When the barista at Starbucks handed me my coffee this morning, the hole in the lid was directly over the seam in the cup. This, I have come to learn, is a recipe for disaster. If the hole is within a centimeter of the seam you are almost guaranteed to experience “coffee drip” on your shirt. Walking into the office with a coffee stain in the middle of your shirt is a rotten way to start a Monday.
There is an elevator in my building. It is often broken. It is often being repaired. The most recent time it was “fixed”, the brainiacs that run the building installed a new, helpful sign. The sign reads, “In the event the elevator becomes inoperable, do not become alarmed. Press the red ‘Alarm’ button.” Let’s ignore the fact that they’re telling us to press a button labeled “Alarm” but not to actually, y’know, become alarmed. What’s more comical is that the button is not red. It’s white.
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About six months ago I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 160 GB USB External Hard Drive from the evil empire™. As far as hard drives go, well, it’s big and it stores data. So in that regard it performs perfectly. It also has a soothing amber glow that pulses while it’s spinning, which is very nice. The problem with this thing is the software. It’s two sacks of rotten apples bad. And, based on the 1994-esque, we-hate-our-visitors Seagate website, it’s not going to get any better.
I’ve been returning to the site every few weeks, hoping that they’ll release some sort of upgrade or patch, but no. The software that’s bundled with the drive is the FreeAgent Launcher. Like almost all new software, it lives in the systray. To kill it, you have to right-click on it, choose exit, and then confirm when it asks, “Are you sure you want to exit?” (This annoys the hell out of me. If you insist on treating me like I might be slightly retarded — Why would I click “exit” if I wasn’t sure? — then at least give me an option to not have to confirm next time.) In a fit of desperation I installed the software for one of Seagate’s other drives. The other software is Drive Manager or something like that. It also lives in the system tray. Get this, though: To kill that one, you have to left-click and do the “Are you sure?” dance. Why would Seagate make one work via right-click and the other work via left-click?!
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To the political analyst who discussed Obama’s campaign this morning on NPR: I’m sorry to say that you lost whatever shred of credibility you had the moment you said that something was furmaliar. Nothing is furmaliar. Lots and lots of things are familiar. There is no r in the middle of that word. It’s not an accent. It’s not “the way we say it here”. It’s not anything other than wrong. You disagree. I know you do. So, Mr. Political Analyst, imagine this: If you and I were engaged in a conversation about Obama and I pronounced his name Orbama, would you correct me? I think you would. If I said, “Oh, that’s just the way I say it,” what would you think? Good day, sir.
The original Plaxo is a little address-book organizing tool that I had always liked quite a bit. It’s got an Outlook plug-in which lets it sit in there and pay attention to the email addresses of people who email me and the people I email. There’s some global information superhighway sort of thing out there that it uses to synchronize these email addresses with everyone’s profiles, so my address book has — for many years now — been more or less up to date. It’s cool.
But now, however, I am having second thoughts about this seemingly-innocent little company.
They’ve started a new Web 2.0-type program called Plaxo Pulse. (It’s in beta.) Plaxo Pulse is sorta-kinda a good idea. It traipses through your address book and emails people to tell them whenever you do something on the tubes. I am now being barraged with emails telling me every time any of my friends post a blog entry, change their cell number, move, post a photo somewhere, etc. I can only assume that the people who consider me a friend (and who use Plaxo) are receiving the same barrage.
That in itself is not so evil. The creators of Plaxo Pulse were wise enough to allow me to disable these email alerts.
Here is why this is evil, and why people should be getting angry: (1) Plaxo Pulse uses blog RSS feeds to import a user’s blog posts into itself and (2) Plaxo Pulse steals blog comments.
That means every time I post a blog entry, the entry appear here on my blog (as it should!) and it appears again on the Plaxo Pulse site. This is bad. For years and years there has been a great debate over how Google feels about “duplicate content”. Most people feel that Google penalizes content which exists simultaneously in two places. Whether you believe in the Google “duplicate content penalty” is irrelevant. Google may very well not explicitly penalize one site for plagiarizing another, but there is definitely some sort of effect. Let’s say I write the world’s most brilliant post on the topic of swimming pyromaniacs. There are probably not a lot of other people writing about this. My website would theoretically start to rank highly in Google SERPs whenever someone searches for wet fire-lovers.
Now let’s imagine that eventually lots of people start talking about swimming pyromaniacs. When other people post blogs about it, they naturally give me credit for exposing this insane practice by linking back to my site. My website receives a SERP ranking “boost” because it is receiving inbound links from other websites mentioning the same topic. (I also — again, theoretically — receive a “boost” because of the age of my post on the topic — I talked about it first — and because of the general popularity of my site.)
I have advertisements on my site. I get paid when people click these ads. I have a vested interest in ranking highly in Google SERPs.
