人生行路 — The Journey of Life

PurityPeople has announced that the full site will be up and running May 1st. This is very good news. Being an “insider” and author on the site, I’ve been given a sneak preview of what it’s going to look like. They created a completely unique Joomla template for it. Very good looking.

Given the ship’s restrictions on posting on personal pages while underway, the site also serves as a proxy to my posting things on the Internet, which is nice to have. The plan earlier was to have stuff written for regular release through underway periods, but that hasn’t really come to pass as I had planned.

Easy: don’t list APO/FPO states on an address form.

If there’s anything to be said about usability, I shouldn’t have to email you about how to enter my address merely because I’m at an FPO.  Zander Insurance wouldn’t let me enter “AP” as a state, so they lost my business.

LifeLock ended up looking too creepy for me, so the safe bet was TrustedID, which listed “AP” as one of the available states.  Good on them; they understand.

Unfortunately, Zander isn’t alone.  For as long as forms have simply listed 50 states, military members — and often residents of U.S. territories — have been left out.  Or rather, companies have unnecessarily limited their customer base by doing this.

I encountered a related problem a couple of months ago when ordering from Kashi.  I emailed them to ask about entering an FPO address, and they replied that because UPS is their exclusive shipper, they can’t send products to FPOs.