action figures sold separately

if (i hope not when) it goes…

terrific idea. seems really odd to me however to devote an entire domain (four actually) to a single string of unchanging text. a hard to recite or recall domain (that doesn’t have any spanish in it anyway) at that.

my old hosting provider, whose name i won’t even use it hurts me so, was causing me so much grief: frequent email outages, frequent web blackouts, and support that was at times laughably incompetent, at other times frustratingly bizarre. two examples for your entertainment / education:

here’s the ACTUAL text one finds on the page one goes to to escalate a trouble ticket. i can’t make this stuff up…

=================
Dear Customers:

There can be different situations in a working process of a support system. Some issues are resolved rather quickly and some may need additional time which cannot be very pleasant.

Our company has multiple levels of support, you even can call them tech staff and supervisors.

From time to time you as a customer may feel like you are not receiving the appropriate support assistance and as a result of this you may be on the verge of getting upset and certainly frustrated. Such matter especially happens when you need your problem to be resolved in a short time frame and it seems to be legging behind.

In order to resolve such situations we want you as a customer to be able to inform our supervisors about the problem you are facing and now you can do it.

After long time of poor support assistance and when you are getting frustrated/upset, you can click the Complaint button on the menu and the ticket will be reassigned to one of our supervisors. It means that from this point a supervisor will work on your ticket and will make to you the explanation about the status of a problem and will punish the tech staff which won’t help you.

Our supervisors will give the answer to your complaint as soon as possible, but bear in mind that they don’t deal with technical issues, but mostly resolve the reason of ignoring your request by our tech staff.

We sincerely hope this will increase your support experience here at Hostony and will help you to feel like you can better communicate with us when you are starting to feel the need to make your issue a prior one.

=================

and here’s the transcript of a recent support chat i had when my email went down again…

SUPPORT: How may I assist You?
eli rosenblatt: at least the third time this week, mail and web are both down. please fix asap.
SUPPORT: Could you please open a troble ticket on this issue, our representative will assist you soon via ticket
eli rosenblatt: ticket = da07eb628895
eli rosenblatt: call id = 128423
eli rosenblatt: what’s going on?:
SUPPORT: FD-******
eli rosenblatt: FD-******? what does that mean?
SUPPORT: i Need call id of the ticket FD-******
eli rosenblatt: i just gave you the call id. it has no FD in front of it.
eli rosenblatt: [url pasted]
eli rosenblatt: that’s the ticket i opened
SUPPORT: please check it again - FD-128***
eli rosenblatt: look at it! that page has no FD on it at all!
eli rosenblatt: it says Call ID and in the next field the number i gave you before
SUPPORT: maybe request ID
eli rosenblatt: the “Request Key”, which i gave you already, also has no “FD” — it is da07eb628895
eli rosenblatt: but none of that actually helps get my web and mail back up, it’s just a way of confirming that i’ve put in a ticket on this issue.
SUPPORT: ok , I see your ticket 128423
SUPPORT: we will answer you in the ticket soon
eli rosenblatt: fine, but please tell me, EXACTLY WHY is this happening?
SUPPORT: ok
SUPPORT: we will answer you ASAP
eli rosenblatt: and can you confirm that i will be getting credit?
SUPPORT: have a nice day

=================
now i know that supportdesk people work hard and get a lot of flack, but come on. common courtesy, and some common sense would be good.

rant over. thank the makers for A2 Hosting. the best!

one no longer needs to know html to make a web form that anyone can fill in with data that you want to collect. details of how you can use this cool new feature of google documents are on their blog.

i’m kind of loving the new feature of 10.5 that lets you hover over a date or some contact info in a mail message and be prompted to make either a new contact or add to an existing one, or to make a new ical event or to just pull up that date in ical. it’s good at interpreting strings that aren’t clearly a date, like “tomorrow” or “at 5″ or 555-1212. but this one was just odd:

not sure what kind of an event that would be, i am so… what? excited? fed up? glad to see you?

