- Muxtape – Ghetto-blastin’ the web (2.0)
Holy crap. This is going to be one the best indy sites we’ll see in 2008. Built by Justin Nouellette it has a simple interface for making your own sharabale mix-tapes for the web. You get your own sub-domain and everything, and it streams nicely through an AJAX interface which means it will work on an iPhone (but it only sort of works). Click on the links below to rock my own personal mix; it’s got it all!
Popularity: 29% [?]
- The family that blogs together
So my whole family is a bunch of nerds. I think we have five or six blogs between 3 of us, and the really nerdy ones in the family have workshops that are bigger than my condo.
Today, my mom sent me a recent post from her blog in tribute to her Uncle Charlie. I wanted to post my own tribute here, to Charlie and to my Mom for always picking up new technologies and using them to contribute positively. I honestly think 10 and 20 years from now I will be trolling through these posts with quite a fond recollection of these wild west days of user driven content.
Popularity: 23% [?]
- Apple Customer Service Report – WTF
I decided to upgrade my system last week, and outfitted my home office with a nice mac pro, complete with dual 20″ displays. I spend much of my waking life at the computer so I figured it was worth it to splurge and I made the conscious decision to pay that extra cash to get more than enough hardware, and the option of being on Leopard instead of Vista. I am fully impressed and satisfied with the systems performance and interface BUT when I set things up I realized the build was mis-configured!
The system was not installed with the optical DVD drive I had purchased! I am shocked. I could have bought a car for the money I paid! I figured the three business days it took them to ship the system was a QA cycle. What happened?
Today I got on the phone with a customer service rep to address the situation. No biggie, I figured, I’ll just get them to send me the part and I can either install it myself or bring it over to the Apple Store. I have heard from Apple service folks before that the online store and the physical store location are two different entities, but certainly they can communicate on a service issue like this. NOT THE CASE! “We can’t really do that, they are totally separate.” was all the rep could offer me.
“OK Fine”, I said. “Send me the part.”
“Well, I am going to have to process this as a return because we don’t sell that part online.” the rep stammered.
“What? I don’t get that. There is obviously a part missing, get your hands on it and ship it to me.” I was getting a bit heated at this point.
“Well,” he explained, “the part comes from our shipping center, and I don’t have the ability to get the one you need.”
“So really this is a communication problem with your warehousing and fulfillment infrastructure? ” I proposed for him.
Silence.
This didn’t seem to be going anywhere for either of us at this point so the rep changed his strategy and asked if I wanted some free speakers. I conceded and settled for a copy of Office 2008 instead and am going to have to part with my brand new precious system for a few days to get it reconfigured. As a customer I was very dissatisfied my customer service experience, and as a share holder I am worried about the communication and quality assurance problems I uncovered. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect more and certainly hope someone at Apple is reading this post; my contact info is on the About this Site page if you care to take this off-line.
Popularity: 26% [?]
- WSOD Blog Post
This is a quick post for Client Solutions. If you were able to make my presntation, I’d love to hear what you think. Please comment below.
Thanks!
Adam
Popularity: 26% [?]
- The Kleptones – Liver than you’ll ever be
(In a traditional stylee – Just like the albums, but with a bit more reverb and cheering
So The Kleptones have a new release that was posted in the last week or so. I am a huge fan of Eric’s breed of bastard-pop. It draws on all kinds of musical influences with classy to hilarious song pairings. The best part is that The Kleptones operate under a Creative Commons license. This means two things; first, they do not clear samples so their music is packed with otherwise off limits mixes. Second, the album is free to download on their site! No iTunes, no DRM, just free music.
The album has some real highlights; David Bowie – 2000 Light Years with Rappers Delight, and The Eagles, Life in the Fast Lane with Beck E-pro are my favorites. The full breakdown is already on wikipedia. The only down side is the album has quite a few repeat tracks from their current albums; but hey it’s live and free. (I am actually not exactly sure what that means for The Kleptones honestly but it rocks).
Popularity: 100% [?]
- Here comes another bubble
Popularity: 21% [?]
