It’s so incredibly rare when major Web sites go down or get broken, I was shocked to see Adobe’s home page generating all these errors – betcha’ someone’s getting thrown down a few rungs on the ol’ corporate ladder. Thankfully I was still able to find the Adobe sub-page and grab a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.1.
I wonder how many releases of WordPress there are going to be before they address the issue where WordPress mangles pasted in YouTube code? I know there are many YouTube plug-ins out there, but I’m not looking to have to jump through hoops to implement YouTube video code – I want to take the YouTube code from YouTube, paste it in, and submit my blog post. It’s truly bizarre that such a massive bug can go un-fixed for so long – and I’m not the only one that’s noticed this. The work-around right now is to switch to the raw code view, paste in the YouTube code, then hit Publish without switching back to the visual editor. If you do that, the YouTube videos show up just fine. Need to edit it? You have to re-paste the original YouTube code into your post.
Come on WordPress crew: I love your CMS, but there are some gaping holes that need plugging up.
I think eBay is one of the greatest Internet-era inventions in history – it leverages the power of a world-wide market of sellers with an equally large pool of buyers, connecting in ways that no previous market ever could. When eBay works, it works very well – but when it works poorly, boy can it get ugly. eBay relies on the individual integrity of buyers and sellers, but when the integrity of a buyer collides with that of an ethically bereft seller, it’s usually the buyer that gets burned if he’s not expecting it – which unfortunately is what happened to me. Allow me an early morning rant…
My wife Ashley was looking for a new flat iron – I’m mostly ignorant about such things (my hair takes 30 seconds to “do” in the mornings), but apparently there are flat irons that get hot, and flat irons that get really hot. She had the former, but wanted the latter to tame her unruly hair. Local sources for the type of extra-hot flat iron that she wanted were charging over $250 CAD (about $240 USD) so naturally I turned to the greatest marketplace on earth to find a better deal: eBay. I found a seller, Majeeda Haaq (who sellers under the name wickedly-whimsical with a store called Wickedly Whimsical Witches and Cats), who was selling a Paul Brown Hawaii Ceramic Flat Iron for $100 USD. The shipping charges were steep at $25.68 USD, but I assumed this was because the box was fairly big and I’m always willing to pay what it costs to ship to Canada. It was still a good deal overall, so I used the Buy It Now feature and paid $125.68 USD for it on August the 2nd. I received an automated response to my message stating my payment had been received. I never heard back from the seller, but I assumed the package would be on its way soon enough, and I’d see it within two weeks – that’s on the long side of how long it normally takes to get a package from the US to Canada. Continue reading Unethical eBay Seller: Majeeda Haaq (wickedly-whimsical)
Here’s some feedback I just submitted to the people who work on Firefox. I decided to put my 2 cents in after reading this article, which links to this site. I’m certainly not going to block all Firefox users from my sites – I think Firefox is an excellent browser and I think more people should be using it – but if I could I’d display a polite message to any Firefox user who’s also using an ad-blocking extension and ask them to white-list my site. Firefox not offering publishers a way to detect the use of a certain plug-in makes them complicit in the loss if income that occurs.
“I’m a happy Firefox user, but as a publisher who relies on advertising on my Web sites to make a living, it’s disheartening to see the way Firefox has embraced and even endorsed the AdBlock plugin, allowing people to use my server resources and deny me the income I need to continue to offer that content.
The issue here isn’t that the extensible Firefox design has allowed for someone to develop a plugin that someone else doesn’t like – the issue is that Firefox offers no way for me as a publisher to DETECT the use of that plugin on my site. If I could, I’d display a polite request to the people using it for them to white-list my site and allow the ads to show. I’ve found most people don’t understand how Internet advertising works, and they don’t realize that by just allowing the ads to load they’re helping the Web site. Many people think that if they don’t click on the ads, they might as well block them.
Please, do something to help the people who create the majority of the content on the ‘Net, giving it away for free, with the only request being allowing a few banner ads to load.
