Nathan's Occasional Blog

I have to give a hardy “amen” to Graham’s post on the Canadian IT Manager blog.

“After much careful and prolonged deliberation, I have decided that one of the main reasons to switch to Vista for me is the much improved version of Solitaire!! … Fortunately, there are some other good reasons to switch to Vista but I can’t seem to get to all of them because of playing Solitaire.”

It’s only a matter of time before advertising finds its way onto the rest of XM Satellite Radio’s channels, and this Google deal only makes it worse.

But what really gets me is that XP purports to be “CD quality” sound – BULL HONKEY!  We’ve got XM in a factory Honda unit and an add-in SkyFi2 and both have the same issues:

• We get numerous dropouts of signal on our commute … which is 80% on I-90, a major and very wide thoroughfare east of Seattle.  Certain bridges, some hills, a cement wall, and even trees will kill the radio feed.
• I think even my 16 month old daughter can tell that the XM feeds are heavily compressed.  It’s way too noticable for my ear and quite distracting.  Being a drummer I tend to hear the nuances of the percussion tracks on a song, and the higher frequencies that cymbals generate are the very ones XM compresses the hell out of.
• For two vehicles we’re paying about $20/mo. for crappy radio that cuts out.

Done.  I’ll be calling XM customer service later this evening to cancel.  Enough is enough.  If they put a satellite over the west coast (so the signal is higher than 15–20 degrees above the horizon to the south east) and double their “premium music” streams from 32kbps to 64kbps, I might reconsider.

Until then we’ll be spending our $20 each month on a new CD for our massive collection.

I just came across a post on Bink talking about the newest Neilson//NetRatings (for May 2006).  Bink points out that Google replaced MSN.com as the third most visited site online.  Interested, I decided to skim the report and I found bigger news than that!  Facts and my comments below:

• 72% of home Internet use in May in the US was over broadband.  WOW!
• An average visitor to an AOL website spends over 6 hours on that media property each month.  What’s interesting here is that AOL is going to give their content away free if you have a broadband connection, which means they’re transitioing from a service provider model to an advertising revenue model.
• An average visitor to a Google online property spent 53 minutes on a Google site in May.  AOL might actually have a shot at Google in advertising since they are already providing more attractive content (by a factor of 6X).  BUT Google has done an excellent job in getting AdSense on non-Google sites.  Maybe AOL should offer the same service?
• 1/3 of the US population has broadband at home (102M of 300M).
• Broadband users (now the majority) are early adopters of new online tools like RSS and blogging.

Read this post by Chunk O Funk to feel what it’s like to have your blood boil over as a parent.  I would totally react the same way … shaking, angry, fuck the world.

But how would I get out of it?  I’ve got some pictures of Kaitlyn in my wallet, but none of both of us.  Maybe I could pull up some of our online pictures on my Blackberry [note to self – bookmark that picture].  But what if I had left my device in the car?

What if …?

It’s things like this that I think about when I can’t sleep at night.  How do I protect my daughter against the stupidity of the world?  How do I let her know that I love her more than life myself?  How do I even recognize those feelings myself when I hadn’t really thought about that love, really, until I read that post?

I’m hopeless.  But I’m her hero, even at her young age.

Oye … I need a drink.

Just 2.5 years after we moved in to our new house in a new neighborhood we’re finally on the map, as it were.  I just looked at Yahoo Maps (Beta) and to my surprise our road is there now!  Plus you can actually search on our street address – which didn’t work for a long time.  Hurray!

I wonder when Google and MSN Windows Live will catch up?

Update: Google is still clueless and Windows Live can find our address if you search for it, but the road map and aerial views don’t show our house or road.

My wife’s uncle flys for Delta … I think … unless they’ve laid him off … or cut his pay all the way down to peanut butter crackers … but I digress.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, the wonderful world of our airline industry.

I wanted to pass along a little nugget of fun from zefrank.  Seems he got “the screwed” by Delta on a recent trip and now their backing off their promise to reimburse him.  Check it out.

Now I’m just seeing one side of this story, but when will corporations learn that “customer services is our number one priority” isn’t something to just banter around at floggings company meetings?  Don’t they realize us customers actually talk to each other and give recommendations?

It’s enough to make me want to scream at them just like they did do Marsha on the Brady Bunch.

I’ve seen the blogs light up this week around Dell’s announcement of their new corporate blog Dell One2One.  It’s kind of Dell’s take on Microsoft’s Channel 9 and the latest effect of what I’m going to call the “Scoble Revolution” in corporate America.

Just now I received a bulletin from Symantec announcing their first ever public facing blog entitled “Security Response Weblog”.  Wow – what a warm and fuzzy [corporate generated] name guys!  Someone from Microsoft’s naming group must have joined Symantec.  Here’s the announcement I got:

Symantec invites you to visit the recently launched Security Response Blog.

On Friday, June 23, 2006 US Pacific Time, Security Response began a series of blog entries on the public website. More than 20 Security Response engineers, architects, developers, research analysts, and security gurus from the Security Response team have signed up to post information on Symantec’s first-ever public facing blog.
http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/

They best watch out because that URL is just too damn easy to remember! 

Anyway they’ve got a few articles up already and by reading the headlines on the page (why not full content?) (Dell, same question for you RSS feeds?) it seems like another marketing avenue, which would be sad.

Hopefully Dell’s and Symantc’s efforts will be able to hilight the employees and their stories instead of being another avenue for the corporate face.  Good luck to both teams!

PS – I hope Symantec doesn’t get mad at me for posting that – the announcement of their public weblog had their standard “this message is intended…” disclaimer on it.  🙂

When the UI looks like Frankenstein’s progress bar on marijuana, how is the end user supposed to have clue one on what is going on?
– Vista’s Powerless Power Users: Someone Neutered My Defrag!

This is perhaps one of the best quotes I’ve ever read describing a software interface.  And I have to agree with the conclusions – what is MS doing with their defrag tools?  To me it looks like it’s getting worse with Vista (I can’t even choose what drive to defrag), but you can at least (finally) schedule it … whatever “it” is.

About 4 or 5 years ago, when I was still working as a consultant, I was brought into a firm to deploy a Blackberry Enterprise Server and about 10 devices.  We worked closely with AT&T Wireless and even brought in their RIM liason (he was from the home office in Canada) to train our users.

I sat in the training meeting and asked few questions of the RIM guy.  Specifically I quizzed if they were planning support for Bluetooth or polyphonic ring tones.  I was told, with an air of disdain, that “business users wouldn’t want those features, and RIM is solely focused on the needs of business users.”

That makes the comments today by RIM co-CEO Jim Balsille ring in my ears with sweet, sweet irony.  Not only does my current Blackberry 8700c support Bluetooth and polyphonic ring tones, but coming models will have much more…

“Adding in media players, removable storage and image capturing will only further that (growth). “Even enterprise employees have a life beyond that and these lifestyle devices will be a part of that. Gaming, IM, personalization… it’s just as exciting as the enterprise space.” [via BBHub]