- Automata
So the latest DARPA challenge is currently underway. If you haven’t heard of it, last year they were racing automated cars across the desert. The Stanford team took home the cash prize with their modded VW Touareg.
This year the ante has been upped and the contest is being held in an urban environment. Wired has some pretty good coverage, but the best stuff is up on youtube.
All this reminded me of a crazy post I saw on NPR a little while back. This guys is creating some truly remarkable “creatures” completely powered by the wind with 40’s erra mechanical processing “brains”!
Check out the video on the TED site
Popularity: 13% [?]
- How many hits do I get?
If you live in the Colorado front range you have undoubtedly been following the hysteria regarding the sale world series tickets, or more aptly the lack there of. It’s a literal panic out there for tickets and having participated in my fair share of high pressure, high bandwidth launches I must say the Rockies and Paciolan (MLB’s ticket vendor) have botched this one good.
It’s funny because just today, The Times ran an article on just how unreliable web traffic figures seem to be. It’s a complicated problem. Just for this little site I have Stat Press, Google Analytics, Google Ads and a couple log parsing offerings from my hosting provider all giving me slightly different data, derived in slightly different ways. From the best I can tell I average around 20 hits a day, but my spikes are sporadic and quite significant. Predicting traffic is more complicated but there are plenty of tools out there to help so these guys have no excuse. A shout out to the Sponsor Keynote for providing a great third party load testing solution for just this problem.
I’ll be sure to let you know if I get any tickets
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Democracy 2.0?
Another great Wired Article today on the disappointment in the web community regarding the presidential debates. Fortunately the site 10 Questions is bringing the debate format into the 21st century. Check out this excerpt from wired on the logic behind it:
In the CNN-YouTube debate in July, it was CNN producers who chose the online-video questions to present to candidates. Similarly, in the ongoing MySpace and MTV forums, journalists serve as filters between voters and candidates. TechPresident’s goal is to provide U.S. voters the leading role in controlling the much-touted national dialogue with the presidential candidates.
The project’s organizers are hoping to do that with social software designed to enable “the crowd” to speak responsibly with a collaborative voice. They plan to keep their online voting system simple, and audit the tallied votes.
The point, says Sifry, is to create a large-scale online forum with the same rhetorical attributes that characterize physical town-hall meetings, instead of tweaking a commercial broadcast medium that provides candidates with 30 seconds to advertise their personalities and positions.
Popularity: 4% [?]
- A Gossip Culture
New York times has an interesting article on the power of Gossip today, and how gossip stacks up against facts when it comes to making a decision. Here’s a quick excerpt.
If the first player refused to give the money, he’d save 1.25 Euros, but if others found out about his miserliness they might later withhold money from him. As the game progressed, with the players changing partners frequently and alternating between the donor and recipient roles, the players were given information about their partners’ past decisions.
Sometimes the donor was shown a record of what the partner had done previously while playing the donor role. The more generous this partner had earlier been toward other players, the more likely the donor was to give him something.
Sometimes the donor was shown gossip about the partner from another player. When the partner was paid a compliment like “spendabler spieler!” — generous player! — the donor was more likely to give money. But the donor turned stingy when he saw gossip like “übler geizkragen” — nasty miser.
…
But here’s the disconcerting news from the experiment. In a couple of rounds, each donor was given both hard facts and gossip. He was given a record of how his partner had behaved previously as well as some gossip — positive gossip in one round, negative in another.The donor was told that the source of the gossip didn’t have any extra information beyond what the donor could already see for himself. Yet the gossip, whether positive or negative, still had a big influence on the donors’ decisions, and it didn’t even matter if the source of the gossip had a good reputation himself. On average, cooperation increased by about 20 percent if the gossip was good, and fell by 20 percent if the gossip was negative.
This is an interesting concept in the age where Gossip has gone digital, and social computing is emerging as a valid form of exchanging such tid-bits. I find my actions are consistent with the study. I look at news and data all day, but I really pay attention to personal recommendations or warnings.
Popularity: 4% [?]