But now the exact same content I posted about swimming pyromaniacs is appearing on the Plaxo Pulse website. Plaxo Pulse is a huge website with hundreds of thousands of pages and is growing like kudzu. Plaxo itself is tremendously popular, much more than David Gagne. It is very, very likely that the content I wrote which now appears on the Plaxo Pulse website will rank higher in Google SERPs than that same content on my davidgagne.net website. (When someone searches for swimming pyromaniacs in Google, the Plaxo Pulse link is going to appear higher than the davidgagne.net link.) The huddled masses tend to click what’s at the top in Google. That means that my ad will not be seen. That’s bad for me.
Even more nefarious is the fact that the blog entry which appears on the Plaxo Pulse website allows visitors to post comments to it. These comments are not posted to my site. They appear on Plaxo Pulse. This is wrong on so many levels. If I don’t ever check Plaxo Pulse (and, presumably, if I have all my Plaxo Pulse email notifications disabled) I will never know that someone commented on my eloquent dissertation on swimming pyromaniacs. If enough people post comments to the Plaxo Post plagiarization of my writing, it will most definitely appear to be more popular (as far as Google is concerned) than my original essay. In fact there will likely be people that read and comment on swimming pyromaniacs at Plaxo Pulse who don’t even know that davidgagne.net exists, much less that it / I was the author of the topic.
Here is an example:
My friend Bob has a website called Numenware. On January 1st he posted a blog entry about an esoteric math news item. Bob’s original post is here. Bob’s content is plagiarized verbatim on Plaxo Pulse here. A savvy reader will note that someone named David Fotland has posted a comment to Bob’s blog entry at Plaxo Pulse. This comment was “stolen” by Plaxo. It does not appear on Numenware where it should. If I was Bob I would be quite peeved about this.
On November 4th I entered my local Starbucks and laughed when I saw the entire store was decorated for Christmas. There happened to be a manager and a “barista” working the counter, so I mentioned that it was a bit early for Christmas decorations.
The manager replied, as if I was daft, “No it’s not. Thanksgiving is next week!”
I told him that Thanksgiving wasn’t for three more weeks and he seemed surprised. He said, “Really? I don’t know why I thought it was next week …”
MAYBE BECAUSE OF ALL THE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS?!?!?
I know you want to believe it. I know that it came from a trustworthy source — your sister, your cousin, your aunt — who would never lie to you. I know it is almost plausible. But, no. Your aunt did not have twins in her class named Orange Jello and Lemon Jello. Your sister did not overhear a woman in the grocery store calling her daughter Shithead. Your cousin the nurse never had to explain to someone that Vagina was not an appropriate name for a newborn. Stop forwarding me these silly stories, people.
The new member registration form at the Blue Cross of California website has what I consider to be several major bugs.
When I got my new laptop a few weeks ago I thought it was pretty cool that it came with Office 2007. The nifty new toolbars and embedded wavey swooshes are slick. I don’t really mind that by default Word and Excel assume you want to save files with a .docx or .xlsx extension. (That’s fine with me; makes it easier to remember to not save something as an ‘07 file if I need to share it with others that are still using Office XP or 2003.)
What I cannot handle is the fact that Outlook 2007 is using over 130 MB of RAM. 130 MB?! I wouldn’t mind that much, since apparently it’s supposed to play nicely with Windows and just use whatever RAM is available. But even using as much memory as it is it’s still slow slow slow. And this is even after I disabled iTunes 7.3’s ridiculous Outlook add-in. 130 MB?! Are they crazy?
A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”
First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.
Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.
Zeldman does a spectacular job explaining why I hate when people use Word as their email editor.
The “assisted living facility” where my grandmother lived — Indigo Manor in Daytona Beach, Florida — just sent my mom and uncle an automated form letter. It was something along the lines of, “Please tell us how satisfied you are in the care we gave your loved one.” They’re really not very bright over there.
If my mom and uncle are still too upset to do so, I’m going to be the one sending them a reply: “We were completely satisfied … right up until the day you dropped her and broke her femur, then allowed her to spend over 36 hours in agony before telling anyone what had happened. Y’know. Right before she died because of complications from the emergency surgery. Aside from that, though, you were terrific.”
There’s been a lot of blog buzz this morning about a page displaying the difference between what you ordered and what you get at fast food places. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being in the car with me on a trip through a fast-food drive-through, you know that this is a subject near and dear to my heart. I do not care how many cars are in line behind me. I do not care that you are only making minimum wage. I do not care what your franchise policy is. When I order super size french fries, you better give me super size french fries. I want it to look just like it looks on the big menu ten yards behind my car. I’m paying you two dollars for about eight cents worth of potatoes. Do not $*&# with me on this.
Also: It is amazing that a Google image search for “french fries” returns so much porn. Who knew?
One of the world’s worst, most-annoying spam-prevention systems is the one in my current version of Outlook — Microsoft® Outlook® 2003 (11.8002.6568) SP2. I’d say about one out of every three times I attempt to click on a link in an email, I get a warning telling me that all links in the message have been disabled to help protect me from ones that may be “harmful”. As far as I can tell there is no way to globally deactivate this, so I have to continually enable links before I can click anything. It is obnoxious and insulting and I hate it.
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I’ll use your head as a bucket and paint my house with your brains.