Sincerely,
Jason Dunn”
Here’s pure arrogance for you: having an auto-responder on your email account that responds back to every single person that emails you with a message that says “Thanks for your email, but I’m so busy that I only check email twice a day so I’ll get back to you later”. What kind of self-important person thinks that they’re so vital to the world that they need to inform me that they can’t get to my email right away? What kind of a person thinks it’s ok to clog up my inbox with a message telling me how much email they get?
What kind of a person rants on a blog about other people late at night? Wait, don’t answer that…
If you get an email in your inbox that looks anything like this, delete it and don’t respond:
It seems they have an extremely aggressive way of going after people to get them to join – when someone signs up and the user says “Check for Friends” and selects their address book, rather than scanning the address book and seeing if there’s a match for any of the email addresses, it sends out an invite to every single email address it can find! That’s absolutely ridiculous and ranks right up there with the worst social engineering spyware I’ve seen – the intention of the user is to see which of his friends are already on Quechup, not invite them all. If the option said “Invite all my friends”, which is what it’s really doing, you can be sure most people wouldn’t be selecting that option. Facebook is more than enough for me to try and keep up with, thank you very much…
Hats off to the people at the local Canadian Blood Services in Calgary – Ashley and I went down there this past Saturday to be first-time blood donors, and it was a really great experience. Donating blood is something I’ve “wanted” to do for years. I put wanted in quotes because it seems for most people, and I’m sadly often in this group, they’ll “want” to do things but always find excuses to not do it. Every year I get old I try to push myself to higher levels of integrity – where when I say I’m going to do something, I do it.
This time around I had a one-two punch to the jaw: last week my friend Crystal (she’s the one I’ve been taking a lot of pictures for lately) went into the hospital with an extremely low hemoglobin count. She needed an immediate blood transfusion – it saved her life. That was punch number one. A day later, I received an email from Canadian Blood Services (using an email address I used for a one-time online contest) saying that they were in desperate need of blood donors – they had only a three-day supply of blood available. Punch number two. Some days I’m a bit slow, but I’m not that dense, so I told Ashley we should really get down there and donate blood.
We went in on Saturday at noon, and it was a great experience – yes, even though we got poked in the arm with a needle. The process was fairly quick – the worst part was the paperwork…well, that and the finger-pick to test my blood for iron levels. That little clicker thing hurt more than the horse-needle they put in my arm! After answering the questions about where I’ve been in the past three years, and the ones that might make some people blush (“Have you ever been paid money or drugs for sex?”) and them checking my arms for needle tracks, it was off to the comfy chairs. Ashley and I brought paperback books because we thought the drawing blood process took 30 minutes – it didn’t. The very skilled nurse put the needle in my arm with almost no pain, and my heart slammed out 0.5 litres (1 pint) of the red juicy stuff in 6 minutes 8 seconds. Ashley took a bit over 8 minutes – apparently women are typically slower. Maybe men were made to bleed faster because we’re the ones usually starting the wars.
After the donation I spent a few minutes sipping Apple juice and eating cookies, then we left. We’ve already booked our appointment for October – you can only donate every 56 days – and we both felt great about having donated blood. My only regret? That it took me this long to get around to doing it. If you can donate blood, you should – they need it. Besides, what else are you going to do with it?
I’m not much of a movie snob – if a movie entertains me, makes me think, or changes my perceptions about something, then it did its job. So while others may stick their nose up at Michael Bay movies for being too Pro-American/cheesy/explosive/whatever, I don’t mind them at all. Armageddon was entertaining, and Transformers was very cool (not perfect, but very cool). All that’s to say that I hold no malice toward Michael Bay in the way that some do…until today.
Today I went to his personal Web site and saw an AdSense ad. An AdSense ad on the personal blog of a guy who’s net worth has got to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I tried to find some information on how much money he makes, but all I found was that he cut his salary by 30% to keep Transformers a “Shot in the USA” flick.
Why in the name of Optimus Prime would a guy like Micheal Bay need with what would surely amount to pocket change from a single AdSense ad?
