CogBlogged Tagged ‘web bad dog’

It is definitely NOT Ok, Google. The rationale for shutting down Google Reader smells like my old tennis shoes. You bring in gazillions of bucks on ads and you cannot aford to leave a service running as is? Show us the numbers! Make the Web, don;t breaking it. Bad, dog, Google, you are a very bad dog.

Sure I want the newer camera and video capabilities. I want a compass. I want the 32Gb of space. I want the speeeeeeeeed. But like others who find the notion of an “upgrade” for buying the most recent model an interesting term….. apparently the pirates known as AT&T want to Ssssssuck more money out of the Apple love. I went to check how I could buy an iPhone. The “early upgrade” fee of $18 which is really $36 which is really $236 if you are a sap who owns a 3G. That $299 iPhone 3GS will cost me $499. It is explained really clearly: As a valued AT&T customer, AT&T can offer you an early iPhone upgrade with a new 2-yr commitment and an $18 upgrade fee. You may qualify for a standard iPhone upgrade on 01/19/2010. In the spirit of Tom Woodard, I am close captioning this for the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Zervas One can hardly read a twitter stream these days without tripping over a boat load of hash tags (for those knot sure of what twitter is or what hash tags are, please go check out Oprah or some other oracle, I am not feeling like explaining everything…). First of all, I completely get, grok, and am on board with the desire, the reason for hash tags. Twitter as is, lacks anything in its architecture to allow cross grouping oh content. And hash tags do fill that purpose, though IMHO rather awkwardly. But before going there, I again wonder about our cranial capacity to keep track of hash tags. Event ones are of course short lived. I have been gaming them, toying with them for a while but creating what I call #totalUselessAndRidiculous tags. Just for the fun of it. Just to through a spanner [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by deadrobot Good gravy, if you are going to send me spam-mail, at least make it a worthy effort? This one “Your Tax Refund” from supposedly the “Canada Revenue Agency” makes those Kenyan inheritances and dutch lottos seem legit. I really expected more from Canadian Spam, and I am way disappointed in this attempt. After the last anual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $475.20 From 2009, we process refunds through your VISA / Mastercard Please fill the form below and e-mail it to canadarevenueagency@minister.com or simply reply it from this curent e-mail ! First Name: Last Name: Address: City: Province: Postal Code: Home Phone Number: Mother’s Maiden Name: Date of Birth: Social Insurance Number: Credit/Debit Card Number: Expiration date [ MM/YYYY ] : Card Verification Code: Card Signature/ATM PIN: Bank Name: We are [...]

I will tap into a generational nerve (if you get no response, read someone else’s blog post) with a curiosity as to how, over time, the answer to that sacred answer was changed: Yes, I never liked the Owl’s cheap answer, and always thought the number of licks to get to the center of a Tootsle Pop was a few orders of magnitude higher. Even the FAQ cops out (What kind of FAQ does not provide an A?): How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? It depends on a variety of factors such as the size of your mouth, the amount of saliva, etc. Basically, the world may never know. If you go the wiki route, you get variable answers from 1 to 10,000. So this answer is not really fixed, and it gets more complex given the trend of product downsizing, [...]

I am far from alone being in individual ramrodded by a company that takes your money for a service it does not provide. But these dinosaurs are in denial of the asteroids raining down on them, as the net empowers us to put their evil deeds into the light. This is my little experiment to see if a single, frustrated, beaten down customer can take on a giant smelly pirate. Help me out my casting foul words and links their way. Hence, I am here to tell you the tale of the Alltel Pirates and how they have me chained to their brig. Oh how foolish I was to fall for their ship! Mock up of Alltel.com site plus pirate face from cc licensed flickr photo Pirate Phobia. In summary: The wireless internet service my organization pays monthly fees for has failed to connect, repeatedly disconnected, or has been wrongly [...]

I am a die hard Google junkie. For more than 2 years, iGoogle has been home on every computer I use, while others clamor about their RSS tools, I just dig and dig Google reader, Gmail is my hub for all my non-twitter communication ;-) and I put all my time into Google calendar. Yet, I have a gripe. It’s the menus that are supposed to make it easy to be moving around my Googlespace. For the longest time, there were no menus in Google Reader. Then a few weeks ago, Reader just disappeared from all menus. But lately I am just looking at these menus, static, and saying, “Boy are you dumb.” Let’s say I start in Gmail…

Do you want to have fewer blog readers? Are you tired of pesky commenters who disagree with your posts? Is there something to be gained by frustrating users? Here’s how… Just set up your blog so users have to create accounts and log in to post a comment. Heck, they already have 50 gazillion accounts, what is one more? And by the time the poor fools actually wade through a registration form, wait for an email.. they have forgotten what they wanted to criticize you on! And, for an extra added, evil twist.. never email them the password! Brilliant! You will be free of readers in no time. I just had this lovely experience and could not wait to pull out the canine teeth… Okay, so this post on “Henry Jenkins on Emerging Technologies” parrots the list of topics from the 2008 NMC Horizon Report. But the author has a [...]

It’s been a while since I barked about the clumsiness of LinkedIn but just had another one of those near deaths by lame interface design. But before that, i am still trying to fathom what LinkedIn offers beyond the ability to just link. It seems utterly recursive with no ending condition to stop the loop. I am sure I am missing the supreme benefit, and get tripped up by their spurious claims of benefit. But the cart is getting ahead of the dog and we are barreling down a steep grade…

Good golly, 2008 is not even 24 hours in the bag, and I am blogging about spammers. You can certainly see something I did not put on my resolution list (which, in fact, is another one of those zero item lists). Spotting spam sometimes takes some detection, but other times its a simple matter of: * is the comment relevant to the blog post subject? I wrote the darn thing, so I can sure tell the difference * is the comment hoisting a link to another site, which has no relevance either to the blog post So I get one that tries to be “clever” in declaring that it is not spam. But it fails on both accounts. Spam is spam and it goes back in the can. When I write a blog post about my first effort of doing a daily flickr photo post, does it take a nuclear [...]