(Internets)
I’ve mentioned customer service a couple times before. But this one is for the positives. The good karmas.
And for those who can’t wait for the big reveal: the company was Amazon (and the number was 1-866-216-1072).
We have, all of us, learned that the first thing to do with any computer related issue is…………….
reboot.
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You see that kottke went through a redesign? The first, and I’d say most obvious (and perhaps most original) difference is that the entire site is now bordered with four shades of blue. It also looks like he’s now displaying a title for all posts. And gone is the Buzzfeed sidebar widget. That might have only been there as part of an effort to help get the site established since he was part of “the board” (never really sure what that means). Also noticeable is the font change. His use of Georgia for the site font was what inspired me to use the same. He’s now moved to Whitney (by Hoefler & Frere-Jones), as his primary.
I visit kottke.org many times most every day. I remember more than a few years ago finding it as a result of an article mentioning Jason Kottke as one of the first full-time, “that’s my job”, bloggers. At the time he was open to (and soliciting I think) contributions. I thought the whole idea was cool enough that I sent a few dollars. And then promptly forgot all about it. It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I stumbled back across the blog and really became a dedicated reader.
As with any visual overhaul of familiar sites, it will probably take a bit getting used to. I really like the border concept as something unique (and sure to be mimicked). But the rest of the changes seem to be away from his more minimalistic design, which I loved, and towards something more……vanilla. It is, however, still a very clean looking site (much more so than my own). And to be honest, as long as he keeps posting his mix of quick hits, intelligent observations and informed opinions, I don’t mind what the site looks like.
For the last couple of days, Gmail has been showing one unread message, but I didn’t see any in my Inbox. This is the type of thing that can slowly drive me insane. I changed themes a couple weeks ago and thought it might be related (however unlikely). Changing themes again did nothing. From somewhere deep in my thinking machine came the idea to do a search for “label:unread“. I must have read that at some point in time, though I have no idea where.
Anyway, it worked. There were about 80 of them total, and I started selecting all of them to mark as read. Finally it got down to just one last one. I noticed it was marked as being in my inbox (unlike the others, which were most likely archived or in spam). It was from Adam Clayton (a name I don’t know). The subject was “Delivery Confirmation”. And it was sent September 21, 1976 (mere months before I was born). When it arrived, it slipped past spam filters and was dutifully placed in correct chronological order.
I’m not sure why the spammers would set the date like that, other than to accomplish what it did in my case, which was checking out the email (prescription drugs from Canada). But regardless, mystery solved. I won’t go insane after all.
My dad has a couple of domains registered using eNom.com. It was originally done on his behalf by someone else but I’ve since helped him to “take control”.
Today he forwarded an email he received, asking if he should be concerned. It begins with “On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:05:53 +0700 we received a third party complaint of invalid domain contact information in the Whois database for this domain” and then goes on to say they investigated, found the information to be incorrect and canceled the domain.
The domain has subsequently been purchased by another party. You will need to contact them for any further inquiries regarding the domain.
Dave Shea linked to a niffty, single-purpose little website not too long ago called Copy Paste Character . It’s so wonderfully simple and useful that it must be bookmarked (or delicioused).
A couple of days ago I came across various news items regarding the launch of Yahoo’s “Smush It” service. Point their web app towards any image online (or just upload one) and it will try its best to decrease the file size with no visible degradation of image quality.
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BookMooch looks seriously cool. I can’t help but think I’ve come across this before (a long time ago) but whatever…I’ve made new contact.
Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.
….Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every three you receive.
The only cost associated with all of this that of shipping your books to those who’ve made the request. The site itself appears to do nothing more than serve as a matchmaker.
As enthusiastic as I am right now about doing this, I have a long and sordid history of initial energy for something followed by little to no follow through. But this time will be different! My fingers are in the crossed position!
Merci Scott Klarr
Most of us are by now fully aware that sex sells (slightly NSFW). The animalistic instinct is always operating in the background, eager to influence our purchasing decisions. In addition, it has become pretty well acknowledged in blogtopia that lists help drive traffic to your site (did you follow the first link of this post?).
I now direct you towards the mother of all traffic binging posts. The ingeniously devised packet vacuuming blog entry that is 10 Movies Sold on a Sex Scene.
