Friday, July 14, 2006

Net Neutrality

If you haven't heard of Net Neutrality, it is one of the biggest issues that we have to deal with in regards to the internet. Jon Stewart explains:







If you don't already watch it, The Daily Show is one of the best shows on TV.

The concept behind Net Neutrality is that the telcos would be implementing a "fast lane" that they would charge content providers for. This means that companies like Amazon and Google would have to pay more than they are already paying to be able to provide consistent, good service to their customers. What this also means is that small companies won't be able to afford to provide the same service to their customers. Websites like Youtube.com and other start ups will not be on a level playing field with the established companies.

This concept is nothing more than a scheme for telcos to establish further control over the internet and put more money in their pockets. It will stifle growth and ingenuity and end up costing the consumer money out of their pockets, albeit indirectly.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

RIAA

For those that don't know, the RIAA is the strongarm gestapo organization that sues kids and the elderly for alleged file sharing. I say "alleged" since it seems that they don't really seem to have proof when they go into these lawsuits, they just hope to strongarm people into settling and make an example out of them.

Here is the latest:
RIAA loses in file sharing case

As a bonus, in the second to last paragraph they have a link to the story about the RIAA suing a dead grandmother that didn't own a computer for allegedly sharing gangster rap music over the internet.

Maybe this should have gone in my other post about companies that create adversarial relationships with their customers. After all, I'm not sure how they intend to develop business when they are suing people that they might want as customers at some point.

Shadowshopper.com

A friend of mine was extolling the virtues of mystery shopping to me, so one afternoon while I was bored I did a search for mystery shopping companies. I came across Shadowshopper.com and decided to sign up for their free bronze account.

When you are signing up, it is explained to you that one of the reasons to upgrade to a better account is so that you can get email alerts for mystery shopping assignments. I figured I didn't want email alerts, I'd just check the job boards manually when I felt like it.

What they don't tell you is that you will get emails anyway, but instead of being an informative alert, it will have the bulk of the email snipped off with a message saying that if you upgrade your account you can see the whole thing. As an added insult, the job boards that I thought I'd peruse at my leisure also have snipped listings. Apparently, the bronze members only have access to listings that are past a certain age, and typically that assignment is expired by then.

Not to be deterred, I took advantage of an offer to upgrade my account for one month instead of paying for a whole year. I went ahead and paid $9.99 for the Gold package figuring I'd just get the max access and see if it's worth it.

Turn out, no, it's not worth it. Once you have access to the listings, you find out that just about every company that posts a job wants you to go register at their site, as well. Shadowshopper.com is definately not the central hub of activity that it claims to be. Basically, if you already know the names of mystery shopping companies, you can just save the money that you'd pay to shadowshopper.com and register directly.

To rub salt in your wound, I registered with another site, and it is some third-party scheduler that asked me to register with another site.

This is just all too much work for what I thought was going to be some free pizza every now and then. Save your money and time.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 3

After successfully using IE7 Beta 2 for several months, I installed Beta 3 only to have it crash repeatedly. Oh well, back to the drawing board...

Aversarial relationships

It never ceases to amaze me about large companies that spend years building adversarial relationships with their customers and then when an alternative is offered, they are astonished when the customers leave.

Case in point: Phone Companies. My dad used to tell me that back in the day the phone company was worse than it is now, but some of the things that he told me are a little hard to believe. What isn't hard to believe is the gouging that my generation has been through with the phone company.

Here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, it used to be long distance to call from Dallas to Fort Worth. At the border between the cities, the area codes changed and it was long distance to call even 3 or 4 miles sometimes. To get around this, the phone company introduced the Metro Line. For $60 a month, you had the priviledge of calling a couple miles down the road without having to pay long distance.

When you had a problem with your line, you got to endure endless teleprompting to talk to a rude, less than helpful operator. They nickle and dimed you for everything and every feature, too.

Then the magic of inexpensive cell phones came. In 1994, I completely shut off my land line and got a Sprint PCS phone. For $60 a month, I got 600 anytime minutes that I could use to call anywhere in the US. That was more than sufficient for me, and I haven't had a phone line since.

I guess it's normal these days for young single people to not have land lines. VOIP is another technology people are leaving telcos for. I prefer Vonage and no one is the wiser that I'm not really on a land line. It allows me to use my regular telephones and acts like a standard phone line. We had our house built 2 years ago, and the wires that the phone company uses are still hangining loose off the side of my house.

