The day the web came home

I often play the role of disgruntled Mr. Consumerican on here. Part of that I derive from my "better half," who really is a very typical tech "user." By that I mean an average person who happens to interface with popular technology. She loves her Mac, but is frustrated when it runs IE 5 dog slow (Crossover X where are you?).

Anyway, I complain a lot. About every damn thing known to man. I started a Vox blog just to complain about stuff I'd like to keep private time-to-time. I guess I have the need to vent, plus, I have somewhat lowbrow expectations of customer service.

But the web companies of late have learned a thing or two about customer service. Amazon does a superb job. Yahoo called me back today, explaining we had indeed received our blue plate special credit thingy. I have to call another number to complain about hosting, but I won't bother. And somehow Jot came in from last place with a grand finish-- Jim wrote me back.

Yes, no doubt I was just another bitchy-ass, whiny, moaning, jerk customer. It's a terrible habit, like spitting while you smoke. I try to be nice, really, but dammit don't read from a script! Anyway, Jim was super, and said they monkeyed with the code and to see if things worked faster. They do. Home run. Thank you, Jim.

Yahoo - the rip-off artists!

So we tried using "sponsored search" from Yahoo... there was an offer splashed all across their pages (and we use them for our llamapod site hosting and e-commerce engine, so you'd think we'd get some break there): $50 credit for signing up now! Oh, you gotta love those sales tactics. Hey, there's an offer code, what a great incentive!

Guess what? Went through the entire sign-up process... NO CODE! Nope, no place to enter the damn code. So I'm wondering what local BBB or state channels to file a complaint. I mean, WTF? This is Yahoo... they should be better than the old bait-and-switch tactic. For shame.

I'm not even going to mention how they completely screwed up our site on Monday. Nope. I won't detail how their mistake reset a setting we didn't even know existed, causing our page to disappear for hours, and how it took over an hour for some idiot to act like it was my fault... Nope, I'm not going to get into THAT little mess at all...

Really, it is a miracle anyone has a job. I'm convinced that only through the stupidity of those around us are any of us able to press on. Like fake nails.

JotSpot - when will the suckiness end?

When digg and Myspace saw memberships climbing exponentially, they had problems. Granted, these are the problems a business person loves: people love your product so much they are breaking down the door to get to it. Users who went to digg might have had strange errors, or just wackiness. Myspace, well, we all know how crappy the experience gets on there...

But JotSpot (or my new term for them: JotSTOP) doesn't have that excuse. They may have a lot of users, but I would guess they haven't seen traffic take off like a rocket-- certainly no where near the level of my examples.

So when they rolled out these big new changes, I expected things to be a little twitchy. Newness is always difficult to wrangle in technology. Ask the poor saps with airbags in the 50's, or the Engadget crew (although those coders know their shizzie). I did not expect JotSpot to come to a screeching halt.

I use JotSpot every single day of the week. Maybe once a week I don't, but for my job, it is a neccessity. So it has been incredibly difficult to DO my job lately, because Jot's changed have completely fubared the functionality. SLOW is the word. Every click is an exercise in waiting. It's like being on dial-up and trying to order a movie on the iTunes store. This affects almost everyone I work with as well...

So every day I'm sending a little note to the "Help" guy, Jim, to see what's up. One week in, I have no repsonses. Pretty crappy, if you ask me. Get it together Jot, or get lost. I'm already looking at alternatives...

This would have been a birthday!

Space tourism is very cool. I hope to do it someday. After all, I won the "Right Stuff" award at Space Camp!
They the geeks shall inherit...

Space tourist having a great time

I like how everyone else on the station is just doing their jobs ;)

Safe returns!

Wait, people give a crap about HP?

