Aerosmith was a favourite band from my youth, and one of their classic songs is “Dream On”. Imagine my surprise when I saw a young woman named Kelly Sweet covering it and doing a very good job – it’s her own interpretation of it of course, but I found it quite compelling. Her other music is also quite good. I’m a sucker for female vocalists, and when you factor in I’m also a fan of red-heads, well, let’s just say I’m a Kelly Sweet fan and plan on picking up her album quite soon.
When I had to go out and buy ink for my Canon printer this week, it made me riled up about the fact that I can’t use the great 2600n printer I bought last year. Here’s a message I sent through to Mark Hurd, the CEO of HP (nice that they have a page from which to do this, even if his assistant is going to be reading it):
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Mr. Hurd,
Late last year I purchased an hp 2600n colour laser printer. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was with it – great price, amazing performance. I was extremely happy with my purchase. Today, on the 24th of April, I haven’t used that excellent printer in nearly four months. Why?
Vista. I upgraded all of my computers to Windows Vista in early January. I knew that Vista wasn’t officially being released until the end of January, so I wasn’t expecting an HP driver for the 2600n until then. I waited. And I waited. In the middle of February I was starting to wonder what was going on, and upon contacting tech support I was told that no driver for the 2600n would be ready until July 2007. My brand new printer is completely useless without a driver, and it’s taking the hp driver team nearly half a year after the launch of Vista to create a driver? Unacceptable.
I’ve since switched back to using my Canon MP780 printer since Canon was quick to release a Vista driver for it – and that includes all of the scanning and faxing functionality. Mr. Hurd, hp is the most prominent printer company on the planet, and I know the release of Windows Vista wasn’t a surprise for you or your team – so why weren’t there drivers ready at launch or shortly thereafter? Why are customers such as myself staring at brand new hardware, now useless, all for lack of a driver?
I’m deeply disappointed in this situation and will find it hard to buy another hp printer in the future knowing how low hp places the needs of customers such as myself.
Sincerely,
Jason R. Dunn
Has anyone else noticed that email over the past year has become more and more unreliable? We’ve been hearing the Chicken Little stories for years about how the Internet was going to crumble under the weight of spam, viruses, spyware, and other assorted junk. It hasn’t – if anything, it’s faster than ever for more and more people around the world – hardware improvements and infrastructure investments have made it more robust than ever. But somewhere along the way, something bad started to happen with email. I’ve seen estimates that as much as 90% of daily email is spam, and extremely sophisticated anti-spam systems have evolved over the years. Dedicated anti-spam servers with huge blacklists of bad IPs, smart Bayesian filters learning over time to become effective spam blockers, and all sorts of clever solutions for stemming the flow of spam. You’d think we’d be in better shape than ever, right? Wrong.
I do a great deal of daily email – sending, receiving, reading, deleting. I deal with countless people, coordinating news posts, dealing with vendors for reviews, emailing people regarding issues on Thoughts Media Inc. sites – including contests that we run. In the past six months, we’ve run some pretty big contests on the sites. And in the past six months, I’ve had more headaches over email than ever. The basic problem? Person “A” doesn’t get the email that person “B” sent – it’s not in their spam folder, it’s not in their deleted items; the email just never arrived. Person “C” is in the middle (that’s me), able to receive email from both people, but no matter how many emails are sent, no matter what the subject line of email content, person “A” and person “B” just can’t communicate. No error messages are generated, no bounces come back, the email is sent into a black hole never to emerge – somewhere there’s a “helpful” anti-spam server or software program that’s eating the email and leaving no trace. And poor person “A”, the person who won a great prize in a contest, has a hell of a time claiming it because they can’t communicate with the company!
As much as I love the open and free concept that the Internet is based on, email is badly broken. Any idiot can run an SMTP server, there’s no central authorization or control, and thus we have billions upon billions of spam messages sent every year. Email is dying, and no one has the guts to step up and fix it – sure, there have been proposals (Sender ID, etc.) to make things better, but ultimately none of them go anywhere because the repercussions will be so far-reaching. Some of the loudest voices are likely system admins who run their own small SMTP servers and don’t want to have any one company control the flow of email, and they don’t want to have to pay a fee to run an email server. I sympathize, but you know what? Things need to change – how email is sent needs to change.
All of the smart filtering in the world can’t fix the horrible mess that email has become today. The only solution I can see is to only allow authorized, known, registered, and paid for mail servers to send email. Registering your SMTP server should be easy, fast, and not expensive – anyone running an SMTP server should be willing to pay $20 a year (or some other low number) to send email, and it would put an end to the millions of compromised botnet computers out there sending spam without the knowledge of their owners.
