John's Secret Blog: internet

Friday, July 15, 2011

On Instructional Videos

There seems to be a trend these days in instructions on the web: videos.

Videos? Really? Ugh!

I don't know about you, but usually when I look for instructions on how to do something I either just need to find out what tools or utilities I need to use to do it, or to refer to the instructions as I go through the task. Videos are good for neither; you can't effectively skim a video for the important parts, or go through it at your own pace as your task progresses.

Seriously, people, I really don't have the time, and in any case don't want, to slog through your introductions or sit through your "um"s and "uh"s just to find out what to use to get my blog fed to a facebook page. Save the videos for tasks, or parts of tasks, where that kind of demonstration of technique or effect is useful. And add good old text and graphics to your toolbox along with that video hammer; it ain't all nails out there.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

What's All The Hubbub, Bub?

I've been thinking about all the folks shouting other people down at the health care reform townhall meetings this summer, and the stink some people bizarrely raised about President Obama addressing school children to tell them to take responsibility for their education.

It got me wondering - where was the outrage from these people when AOL gave its users internet and newsgroup access?

Oh... wait... nevermind.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

A Bad Move By Cafepress.com

Cafepress has announce that they are about to make a really bad move.

If you don't know who Cafepress is, it is a web site where people can upload images to be printed on t-shirts and other items. You can simply order items printed with your designs. Or you can make them available for other people to buy, with some of the sale price going to you.

Currently their business model is to charge customers a fixed base price for any given item, plus a markup determined by and paid to the designer (shopkeeper) of the image printed on it (less a percentage fee for very high markups to cover credit card processing fees.) In order to bring ih sales, they provide free storefronts for designers, with limited capacity and customizability. They also provide paid storefronts with less limited capacity and customizability. In addition, any designer can opt a store's contents into the marketplace, which is the Cafepress.com design search for customers.

What's changing? Starting June 1 cafepress will be setting the sale price and markup for items sold in the marketplace, paying Designers a fixed 10% of the sale price of said items. They will also be choosing what goes into the marketplace, or screening it anway. The latter is something many shopkeepers have been hoping for to combat the scads of repetitive designs some submit with the only variation being names, pet breeds, state names, city names, etc. The former, however, is a huge departure from their basic business model.

Looked at from the perspective of Cafepress it may actually make some sense. The manufacturer gets their base price, the designer gets a percentage royalty, and whoever's running the store where it's bought sets the final sale price and gets the rest. Sounds fair, right?

The thing is, they haven't thought it through completely. There are many designers producing really good designs that fetch a high price. Under the announced plan they would get much less per sale through the marketplace, and have their shop prices undercut. So many of them have already announced in the Cafepress forum that they plan to pull their designs from the marketplace and even from Cafepress altogether as they move to other sites, like fast-growing Zazzle.com. (This is what I plan to do - see my links below at the bottom of the page.)

The effects have begun to show. Thursday the marketplace said there were 9,080,000 designs. Today it is 9,080,000. So people are pulling out already, though many say they will stick it out through the end of May to get what they can under the current model. (I'm among them. I'm hoping Cafepress will reconsider this plan, but seeing as how they've already put out a press release announcing it, I doubt it.) It is also reported that the rate of new designs being added has dropped by a good 2/3, many are already shifting their efforts elsewhere.

The net effect of all this is that many good designs will be gone from the marketplace, and some will be gone from Cafepress altogether.

I have to wonder if they perhaps predicted this would happen, and and maybe even brought this about intentionally in an effort to switch from user-provided content to licensing designs from name brand sources. We shall see.

My own plan is to begin building up my presence on Zazzle.com, building galleries for my various brands, starting with what's currently selling and historically sold well on Cafepress. At the end of May I'll pull everything from the Cafepress marketplace that I've migrated so far, and maybe take it off entirely. Then, since there's no way I can finish it all with the baby coming (due May 15!) I'll continue to migrate the rest, removing it from Cafepress as I go.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Ambulance Chasers

When I heard about the crash ("water landing", I'd say) of US Airways flight 1549 I did a google for it to see what other news was available. I'm as curious as the next guy and it sounded like it landed about as safely as one could expect - I was hoping someone had posted pictures, or even videos of the plane landing in the water.

There wasn't really anything new yet, so I went about my business. Later, A bit less than two hours after the crash/water landing/epic save, I refreshed the search results. This is what came up...

Click on it for a clearer view if you want, but it's pretty clear to me. This is what they call an ambulance chaser. Nice job guys. Real tasteful.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Another Outlet For My Genius

Okay, maybe that's overstating things a bit, but we all do have our moments of genius and near-genius, don't we? Well, I'm hoping one or two of mine will occur through the lens of a camera because I've signed onto another print-on-demand site. This time it's Imagekind.com, which is focused on high-quality art and photo prints with a large assortment of frame and mat choices. If you have image files big enough, you can get prints up to 60"x45". The size selections for each image are automatically limited by the resolution of the image.

