Ahhh, Ikea! Our favorite one-stop shop to kill an entire Saturday stocking up on inexpensive husgeråd. The checkout process can be exhausting, but I tend to find the post-unloading furniture assembly to be relaxing.
But, fret not, as I had done, for after my whining, Paul posted the number for Ikea US Corporate Headquarters, and I have since heard from others that calling this number indeed connects you to friendly human beings who can resolve problems for you:
(610)834-0180
If you find that this does or does not bring you satisfaction, please let me know. Cheers!
Let’s welcome every foreign student we can get our hands on. Let’s make sure that foreigners come to the Mayo Clinic here, and not the Mayo facility in Dubai or somewhere else. Let’s make sure people come to Disney World and not throw them up against the wall in Orlando simply because they have a Muslim name. Let’s also remember that this country was created by immigrants and thrives as a result of immigration, and we need a sound immigration policy.
Let’s show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do. That’s why I want to see Guantánamo closed. It’s so harmful to what we stand for. We literally bang ourselves in the head by having that place. What are we doing this to ourselves for? Because we’re worried about the 380 guys there? Bring them here! Give them lawyers and habeas corpus. We can deal with them. We are paying a price when the rest of the world sees an America that seems to be afraid and is not the America they remember.
Amen! Let’s stop hiding behind an Iron Curtain of Fear.
Are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves.
I recently participated in some beta test challenge thing for something called Yahoo! Insiders. They sent me some schwag, including a nice little flashlight that came without the requisite 3 AAA batteries, and a cute little USB mouse that is too tiny for my massive hand. The program consisted of 9 “challenges” which basically boiled down to “use our search engine to find the answer to this question and you might win a prize.” (The prizes were nice, one day was a nice digital camera.) The search engine had some “suggestions” of what search terms you might be better off searching, which would appear if you clicked a little widget. Kind of like the Google spell checker, but with synonyms.
I didn’t use the feature because, well, it was buried under a widget and because I’m pretty good with typing keywords into search engines. I’m guessing they think “suggested keywords” might do something for newbies, though it really isn’t clear.
They just solicited some feedback. I filled out the form, and at the end they asked “is there anything at all that you would like us to know about Yahoo!, The Yahoo! Search Insiders Program or Yahoo! Search Assist?” I thought a moment, then:
What are you trying to accomplish? Build a slightly better search engine? Google works awfully damn well 90% of the time, so the bar to get anyone to switch for “better” is extremely high. Maybe you can put your massive resources behind a more ambitious idea like combining social bookmarking with Netflix/Amazon-style “recommendations” and thereby build a more personalized “Page Rank” index using social networking . . . the sort of thing Google SUCKS at.
Systems Administrators can be an uptight bunch. In the past few weeks I have twice spent some time amidst my fellow professionals. Most are nice people, a good many are inoffensively undersocialized, and a noisy minority are just flamingly obnoxious. (I have, at times, been flamingly obnoxious.) Two nights ago one of my fellows recommended Cory Doctorow’s mind-churning post-apocalyptic masterpiece “When SysAdmins Ruled the Earth” . . . I dare you to read it!
Not long ago I joined a professional mailing list, and today I thought I would chime in on the topic of mobile phone reimbursement. I received a polite note from the list moderator: my message had bounced, could I please re-sends the message as plain text only. These days I am using Gmail, which sends messages in the ubiquitous multipart/alternative format, which leads with text that is followed by a potentially-prettier HTML “alternative”.
I dug around in the preferences to see where I could set “text only” but couldn’t find anything, and took that as a sign that in 2007, even Google doesn’t care about supporting this antiquated preference. I have since noticed that you can just click “plain text” right in the tool bar while you are sending a message. But . . . well, I felt inclined to engage in the time-honored tradition of obnoxious computer experts and impose upon the guy my social-technological criticism of the status quo in the form of a well-crafted flame: (more…)
So, I was checking up on my Flickr buddies when I saw Malavagma posted a screenshot, showing that she had deleted her JPG Magazine account. Why? Because the founders had been pushed out. Derek Powazek tells his account of how JPG came to be as an effort coordinated between he, his wife, and a guy named Paul. But as things evolved, the guy named Paul quietly managed to take things over, and recently, Paul decided to rewrite history. Derek’s post explains:
. . . once we looked at the spec for JPG 2.0, we realized that, if we built that tool, we could make a magazine on any topic. The opportunity we had before us was really “Magazine Publishing 2.0.”
