Archive for July, 2007
July 28, 2007 at 7:06 PM · Filed under Internet
Ever heard of Technorati? If not, then you may not have seen these stats: they track over 93 million blogs, and according to their data, there are over 175,000 new blogs created daily and updated at the rate of 1.6 million posts per day. 100 million blogs will happen in just 35 days at this rate. Wow. No wonder I’m subscribed to over 200 RSS feeds and still keep finding new ones every day.
Technorati just doesn’t report this data, but they give you the viewer a website to show how these blogs perform and more importantly, how they relate to each other - who’s linking to who, who’s quoting who, etc.
Oh yeah, go check out my Technorati page for this blog. It’s just a little baby page right now, b/c I didn’t do a good job of telling Technorati about my blog to begin with. Link to me, would ya?
July 25, 2007 at 1:49 AM · Filed under Internet, Misc
Either you already know how this works, or you’re going to say I’m crazy or that this was interesting and/or perhaps worth a chuckle. Reading the news recently, I came across the story on the giant squid that was found washed up on an Australian beach. For some reason, this led me to thinking about Octopi (and how they’re pretty intelligent), so I wandered over to Wikipedia to do some reading. I scanned the article, but somehow this external link at the bottom caught my eye “footage of an octopus eating a shark”. I had to jump over and see that! Here it is (pretty amazing video, although you should be forewarned that it’s very much one of those violent, raw wildlife scenes).
Anyway, you can see how easily you can get taken in and taken for a ‘ride’ by the Web, and that either I have ADD, or just a ridiculous wandering attention. I can’t even remember where I went after this. Probably watched a bunch of videos and then got sidetracked into wanting to learn something about some subject that popped up. Ah, if only I could stay up longer and not have to work…
July 20, 2007 at 5:10 PM · Filed under Internet
HTML 5 is on the horizon and may be showing up in a browser near you in a few years. I wrote up a piece on this over at GfG. I can’t say I’m looking forward to this.
July 17, 2007 at 8:33 PM · Filed under Cool, Misc
I had to blog about a very recent experience I had with Sunbeam, a popular consumer product company. I had purchased one of their products last year from a popular retailer, and the product worked great until 1 day when I plugged it in and it simply did not turn on. So I wandered over to the Sunbeam website and poked around looking for some clues or answers. (I hate sending in complaints/questions without looking for the answer first.) Anyway, not much on my particular product, so I sent in a customer service request simply asking if they had any ideas. I was totally ready to just accept that my particular device ran its course and I needed to just go out and buy another one; after all, it was only about $40, and I felt that I had $40 of use out of it.
As I mentioned, I was only looking to see if they had an ideas. I didn’t request a refund, an exchange or was even angry in my note. I would have been content if they had just responded and said “Sorry, we don’t know without taking a closer look at your broken product.” I was pleasantly surprised to get this response:
“I apologize for the inconvenience you have experienced. I have placed an order for a <product x> that you will receive within 2-3 weeks.”
Wow! Now that is first-class customer service. No questions, just a can-do, the customer-is-always-right attitude.
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July 15, 2007 at 9:01 AM · Filed under Music
One of the things we did when we were in
London (oh yeah, my youngest brother and I went to London and
Paris last week) was to go on a walking tour called “
The Beatles in my Life Walk“. It was pretty interesting - we saw things like the apartment where Ringo, John, Yoko and even Jimi Hendrix lived at some point, the church where Paul and Ringo were married (not to each other!), and of course, Abbey Road.
Our guide turned out to be one of the biggest (but not craziest) Beatles fans around. Richard Porter has not only met and knows some of the Beatles, he is an author, a consultant on the Hard Day’s Night DVD, and president of the Beatles London fan club.
Abbey Road
Unfortunately, the road and crosswalk outside Abbey Road is way too busy most of the time for anyone to attempt to recreate the famous Beatles album cover, although people certainly have tried. At a minimum, the Abbey Road Studios have put up a webcam so you can see the famed spot in real time. If you take a look at the webcam, you’ll notice some leaves in the top right hand corner. Those are from the tree right next to it. When I spotted the camera, it was the first thing that I thought of - it killed not to be able to jump up there and move those leaves out of the way. It just goes to show how much the Abbey Road employees actually watch the webcam. Hmm… maybe I should just send them an e-mail and see how long it takes them to fix it…
July 12, 2007 at 1:52 AM · Filed under Misc
Traveling in the 21st century - what a pain in the ass, thanks to terrorists and government authorities who are either overzealous, clueless or knowingly trying to confuse the masses with the illusion of security. Airport security is a farce, and to add insult to injury, damn inconvenient to travelers as well. Yes I realize that there are many ‘experts’ on the subject who will say that I (and others) can’t possibly understand the situation or the measures in place without the appropriate background, but we have and can apply common sense to what we see, and what we see is a joke. It’s a joke that costs money in lost time and productivity as well as incredible frustration.
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July 11, 2007 at 12:09 PM · Filed under Misc
Why oh why do airlines lie to us and continue to do so? Case in point: I recently went to London. When we landed in Heathrow, we taxied to our gate and pulled up short. The captain comes on over the PA and says that there’s another airplane at our gate and it will be about 10 to 15 minutes. Ok. 20 minutes later, he comes on again and says the same damn thing. He didn’t bother to come on again, before announcing that we were actually moving to the gate. It was an hour since we landed.
Of course, there’s the timeless delayed flight. The classic example of this is when the gate attendant tells you it’ll only be 15 minutes, but a quick look out the window shows you that there is no plane parked at the gate yet and we all know it takes some time to get the folks off the plane and cleaned and restocked.
Aarrgghh. So if there are any airplane personnel reading, please chime in - we’d love to understand why you and/or your employers insist on this tactic/approach to dealing with your customers (you know … the ones that pay a lot of money to be treated like cattle for hours on end!).
