Category — Uncategorized

Pop marketing quiz:

Q: What’s the best way to treat your most loyal customers?

A: Threaten to sue them over copyright that’s how.

It seems that Ford took this moronic move when they caught wind the Black Mustang Club shot pictures of it’s members cars and made a calendar.  They sent Cafepress a takedown notice claiming all the images in the calendar are the property of Ford. I’m so glad we turned in the wife’s Escape early before the lease ended.

I want to hear that meeting.  I’m sure it showed up on everyone’s Outlook calendar as “How to big a colossal douchebag to our best customers.”  This makes about as much sense as Harley-Davidson going after every biker dude and chick that has an H-D logo on their body. Here you have a group of customers who are so loyal to your brand, they form a club and you tell them that while they may have legal title to the vehicle, Ford still owns it.

Original BMC forum message

Update: Turns out Ford wasn’t the one that raised the stink. Cafepress was being overly cautious. BMC Forum Thread.

Omar Shahine recounts a horror story about getting stranded in Mexico with his wife and one year old thanks to Alaska Airlines massive incompetence. When was the last time you heard some one say how great an airline was? Omar’s story is not new (and he admits as much) and not isolated to Alaska Airlines. Why does air travel have to suck so bad?

I certainly don’t miss the travel I did while at Microsoft. To their credit, they contract with an awesome travel agency who’s emergency line can literally move mountains.  Our family is booked for two trips this year (the most recent we booked is my wife’s inaugural trip to Vegas later this year) and it is stories like these that have me cringing every time I think about getting on a plane.

Looks better large (click to see a large version). This is some fog coming off of the Lake Evinrude at the Milwaukee County Zoo.  I’m sure it has a name, but it escapes me right now.

Tech Notes

20D, EF-s 17-85, 1/125 @ f/9, ISO 400

I got the following email this afternoon:

I know enough that the email isn’t legit. First off, $15 sales tax on a $421.85 purchase? That works out to 3.5%. Given the purchase was listed as shipping to “Nancy L Heck, 90 Monrovia St. Beverly Hills, CA 90015 United States” I know California sales tax has to be higher than than. Secondly, a $420 bridal set?  In Beverly Hills?  Come on.

But I thought I’d see what was behind it. In this email there was a link to dispute the transaction. “OMG! I didn’t buy a Gold Bridal set! <click>” That site was hosted on an IP Address that WhoIS said belongs to Zocalo CoffeeShop. Going to the root of the site showed it was just a simple LaCie NAS device hosting a few pages for redirecting the unsuspecting user elsewhere. Something tells me there is one of these sitting with in WiFi Range of the place, sucking off of their Internet connection:

The redirect takes to to another IP address, this one with a hosting company out of Mississauga, ON. The site links into what is obviously a user directory called “test” and runs a fairly convincing looking site that looks like a PayPal login:

The sad thing is, this must still work in this day and age. Knee jerk reaction must be, I didn’t buy this, let me dispute it. If one person falls for it, their bank account could be gone in seconds, and that is all they are hoping for. This person somehow got around a few spam filters as the message was in my inbox. Meanwhile, some coffee shop probably doesn’t know it is helping harvest PayPal passwords.

It took me all of five minutes of looking at what was hosted on those sites and querying WhoIS (for the love of all that his holy, never go to those sites with scripting turned on in your browser - I use the awesome NoScript plugin for FireFox.)  It took me long to gather the screen shots and post this entry.

It just goes to show if you’ve got WiFi at home, you should secure it - you never know who could be using it. Last night, the neighbor kid knocked on the front door asking if he could have the password for our network so he could use his new iPod Touch he got for Christmas. I told him no. I like the kid and all, and he saved me the pain of mowing the lawn this past summer, but you never can be too safe. Plus with as cheap as WiFi routers are these days, for the price of a few tracks off of iTunes you too can be living the wireless life.

I love my co-workers.  A week or so ago, I mentioned my wife wanted to get a Wii since they looked like a video game she’d actually have fun playing.  We weren’t about to fork out the cash on eBay for one, but if we could get one for retail, we’d get it.

Crappy Blackjack Cameraphone Pic

Fast forward to today - I got a call from one of my coworker out running an errand at Best Buy and they had one in stock.  Looks like game-on this Christmas!  Just need to figure out how many controllers come in the box and what else we’re going to need.

