Sprint: Redefining Stupidity
Sprint is a failing company. They’re bleeding subscribers and can’t seem to compete with other carriers. It’s phones suck, its service sucks and new marketing isn’t helping.
I have a deal with myself that when my contract with Sprint expires early next year, I’m taking my phones and throwing them into the Mississippi River (or finding some other elaborate means of destruction that I can video tape). I’ve been with them four years and have watched them deteriorate from a forward-thinking and “cool” provider to the Pabst Blue Ribbon of cell phones.
But what amazes me about Sprint is not that it seems to blow the hard stuff, but how badly it messes up the easy things.
Let’s say, for a second, that you took a quirky picture of your beloved family dog on your Sprint phone. You wanted to send it to your good friend but knew she doesn’t have picture mail on her phone (or, in my case, suffered from bad reception). So, you decide to email it to her and, being the lazy sort, you decide to do it from your phone directly rather than download it to your machine and then email it yourself.
Let’s change perspective and take a look at what you just put your good friend through and the steps they have to complete to get the image. Read more
MailPlane: Not Worth the Price
I have a bit of a saying. If you write good software and charge a fair price for it, people will pay. I routinely buy software for my Mac, including programs that I may or may not use over the long haul.
However, one program I recently started to use, or rather, am starting to use again, has put me in a bit of a bind.
You see, even though Mailplane is a great program that does exactly what it advertises and is very polite with my system resources, I simply cannot justify the expense.
However, I’m not some cheapskate that refuses to buy software. I am a happy customer that just dropped $100 for Screenflow, and $20 for Gyazmail (though I have since stopped using it full-time). I’m the type of customer Mac software vendors love, a small business admin with a decent-sized PayPal account and lots of discretion to buy software I need.
Still, I can’t see myself spending $25 for Mailplane. The reason is that the price point is horribly wrong and $25, though reasonable for other applications, is far too high for this app. Read more
Next Automattic Buy: Too Lijit to Quit
WordPress search sucks. There’s no nice way to put that. If you’re using running WordPress and are using the default search engine, your visitors would likely find it faster to get the information they need with a bus ticket to your house.
Though most of the platform is great, the search has always been the pits. Unfortunately, even as media handling, plugin installation and other features have grown up and become big boy tools, WordPress search has remained as daft as a speak and spell.
However, Automattic has this nice habit of buying up companies that fix their own weaknesses. Need blogger profiles? Buy Gravatar. Commenting system sucks? Buy Intense Debate.
So, in that spirit, I’d like to suggest their next big purchase. Lijit.
It seems simple enough to me. WordPress search stinks, there’s no easy way to fix it, Lijit solved the problem for Automattic and is making a tidy sum doing it.
The pairing seems natural to me at least. But I could be wrong… Read more
The New Facebook Design: Not THAT Bad
It appears, by all accounts, that I chose a really bad time to set up my new Facebook profile. After unofficially boycotting the site for several years, it appears I signed up just in time to be thrown into a civil war over the new Facebook design.
However, as strange as it may sound. I actually got to use both designs and, frankly, I don’t see what all of the excitement is about. Sure, the new layout is different, but it really isn’t THAT bad.
I think a lot of Facebook users need to calm down and think about this a bit more logically. I admit it is a jarring transition and that any change comes with a little bit of pain.
But is it possible that Facebook users are over-reacting, just a tiny bit? Seriously, let’s take a moment to put this in perspective. Read more
Razors and Blades
  photo credit: Zixii |
I own six printers.
I live in a household with two people, my wife and I, we have four computers in use and we own six printers. Six. Three for every person, one and a half for every computer.
The best part is, only one of them is actually in use and, even then, only sparingly.
So why do we own so many printers when the one set up sees less use than a rainmaker in New Orleans? The answer is simple: Cost and the pricing model set up by the manufacturers.
As messed up as this situation is, it isn’t our screwup. Rather, it is the entire printer industry that has created this problem. They’re why I can’t get into my office closet, why I keep finding “printer install” disks every time I look for my Diablo 2 CDs and why I have about a dozen “mystery cords” in my collection of spare parts.
It is time for someone to stand up and fix this. Not only for the sake of sanity, but for the sake of the environment and the people’s whose jobs are being held up by a flimsy business model that blows over in a gentle breeze. Read more
Cone of Stupidity
If you live in New Orleans or any place else along a cost potentially impacted by tropical storms, you need no definition for what the forecasters call the “Cone of Uncertainty”.
For those who have never had the good fortune of a rushed evacuation from the latest “Mother of All Storms” allow me to take a moment and explain.
When a hurricane or other tropical storm is out in the ocean, the nice people at the National Hurricane Center do their best to try and predict where it is going to go. They use all kinds of computer models, forecasts, voodoo magic and dart throwing to come up with a forecasted track, meaning line.
They try to predict where the storm will be in roughly five days and make the best guess they can. However, they admit they aren’t very good at this and that nature has a way of making them look like idiots. So, they hedge their best some and create what they call a “Cone of Uncertainty” that goes out from either side of the track.
Since they are pretty good at the 12-24 hour range, the cone starts off very narrow but, by day 5, grows to approximately 350 miles on either side, meaning 700 miles across.
Now, that really isn’t that bad. If you’re within 350 miles of a big hurricane, you’re going to feel it. So anyone within the cone should be paying really close attention. At worst, the storm could make it personal and hit them directly, at best they’ll need to reschedule their boat race and bar-b-que.
Useful it may be at times, I’ve undertaken the decision to, in my household, rename this aforementioned cone the “Cone of Stupidity”. Why? I’ll explain. Read more
Bad Mac Design
When I got my Mac Mini about a year ago, I was looking forward to getting a taste of Mac design. Sure, it was meant to be just a “dabbling in Mac” system but it quickly became main workstation and, despite my gripes, is the computer I am typing this on.
However, as anyone who has opened up a Mac Mini knows, the slick operating system belies a real mess under the hood.
No computer should ever have a putty knife listed as a required item for a ram upgrade, which the Mac Mini does, but the mess that comes with upgrading the Mini does not stop there.
As I found out this weekend, Apple took extra steps to ensure that their product would disintegrate upon opening, by making a bevy of internal layout choices that are at best hard to understand and, at worst, make no sense at all. Read more
My Evacuation and Return From Gustav Pt. 2
First thing is first, my thoughts and prayers go out to those in Texas dealing with Hurricane Ike right now. I know well what you are going through and it is not someone I wish on anyone. I wish those in the Houston/Galveston area all of the best and I hope the storm passes quickly and that the recovery is swift.
I know that if there is anything that I or the city of New Orleans can do to help, we will gladly do so.
My Evacuation and Return From Gustav Pt. 1
Here is an understatement: Last week was a very long week for me.
However, now that I have had a few days back home, in relatively normal conditions, to reflect about what happened, I wanted to take a few moments to talk about the experience, what happened to me and why I found it so hard to get back to the city and back online.
So, if you’ve got the time and are interested, I’m going to tell my tale the best that I can. This is going to be a pair of long posts, for that I apologize, and they probably won’t be up to my usual writing standard. Still, I want to get this out and down on paper as quickly as possible.
Otherwise, I fear I might forget about what happened and may never really learn from it. Read more