Quicksilver is working again sans crashes. thank the makers.

you have to go over to the landscape urbanism generator and get schooled. just now it gave me some nuggets to ponder:

synergize interstitial pluralities
regenerate visionary mappings
hybirdize granular interventions
leverage interstitial armatures

any by the way, C (i know you are the only person on planet earth who actually reads this blog, so yes, i’m talking to you and yes, i suppose it would be less effort to simply email you, but hey, i guy can have hopes and dreams…), you might have noticed i’ve dropped the delish tags auto-posts. boring! des ne? if one wants to see my latest delish posts, one can subscribe to the feed. coo? coo.

well, that was easy. this blog is now optimized for iphone. no sidebar or images, but it’s fast and easy. perhaps someday i’ll customize it to add images in posts, but for now it’s nice to not have to zoom in and out and have it just right for the iphone screen. enjoy, all ye iphoners.

Update: Workshop rescheduled! Note also cost is now: $donations accepted.

For those in the Portland area, I’ll be giving a training workshop on December 5th. It’s called: Working More Efficiently and Effectively on Your Mac: A Hands-On Training Workshop to Help You Increase Productivity (and Have More Fun!)

It will be super useful for:

• independent professionals
• non-profit organizations
• corporate teams
• freelancers
• students, and more…

See the full description and more details on this pdf flyer. Contact me with any questions

like many quicksilver enthusiasts, i hardly ever touch spotlight. others have posted elsewhere about how spotlight is needed to index certain things on your drive, but it didn’t sink in until i recently realized that nothing was coming up when i searched for terms i knew were in mails in a particular folder. then i realized, i had turned spotlight indexing of mail off, forgetting that you need it even to search from within mail. but as it happens, it’s not enough to check off “mail messages” in the spotlight prefs (see pic at left). that will allow you to see results from an actual spotlight search, but not from within mail. if, like me, you’ve told spotlight to exclude everything from it’s index (turning spotlight “off”), you’ll need to go back and exclude just the things you don’t want indexed, excepting your Mail folder in ~Library. you can do that from the “Privacy” tab in spotlight prefs, like this:

it’ll take a few minutes, but well worth it. spotlight doing just what you need it to and nothing else. happy hunting.

David Weinberger is a new hero of mine, not least cuz he’s a loopy presentation nerd (go watch his great google tech talk video it will make you laugh and go whah?? and wow!) but for the crazysmart way he thinks about information (and specifically categorization) and the history and science thereof.

his ideas (and the incisive if not totally elegant way he expresses them) really got me thinking about:

a) what the heck am i using this blog for? now that it’s been so long since i had a real audience (post-hiatus), who should i target and why?

b) when i tag, i’m doing it of course for myself but also for pals, clients, family, etc. do my tags and taxonomies make sense to them? need they?

and lastly and more importantly not about me:

c) democratizing a technology, and making the way it’s organized way more participatory, can yield unintended negative results (if you don’t have some sort of checks built in). case in point: google image labeler, for those of you not already completely sucked in, is this fantastically addictive tool/toy that let’s you (along with a random & anonymous other user) quickly define first-thing-comes-to-mind tags (like “blue” “sky” “couple” “beach” “dog”) for selected images from the google image library. you score points when you both come up with the same word to describe the image, and it feeds you another one. you have two minutes to tag as many images as you can, and google then uses the tags (as i understand it) to have better meta data associated with the images. pretty cool. except that some have started to see the point as racking up as many “points” as possible and thus stumbling upon other users who will, with you, use simple, short, yet totally inappropriate tags for each image. this person’s strategy, for example, has made it so that the tags “man” and “sky” get associated with images that have absolutely nothing to do with either a man or the sky. perhaps/hopefully google has or will have some sort of check in place to discard the outliers? if you know more, please comment.

Despite it’s amazing usefulness thus far, some of us have had issues with the Quicksilver’s extracool Social Bookmark plugin (mostly problems scanning the source). For those of you not yet familiar with this fantastically handy function of QS, there’s a nice intro and set-up walkthrough over at lifeclever.

However, it turns out that the current version you are no doubt running is not truly secure. Passing data in cleartext is not the end of the world, but it’s nice to know that the new version fixed this vulnerability. Except, how the heck to you upgrade to the new version? You can’t do it from within the QS plugin pane. QS thinks it’s up-to-date with version 8F.