Email is dying – who’s going to rescue it?
Other than a phone call telling you that a loved one has been hurt, I think getting a phone call saying “there’s been an accident, no one was hurt” is right up there on the list of phone calls you wish you’d never get. It’s 7:05 am right now and at about 6:40 am Ashley phoned me as she was on her way to the gym to tell me that she had hit a parked car. 🙁 She wasn’t hurt thankfully, and hit the other car doing about 40 KM/h – she said the damage was minimal, but we all know that means at least $1000 to repair each car, if not more. The weather here went crazy yesterday…
I was out last night at a music practice, and it was snowing but still semi-warm – but that meant a lot of condensation that wasn’t immediately freezing, just getting slushy. Driving home it was windy and getting colder, a sign of bad things to come. Before going to bed I commented to Ashley that the roads were going to be incredibly bad in the morning. She said she heard it wasn’t supposed to get that cold, but when we woke up this morning there was a good six inches of snow on the ground. Light fluffy snow doesn’t give you much traction, and when you have hard, frozen ice underneath it’s a recipie for disaster. And hence, the car accident. It’s hard for me not to get a little upset when I knew the roads were going to be horrible – it’s always the people that go out first thing in the morning that are the most vulnerable to the road because no cars before them have been cleared. I feel like I should have warned Ashley again. Or maybe I should have asked her not to go? Begone stupid voice of hindsight!
I’m relieved that Ashley wasn’t hurt (hopefully there’s no whiplash/neck damage), but I’m not looking forward to either paying a few thousand dollars out of my pocket, or claiming it through insurance and having those blood sucking leeches charge me many more thousands of dollars over a period of several years (I have a special, burning dislike of insurance companies). Here’s hoping the damage is less than I fear…
A message I sent to the Picasa team today…
Picasa is such an easy to use program, I install it on the computer of every friend and family member I have – it has allowed them to get more out of the digital pictures I send them. But, here’s the problem: there’s only ONE online print provider for all of us in Canada, and it’s an outfit out of the UK that, frankly, is completely terrible. I’ve been waiting and waiting for other Canadian printers to be added – Wal-Mart, Future Shop, London Drugs, ANYONE…but still nothing. It’s incredibly frustrating.
I think this may have been the biggest casualty from the Google acquisition: before when Picasa was a commercial product, I felt like the team was more open and interested in hearing from customers and making the product better. But now that it’s a free product, I sense much less inclination to make the product better for everyone: when I asked about getting more online photo printing options available in Canada, I was told that it was up to the photo printing companies to come to Google, not the other way around. That’s a shockingly bad attitude, and it comes from being part of Google – I think it’s very unfortunate.
Please, please: do more to make Picasa play nice with others even if you *are* the mighty Google. Get more print providers for Canada and other countries. Get some integration and functionality with providers like Smugmug…
Generally speaking, I really enjoy using Outlook 2007. It’s a nice evolution from Outlook 2003, and in particular with the way they’ve combined tasks, categories, and flags, it’s now a much more powerful organizational tool. I’ve grown to like the kinda’ sorta’ Word 2007 module that loads when I’m writing email – the in-line spell-check and grammar-check is handy. Outlook 2007 is especially effective on wide-screen monitors because you’ll probably have the space to leave up the “To Do” bar, which consists of a single-month calendar view, your appointments for the day, and all your tasks. Given the type of business I run, and the type of person I am, you’d think that I’d be an enthusiastic user of tasks under Outlook. That hasn’t been the case until I started using Outlook 2007 – with Outlook 2003, tasks weren’t really tied to anything they were just stand-alone items that needed to be completed. With Outlook 2007, with a couple of clicks I can take an incoming email, flag it as a task, mark it with a category, and have it added to a nicely organized list that I can use to base my day around. Granted, I still don’t have enough personal discipline to do that very often, but at least I can’t blame the software any more. 🙂
Outlook 2007 isn’t problem-free though: start-up to using time is brutal, though I strongly suspect it’s due to the six IMAP accounts I have Outlook configured to check in addition to my hosted Exchange account. It checks for mail in all accounts all at once when it starts up, which is a messy and slow way of doing things – why don’t they do some sort of smart queueing? Another thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes URLs in email messages, when clicked, will generate the following Outlook error:
It seems to happen randomly with different URLs, and the URLs in question are definitely valid. The error is a strange one, because it refers to the URL as if it were a local resource (file) that couldn’t be located. I haven’t seen it often enough to nail down a pattern, but I think it may be related to the system load: if I open up Outlook 2007, while it’s churning hard I can click a link in an email and usually get this email. I think if it can’t load the URL in “x” seconds it will trigger this error. I’ve also seen this error in Vista outside of Outlook, so I’m thinking it has to do with Firefox not giving a response back to the URL request in “x” milliseconds – because the error won’t usually happen if Firefox is already open.