I think it’s fair to make money doing what you do for a career – Micheal makes movies, and he earns money for that. I run Thoughts Media, so there are ads on my Web sites. This blog is a personal thing, for fun, so there are no ads.
Maybe I’m missing something and there’s a good reason for him having those AdSense ads, such as he’s donating the money to charity or Nelson the Webmaster gets it because Bay doesn’t pay him enough, but I don’t see any mention of that on the site. So unless there’s a good reason I don’t know about, Michael Bay having AdSense ads on his personal site smacks of the most pathetic greed imaginable and says a great deal about the character of the man.
“Mattel Inc. recalled millions of toys on Tuesday due to hazards from small, powerful magnets and lead paint, the latest round of recalls from the toymaker. The recalled products include about 7.3 million Polly Pocket, Batman Magna, Doggie Daycare and Shonen Jump’s One Piece play sets with the small magnets. According to a statement from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Mattel, about 2.4 million of the play sets were recalled on November 21.” – Full Story
It used to be that the Made in China label on a product simply meant it was manufactured cheaply and simply, much as Made in Japan meant the same thing 30 years ago. As China evolves into a more sophisticated manufacturing centre, they’re getting more and more of the manufacturing business as public companies struggle to cut costs and boost “shareholder value” (a seemingly nice term that justifies some very unethical things). When I see “Made in China” now on something, I immediately wonder if the product is dangerous. China’s fast-growing economy, combined with, shall we we say, highly “flexible” morals (though apparently this guy felt bad), has resulted in some truly dangerous products making their way all across the world. Prior to the Mattel incident, there was the toothpaste incident, and the pet food incident. And those are just the ones in recent memory, and ones big enough for us to have heard about. I’ve seen news reports about some of the counterfeit products on the market, and those ones are really scary: Viagra pills painted blue with paint used on roads in China. Batteries with sloppy chemical mixes that will explode. Headache pills filled mostly with asphalt. Some companies in China will substitute anything they can, no matter how dangerous, in order to boost profits.
The problem is that basically anything goes – it’s like the Wild West over in China right now, with the previously rural-based population, always on the brink of starvation, flooding into the major cities and factory areas looking for better jobs. Reading China Inc. was an eye-opener for me, and a must-read for anyone interested in world events. The thumb of the communist party has been partially lifted, and the Chinese people are applying their industrious nature to new industries – witness the sudden rise of the $99 leather jacket as one example. The story goes (in the book China Inc.) that cheap leather jackets are available now because previously rejected leather, full of holes, is now able to be used because Chinese labourers are so cheap they can be hired to individually fill hundreds of holes in the leather, thus making it usable. That’s a good thing for Joe Consumer who previously couldn’t afford to buy a leather jacket, but it’s not a good thing when cutting corners means products that aren’t safe to use.
Companies having their products made in China need to step up and demand higher standards. Until they do, I’m going to look at anything made in China with a sceptical eye…sadly, with so many products being made there, it’s not like there’s a lot of choice.
You know, there’s nothing worse than buying a piece of software, installing it, starting it up, and having it immediately crash. No splash screen, nothing – it just pukes and gives you an error. I just installed Quickbooks Pro 2007 on my Vista-based laptop, and that’s exactly what it did.
You’ve gotta’ love the fact that there’s no error information. When I click on VIEW REPORT I see a 500-line XML file that’s completely incomprehensible. Ok, I figured maybe the version out of the box wasn’t Vista-compatible, so I went to their Web site and downloaded the latest update. Installed it, started up the software, same damn error. Rebooted, started up the software, same damn error. It’s interesting to note that there’s no phone number for tech support shown, and no instructions for solving the error – clicking HELP simply gives me information about their reporting policy, nothing to assist me in solving this error.
No wonder some people hate computers – the idiot companies making the software ruin the whole experience. I’ve always thought Quicken products were kind of flaky (I had a Quicken file get corrupted on me last year), but now I know they’re completely flaky.