to listen to. These are different than my 5 of the now because the 5otn are usually unrelated tracks and not meant to listen to as a group. To go along with the Slushy Streets playlist I posted last December, here are Sunrise Skyline and Dust and Rain. A few of the readers of this blog have already heard these, but not all. Let me know if you'd like a full listen, rather than the 30 sec iTS previews.

To help you post your own playlists, you can try my Perl script to convert an iTunes playlist XML file to HTML. For some odd reason, iTunes does not allow a simple playlist export of artist and track title. The script isn't the greatest in the world. It has a last second hack I had to put in when I encountered an Album Artist field, and I also discovered that the output is not saved in the file in the order of your playlist. You have to make use of the key IDs further down in the XML to get the order correct. That means this will output your playlist to HTML just fine, but you might need to manually fix the order, for now.