There’s an old friend of mine from high school that maintains a pretty high traffic site (linkage not really needed, but I’ll give it to him anyway: needcoffee.com). He’s turned it into a site that watches/comments on pop culture.
This friend was in theatre with us… and quite good… it’s rather eerie to hear his voice and know his personality hasn’t changed much. Good stuff.
Now this is just sad.
Not content with getting its ass whipped repeatedly by search and online services, Microsoft now plans to pay enterprise customers for convincing its users to use Live search and services.
Yet another item that is just too sad to be real.
I’ll say this about Microsoft Live search and support searching. The algorithms you guys have crafted absolutely sucks. Live search almost never finds the pages I am looking for, plus it will not search USENet, which is one of the largest goldmines of information from user experiences ever made. As for searching its own knowledge base, searching support.microsoft.com has become useless. I rarely, if ever, find what I’m looking for when searching with Microsoft’s own utility (which seems to be based on the same useless algorithms as Live search) and often resort to Google to find items on Microsoft’s knowledge base.
It seems like one of the cool things to do is to have multiple sites – multiple blogs, multiple photo albums (flickr, picasaweb, etc.)… just all things to all people. Why can’t there be one site that functions as the one site for a person and their identity? What is the requirement to need to set yourself up on multiple sites?
Is it because of the passing fads of social networks? At one time, everyone flocked to MySpace. Now it’s Virb and/or Twitter. Twitter will be a dead fad by the end of the year maybe – what will be the next fad?
So here I am at the car dealership, waiting on our car to get it’s 60,000 mile service. I fired up the laptop and curled up in the customer lounge to work a little, play a little… and listen to the iPod.
First off, the last podcast from Ask A Ninja is a real scream. Normally I just chuckle at these podcasts, but this one made me laugh out loud. It’s episode #37: Last Words. Watch it… it’s hilarious.
1. I hate websites that use people art that is taken from an angle high above their head. I am so… incredibly… tired… of this angle. It is the single most overused, overrated, idiotic, silly, stupid, unoriginal thing ever. If you’re going to put clip art of random people on your website, please don’t climb a ladder and shoot pictures of them looking down at them while they look up with this big-ass cheesy smile. Just… stop. It sucks. You suck if you do it. Get off the net. Please.
I updated my Meditations on Vista page because, frankly, I can’t take it anymore. I lasted all of what… two weeks? One of those weeks I wasn’t even home. Vista is crap, folks. I’ll just wrap it up for you here and now.
Nothing to see here, move along.
I’m back, but very very tired. I worked until 4:30am, then slept for a few hours, then jumped back in the car and hauled it to the airport. I dozed off and on during the plane ride, then got home. I’ve been mindless ever since.
I’m taking Monday and Tuesday off to let my brain cool off. We worked close to 80 hours this week and I’m just roasted. We accomplished a lot, but it was rushed… way rushed.
Yes, I’m about to get on a plane again. Emergency trip to a southern coast of the U.S.
I’ve started using Vista for the last month or so of my expected Windows tenure. I thought it would be nice to try to use Vista and write some meditations on it. As I never seem to be able to get anything done in one sitting (or two, for that matter), I’ve decided that you people are mature enough to understand the term “work in progress.” I’ve started the page “Meditations on Vista” and it will be updated when the muse strikes me. Believe me, muses strike me.
Now from the Don’t Knock It Til You Try It Department comes word that I’ve fallen upon a copy of Windows Vista to try it out (yes, legally). So I will do so on the primary x86 machine at home.
This will be, of course, the final determining factor about what I do… either branch off completely to the Mac or stick with Windows/PC.
Here’s to hoping it’s a good experience… cough.
