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Na No Wri Mo

I am going to participate in Na No Wri Mo this month. However, instead of writing a thousand words for a novel, I am going to write a nice blog post about something relevant. Luckily, I’ve been so bad at keeping my blog updated this past year that I have plenty to write about.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to write:

  • a guide for Timeline images on Facebook
  • why nobody should rely on Facebook Like pages to get their message out to their constituencies
  • NationBuilder best practices (as I see them)
  • my take on the hissyfit temper tantrum thrown by many Democrats and liberals against NationBuilder for their deal with the Republican Liberty Caucus
  • my voting recommendations (I’ll probably do this one first)
  • my Disneyland and Disney California Adventures trip, and
  • Hamburger Mary’s in West Hollywood.

My goal is to blog at least once every day.

Wish me luck!

Boycott the Left!

The people on the left side in this chart are spending $25 million to prevent YOU and ME from knowing what is in our food. This is anti-consumer. They SUCK and you should join my BOYCOTT of them. More information here.

Boycott the left … side of this chart!

(Sorry for the play on words – I’ve never had an opportunity to say “boycott the left” so I couldn’t pass it up.)

My favorite belt

In the mid-nineties, I borrowed this belt from a friend. I liked it so much he let me keep it. I’ve loved this belt for a long time. Yesterday, my dog ate half of it and turned it into poo.

I still have the buckle, which is, I suppose, the important part. As you can see, the belt has no prong. This is extremely uncommon and what makes this belt super awesome and the best belt I’ve ever worn. I’ve never been able to find another quite like it. I’d look on the internet for a replacement, but the Internet is a sea of prong belts.

I can replace the leather part at any of those freaky leather bondage places down in Folsom. But in the interim, I’d like to get another one of these exact belts.

So, my question to all of you: Do you know what these types of belts are called?

Faire photo before / after

Some of the Faire photos I’m seeing on the Sea Dog group have that dual-exposure problem when half the group is in sunlight and the other half is in shade. You either get overexposure of the people in sunlight or (more often) underexposure of the people in the shade. I did five minutes of clean-up on this one and was able to pull out a lot of details from the shadow. If I had the full-resolution version to work with, I would have done a lot better, but this was a test.

(OK, it looks like the handle on my slider has stopped working. Look for the green sliver in the middle – you can grab on that and slide it back and forth.)



before
after

Form troubles on Febreze website

When I have a product question, I like to go to the product’s website to find the answer.  It’s not uncommon to not be able to find the information you’re looking for: a startling number of sites don’t have FAQs; the information is organized specifically to support sales & marketing.  That’s just the reality these days, since the website in most companies has been folded into the marketing department.

But every once in a while, I run into a website flaw so annoying it should serve as an example to others: “don’t do this every dumb thing.”

Alex and I have a new dog. We’re finding that even though we are washing him once a week, the dog smell starts to be noticeable on day five after the bath. Alex suggested we get some febreze. I like the idea in theory: something we can spray on our stuff that neutralizes the odor. However, in practice, I crossed out febreze from the list of things I would ever buy because the perfume in the product is so overwhelmingly heavy. The perfume in febreze is  so strong it gives me a headache. It’s not as bad as Glade air “freshener” but I put it in the same category: so-called “fresh” smells that come from a can are never fresh and never “light.”

I heard an interesting story about febreze just a week ago on a podcast. The takeaway from the story (for me, anyways) was that febreze, in its original incarnation, had no scent. It was simply an odor blocker. That’s exactly what I want: A scent-free version of febreze that won’t give me headaches from the cloying, noxious, chemical perfume smell they add so it sells in the car-on-the-lawn states.

febreze pet odor eliminatorSo, as one does, I went to the febreze website to find out if they offered such a thing. I saw every conceivable added scent, even a “pet odor” version, but that says “scented” on it. No dice.

I did, however, find a contact form, so at least I could ask my question on this Saturday morning and perhaps have an answer sometime on Monday.

