Category: Aggregate This

Clickthinking ClickJacking

I love a good game of internet pile-on as much as the next guy, but god damn this is hilarious.

The brilliant designer Coda, based in Cape Town, regularly gets his site design jacked by punks all over the world and most of the time he just laughs it off. Then the other day someone pointed him to the new Optimal Energy site done by Clickthinking, a Cape Town based (ie. They must know who Coda is) “web company”. You can read Coda’s opinion here.

Right now I guess Clickthinking are busy digging the hole they plan to live in for the next few weeks until this quietens down, but damn, Optimal Energy should be pissed… They got fleeced and are probably feeling pretty damn uncomfortable about their *brand new website* right about now.

ps. No link-love for Clickthinking… just google them.

If you want real people don't make them wear a uniform.

We get invited to quite a few media things… Normally I don’t need to worry about what I wear. I have some smart stuff and some casual stuff. My “Beware of Squirrels, They’ll Steal Your Nuts” shirt was stolen, and that was the most “out there” thing I owned.

But now we’re invited to some or other launch and they’ve stipulated their dress code as “Elegant Casual, Jackets for Gents“.

This sort of thing makes me so angry I can not tell you…. and I know it’s really dumb that it irks me, but it does. I don’t wear jackets…. It’s just not me… but yet they want *me* to go…  so I have to dress up like someone else in order to fit into their stupid fancy dress party.

The world is a fascinatingly diverse place; Why on gods green earth would you want people to hide that diversity by all dressing the same? Hell, I only ever go to these things because of the interesting people, now I’ll have to actually *talk* to them in order to find out whether or not they’re boring-jacket-wearers.

over and out.

ps. You just know that some stinking-rich couldn’t-give-a-fuck-billionaire is going to rock up in shorts and a t-shirt.

Again and again and again

So after chatting to some people who love their hacked iPhones, and seeing a terminal running on one, I have to admit that they’re very pretty and possibly very powerful. However all that power is being locked up inside the shiny little box, and Apple seems convinced that that is the way forward for their platform. They’ve even resorted to telling some app developers that their apps are too similar to the existing Apple apps, and therefore won’t be allowed onto the marketplace.

But before I turn this into an anti-iphone blog, the reason I’m again saying that Android is going to eventually reign supreme is because Motorola (whose cell phones I’m not a huge fan of) are planning to employ 300 developers to work on Android internally. While this might just mean that Motorola ends up producing more crappy cell phones, it also might mean that they are having a bit of a mind shift… (possibly caused by the iPhone’s success?) and want to build something that competes for that power user rather than the 16 year old school girl they’ve apparently been developing phones for for the past few years. And physically motorola build solid devices. They have a rich history of building miliatary grade equipment and comsumer trendoid crap like the Razr (Is that how you spell it?)

Regardless of what Motorola end up doing, the real winner is going to be the Android software stack that they’ll no doubt push code back into. I’m not sure how their licensing is going to work, and they might chose to close source all their android applications, but they’ll no doubt have a positive effect on the Android operating system/software stack, and that’s all that matters.

ps. Thanks to Jonathan Carter for pointing me to the news story.

The Internet – Don't Broadcast Yourself

The internet is about 2 way communication. A company that “broadcasts” but doesn’t enter into a dialog runs the risk of alienating their customers and appearing authoritarian.

Recently a bit of an online dispute arose when a local representative from a security company failed to adequately respond to some criticism from members of community mailing list that I’m on… not only did he fail, but when the pressure got too much he just disappeared and stopped responding to the list members questions.

Then a few days later the regional GM of the security company wrote a response, but instead of joining the list and posting as himself, ie. embracing dialog, he chose to ask one of the list moderators to post the email on his behalf. That undermines the dialog since no one knows whether he will ever read the replies.

While he did address some of the issues and make promises to meet with community, his email generally  felt a lot like something between a press release and damage control. It was impersonal and failed to address all the complaints.

However, my biggest criticism of the communication was the GM’s suggestion that people submit their issues or complaints in writing directly to the local representative instead of airing them on a public forum and asking for public response.