It's pretty easy. You sign up, pick an account type (they range from free with a 1-gallery/200M/24 image limit, to $11.99/month or $94.99/year unlimited Platinum plan,) create & name your gallery(s), and upload photos to them or import from Flickr. After that you can set names & descriptions and tags (if you want your images to be found in the on-site search,) and set your markup if you want more or less than the default 10%. And of course you should set up your profile and payment information so you can get the checks they should eventually be sending out.

It's fun! You can find my stuff, currently a dozen photos, here.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Celebrating The Smile Emoticon's 25th Anniversary

I created this Original Smile Emoticon Anniversary Edition T-shirt to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the classic computer text Smile emoticon, created on September 19, 1982 by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman. Thank you Professor Fahlman!

It's available in several long and short-sleeve styles for men and women, and in kids sizes as well. Plain Smile edition t-shirts also available.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Deer In The Headlights & Cable Outage

As we approached our neighborhood, we had to stop for this deer and two fawns in the road. We rolled forward a little more and they ran off. When we got home the cable modem wouldn't connect, an entirely unrelated matter, I'm sure.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

What if the internet had been invented 100 years earlier?

This YouTube video explores that very question.

Back Online Again

As I mentioned yesterday, we got a replacement modem, but were told that there was an outage in our area. In hindsight, maybe taking the new modem wasn't such a good idea. I'd still make the same choice, though - the old modem could have been bad and if it was that would have cost us another day. We need home access for our business & banking.

Anyway, when we got home around seven or so I hooked up the modem. It still wouldn't connect. Well, they did say there was an outage, so I looked at its diagnostic screen via the web browser to monitor its progress. Almost right away it started progressing through the connection sequence, though much more slowly than normal. Then it reset. It did that a few times then stopped, then finally connected. Yay!

Or not so yay. Nothing would resolve on DNS. Nothing but the comcast.net web site, anyway, which was showing a welcome message and instructions to download installation software. (That link didn't work, by the way.)

I called in and the technician who answered tried to activate the new modem. She said there was something blocking it and she would forward me to billing so they could clear the blockage then send me back to her. I thought that was odd since we currently have a $40 credit on our account, but in a large corporation there's no telling which department will need to stick its fingers in when so what the heck. She transferred me over and after listening to an increasing annoying piano piece that apparently has no ending I got a menu. There was nothing on the menu that sounded like what I was told I was needed, so I hit 0 to try to talk to an operator. After a little while waiting for someone to pick up I hung up and called in again.

This time I had better luck. The woman I got seemed a little slower going through the routine questions, but in a methodical way, not like she was "slow" if you know what I mean. She tried to get the modem activated but ran into an error. Instead of transferring me she contacted the provisioning department and had someone there set me up. While waiting for that to be done I asked where they were located. Turns out she's from New Orleans, but still displaced by Katrina. They're waiting for their electrical system to be inspected so they can put up their drywall. The modem reset itself again, I reset our router and released & renewed my computer's DHCP connection. (See instructions below - much faster than a reboot in such situations.) And it worked! I had my wife release & renew and she was up too. I thanked the woman and wished her luck getting back home soon.

How to release & renew your connection instead of rebooting...
(These instructions are for Windows 2000 and XP.)
1. Bring up the Command Prompt. You'll find it in Start > Programs > Accessories
2. Enter "ipconfig /release" and wait for the prompt to return.
3. Enter "ipconfig /renew" and wait for the prompt.
You're done! You can check your connection by pinging something, like "ping johnssecretblog.blogspot.com"

Monday, August 27, 2007

Again Comcast Sucks

We brought the cable modem in to the local Comcast office today. The woman who helped us said they didn't do testing there, but they could swap us a new one. That was nice and quick. However, when she went in to associate the new modem's number with our account she found that, lo and behold, there was an outage in our area. So apparently either the person I talked to last night didn't know what the heck they were doing, or Comcast's outage alert system is dog slow by any modern standard, or everyone in my area was out all day and evening or else didn't bother to call in about their difficulties until today. That last possibility really wouldn't surprise me much. Cable customers seem to take extended outages in stride, just assuming that somebody else will call in.

Anyway, we went ahead and got the new modem. It won't hurt anything and there's always the possibility that the old one went bad at the same time, maybe due to a power surge or something, or that the outage really didn't happen until today. Hopefully we'll be up and going when we get home this evening.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

I called Comcast again to see if they had gotten any more calls from my area, but they hadn't, so it's almost certainly a problem with our modem. We're thinking of bringing it in ourselves tomorrow to get it checked out at their office. Maybe they can give up a replacement right away that way.
Meanwhile, here's a pic of a rhinocerous beetle one of our employees found around Secret Headquarters.