I just heard HP wanted to plant spies at WSJ and CNet (watch your back Veronica)... This is yet another item on the ongoing "stop the leaks" story that has felled yet another female CEO of the beleagured tech company. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

But my question is: did people really care? I mean, obviously any company has to keep trade secrets, but were folks really chomping at the bit to get HP deets on whatever new laser printer was due this holiday season? Apple, with the secrecy and hotness of the brad, I see the leak issues there... Microsoft, same thing for different reasons (we'd all like to see the entrails of a dinosaur, right?).

But HP??? Paranoia run amok in corporateville. Time for another round of golf... er, strategizing.

The MySpace Economy

Wow, this is really smart:
WhoseSpace is MySpace

All these little startups driven by MySpace? Maybe. Flickr could do without the emo's. Really. MySpace is no "Web 2.0" that's for damn sure. There's a sort of aesthetic that comes with the label...

But YouTube? I'm inclined to agree with Cuban and say they are basically a hosting service. Add in a social layer, but they all got that now (and some do it better).

Then again, it is very simple-- which people are craving more. The long tail may be eating itself...

No one said sales was easy...

It took a long time for the iPod to achieve critical mass. I mean, considering it's a closed system from a company that nearly disappeared entirely..
Well it's been more than 2 years since I made this iPod case from a milk jug, and I still don't have a fancy-schmancy video iPod to create another. But I did make a darn nifty leather iPod case for ALL models of the iPod but the shuffles. My nano cases are modular, and the 1G-5G cases are clever, but hard to explain. So through the magic of YouTube, here's my pitch:


Trouble is, we have a bunch of old model stock still in. Because I came up with my jug version as the cottage industry surrounding the iPod was on the ascendency. NOW you can't swing a dead junebug without hitting some "newfangled" iPod case. Makes our clever design harder to spot in a crowd. Oh, except that you won't be straining your neck/back to use the thing. Really, it's very simple and easy. And made of llama leather. How many cases can say that?

Please buy one (^_^)
llamapod

there's only one show on TV

I had considered watching 'Grey's Anatomy' after everyone started raving about it but... the lead is named McDreamy. WHAT? Seriously, that is asinine. I haven't laughed so hard since I heard them say "Electric Nachos" in that craptastic 'Daredevil' movie...

There's only one show for me worth watching: 'Lost'

Great mythology, incredible characters (and acting), wonderful story arcs, and to top it off, some brilliant technical work (editing, sound, cinematography). It has the whole package. My wife and I talked about whether it would be better on something like HBO, so there were no commercials. But honestly, I like it without the vulgarity and whatnot. I mean, I'm all for vulgarity-- when appropriate. How are you going to take Tony Soprano seriously if he's saying "I'm gonna frig you up, you motherfather'in snigglebunny!"

But the constraints of network TV have really helped Lost IMHO.

YouTube: Get Lost

Well, another popular-site-under-pressure has popped up. First it was MySpace, with the server errors and whosafudgits, and now it is YouTube. All morning I've been trying to see the last 2 minutes of the assembled "Lost" footage (from the show, the online experience stuff). Kudos to the guy who put it all together but... YouTube is only getting a minute or two before completely crapping out. First, I'd like to see the fan sites put together all the clips on a page, but individually. And second, I'd like to see YouTube get their act together. Nothing screams "I need an influx of cash" like failing to load content... Digg went through the growing pains too. I'm surprised it took this long for YouTube to crack-- video takes enormous amounts of bandwidth, even crappy, pixelated Flash-based video...

Politics, schmolitics

Going to try and keep relevant here, and stick to tech stuff. Want politics? Find me on Vox, where the wackos are ;)

Now, as for tech thoughts... Nuggets of wisdom for today:
1. when you live in a fishbowl with one other fish, don't pick fights
2. when you live in this life-is-fast-but-the-web-is-faster world, WORK TOGETHER

As I point out on Jason's blog: even Steve J. and Bill G. learned to work together at some point (while still poking fun at each other). Can't we all just move along?

Here's what got me on this jag:
Dave and Tim

Hope it ends well.

Why "site wars" are asinine

Well my previous post was a little too ebullient for a curmudgeon like myself, so here's a little snark for the day...