. . .
Paul and I talked about all the different magazines we’d start, but ultimately decided to begin with JPG. The brand had two years of momentum behind it and a strong community. 8020 bought JPG from Heather and I for a modest sum.
. . .
We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing.
Why? The reasons are complicated, and the purpose of this post is not to air dirty laundry - it’s just to let the community know why the founders of JPG are no longer there. We owe you that much.
In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.
Here’s where the whole “not lying” thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any business sense to me. Good publishing companies embrace their founding editors and community, not erase them. Besides, we’d published six issues with participation from thousands of people. There’s no good reason to be anything but proud of that.
We had a long meeting with Ron. I tried to compromise. I suggested we add text to the website, explaining the difference between issues 1-6 and the new issues. I wanted to embrace the truth: Tell people how we started, how we grew, and what we were now. It’s the story of how a successful, organic community begins. It’s the story of how authentic media gets made. And it has the added benefit of being true. Compromise could not be reached.
It became clear that we could not continue to work together with this fundamental disagreement. And because he was the CEO, I was the one who would have to leave. I still own a percentage of the company, so I hope to see JPG continue to grow and prosper. Unfortunately, it will be without its founding editors.
Note: Typos corrected and the emphasis is mine.
So . . . having recently subscribed to JPG Magazine, and having my own account, I had to consider . . . what do I do? (more…)
I like how every ingredient is Capitalized, that the principle ingredient is government-subsidized High Fructose Corn Syrup, and that it features both Purified Water and plain old non-purified Water.
On my way home on Thursday, I stopped to check out a protest on Market Street. It has been a while, and people were gearing up to protest the President’s recently-proposed “troop surge”. I stopped to take a few pictures, and when I got home I spliced together a short video:
I wrote a letter to Yahoo! today. I am curious what answer I will get:
Hello,
I live in the Bay Area. I have friends who work At Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. I am a big Google fan, but I am also all about Flickr!. I purchased an account even before Yahoo! bought them and have since written a Flickr plugin. I have followed the recent controversey over google.cn’s launch, and I have come to the conclusion that Google is doing the right thing:
They will openly censor searches in accordance with Chinese law.
They will not offer services that would put them in a position to compromise privacy: mail, blogs.
Do I need to stop using Flickr if I want to feel good about using the Internet? Do I need to encourage others to boycott Yahoo!, as consumers once boycotted companies engaged in human rights violations in South Africa?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
-danny
Perhaps, you too, should contact Yahoo!, or perhaps Microsoft, to express your concerns. I will post any reply I receive here.
[From an e-mail I sent to the Sci-Fi Channel . . .]
Hello,
I don’t have cable, and my only access to TV shows has been via Netflix and Internet downloads.
I am very excited that you folks are now offering paid downloads of Battlestar Galactica! Bittorrent works great, but I’d like to see you guys compensated for the creative work and production costs, right? And since I only watch a few shows per month, the $2/episode is definitely a better value than buying Cable access, which is overpriced for my needs.
UNFORTUNATELY, the iTunes store is a closed, proprietary system, that can not be accessed from my home entertainment center, which runs on FreeBSD. So, even though I own a video iPod … I can not easily obtain the downloads from your vendor … and if I do somehow get to the iTunes store, I have no idea if they’re DRM-protected, which would block me from watching your show on my entertainment center anyway. :(
Please … please try to either:
a) Convince Apple to open up iTunes access to third parties. A while back, the open source community reverse-engineered the iTunes protocols so that Linux users could access this resource, but Apple locked these consumers out again.
b) Consider adopting Google Video as a sales channel — they have the capability to sell videos via traditional web browsers, which would allow ALL computer users to access your content, increasing consumer accessibility and sales for Battlestar Galactica.
Failing that … can I Paypal you guys $2/week for the episodes I have been obtaining via Bittorrent? :)
So, the pattern with Google projects seems to go like this: release something mediocre and not so interesting, and over time, it gets a lot better.
