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.
The marketing engine is in full swing for Halo 3 now, and this morning while watching the UFC 76 Countdown I saw a great commercial for it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it – they essentially built a diorama with dozens, possibly hundreds, or Halo 3 miniatures and film around them with an eerie piano melody slowly building. Very cool stuff.
There are also some interesting live action trailers that are impressive. Great stuff!
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)
Sometimes I’m amazed at how poorly big companies can be at executing upon the simplest things. Future Shop, a big-box retail chain in Canada, sent out an email on the 13th warning customers about an email phishing attempt. That’s nice of them, but they violated one very important rule that all companies should follow when they warn customers about phishing attempts: they made their email look like a phishing email. The small thing was the lack of a FROM name – the email came in with no information about who it was from. The bigger thing was the URLs they were using for linking. Check out the screen shot below:
The easiest way to determine if something is a phishing attempt is to look at what URL the links are going to send you to – if it’s anything other than the companyname.com, you should be slightly concerned. When you mouse over an URL that’s typed out as www.futureshop.ca, you should see an URL that says www.futureshop.ca. When I looked at this, I thought to myself “What the heck is DCM5.com?” That’s sure not Futureshop.ca! The length of the URL was also raising a red flag – it was linking to an unknown domain, sure, but it also looked like it was linking to a script that would do something. I tried going to DCM5.com in my browser to take a peek, but it didn’t load, which is also suspicious.
Eventually I just clicked on one of the links, trusting in Firefox and Vista to protect me from anything seriously bad happening, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up taking me to a legitimate Futureshop.ca page about phishing. I suspect the DCM5.com URL is some sort of click-tracking service, but guess what: when you’re emailing your customers about an issue of security, tracking their clicks should be the last thing on your list.
It seems like it’s once again time for me to explain again on this blog that I’m not the Jason Dunn from Hawk Nelson. Below is an email exchange I had with someone this week. She (and it seems to be a “she” 95% of the time, and probably age 15 or under) had subscribed to my RSS to email feed (the box in the upper right corner) and saw my post about the Heroes disc two locking up where I said the words “my wife”. She then emailed me back expressing her shock that I was married. The screen shot below explains the rest.
I suppose by now I shouldn’t be surprised by these types of messages, but I swear when I was 15 years old I was smart enough to realize that are “regular” people in the world that have the same names as the famous people, and when someone becomes famous the rest of the non-famous people in the world with the same name aren’t required to go to a lawyer and get their name changed. I also think that at age 15 I could read and understand what I was reading.
I couldn’t even respond back to this girl a second time because every response I wrote ended up sounding mean. I shielded her identity in the screen shot above, and unsubscribed her from my email feed, but I swear this is much less funny as it was a year ago. 😉
George Dunn in 1939, around age 22.
George Dunn at age 74 enjoying a four-olive martini.
It’s been just over a month since my grandfather (whom we all called “Nampy”) passed away, so I thought it appropriate to publish these two photos as a way of saying one last goodbye. Goodbye Nampy, your family and friends will miss you…
Ok, I didn’t think I’d be posting another one of these, but come on, it’s the freakin’ Transformers! Looks like I’m quite up to Optimus Prime role model standards though. 😉
This is the first post in a new category of posts on this blog: Someone Invent This. Every so often, I’ll get an idea for a product, a business, a service, or a technology that I’d like to see come to market. I figure if I throw the idea out there, there’s a chance someone might pick it up and run with it – or, better yet, maybe the service or product already exists in some form and I just haven’t found it yet.
So here’s what I’m looking for: a better way to block, filter, and generally manage phone calls that come into my home. In the email era, we’re used to having some form of control over when and how we are communicated with – we have spam filters, challenge/response systems, and of course the ability to only check email when we feel like it. Phone calls are the most intrusive form of remote communication – we have these little boxes that make noise, any time of the day or night, and anyone can dial our number and interrupt whatever we’re doing. We only have basic, binary-like control over our phones: plugged in, or disconnected. Ringer on, or ringer off. There are some rudimentary controls from the phone company – the ability to block unknown callers for instance, but they’re crude and limited. Over the past few months we’ve had a few late night wrong-number calls, and a constant barrage of telemarketers calling during our dinner time. I’m envisioning a system that would allow for a much greater degree of when and how you’d receive phone calls in your home.
This proverbial “little black box” would sit between your incoming phone lines and the house lines, or if you’re using a digital phone/VOIP service, sit between your VOIP box and your house lines leading to your phones. It would also be connected to your router and be managed via a Web browser with a simple user interface and would filter all incoming calls at certain times (after 10pm), turn them back on at a certain time (7am), and would give you the control to turn off incoming calls during your dinner hour. It would have an option for a message to allow for emergency calls to get through by a voice prompt saying the user has turned off their phone, but press a certain number combination (that would change randomly) to bypass – this would be optional, but it would stop all of the automated calling services cold. In fact, you might think of it as a basic Turing test for the phone – verification that the call is really coming from a person.
It would also have a “whitelist” of incoming numbers (family, friends) that could get through at any time of the day or night without any challenge. What about a community-based voting system where people could rank incoming phone numbers as being from telemarketers? Similar to community spam tagging, the user could open up the system’s incoming call history and mark the phone call at 6:05pm as being a “junk call” and comment why. If more than “x” number of people classified it as a junk call, it would automatically be filtered and not passed through. There would be a way for a caller to visit a public Web site and see (anonymously) the complaints against their phone number. Also included would be basic functionality for controlling the blocking of anonymous or unknown callers. There’d be some sort of address book (Outlook, Gmail, etc.) synchronization to populate the black box with known good numbers.
The business model is pretty simple: if it was sold independently by a networking manufacturer (D-Link, Belkin, etc.), there would be a charge for the black box, and perhaps there would be some sort of a low yearly fee for the service, software updates, tech support, etc. Or it could be sold by your phone company as a value-added service for a monthly fee. It might also be implemented by mobile phone carriers as more people move to just having mobile, and not home, phones.
Those are just a few ideas – there are many creative uses for a filtering system such as this. Putting some software intelligence between you and your phone system would allow for a definite improvement in the way we use our phones.
That shiny picture is of a Shuttle SD39P2, a computer that I’ve had for a few months now – I requested parts from Intel, Kingston, Western Digital, and of course Shuttle. Through a series of frustrating circumstances – defective hardware, problems with getting the parts I needed, then problems getting it all working – the article took months to complete. My own lack of motivation also played a role because at the start, I had such high hopes to get a comprehensive review out fast. I had contacted Intel, Western Digital, Plextor, XFX, Kingston – a bunch of companies, all giving them an outline of what I was doing and when it would be finished. Then it all fell apart…and as a writer, I tend to get de-motivated at writing when things fall apart. That starts a very negative cycle where because things went bad, I don’t want to write, and the longer I don’t write, the worse I feel about not finishing the writing project…and so it goes.
In the past year, I’ve had some products for review where I’ve had the product for eight months and still not written about it – it’s only recently (in the past two months) that I’ve gritted my teeth and blasted through some of those outstanding reviews. As embarrassing as it is to email a vendor eight months after receiving a product and telling them the review is finally finished, it’s better than looking at a table full of review products and feeling guilty that I haven’t written about them. Oh, the tortured soul of the geek tech blogger. 😉
At any rate, on Sunday I gritted my teeth and spent 12 hours working on my article on building a monster media editing machine, and 5654 words later, it’s all finished and published. What a great feeling to get it out the door! Now if only I can apply the same level of determination to the other articles on my To Do list…