Now the telcos have figured out that they stand to lose more and more customers each year. So, instead of making their services cheaper and easier to use, they are looking to blackmail backbone users with a tiered internet structure where content providers would have to pay an extortion fee so their content would be delivered reliably.

Cell phone companies are running into a similar problem. They have been gouging their customers for years. You pay $40 a month for 600 minutes, but then every additional minute is $.30. Now with widespread wi-fi access, you can use VOIP technology in increasingly wider areas on the move. It won't be too much longer before you can take a wi-fi device such as the D-Link DPH-540 and make VOIP calls from within major metro areas. Some cities are entertaining the concept of a public wireless network which would eliminate nearly every cost associated with making a call.

Of course the Cell phone companies are still going about their old ways. Hear me now Cellular Companies! It's not too late! People don't want the hassle of alternate technologies, they are tired of getting bent over every month when it comes time to pay!

My cousin the future cop








My aunt sent me these pictures of my cousin who is an intern with a major police department. Due to geography I haven't seen my cousin since she was knee high to a grasshopper, so it was thoroughly amusing to see these pictures. She'll need to get a haircut before she becomes their sniper, though.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Pocket e-Sword

A few months ago, I started looking around for a Pocket PC Bible software. Since I wasn't sure if I was going to be keeping my Windows Mobile device, I didn't want to invest in software only to be stuck holding the software with no device if I wound up getting a Palm device such as a Treo.

I stumbled across Pocket e-Sword by Rick Meyers. Ok, maybe not stumbled, since I Googled "free bible pocket pc" and it was the first result. I downloaded it, installed it, and then installed a couple different versions of the Bible.

The software runs flawlessly on my Windows Mobile 5 Cingular 8125. It takes about 5 seconds to start, but once it starts, there is no noticable hesitation in the software.

Navigation is simple using either the stylus or the hardware directional pad on the device. Using the stylus, you can jump to any verse in the Bible with 5 clicks. The directional pad lets you scroll through a chapter by pressing up or down, or jump chapters using the left and right.

If you load multiple versions of the Bible into the software, you can switch versions and remain on the same chapter. There is also a function to show multiple versions of the same passage on the same screen. You can also load commentaries in and view them along with the verses.

There's the usual search features, allowing various searches for words or phrases and limiting of search parameters. It is limited to searching the current version of the Bible that you have selected.

There's a bookmark function which I haven't gotten much use out of since it's so easy to navigate directly to the passage you are looking for.

There is a highlighting function which lets you highlight in 9 different colors. It's not actually a free-text highlight, but instead highlights an entire verse.

My favorite function is the Verse Note function. It allows you to attach text to a verse. I've found this very useful while entering notes from sermons directly into the relevant verse.

The software also handles VGA and landscape. My device switches between portrait and landscape when I slide the keyboard out, and the software keeps up just fine. I don't have VGA, so I can't really comment on how it looks.

A full listing of the functions can be found here.

The only thing I wish it had is the New International Version translation available. There are some that seem to read similarly, though, so it's not much of a limitation in my opinion.

This is such a great piece of software that people would pay for it. The fact it is free makes this a no-brainer.

Epinions.com

I wrote a few reviews for Epinions.com yesterday. It's a nice looking and informative site, but it doesn't seem to be as immediately informative as CNET.com reviews. The reviews written by average people have different angles than those written by the professionals.

A professional reviewer likely has several similar widgets to compare the widget to. This can give them insight that the average consumer won't have. On the other hand, the professional reviewer doesn't spend much time with said widget, so they typically can't comment on the durability and long term usage of it.

The typical consumer won't have as much of a baseline to compare something to, so reviews are more often either rants about something that they are having problems with, or a glowing review about something. Then there's that small segment that will refuse to acknowledge that they bought a piece of junk.

I don't want to seem like I'm saying that there aren't great, balanced reviews on Epinions.com. The inherent problem with the site is that you have to sift through the reviews to find ones that you find relevant and trustworthy. The site designers have done a decent job of giving you tools to help you with the process, however.

Overall, I think Epinions.com gives the consumer one more tool in the journey towards making a good decision.

Excitement for the day

I usually get in to work earlier than most of my co-workers which lets me get stuff done when the office is nice an quiet and people aren't asking me for stuff that they should be able to do themselves. This morning I was sitting at my desk enjoying the song "I Feel Love" by Blue Man Group and one of the ladies that works in our building came in shouting, "There's a fire in the break room!" On a related note, I've noticed that everywhere that I've worked, people seem to think that the IT department is the group to go to unless otherwise directed. Anyway, since the IT department was the fire department today, I went to investigate.