Download Squad found this really cool ftp search engine:
Gegereka

It crawls ftp sites for all manner of files, which is creepy AND cool.

Now here's the fun part. As you all know, there's an ongoing "war" between the diggites and Netscapians. Netscape supposedly "copied" the digg model (and added turbo-cooling, but diggites are too fond of truthiness to point out the diff), in the same way every other car maker copied Henry Ford... So now really great stuff isn't making it to the front page, ONLY because it is a Weblogs, Inc./AOL property.

Gegereka is caught in the middle. IMHO, diggites would love the search engine (I mean, aren't they all music-stealing porn addicts anyway?). But on digg it gets 11 votes as of right now, and on Netscape it has 18. Prejudice? Gaming? Hatred, blind and stupid? Bingo.

The internets are all about openness and equality, not hating and xenophobia. Get a clue dudes.

Investing with a conscience?

Great conversations begin with a simple premise, and develops over time with salient points from intelligent folks. Unless you're talking politics ;)

Anyway, Blogging Stocks posted a primer on Socially Responsible Investing. Good comments in there!

No comments on Netscape or digg though, which is interesting...

Dear Apple: Finder Sux

Crash-prone Finder strikes again. I don't know if it's too much Carbon, too little coffee, or just plain stupid, but Finder crashes way too often. How often? Well, in the 2 years my wife has had her iBook G4, she never had to reboot (aside from updates). She's had her Macbook for about a month, and she's rebooted 3 times from hard freezes (beach ball, total lockup). Why? Finder is a steaming, neatly folded, pile of shit that is totally incapable of recovering from a disconnected network volume.

I posted this on TUAW a while back. A number of people didn't RTFA. While yes, sometimes Finder can recover from a disconnected volume, sometimes it does not. So, I had updated firmware on our router with a PC, and upon reboot, it reassigned IP addresses to the computers on the network. The practical upshot? When my wife opened her "never crashes" Macbook, and Backup begins a few hours later, suddenly the drive she's used to backing up to is "missing" for OSX. That's just plain stupid. I mean UNIX WAS MADE FOR NETWORKING!!!

Only Apple could fuck up UNIX so bad it borks a simple network connection. Now this presents a neat little question though... Will Leopard's Time Machine, which requires an external drive, get all jacked up like Backup when it searches for a network volume whose only crime was to have a host PC change IP address? Or will Apple just expect all notebook users to dangle a Firewire (400 only, thanks guys) drive from their machine?

Brilliant.

Azzam the American

Here's the post on CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/09/02/zawahiri.tape/index.html

The agenda of al Qaeda is clear: the world must convert to Islam or it will be destroyed. That's it folks! The parallels in history are clear-- do I need be crass enough to point them out? Is there any question now why al Qaeda must be stopped? I'm not saying we're doing it properly, or that there even IS a way to do it right... But the point remains valid: the world is not going to accept a one-world religion any more than I'm going to start eating battery acid.

Which again turns me to the issue of how these guys are able to inflict so much pain on the world. They are well-funded. Stop the source of money, you stop the ability to fund multi-million dollar terror campaigns. Again, this isn't so easy. It's easy for me to scold the bouffant Hummer-driving wingnuts for their oil-sucking ways. Fund a terrorist with your SUV! But that's an oversimplification that makes Creationism look like rocket surgery...

I remember the days when we had a poorly-funded but easy-to-find enemy: the U.S.S.R. Sure, we grew up scared to death that nuclear winter could rain down on us at any moment, but it was a shared fear we could all rally around.

The shared human experience is disappearing, along with our rituals and references that once bound us together as a race. Which would explain why many people are trying to get "out" of the human race altogether. I don't blame them! People find solace in purpose, and often religion becomes a purpose in itself. But what one loses in blind fanatacism is the humanity in the ritual and purposefulness of faith. What cruel irony. Perhaps that's not very clear, but these things rarely are.