This is where I get up on my angry horse and start shouting. That’s the “old way”… this is the “new way”. In the “old way” you could tell each customer who complained “We’re sorry you had that experience but no one else is having a problem so it must be an isolated incident“… The “old way” isn’t going to work any more, and the more companies try and push people back to the “old way”, the more they’ll think you have something to hide.

The good news is that a company who embraces the “new way” can reap the rewards. If you respond on a public forum to one person’s issue you’re actually communicating with the entire group in a personal manner, and they all walk away thinking you’re a good guy who answers their questions and deals with their issues, even if you weren’t actually responding to a question they asked.

It remains to be seen what the fallout from this issue is, but it certainly isn’t having a positive effect on the company’s sales… especially since I need to decide which security company to use in a months time.

The joys of a non-tech girlfriend.

Lynnae, as you may know, is a food nerd. She teaches me stuff about how broccoli is from the Brassica family and therefore not suitable for stocks if you want a clear stock and that toast smells nice because of the Maillard reaction. So she’s a nerd, but she’s definitely not a computer nerd and it’s kinda funny when she’s trying to understand what I do all day or tell me about some or other computer problem she has at work. She has a windows box and a mac… no prizes for guessing which one “flashes on the one window and then the other one goes orange and starts flashing too and then you click on the tab for the first one and it starts flashing too so I had to work the whole day while the screen flashed at me“.

The real gems seem to pop out of nowhere:

Who pays for the network waves?
– Asked while I was trying to explain the concept of a wug.

Maybe it’s a glitch.
– Pretty much anything that goes wrong is “possibly a glitch”.

Something with a megabyte.
– When asked what size the SD card in her phone was.

What’s an aggregator, is it an angry alligator?
– Ok, admittedly she’s trying to be funny.

But she’s learning… We have a shopping list wiki, which she thinks is arbiwikiwiki.com (or something) but she runs firefox and is starting to understand why open source is better… that, and she’s the most awesome friend I’ve ever had, so I’ll tolerate her noobness.

How stupid are Americans?

“This is what happens when you confuse the free market with a free license to let special interests take whatever they get however they can get it.”
– Obama

My Father asked me the other day who I thought would win the US Election. I’d be mulling over this for a while and had my answer ready.

“If Americans are clever they’ll vote for Obama, if they’re stupid they’ll vote for McCain… The real question is, how stupid are Americans?“

Obama is a clever guy, but what makes him far more impressive is that he’s made a concerted effort to channel that intelligence towards understanding the problem. No doubt his law degree etc is helping him in this arena, but comparatively McCain looks a bit shell-shocked by all this banks-in-the-poo stuff that’s going on, even though every analyst and his brother in law has been predicting it for years. McCain is actually so out of touch with the problem that he’s treating it like something outside of government, something in private industry where government shouldn’t meddle.

Obama was talking about predatory lending in the housing markets 3 years ago in Illinois on TV. I listened. So when those lending vultures kept trying to goad me into refinancing my home and pulling out tons of money in equity, I wondered why are they so anxious to reassess the value of my home so high? What if these homes don’t keep appreciating at these levels. Then what? I’d have been stuck with the clock restarting at a teaser rate scheduled to ballon on something that wouldn’t be worth what was being paid for it. Then what? Thanks Senator Obama for saving my life. I listened to you. Is there any doubt people? OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT 2008!!!

– Random guy on the Internet.

What happened in the US is really simple. Banks were given the freedom to rape the ignorant public by extending them far more debt than they could ever possibly repay. They reaped great short term rewards but it was a Pyramid Scheme that was doomed from the start. The banks are now paying for that… but the funny thing is that the banks *had* to have seen this coming when they went on their rampant lending sprees 5 years ago… I guess the fat cats got 5 years of great bonuses and will now move on to some other parasitic business practice and start another 5 year cycle.

Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Watch the video:

Grumpy Old Man Rant.

In case you weren’t counting, the year is 2008… In the past week I have received both the Spier Wants To Give You Free Champagne email and, more recently, the Microsoft Will Track This Email And Give You $321.56 For Every Person You Forward This To email. Both of these emails came from people I ~used to know… People who do not suffer from diminished brain capacity, amnesia or bouts of uncontrollable binge drinking & emailing. I’m tired of being understanding. Ignorance is not an excuse for not using your logical faculties.

Find your own internet, this one is taken.