5 Reasons I Don’t Shop at Your Store

photo credit: Justin Marty

When it comes to where I take my business, I’m a pretty picky customer. I demand a lot of the places I shop, especially the ones I’m going to get into my car and drive to.

First, there are the obvious criteria for where I shop. The store has to be reasonably close, has to have what I need/want, be friendly and has to have reasonable prices. But then there are the less-obvious reasons, reasons that it appears many shop owners and managers forget in their bustle to keep the ship sailing forward.

So, as a public service to those stores I haven’t seen in a while, here are my top five less-common reasons I don’t visit your business. Read more

Daylight Savings Scam

photo credit: √oхέƒx™

Even on a blog about inelegant solutions, Daylight Savings Time (DST) has a special place. Not only is it an inelegant solution, but it is a bad means to a solution that doesn’t solve its designated problem. It’s a bad answer to a very stupid question.

The idea is simple, in a bid to save energy, make people happier or whatever the logic is this year, we all, save those of us who don’t live in a DST zone, set our clocks back one hour in the fall and then set them ahead that same hour in the Spring. The idea is that, during the months where DST is in effect, we get more sunlight in the evening.

The problem is three-fold. A) For it to work it requires every county in every state in every nation to agree to go along with it, then requiring every person in those countries to successfully set every clock to the right time. B) It doesn’t do the job its advertised to do and may actually make things worse. C) Even if it DID work, there would be far more efficient ways to achieve the same effect.

So let’s take a moment to stop and think about DST for a bit and marvel at its stupidity. If you think it’s a good thing, give me a second and hear me out, you might like my competing solution better.

After all, the true marvel of DST isn’t that it doesn’t work, but that it’s such a horrible way to get to something that doesn’t work. Read more

Seeking Better Email

As I was writing my column yesterday for Blogging Tips, something dawned on me. That as much as I love Gmail, there aren’t many alternatives out there.

I wondered aloud on Twitter why there were no viable competitors for Gmail and got a slew of good responses. One of the best came from user @lance_ who said that “It takes a lot of market clout or money to get past spam filters. There isn’t a huge market for b2b & consumers already got an address.” (fixed quote for tweet-speak).

Others seemed to feel that the market was saturated while others still were quick to remind me about Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, neither of which really hold much of a candle to Gmail in terms of features. When you consider that Gmail, for free, offers nearly unlimited space, free IMAP access, threading, powerful search, good spam filtering and more, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail look like weaklings.

Gmail is pretty much the undisputed champion right now, at least in terms of features and power, and, sadly, there is no real competition on the horizon. Yahoo! and Microsoft seem to have rolled over and other companies, like Zenbe, would rather build off of Gmail than create something truly new.

The result is that Gmail has stagnated. What was revolutionary when it was first created has slowed to a crawl. Most of the “Labs” features are either mistakes that should never have been in Gmail, such as Signature Tweaks, Title Tweaks, etc. or outright catchup with other systems, such as Canned Responses.

Gmail, which is still in beta, hasn’t blossomed and though it seems to announce new features regularly, most seem outright trivial. So where’s the competition to keep the fire hot? Where is the upstart company with a bold new vision and a competing ideal? It isn’t there.

It’s time for some competition. Time for an upstart group of rebels to really attack this issue and see what they can do. Will it be easy? No. Is it impossible? Maybe. But the future of email may depend on it. Read more

Why OmniWeb Failed

Update: See comments below for a response from Omni Group The OmniWeb Web browser is, for the most part, no more. Though the announcement last week highlighted the fact that it was now available for free, the buried lead is that they are stopping active development on the browser. Though they aren’t ruling out future updates, they aren’t promising any either and they didn’t open source the browser. With the browser wars the way they are, that’s as good as a death sentence.

However, most people that used OmniWeb seemed to like the browser. I tried it several times over the past few years, never quite getting to the point where I was willing to pay for it after the trial ended. Sadly though, the browser couldn’t build any real traction. Many Mac users were unaware it was available and, those that did, seemed to always go back to free browsers.

It was, and still is, a fairly innovative browser and one that works fairly well. Based on Webkit, it’s a fast browser with an intersting “tabs on the side” system that uses thumbnails of pages rather than a traditional tab bar. It also has a slew of built-in features, such as ad-blocking, workspaces and individual site preferences.

Yet, the browser is clearly being put into retirement. Where did it go wrong and how can other “deep in the pack” browsers, such as Flock and Opera, avoid a similar fate? Read more

7 Beers, 7 Countries: A Review

photo credit: Jayel Aheram

I’m not a beer drinker. When it comes to my very limited alcohol consumption I’m definitely more of a wine/daiquiri/mixed drink kind of guy. A good bottle of red wine or a jack and coke is more up my alley than pretty much any beer.

However, economic times are tough. We don’t have the income we did a year ago so we’re looking to cut back on our expenses. One of the easiest for us is drinking. Though we love our daiquiris, $20 for two larges (with tip) makes little sense when a six pack of even high-end foreign beer is less than half the price.

So we set out to find a beer that we could enjoy. We had the good fortune to do some overseas traveling in the past year and learned that we liked some foreign beers but the ones we truly enjoyed, such as Duvel beer, were not widely available in the U.S. The goal was to find a beer we could locate easily and enjoy on a whim.

