jtnt://life/unedited

At 3:42pm, I submitted a trouble ticket to Site5.com support.

At 3:57pm, I got the following response:

Good afternoon,

I’m sorry you’re facing this roadblock! How frustrating.

I’m transferring your ticket to Beau Henderson, one of our senior engineers. He’s experienced with Fantastico, and expressly requested to help with this issue. Sit tight, and you should be hearing from him momentarily.

If you’re not getting this level of service from your web host, there’s no reason you shouldn’t move your site(s) to Site5. This is by no means the first time they’ve responded to me in minutes. Web hosting is something that should just work. And Site5 has consistently done that for me for years.

And it’s not just simple things that get taken care of in a jiffy. I’ve had seriously complex issues completely resolved wihin minutes and with nary a question from them or need for me to explain more. They just get it.

I have an referral program link that I could use, but I like them so much, I’m not using it for any of the above links. These guys are so good, I want people to move to them just for their own sake. Check out their hosting packages, and you’ll see that in addition to their top-knotch support, they offer some seriously hefty disk space and bandwidth as well.

(If you want to join up with Site5 and you want to throw a few bucks my way in the process, there’s really no harm in that.)

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UPDATE: Before I could even finish typing up this post, I got a resolution:

I have had to re-install fantastico on your system which has applied a solution to this issue. Give this a try now and let us know if you encounter any further issues.

So-called life hacks are starting to smack of the insipid Hints from Heloise. And this excerpt from a “Finding-your-car hacks” post on LifeHacker is up there on the list of most obvious things ever put into print:

Once you start paying attention to where you parked, it soon becomes an easier-to-remember habit.

#1 finding-your-car hack? Remembering where you parked it.

I predict, nay, I hope for a backlash against all these life hacking sites. I don’t know how one would stage a backlash against a slew of web sites, but I hope some enterprising person figures this out and employs these tactics on these bandwidth-wasting, time-sucking (GTD?) sites.

Go up to try out Basecamp for the first time, and it goes down for maintenance five minutes into getting going.

At 11pm EDT. When do they think people work? During the day?

Web apps like Basecamp should never go offline. And if they do, it should be in the middle of the night (say, 4am, since I have to think most of their users are in North America).

I feel a bit guilty about my previous post on Dreamhost, and feel that at the very least some more information and clarification is in order.

Dreamhost is rightfully held up as one of the best and most responsive hosts in the industry. Not just out there to make a buck but to provide top-notch service to their customers. They see the value in good hosting and the importance of it to their customers, many of whom rely on them to run their own businesses.

Let me also add that Dreamhost does offer a variety of great and unique services, such as its easy to use list management system, which I wish I had known about before I wrote my own for my company.

They are also to be recognized for thier involvement in civic causes.

My only real gripe about them (since pretty much everything else about them has been positive) is that their control panel is not as easy to use as some others I’ve come across.

So, I apologize to Dreamhost for dragging your name through the mud unnecessarily.

I am convinced that the reason why so many bloggers are so gung-ho about Dreamhost Web Hosting is because they have a fairly lucrative referral deal going. Because, in reality, their control panel is an eyesore, and worse, is often confusing. Most of all their concept of users is so varied and confusing, I’m still not sure what my passwords are for the various different users they make you create for each thing (admin, mail, ftp…).

All that said, everyone should use Dreamhost, because I’ll make a bunch of money if you do.

I don’t understand it when places offer minuscule discounts on multi-year subscsription purchages. Here are some examples:

Flickr: 1 year = $24.95. 2 years = $47.99. Savings = $1.91 or $0.96/year. Woohoo!

Network Solutions: 1 year = $34.99. 2 years = $29.99. Savings = $5 or $2.50/year. I’m rich.

I would guess that the same principles that say pricing something at $34.99 instead of $35.00 will generate more sales are at work here. Some people aren’t really looking at the actual savings. But still, how does the prospect of saving less than a dollar a year provide an incentive for me to basically double my out-of-pocket expenses right now?

If people are still falling for these Jedi-marketing tricks, I wouldn’t be too quick to jump on the bandwagon that the internet is making smarter consumers.