After filling out all sixteen fields of the form and hitting submit, the form spits back the dumbest, most useless of error descriptions:

Febreze website contact form error messageThis is god damn annoying. I took the time to fill out the whole form, only to be defeated by some half-baked javascript. This is a nightmare from a user-experience perspective. The  form has not been thought out. I should never see a message like this. And if it happened to me, you can bet it’s happening to other people.

Macworld 2012 at Moscone Center West

Alex and I went to Macworld 2012 today at Moscone Center West. Macworld is like a grandparent: she’s beloved, but each year she shrinks a little bit. And when you see her around the edges, you can’t help worrying how much longer she’ll be around.

Macworld is turning into the iPad/iPhone show. I think three quarters of the booths are device cases, covers, arms, attachments, cleaners, accessories or other related gear.  Although I’ve been an Apple Computer person since my Apple II, I’m not much into the gadgets. I finally have a newish iPod, which I love, but not the iPhone nor an iPad. And so really, three quarters of the show is not for me. As a Mac user, I’m used to feeling left out, but I’m not used to feeling left out at Macworld.

And, like I said, it’s shrinking, bit by bit, it seems. If things go on their present course, there will be nothing there but iPad and iPhone booths in a few years. Well, maybe by then I’ll have an iPad.

I made the following observations on the MacWorld 2012 show floor:  

1. Seeing the data recovery booth is off-putting, at best. Yes, I know they are providing a valuable service. Yes, I understand they are great at what they do. But advertising for data recovery is like advertising for chemo. There may be a few of us who really need it right now, but the rest of us avert our eyes, superstitiously, in the hopes that we never, ever need to remember the name of that booth. (I’ve already forgotten).

2. The boys bathroom in Moscone Center needs hooks above the urinals – the same kind of hooks they provide in women’s stalls for their purses. All of us male convention goers have our bag of goodies and all of us go pee and not a god damn one of us likes setting our bag of goodies on the floor anywhere near the god damn urinal. Disgusting!  We also don’t like the alternative – trying to hold our bag with one hand while trying to unzip and unbutton and all the rest, while trying not to pee on our bulging, unwieldy swag bag.

Please, Moscone Center. Give us the god damn hooks. It could not possibly cost that much to install. You could even use the cheap-o plastic ones from the container store a few doors down. It would cost, at most, a hundred bucks.

3. No wifi on the convention show floor is mind-numbingling stupid. Really. Yes, I know, Moscone Center gets a king’s ransom for selling wifi at incredibly jacked-up prices to the booth owners (we’re talking north of a thousand dollars each in some cases), money Moscone Center won’t get if there’s public wifi on the show floor. But Jesus H. Christ, this is the iPad show and every one of these iPads is hobbled without wifi. Let up! Those of us attendees who want to do online things with our laptops can’t do any of those things on the show floor. It’s incredibly frustrating because we all, every one of us, knows the reason: The wifi signal is blocked by Moscone Center’s sickening greed.

4. The show floor is about ten degrees hotter than it should be. It’s always this way, every show, every god damn time. Why can’t it be cooler? Why, oh why? I ask this every god damn show.

 

It’s time to stop using GoDaddy

GoDaddy has been a supporter of nearly every intrusive government regulation imposed on the Internet by governments. Via Reddit: GoDaddy supports SOPA, I’m transferring 51 domains & suggesting a move your domain day.  And then again via Boing Boing, the adorable David Rusensko narrowly averted a Go-Daddy-caused meltdown that would have impacted tens of thousands of his customers:

“They had received a complaint about the content of a site, and that they were removing the DNS entries for weebly.com because of it. I asked him if they had contacted us previously — he responded that they hadn’t. The site in question featured a bad review of a local business, and that business had complained.”

Should you need to register a domain, there are several non-SOPA supporting alternatives available, like HostGator, Name.com and EasyDNS to name just three.

UPDATE: Yeah, they changed their position on SOPA. So what. They still suck. Jonathan Mann (sings) it better than I can say it:

Hypocrisy

Conservatives who turn livid when you bring up the Gingrich-hospital-wife-cancer-divorce story are the same conservatives who brought up Chappaquiddick at nearly every mention of Teddy Kennedy.