Thanks to MaxP, here’s how to upgrade to the Social Bookmark plugin version 92 (i’m pretty sure you need to be running the latest, ß51 (3800), comment here if your milage varies…) –

1. invoke QS and put this string in the first qs pane: qsinstall:id=com.blacktree.Quicksilver.QSDeliciousPlugIn
2. then tab to the next pane and select “open”
3. confirm the resulting prompts to install and relaunch (you may need to RE-invoke qs to see those prompts).
4. the plugin may take some time to rescan the source, you can do so manually from the QS plugins pref pane.

Enjoy!

i’ve updated the chart i made [pdf] comparing and contrasting the features of camino and firefox. enjoy.

part of the beauty of merlin mann’s inbox zero series, and especially this vid, is that his humility and infectious easy-goingness make one feel as though one could quite easily be as much a bad-ass-ninja-productivity-viper as he is (or plays on TV…)

[update: this person took notes.]

a lot of the tools and tricks for making inbox zero work, in Mac-landia, i will be covering in the aforementioned workshop.

and remember, lunch is included. yum…

another project i want to do sometime (soon?) — maybe it’ll have to wait til sol is 11 and is into doing it with, but if not, there’s details from make zine on a full-size and a juicebox one also. juicebox baby! i love makezine cuz they have so many cool ideas, including obvious stuff like getting old jabra earbuds to make your earphones more comfy and sound better, and how to make an animated cartoon in 10 minutes with a whiteboard and webcam.

so many folks have sent me the link to this woman’s cool timelapse film, i had to post it here. i’ve dreamed up a few different ideas of timelapse projects it would be great to do someday soon: the building of our chicken coop, a well-managed gourmet restaurant kitchen from open to close, a couple having a fight, and a picture a week for a kid growing to adulthood. feel free to comment with links to other cool timelapse stuff.

With his right-on post on infoglut [via 43folders] and his ingenious “the American People” feed, Greg Knauss is a new fave read.

related: Kathy Sierra’s post on not keeping up.

entering geekdom, skip if you think it’s silly to care about syntax and suchlike…

what i would say to the grammar guy if i could find the site where i first found his musings:

first off, it’s not waiter, waitress, or waitperson. never a need to use any of that claptrap ever again. just say server! a server is not waiting on you, as in every need, but serving your food & bev!

grammar guy says

It’s common enough in speech: “A friend of mine called me.” “What did they say?” But, although many writers have used it (see examples from Jane Austen), it often sets off alarm bells among the fussier readers of formal writing today.

who need to get over themselves - language changes and this is a reasonable adaptation that is not in any way diluting or dumbing-down the language as those fussyfolk might fear.

on pronouns dude notes:

when saying “Bob gave Terry a memo Bob wrote, and Terry read the memo,” we’d use the nouns Bob, Terry, and memo only once, and let pronouns do the rest: “Bob gave Terry a memo he wrote, and she read it.”

and i say that it’s all context (in the first place what if terry is a he). but what about where we say:
“Bob gave Tom a memo he’d written and Tom read it.” This is fine while it’s the memo bob had written, unless tom forgot writing it and bob was showing it to tom as a reminder. aha? aha!

i’d also needle out of him an opinion on correct use of the em dash and i’d lay into him about my personal pet peeve which i know is kind of dumb, but “exploitive?” no! exploitative. it (and all those like it) just sounds better. you know they do. admit it. (cane pulls me by the neck stage left)

as you see below, i’m just now taking advantage of it, but a while back, marc nozell updated Yet Another Daily del.icio.us hack so that it goes for the whole week. and such a nice hack it is. thanks marc!

yep it’s true. action figures is back in action. better than before i think. i’ve moved from moveable type, great as it was, to WordPress, about which i can’t say enough. it rocks my universe. lots more links to add on the side, but i’ve got the setup done (for gecko browsers and IE - let me know if you are seeing it wonky). i can be reached at web at movementbuilding dot o-r-g. stay tuned!