Via Slashdot:

How Battlestar Galactica Killed TV: “Don Melanson writes ‘Following up on the MPAA going after torrent sites, you may be interested in Mindjack’s latest feature - Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV by Mark Pesce. It includes a post-script written in reponse to the recent Torrent site shutdowns.’ From the article: ‘While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves. From its premiere, Battlestar Galactica has been the most popular program ever to air on the SciFi Channel, and its audiences have only grown throughout the first series. Piracy made it possible for ‘word-of-mouth’ to spread about Battlestar Galactica.’”

This is how it works, people. Just like when bands let people tape and freely trade their music. Ever heard of the Grateful Dead? Phish? Dave Matthews Band? All of them owe their success in part to embracing this sort open trade. They knew that the more people that heard their music the more people would like, and thus buy, their music.

The other part? Quality product. Yeah, that’s the hard part.

I’m on the look-out for a simple multiple clipboard utility. Basically, just an app that allows you to keep keep a list/databse of the snippets you Edit: Copy. I need no other fancy features. My only requirement is that it live in the menubar (optional: contextual menu) and not have an icon that shows up in the OS X Dock.

I’ve run into the following apps:

• Butler
• CopyPaste-X
• iClip
• iPaste
• Spike

CopyPaste seems to fit my needs (and have some pretty sick advanced features if you want to use them, but they are out of the way if you don’t), but I’ve just downloaded iPaste, so the race is still on. And I’m still open to suggestions.

Smart Marketing agency and my employer, Erickson Barnett, launched the new Ascend Therapeutics site yesterday.

Today I came up with an idea that I think could warrant a patent. After doing a single search for “browser” and “bookmark” against the US Patent Office database, I knew that knew that it could land a patent.

Check out some of the beauties I found in just a few minutes poking around the USPO’s virtual filing cabinets:

US Patent 6,851,060: User control of web browser user data

Specifically, allowing a user to see his/her authentication information and saved cookies.

US Patent 6,853,980: System for selecting, distributing, and selling fonts.

Specifically, an online font store that displays related fonts with the currently viewed font.

US Patent 6,772,124: Content-driven speech- or audio-browser

Specifically, a search engine for audio files.

Sorry these are so web-centric. There are obvious, completely novel things patented in other areas, too, though:

US Patent 6,832,916: Soap dispenser hand wash interval timer

This is literally nothing more than a soap dispenser with a sign that says, WASH UP with Soap and Water. Get rid of germs in only 15 seconds” over it, as the patent says that the user “may use an ordinary clock” in determining the intervals.

I bet you never would have expected to find an image like this in the United States Patent and Trademark Office database. I bet you’d be even more surpised if you found out it was a drawing of a patented beer glass.

Another fine example of American ingenuity in design. Form really does follow function.

And then there are those that are completely justified and somewhat ironic in their titling, like US Patent 6,862,223, and I quote:

MONOLITHIC, COMBO NONVOLATILE MEMORY ALLOWING BYTE, PAGE AND BLOCK WRITE WITH NO DISTURB AND DIVIDED-WELL IN THE CELL ARRAY USING A UNIFIED CELL STRUCTURE AND TECHNOLOGY WITH A NEW SCHEME OF DECODER AND LAYOUT

Monolithic indeed.

It’s like the first time I got my picture in the paper for being a cub scout in a local parade, but much geekier… I am quoted in a Wired News article on the security oversights Apple made with Dashboard Widgets.

“I hope they see the danger, if only for their marketing,” said Tolson. “All it will take is one seriously nasty widget to completely wreck (Apple’s) image of ‘no viruses’ or ‘Macs are inherently more secure’ message. And you better believe that would become news.”

I said it then, and I’ll say it now… “Nasty widgets” is fun to say.

GimpShop is the open source image editing software, the GIMP (the worst UI in the world and perfect example of why OSS isn’t in the mainstream yet), hacked, er patched, to look and feel like Photoshop.

I’m in the middle of the 40mb download (not bad, considering Photoshop would likely be well over 100mb), but from the screenshots, this looks like it could be a killer combination.

Now available for OS X, Linux, and Windows XP.

Sweet. This guy should be rich.

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UPDATE: It doesn’t change the UI as much as I would have hoped/thought. It organizes the menus better (like Photoshop’s), but the same schlocky interface problems that seem to always plague projects like the GIMP remain. I guess I should have known, but I got so excited about the prospect of a more Photoshop-like GIMP that I got a little carried away and a bit too hopeful. Damn. Nice work, still.