Our company is very generous in the facilities that it provides for employees in the break room. We're not Google or anything, but we have multiple refrigerators, soda fountains, iced tea, microwaves, toasters, etc. The downside is that no one takes it upon themselves to clean things like the crumb tray in the bottom of the toaster. It turns out that if you never empty them, they will catch fire.

When I saw the flames, I thought to myself, "It's a good thing that we had our fire extinguishers serviced last week." Then I turned around and saw the empty hook where the extinguisher hung until the guy took it last week to have it replaced but hadn't gotten around to replacing it yet. By then, a small crowd was gathering to stare at the flames and one of the people began filling a pitcher with water. Was no one paying attention in third grade when the fire people came to the school and told you not to throw water on an electrical fire?

On an anti-climactic note, I grabbed the toaster, yanked the plug, and then carried it outside. There was an extinguisher in the lobby that I used to put it out, and as soon as the crisis was over and it needed to be cleaned up, the crowd dispersed instantly.

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Jabra BT620s

The Jabra BT620s is a combination of stereo headphones and a wireless headset. It can be "paired" with both a phone and a music player or PC. It's a great concept in a world where people carry both iPods and cell phones.

The right side of the unit has a button that will play/pause/stop the music, and buttons to skip tracks forward and backward. The left side of the unit has a button to connect/dial/take calls and volume buttons.

I had some trouble pairing it with my computer initially, but it may have been user error as it eventually cleared itself up once I did the process over a few times. Once paired with both my phone and my computer, I started listening to my MP3 collection through the stereo headset. The buttons to control your player work as advertised, with only a slight delay from the time you touch the button until something happens.

The sound quality was passable, for headphones. They sounded similar to my $35 set of Sonys that I use at work to drown out the din of my office.

When a call comes in, you tap the button on the left side of the headset and it pauses your music and takes the call. Once you hang up, the music resumes. This is a great feature for people that will use it with their new iPod bluetooth adapter and a cell phone on the move. There's no reason to ever take the devices out of your pockets. The headset can also trigger the voice dial, so when you tap the left button, it will pause the music and let you make an outgoing call using a voice tag that you have set up previously.

Personally, I think these are a great buy at $50. The problem is that they are around $100. When you consider that you have to buy an iPod adapter or a USB bluetooth dongle to pair your computer with it, you're spending an awful lot of money to rid yourself of some wires. Of course the convenience of being able to pause your music and take a call with only one button may make it all worthwhile for some people.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Bluetooth

Bluetooth has got to be one of the coolest technologies around. It's got a ton of potential, but it has yet to gain widespread acceptance.

Wikipedia entry: Bluetooth

My company works with Jabra so the account manager gave me a couple wireless headsets to try. I used to mock the people that walked around with the little things in their ear, but I've twice forgotten that I was using it and walked into a store with it on.

I have a Kodak Printer Dock Plus Series 3 that has integrated Bluetooth. It's pretty cool because you can print wirelessly from your camera phones that have bluetooth. It's a neat party trick, but not a compelling reason to have bluetooth, admittedly. What was compelling, however, is the fact that I was able to completely remove the printer cable once I installed a Jabra A320s USB bluetooth dongle on the computer. It's only one cable, but I picture a world where all the peripherals connect with the computer wirelessly, and you only have to deal with power cords or replacing batteries.

Things that I wish were all cordless: Mouse, keyboard, speakers, headset, printer, and scanner. I've already got a cordless keyboard and mouse, and now a cordless printer. I just have to get a bluetooth adapter for my main printer, and find out if I can go cordless with a USB scanner. Based on the performance of the Jabra BT620s stereo headset I'm using, I don't think bluetooth speakers are to the point where I want to replace my existing set.

I think once this technology matures a little more, we can look forward to a world with fewer cables.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Adsense

I finally got around to getting my adsense account set up. No doubt I'll be a billionare soon.

Ok, really, I know no one will really want to read my random thoughts much, but it really surprised me what some of the people I know are making while doing no real work. One of the guys that works for me makes over $300 a month on a blog that he only updates once a month or so. He won't tell me what the blog is, so I assume it isn't appropriate to tell your boss.

I don't expect to see any money from adsense, but it's an interesting exercise.