Comcast sucks. :P Still down.

Our cable modem is out.

Our cable modem is out. I called in and they said a tech can come tuesday morning. :P Hopefully they will find and fix an outage.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Is This Progress? or The Post Office Pisses Me Off!

I just mailed out a package. That should be a simple proposition, but in this case I had two different zip codes for the recipient so I had to check which one was correct.

In the past I've just fired up a handy little program called the USPS Shipping Assistant. It's a free program downloadable from the post office web site. I'd been using version 2.2 for a while and it worked great. It was much faster and more convenient than using the web site for such things. This time, however, it wouldn't run. It told me I had to run 3.0 or later.

Okay. It had been a while since I'd had occasion to use it so it was understandable that there was a later version. I'm not so sure why the old one should stop working, though. Anyway, I downloaded the new version 3.1 (over 7M compared to 2.2's 225k - that should have been my first clue) and installed it.

What a piece of crap.

It takes forever to load, which is only natural since it's built on .NET and Internet Explorer. (Damn, I hate lazy "programmers". No better that "script kiddies" if you ask me.) Every time a new dialog comes up you can watch it draw all the controls and graphics. I kid you not - it's that slow. From the looks of it, whoever "programmed" it spent most of their time doing graphic design for the interface. I'd characterize it as putting lipstick on a pig, and stand by that as being 100% accurate. If this is the sort of thing the money from the postage rate increase is going to I want a refund!

Also, when I closed it it didn't stop running! It just minimized to a little icon in my tray next to the clock. I had to right-click on that to tell it to finally exit. Why? Do they perhaps know that the thing is dog slow to load and decided that the "solution" to the slowness of loading this bloated piece of crap is to keep it running? Get an actual programmer to actually fix the thing!

I emailed the following to the USPS on their contact page, specifying in the form that it was a technical issue regarding Shipping Assistant:

Please! Please! Please! Reactivate 2.2!

I tried to use it today and it wouldn't run. I had to use 3.1 and it is PONDEROUSLY slow.

Failing reactivation of 2.2, please include the following changes in 3.2 or 4.0...
1. Drop .NET so it won't require so much memory.
2. Drop the IE interface and do some actual UI programming so it won't take forever each time you switch dialogs, or switch fields for that matter.
3. When the user closes the program, close the program. Don't leave it running in the tray.
4. Get rid of the gingerbread/bells & whistles. Fire the designers and whatever postal official let his ditzy trophy wife approve the interface while you're at it too. If the programming & design were outsourced, get someone else this time because the people who made 3.1 padded the project with useless crap.

In other words, get rid of all the crud that just slows the thing down, defeating its purpose of *assisting* our shipping. It doesn't assist if it slows us down. The changes from 2.2 to 3.1 only serve to further cement the USPS's old reputation for slowness.

I doubt it will get any action, but maybe if enough people read this blog, agree, and decide to stop settling for crap software and complain, maybe together we'll make something happen. I will post about this again when and if I get a response.

Meanwhile, I also intend to see if I can't hack 2.2 into thinking it's 3.1 so that just maybe it will work again. If I have any success with that I'll post instructions. If you have already been able to do it, please reply with instructions - no sense reinventing the wheel.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Helpful Things You Can Do On The Internet

Apparently there are several sites on the interweb where a body can sign up to contribute their time to those sites' projects. Here are a few I already knew about or recently heard of, followed by a list of others.

Distributed Proofreaders
I have this on in my blogroll already. Basically it's a site where you can help proofread, one page at a time, scanned and computer-transcribed public-domain texts to be included in the collection of Project Gutenberg. You get to pick from a list of current projects, some of which can really suck you in. (Yes, I have participated in this one.)

Stardust@Home
The Stardust probe traveled to a comet and once there held aloft an extremely light gel block (aerogel, the stuff is called) to gently catch bits of interplanetary & interstellar dust. They then put the aerogel under an automated microscope and took over a million pictures, scanning the position and focus depth along the way. Volunteers scan through the pictures, noting tell-tale signs of dust impacts so that the scientists can retrieve the captured dust for analysis.

Galaxy Zoo
An astronomical photographic survey promises to reveal a good million or more galaxies. The astronomers want to find and classify them all, but while computers are good at finding possible galaxies, they aren't nearly as good as humans at verifying that they are in fact galaxies and noting their characteristics. You can help by looking at the pictures they have gathered and noting whether each is a galaxy, what type, and the direction of rotation for spirals. They say that as a participant you may be the first human to see these galaxies.

And here's a list of others (more details at Distributed Human Projects at distributedcomputing.info)...