World Market came to our rescue. Their “Make your own six pack” feature let us literally build a six pack of beer from six different countries at an affordable price. So we decided to try and then do a review of it. Here are the results. Read more

Safari’s New Interface: A Shiny Mess

Though the Web browser has grown in importance and changed drastically in function since the first version of Netscape Navigator ruled a fledgling Web, its interface has not changed that drastically.

Though tabbed browsing introduced an important new element, most browsers sport forward and back buttons along with stop/reload buttons, an address bar and, more recently, a search box. Most browsers today look enough like Netscape Navigator 0.91 that few would be lost if they traveled back in time.

But lately there has been an attempt to shake that up some. First came Google Chrome, introducing the idea of tabs on top, and now comes the new beta of Safari 4, which adds even more new interface changes.

Though I’m always a fan of innovation, there’s a lot about these interface changes that bug me and not just the new “bug report” button. I’m admittedly no interface designer, but there are a lot of things that I would definitely do differently… Read more

Mardi Gras 2009: Wrap Up

photo credit: Toast to Life

Mardi Gras 2009 is over. At 12:01 AM this morning local time, the police swept Bourbon St., shutting down the celebrations and bringing on the coming of Ash Wednesday. Another Mardi Gras is in the books.

Some people asked what I thought of this year’s Mardi Gras, unfortunately though, I don’t have a lot to say about it. I was sick the entire week before and most of the weekend before too. My revelry was limited to a bit on Sunday and Monday evening and most of the day Tuesday. I wasn’t able to go to any of my favorite parades, save Krewe Du Vieux early in the season, and it really feels like I missed most of this year and I don’t even have any pictures to share (be thankful for Photodropper).

Which, unfortunately, is a terrible shame. It was a very good Mardi Gras. In my estimation, it was the first Mardi Gras since Katrina that felt like the holiday was “back”. The 2006 one was a very bittersweet one, largely for the locals and the workers rebuilding the city. The 2007 one was still too early after Katrina. 2008 was just too early in the year (early Mardi Gras are always more tame) and this was the first time the city has both healed enough and has had a good date to work with.

On that front, 2010 looks very promising, with a mid-February date and 2011 even more so, with an early March date. I think we’re poised for a good run of Mardi Gras years coming up. Read more

Why Boycotts Fail

photo credit: EDgAr H.

Last week, the The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology announced that they were going to boycott the state of Louisiana due to recent laws passed in the state that has opened the door for creationism to be taught in the state’s schools.

As a result of this, they will not be holding their 2011 meeting in New Orleans, instead, they will be taking it to Utah.

No matter what you think of the politics of teaching creationism in schools, one can easily see why an organization like SICB would be opposed to it and why they might want to do something about it.

But boycotting Louisiana, in particular New Orleans, isn’t going to solve the problem and is only going to hurt good people who work hard and likely agree with them politically. After all, New Orleans is a very liberal city (a bright blue dot in the deep red south) and one of just four parishes to vote against Jindal in the 2007 gubernatorial election.

However, the problem with boycotts runs deeper than that. With only a few exceptions, they are just lazy, ineffective means of protest that do more harm than good. They are misused, especially in modern history, and almost never achieve the intended goal.

The reason is pretty simple when you look at the math. Read more

Mardi Gras Monday: Beads

photo credit: DoctorWho

Truthfully, I’ve been loathing this article. Keeping this site-family friendly and discussing an item so rightfully associated with very adult activity is a challenge.

So, rather than discuss what one does with them, which is a very personal choice, I’m going to talk about what they are and where you can get them. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

So this brings us around to the main question: What are beads? Beads are strands of cheap plastic spheres and shapes strung around a thin cord. They come in all colors and are typically worn during carnival season that you can find them pretty much year-around on weekends in the French Quarter.

So where do you get them and how do you know which are the best? Those questions aren’t nearly as simple. Read more

A Quick Question for Financial CEOs

photo credit: Tracy O

I’m not a mathematician. I admit that I completely suck at math, a big part of why my childhood dreams of becoming a programmer were dashed and I switched to writing. However, I think I spot a number issue here.

You see, many of your banks and firms have received billions of dollars in government assistance over the past few months. You say your firms needed it to stay afloat and, looking at your staggering losses, I am definitely hard pressed to disagree.

But then comes the rub, you take that money and, out of the funds, you give yourselves and other executives multi-million dollar bonuses. While I grant that it was only a percent of a percent of the bailout money spent that way, it certainly shows a lack of care and concern for saving money at a time where your companies are, supposedly, so desperate to stay alive they need government help.

This, understandably, upset the public. After all, very few taxpayers earn anywhere near the amount of money you guys do on your worst years and we aren’t getting any serious government assistance. In large part, we’re the ones financing you. So we made some noise and the government heard. President Obama signed an executive order limiting executive pay to just $500,000 and adding some additional oversight.

How do you guys respond, by trying to give the money back.

This begs a simple question. What are you guys thinking? Sure, you don’t get to keep making your multi-million dollar salaries, but you get billions of dollars in cold hard cash and you get to keep your business afloat. What is there to decide?

I have a sneaking suspicion that even laypeople are better with money than you guys and I think I can prove it pretty easily. Read more

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