Case in point: Google Video. At first, I saw no utility in this disorganized beast that only supplied video within the confines of a web browser. Ah, but the times they have been a changin’! Now you can buy videos from Google video, and unless the content provider has DRM, you can download the Google video in a file, and watch it without a stinking web browser. It is my fervent hope that before long, I’ll be able to download the shows I like to watch for about $2/hour, and I won’t have to deal with the gorge-your-brain-on-crap-all-you-can-eat buffet of mediocrity that is Cable.
Well, we’ll see if things go that way. But I think the TV industry is ready to learn from the opportunities missed by the music industry. And I think that while Apple Video store has an early lead in this territory, the Google Video store shows more promise, as it is in the business of making video available to the widest audience possible, where Apple is in their 1980s business of giving people an incentive to buy their proprietary hardware.
But what really gets me excited is Google Updater. What’s this? Well, they aren’t touting Updater, they’re touting Google Pack, which is a software bundle that Google thinks you should download. The pack is mediocre–Norton Antivirus? Norton is the suck! The Pack software litters up your desktop with icons . . . grr! And since Google is making your decisions for you, Google decides that you need Firefox with Google Toolbar. Okay . . .
So, Pack is mediocre, but Google Updater . . . now this is what excites me! It is a tool to update new versions of software. Nothing so magical about that–we have been automating software update deployment in the Unix world for years now! The cool thing is that Google is releasing a tool to do this on Windows. I hope they’ll release an API, as this would be very useful for IT folks. I think this will ultimately come to pass . . . much as Google Video ultimately let you download and buy video.
But why I really want Google Updater to be unleashed as a generally useful tool, is because this sort of framework for tracking and updating installed software really ought to be a part of the OS–it is in Unix land–but Microsoft has . . . well, let us say that they have not chosen to innovatein this direction . . . and Microsoft is ever so jealous of Google, with Ballmer throwing chairs around. If Google gets into the business of improving Microsoft’s core product, man, that’s gotta scare a few in Redmond.
Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I love shopping at IKEA . . . the drive to the mega-store, the search for parking, the endless meandering through furniture and accoutrements, only to find yourself facing the stark reality of a giant warehouse, asking yourself if the Black-Brown BILLY bookshelf, which looks so black in the warehouse, is really the same color you were looking at in the showroom, and standing in line, wondering just what kind of crap they put in a 50c hot dog. But once you pay, and you’re rolling out the door, you know you’re not far from the actual joy of wrangling your heavy flat-packed furniture up the stairs and getting busy with the allen wrench.
But yesterday . . . well, I have officially given up on the Emeryville, CA IKEA. Here is my tale, as told in the call-and-response format that passes for “customer service” via the “Internet” these days: (more…)
Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers’ computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, Sony has hired graffiti artists in major urban areas to spray-paint buildings with simple, totemic images of kids playing with the [PSP].
dannyman says:
Corporations who think they have Street Cred are kind of lame an awkward, like White People who think they can Rap. I’ll grant you, there may be a Corporate analog to Eminem, but it aint Sony.
If you are free to visit San Francisco on Thursday December 8, then this may be an interesting activity. Even if you can’t go to this thing, you may be interested in your freedom anyway:
On the 4th of July 2002, John Gilmore, American citizen, decided to take a trip from one part of the United States of America to another. He went to Oakland International Airport — ticket in hand — and was told he had to produce his ID if he wanted to travel. He asked to see the law demanding he show his ‘papers’ and was told after a time that the law was secret and no, he wouldn’t be allowed to read it.
He hasn’t flown in his own country since.
On December 8th 2005, oral arguments in Gilmore v. Gonzales will be heard before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel anonymously in their own country — and the exposure of ’secret law’ for what it is: an abomination.
I think my mom once said that she tried to send money to one charity a week. I thought “hey, that’s a neat idea.” So, I tend to cut checks . . .
. . . but, honestly, I’m sick and tired of the massive volumes of direct mail I receive as a consequence of my good intentions. My favorite are the environmental charities that send me mailing labels . . . I have like 6zillion mailing labels already, right? So, let’s kill s’more trees.
Danny Howard is 100% responsible for the content on this site,
except some of it is stolen.
All rights are reserved, unless otherwise noted. Generally, I'm
a BSD guy, so you can assume implicit permission to adapt, modify,
and redistribute my intellectual property with appropriate
attribution. Except some of this content is itself re-appropriated,
so you'd best ask first, especially for commercial use. Thanks!