Looking through the CodeIgniter site (very cool…be sure to check out their two video tutorials), I came across a link to something pretty novel: Clever Andy. It’s a business that allows you to upload a site design. If they find it acceptable, and know of a potential client, they put in all of the leg work to get that design fully implemented and (hopefully) sold. You get 25% of the sale price. Pretty neat, eh?
Fuel Your Creativity posted about this a month ago and one of the commenters expressed some doubts, one of which was proof of its effectiveness. Lee Tengum (the man behind Clever Andy) responded:
…we have already moved some user submitted designs to production so you will see proof soon!
Assuming success stories are made available, this seems like a great resource for designers out there looking to cash in on some of their unused work.
Did you think woolie had something to do with clothes or sheep? Not anymore, for it hath been redefunned.
The Big Word Project is a website to be set in your “my brain no ideas make” bag alongside The Million Dollar Homepage. The nuts and bolts of it is this: you pay a buck a letter to buy any valid word from them, and their site will link to your site using that word. I’ll let Paddy and Lee run a use-case by you:
For example, you may buy the word ‘Donkey’ for $6 and it will link to your site dedicated to donkeys. The word ‘Donkey’ will then be the gateway to your site and the definition will be changed. No longer will the word Donkey mean ‘a woodworking apparatus consisting of a clamping frame and saw, used for cutting marquetry veneers’, instead it will now be represented visually by ‘Chris’s Donkey Site’.
I bought woolie. Like donkey, it’s a six dollar investment. Here’s my badge:
What’s funny about all this is that I had a pretty strong desire to buy the word. There was, of course, the powerful incentive to experiment with link purchasing, and I’m sure that was the push that put me over the top. But there was also a strange need to buy it…some weird send of ownership I had to fulfill.
Kudos to the guys behind this. Great idea.
Dr. Dobb’s Journal is a pretty well-known magazine geared towards software engineers, and they’ve been at it for more than thirty years. The articles are generally pretty hit or miss for my taste. I was just reading the August 2008 print edition, specifically Disentangling Concepts in Object-Oriented Systems. It’s pretty meh in my opinion, but that’s neither here nor there. The problem I found is something I’ve come across before in this magazine, but this time it was just plain absurd.
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A few months ago I posted about my purchase at Torrent Freedom. I bought three months worth of the service, and only three months. Three months have passed and I went back to their “Buy It” page to perhaps buy more time. But now, for some reason, they only offer recurring plans (i.e. there’s an automatic recharge). Why? I really dislike handing over my payment info and allowing it to be automatically billed at every cycle. The “News” section hasn’t been updated since mid-March. This stinks.
I really like this: bomomo. To be honest, I feel a twinge of jealousy because I wish I had created it. You will need to be using a browser that supports the canvas element (part of HTML5) because this baby is nothing but javascript (no flash required).
A few factors converged and I made what it a pretty rare decision to try out a paid online service, Torrent Freedom. It’s really a great idea for a business (I wonder if it’s working out for them money-wise). The short form summary is that they create a sort of “ISP within an ISP”. The purpose of which is two-fold: 1. all of your traffic is encrypted 2. all of your traffic appears to originate from, and end at, their servers.
The first impetus towards wanting something like this was the news late last year that Comcast (my ISP) was screwing with their customer’s traffic.
Comcast is forging TCP RST packets which cause connections to drop (a technique also used by Internet censorship systems in China). These packets cause software at both ends to believe, mistakenly, that the software on the other side doesn’t want to continue communicating.
I knew this to be true because while running my Bittorrent client (Azureus), I noticed that once I was seeding, I had practically zero upstream traffic. In other words, my share ratio was close to nil. I, of course, figured I had messed something up, though for the life of me couldn’t figure out what. Not to mention it worked fine when used with another ISP. Comcast recently announced they would, by the end of the year, end that practice. But as this EFF article points out, ISPs will probably continue to fuddle with your traffic in some form without your knowledge. So, unless Comcast decides to start throttling all encrypted traffic (i.e. Canadian ISP Rogers), Torrent Freedom is a nice fix.
Running Wordpress locally and not sure why the permalink or category pages are resulting in 404 errors?
It’s more than likely due to mod_rewrite not being allowed to do its job. If you don’t know anything about mod_rewrite, here is a nice howto. Also, of course, is Apache’s own documentation.
In a nutshell, the redirects created by Wordpress in your .htaccess need the authority to send a page request elsewheres. Open httpd.conf and make sure that you have AllowOverride set to All.
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