I don’t keep an eye on Microsoft stock like I used to.  As a cathartic move, I dumped most of my stock when I left, though I held on to a small amount from my final ESPP purchase.  I was firing up a browser to debug some code today and caught the quote for MSFT - 37.15 at the time.  Crazy.  When I started back in June of 2000, my strike price for my initial option grant was somewhere around $67 (so $33.5 split-adjusted).  Those options were above water, maybe a month.  Almost seven years later, and the share price is barely above that mark.  All I can say is I’ve had a good ROI on that final ESPP purchase.

While this looks to be an older story, it is a rare one of a large retailer getting customer service right.

As a runner, I buy a few pairs of running shoes a year.  While I really try to support my local running store, I might try ordering my next pair from Zappos.

On the way into work this morning I was listening to NPR as I usually do and at the top of the hour they announced the date, September 11th.  I wondered to myself if that will ever be merely a date to me again, if it will follow me to my death bed as an event.  Probably the later.

I was no where near the East Coast on September 11, 2001 - I was actually across the country in Seattle.  I’d flown in on September 10th for a technical “Airlift” which was (is?) a Microsoft term for an internal technical briefing for field staff.  I think it was for Mobile Information Sever. I remember the clock radio clicking on at 6am pacific to KUOW and Carl Kasell doing the news at the top of the hour. There was mention of a “possible plane crash” at the World Trade Center in New York, which got my attention.  I figured that’s big enough news, CNN should have something on.  Sure enough they did, and less than 10 minutes later I watched along with the rest of the country as the events that would permanently become identifiable by only the date they occurred on unfolded on live TV.

My story is that of a distant observer, and for the most part unremarkable.  Our briefing continued on - the only interesting thing was that it was held in the building that the Microsoft side of MSNBC was housed in, yet all the TV’s were tuned to CNN.  My return flight was canceled and there was no sign of when I could get back to Madison, WI.  Two Chicago based co-worker and I decided to drive back, and did so in shifts for 32 hours straight, each rotating through getting to sleep on a pillow we picked up at a K-Mart in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.  All three of us just wanted to see our families again.

Like, I said, fairly unremarkable.  Yet, two stories that came across RSS today are from Penelope Trunk and Runners World. In particular, click through to Penelope’s accounts posted the day after.  Say what you will about what actually happened that day.  There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there, many which are quite plausible.  Either way, it still happened, and I’m always moved to read these accounts and my heart go out to those who can’t tell there survivor stories.

For a hard dose reality, check out the archival footage from the live broadcasts of that day at television archive.

So, I’m a bit late to the game in watching the update from Apple that happened yesterday. I’m watching the keynote in spurts as I’m making some code updates and saw that they are offering ringtones on iTunes now as well as being able to create ringtones from purchased songs. I don’t get this. Pay a buck for a song, then pay another buck to take a 30 second segment of that song and make it play when your cell phone rings. The fact that people pay for this is incredible.

Going back even three years to my Audiovox 5600, any WAV or WMA file could be a ringtone. Cost? Free. Being the 24 nerd I am, I’ve had mine as the sound the desk phones at CTU make for quite a while now. In fact, during the past two season premiers I did a double take to make sure it wasn’t my phone ringing when it was one on screen. Given that show pretty much jumped the shark last season, I’ll probably have to find something new.

I’ll give Apple credit - they spin this as a super cool, neato feature and they will make money off of it, for sure. I just don’t get it though.

I knew 22 miles was going to suck, but with all the mental preparation, you know what?  It sucked. 

4:40 all said an done.  I need to go back and re-trace the route on the USA Track and Field site to see how close to 22 I came. I know I was in the ballpark, but that time seems a bit slow so I think I may have gone further.  My 20 mile time was 4:10, so 30 mins for 2 miles seems a bit off.

I still think I’m line to meet my goal of finishing while the course is still open. The Chicago marathon finish line closes 6:30 after the opening gun, and given I’m not going to be starting until well after the opening gun, my goal is a sub 6:00 time.  Doing the math on today’s run puts me right there (5:50ish).  I know there is no way I could have gone another four miles today.  I’ll be interested to see what my 24 mile time is in a couple weeks.