Note to self: double-check spelling of domain names before you register them. Good thing I never tried to use these…
Doesn’t Anyone Care About Video Quality?
I was watching a few videos on MSN Video, and it seems that Gillette Venus (women’s razor) was the only sponsor – they played the same ad every three videos of so. Beyond the obvious bad targeting of showing me a woman’s razor, and the redundancy of the same video over and over (which tends to breed brand dislike in my opinion), I was shocked at how completely crappy the video looked. Flash isn’t a great medium for high-quality video (though the new h.264 codec in Flash 9 rocks!) but this video reached new lows in terms of quality. Check out this screen shot (saved as a PNG file, so the poor quality is from the video):
If you were an advertising executive working for Gillette, how would you feel about your product being portrayed in such a low-quality manner? The video was truly atrocious in quality. Perhaps MSN Video has some ridiculous limits on the bit rates of submitted advertising videos, but if I were working for Gillette I’d say “This is the video quality we want, if you want our advertising dollars, you’ll run this.”
Direct Linking to Images Blocked
I’ve noticed that a number of people, pretty much on a weekly basis, are deciding to link directly to images on this blog rather than copying the image to their own server. I’ve watched it happen for quite some time, but after seeing a few spam blogs do it, I decided it was worth putting a stop to: so, from now on, if you want to use an image on this site, please copy it to your own server or blog. Thanks!
If Modern Business Designed a Stop Sign
That video pretty much speaks for itself – it’s amazing how so many businesses can screw up something so simple. I see it day after day with technology products. I might not like Apple on a dozen different levels, but I respect their singular vision for trying to get things right.
Dell’s Premium Panel Guarantee
I was browsing through Dell’s monitors, checking out what their latest 24″ displays had to offer (I was curious if they had SDHC support; their tech specs don’t actually mention that point – irritating!) and I happened to notice something that made me chuckle:
So why would I find that amusing? Because it took me 12 monitors to get three flawless 24″ monitors, and if Dell had this policy in place last year I would have had much less stress. Good to see Dell improving their system, albeit fairly late in the game. One of my 24″ Dell monitors has a nasty flickering problem that comes and goes, and I was very wary of returning it and getting sent a replacement that has a dead/stuck pixel – I wonder if Dell honours this policy on older Ultrasharp monitors that are still under warranty? I guess I’ll find out soon enough…
Making a USB Flash Drive Boot Disk Under Windows Vista
I’m fighting with a trashed install of Windows Vista on a laptop and it’s a complete nightmare – one of the things I needed to do on the road to getting it working again was to update the BIOS. Since Windows Vista wasn’t booting, however, I was left with a quandry: how do I update the BIOS? Booting from a floppy disk to update the BIOS was a common thing a few years ago, but I haven’t done it that way in a long time. I found the solution in this forum thread: the only thing different that I had to do was right-click on the “RunThis” file and run it as an administrator. It worked great, and I’ve now updated the BIOS. Now if I could just get the Vista repair function to run (it keeps locking up – and I’ve used the Dell hardware testing software to confirm that the laptop has no defective parts).
Japan Day 2008: Day 10
Our tenth day in Japan has us leaving Hiroshima behind, along with Honshu (the main island of Japan), and travelling by plane to the island of Okinawa. We didn’t do much our first day in Okinawa, and were disappointed with how windy and cool it was – we were hoping for warmer weather! The photo gallery is now live.
Japan 2008: Day 9
Our ninth day in Japan was our final day in Hiroshima, and our hosts James and Miko took us out for a fun day in the town of Kurashiki, a traditional Japanese town that’s been kept fairly historical over the years. This gallery wasn’t nearly as big as the last one, so it was easier to get through and is now live.
Zip.ca Clueless About Security, Customer Service, and Fast Servers
I’ve been a member of DVD-rental service Zip.ca for a few years now, and generally like their service – with a few exceptions, mostly around their deeply skewed ship-ranking system (I have six months worth of data to process and eventually write up into an article) and their horrendously Web site (which usually comes from slow servers). Going to Zip.ca, finding a movie, and adding it to my account should be a fast process, right? Since day one as a Zip.ca customer, I’ve found their servers to be slow – it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to wait 10 to 20 seconds for a search result to come back, then another 10 to 20 seconds for the movie page to be displayed – thank goodness they use an AJAX-type solution for adding movies to the cart so that part of the process was quick. The server slowness was consistent: it didn’t matter if I visited at 9am or 11pm, a week-day or a weekend, from home or from a different country. It was always slow. I did the usual things a geek would do: tracerts, pings, etc. It always came back to the same thing: the Zip.ca servers were sluggish. I stared at this message frequently:
Every couple of months I’d send an email to Zip.ca customer service, complaining about the issue and asking them to invest in a better server infrastructure to make using their site more pleasant. I’d get the usual service drone responses promoting their “continued improvement” but nothing ever changed. I decided to kick things up a notch: I wrote separate letters to Rick Anderson, President & CEO of Zip.ca, and Kelvin Osborn, Director of Product Design. In these letters I detailed my complaints with Zip.ca related to their slow servers, informing them both that after several years of putting up with their poor level of service I was placing my account on hold as my way of protesting their lack of improvements in this specific area. I’m just one of thousands of Zip.ca customers, but my hope was that if I made my voice heard they’d realize that I likely wasn’t the only one unhappy with their Web site speed. I also submitted my complaint to Zip.ca customer service.
Guess what happened? Almost nothing. Kelvin Osborn sent me an email informing me that he agreed the Web site experience wasn’t as good as it could be, and they had resources dedicated to addressing this issue – and that I should see the work go live in “the next couple of weeks”. That was the first week of June. Amazingly (and, yes, this really surprised me), I received no response from Rick Anderson’s office, or from Zip.ca customer service. The few occasions when I’ve gone the extra mile to write a letter to the head of an organization, I’ve always heard back from their office – even if it’s just a letter filled with empty platitudes. The fact that neither the President & CEO, nor the customer service department, replied to my concerns in any way is extremely telling in terms of how Zip.ca perceives their relationship with their customs. Mr. Osborn seems to be the only one of the three that I contacted that felt I was worth responding to.
I was planning on re-upping my service sometime in the fall, because I really do like the service they provide even if I’m not happy with how fast they provide it, but something happened this week that made me re-think that. Check out the email I received this week:
Yes, that’s right, they sent my account password over an unsecured email – a completely idiotic thing to do. The only time a company should send a password over email to a customer is when the customer has forgotten their password and they need it sent over email so they can log into their account and change it. I’m not surprised when Joe Average computer user sends passwords, and even credit card numbers, over email, but for a business to do that is another story. I’d say that Zip.ca should know better, but given my experience with them over the past few months, they just don’t seem to care about what they do to their customers.
Japan 2008: Day 8
In the never-ending quest to finish my Japan vacation photos, I’ve managed to get though another day’s worth of images. Our 8th day in Japan was our first full day in Hiroshima. We spent the morning on the island of Miyajima, the afternoon at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and the evening out for dinner with our friend James and his girlfriend Miko. It was a busy day!
