Archive for September, 2007
I was interrupted during the Lions game today by a kid selling candy at my door. Ordinarily I’m a sucker for helping kids fund raise (ok, you got me I’m just a sucker for candy!)
Anyway, before I could say “Gimmie some Reeses cups” he went into his spiel about what he was fund raising for. After listening to the kid talk, I decided NOT to buy any candy from him.
This little brat was selling candy to finance a trip to cedar point for him and his brother. It wasn’t even part of a school or a club! To make matters worse, he was from a city about 20 miles away from me!!
I know times are rough in Michigan right now, but that’s no reason to send your kid around trying to sell candy so you can make money. If he was selling for charity, a sports team, church, school, or anything else that somehow provides value it would have been a different story. But an amusement park for you and your family? You’ve got to be kidding me! If you can’t afford Cedar Point, don’t go, but don’t drive your kid 20 miles away to a more upscale part of town to re-sell your store bought candy. That’s just not right.
September 30th, 2007
I’ll be in Seattle (actually, Bellevue) until late Thursday night, so if you’re trying to get a hold of me you’re going to have to wait it out.
Hopefully I’ll have some news to announce after I get back.
September 25th, 2007
A long time ago I did a post about the best job search sites as well as a post on HotJobs Spam. I was really impressed when Craigslist CEO Craig Newmark came in to comment and share his thoughts.
More recently I did a post talking about how cool the techcrunch winner Mint.com looked, and how frustrated I was because I couldn’t use it. Lo and behold, Mint CEO Aaron Patzer stopped in to offer his apologies.
Today, at the bottom of a post venting about my bank I mentioned that Mint was working fine for me, and that I wish they’d combine with Cake Financial to form one uber financial system. And guess what? Cake’s CEO, Steven Carpenter, stopped by to offer his take.
Now, I’m not trying to stroke my ego when it comes to this blog. I barely get a few hundred readers each day. If you’ve heard of the A list, I’m probably a member of the D list. That’s what impresses me so much about these CEO’s stopping by to comment on my blog.
These guys clearly understand the importance of blogging and having a visible presence (or, as Robert Scoble calls it: Naked Conversation) out there for your customers. They’re taking time out of their day to not only read what people think of their services, but to respond to it as well. And that’s important as hell!
In today’s web2.0 world customers don’t want to see just a big ugly corporation. They want to associate a face, a voice, and a person with that company. It’s amazing how many companies fail in this regard. We’ve already seen how bad it can blow up when you fake it. Just look at the MagsForLess.com bot that posts the same text on every blog complaining about getting ripped off. That just makes things worse!
Nowadays most companies have blogs but they only use them to hock more product; and rarely comment back (if they even allow comments.) These same companies would never even think to interact with somebody on a different website, and that’s sad.
It’s great to see that many CEO’s are starting to understand the power of blogging. These guys are going to go places.
September 24th, 2007
If you’ve ever done any online banking, you’re probably familiar with the whole concept of wish it was 2 factor authentication. Basically it’s their attempt to implement the “something you have (atm card) plus something you know (pin #)” idea on the internet. The only problem is, it uses something you know (password) and something you most likely will forget (grandpa’s nickname, pet’s name, business street name, or favorite mersenne prime)
Well my bank did something similar. They asked me for questions a very long time ago. Unfortunately they didn’t let me pick the questions, so I was forced to make up a pet name at a time I didn’t have a pet (among other things.)
Last Wednesday they finally presented me with one of these questions. It was the company street name one. Of course I have no idea when I filled this out, and haven’t used it for a LONG time so I couldn’t remember if it was Troy Center, General Drive, South Street, or Meyer.
I tried Troy Center. That wasn’t it. Restart… Oh shit I’m locked out.
Not only was I locked out, there’s no number to call, address to email, or automated form to get me unlocked.
Here it is 5 days later and I’m still locked out of my account. I just called the bank and to get unlocked it requires me to go in to the bank in person, and then for them to call another company to unlock my account. Ridiculous!
I also just noticed that everybody can login with their account #, and account numbers are sequential. Given that it only takes one improper try to lock an account, it would be very trivial to write a program that locks out every user simultaneously. It’s a good thing for them I’m not feeling mischievous today.
On a side note, mint is working fine now and it’s a great program. Try it out! I’m also liking another techcrunch runner up called Cake Financial. It’s like mint but for investment accounts. Those 2 should really combine.
September 24th, 2007
By now we’re all familiar with the crazy interview questions given potential Google and Microsoft employees (and anybody who’s ever interviewed with me.) Often times they’re not even closely related to the job, but they’re good at seeing somebody’s thought process.
By now every programmer should know how to solve the lightbulb problem or the bridge problem by memory, and we’re pretty good at estimating the height of the empire state building in quarters (and how many sodas that would buy.) A few of us have even estimated the number of gas stations in the US and then looked it up to see we were close - it’s over 200,000.
But there’s one that I just can’t prove either way… and I don’t remember enough college physics to prove it.
Here’s the question:
You’re on a boat in the ocean and you throw a very heavy suitcase overboard. Does the boat rise in the water?
I can make a compelling argument for either side, but I want to know what side is correct.
Can anybody prove this using math and physics? I’d be interested to see how.
I’m leaving up north today for a wedding, and then I’m in Seattle next week.. but I’ll check in to see if anybody has an answer for me.
September 21st, 2007
Like millions of other people right now I’ve been trying out Mint - the online finance manager. It looks like it has lots of cool features, but so far I’ve been unable to get it to add any of my accounts. They all just time out and say “try again.” I’m sure it has to do with their traffic.
On a side note, I managed to lock myself out of my credit union account because I can’t remember what street my business was on years ago when I set up my account, nor if I entered James or Jimmy for my sibling’s name.
Not only does my bank not work with quicken, money, or mint - they don’t offer me a way to unlock myself out of their online banking. After calling the office they told me “we’re not sure, we think it unlocks after a few hours.” To me, that’s just not acceptable.
Needless to say I’ll be writing myself a check for the entire contents of my account… the question is where should I put it?
I have an ING account, but I like having an actual branch account for all of it’s other benefits. Is anyone offering free ipods or $50 or what not? Where do you bank? Why?
September 19th, 2007
It seems I’ve found my motivation. I managed to get a bunch of small changes done tonight that I’ve been wanting to get done to some of my websites for a while. The good news is that I got about 5 or 6 things done. The bad news is, I’ve got about 20 or 30 more to do.
So here’s what I did:
- Added a cool new feed scroller to the bottom of feedbutton
- Added links to my Shoutwire editorials on the right side of dotCULT
- Finally fixed translatebritish - it works again!
- Got around to approving about 100 new words for noslang - and added a dropdown to the menu too!
- Got some work done on an upcoming project called allslang. It’s nowhere close to done, but I got started
- A few other things too that I’m not at liberty to talk about yet… more news coming soon!
It feels good to finally get my programming motivation back. I hope I can channel this into the next few months and get some really cool things done.
September 17th, 2007
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