I’ve been waiting to build a “super computer” for months, and now that I finally had enough parts to get started, when I put it all together into the ultra-sweet chassis of the Shuttle SD39P2 XPC…the damn thing wouldn’t boot! I had a kick-ass Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 running at 2.96 Ghz (courtesy of Intel Canada), 4 GB of 800mhz RAM (courtesy of Kingston), 1150 GB of storage (courtesy of Western Digital) – what I didn’t have was an optical drive since Plextor said they’d send me a Blu-Ray burner but never did, and I never did end up sending that email to ATI asking for a card…
At any rate, I cannibalized a few parts from another PC and put it all in the SD39P2. I felt a rush of excitement booting up such a powerful machine, pressed the power button, and nothing happened. @&*$%&^@#!! I spent the next couple of hours trouble shooting it, swapping out the RAM and video card, all with no positive results. @&*$%&^@#!! Then I got in my car and spent 90 minutes driving to and from Memory Express, having bought a ghetto 2.8 Ghz Celeron CPU ($60!) just for testing purposes (I didn’t have a spare Socket 775 CPU sitting around). It was a grim scenario: either the $1300 CPU from Intel was bad, or the Shuttle motherboard was bad…both scenarios sucked for me. Turns out the new CPU didn’t change anything, so it looks like the Shuttle XPC is bad. Damn. Damn. Damn. They’re sending me a new one and I’ll send this one back. That’s going to take at least a week though, meaning this project is on hold.
I guess on the bright side though by the time the new Shuttle arrives I’ll have the new video card I ordered and the new optical drive as well. I just hope that XFX video card fits in the XPC (gulp).
Every time I build a computer and it doesn’t go quite right, I think to myself “Jason, just go buy a Dell…” – but once I fight my way through the problems and I end up with a sweet-ass rig, I know it was worth the effort. I really hope this is one of those scenarios…
“In a retrieval once thought unattainable, scientists have recovered and identified proteins in a bone of a well-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex that lived, died and was fossilized 68 million years ago. The scientists say the success, attained with advanced research techniques, opens the door for the first time to exploration of the molecular-level relationships of ancient, extinct animals, instead of just relying on their skeletal remains. Dinosaur fossil hunters are planning nine expeditions this summer to search wide and deep for more specimens as promising candidates for similar tests. A few large dinosaur bones already in laboratories might be examined for surviving traces of organic matter.”
– International Herald Tribune
Jurassic Park here we come! You guys go first though, ok? I’ll take the second helicopter over. No, really.
I’m not a professional video guy, but I’ve done enough video work over the years to pick up some of the basics. One guideline in shooting video, and subsequently editing it, is that shooting the same scene back with cuts is a visually jarring experience for the viewer because the head (and sometimes body) of the person jumps from one place to another with each cut. Anyone remember Max Hedroom? What’s interesting to me is how the emergence of sites like YouTube have taken jump cuts to a whole new level – and in the case of comedy or a monologue written in a broken up style, it actually works quite well. Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about…
I was watching a UFC show called “All Access” the other day – it’s a behind the scenes show that covers how UFC fighters train – and I noticed that the show had “Blue Chip” branding all over it. I didn’t know what Blue Chip was, but later in the show they showed an URL for Blue Chip, evidently a sports collectible company.
Now here’s the funny part: www.bluechip.com loads a empty Web page related to something called the “Telamon Project Tracking System”. There’s no mention of Blue Chip anywhere. A first I thought I had made a typo in the URL, but that wasn’t the case. Next I thought “Ok, maybe it’s .net or something else” but a Google search for Blue Chip Sports failed to turn up any likely candidate that would have sponsored this UFC TV show. Was this some sort of typo in the domain? Or did BlueChip.com at one point have a sports collectible store, but they went out of business before the UFC show aired? Did they also have zero Google juice? That’s a bit hard to believe unless they started up this company last month.
At any rate, the lesson here is clear: if you’re going to sponsor a TV show, make sure they get your domain right, and that your company will last long enough to see some benefits from it.