Today’s only in America tale is bought to you by fine American heroes at NASA who drive the Space Shuttle whilst drunk.
I would imagine that being blotto in Space would be fun, and imagine the toilet humor; shit flying would take on a whole new meaning.
Spot question: how the fark do you random breath test someone driving a space shuttle?
In an age of crap customer service and people who don’t care, every now and then you encounter a company that bucks the trend.
At 10am PST this morning (1am AWST) I got an email from my wife indicating that the hose behind the fridge had broken and that a good portion of the house was ankle deep in water. I Googled Bunbury Flood Help from the other side of the world and found Bunbury Fire and Flood. She who must be obeyed rang them and they were there within 45 minutes with industrial water vacuums etc… and they were nice about it as well. The service includes a dehumidifier and floor board repairs as well.
So a quick thanks to Bunbury Fire and Flood. I hope we’ll never ever need to use again, but I’m more than happy to recommend you to others in need.
Who ever thought that Qantas might become a world-leading airline? OK, so I’m typing this from the Qantas Domestic Terminal at Perth Airport on free WiFi, but as Engadget reports, starting next year Qantas is going to offer Wifi + Power on A380’s and refitted 747s. Touchwood it’s the entire 747 fleet given about half of Qantas’ flights to the Eastern States out of Perth are on 747’s. Still got a book for today though, but I cant wait for next year 🙂
An important question though: I wonder how much Qantas will charge for data? This is Qantas after all, I just cant see it being cheap, but hey, if it’s $50 or $100 on a long flight it would be well worth it.
A fair bit of feedback on some recent posts. It reminded me that going on a puritanical save the world by highlighting wrongs binge isn’t always a good thing, people in glass houses etc…
Matt Mullenweg
I found an email from Matt Mullenweg in my spam box re the post on WordPress and the crackdown on sponsored templates.
Matt is pissed, and probably rightly so. The post in retrospect was unnecessarily personal and it wasn’t called for; she who must be obeyed asked me a very good question: would I like to have that written about me? One should never mess with she who must be obeyed, she is all wise and always right. So sorry Matt, it went too far.
However without taking away from the personal apology, I still believe you’re wrong. Your email stated that people were abusing sponsored templates by stuffing them with spam, but here’s the beef: in Australia Aboriginal people commit crimes at a higher rate than non-indigenous Australian’s, for memory the crime rate amongst African American’s is probably similar as a percetage of the population as well: would the solution therefore be to lock all black people up? You see Matt, you’re punishing a pile of good people for the actions of a small number of bad people; blanket solutions are rarely ever the right answer.
The link thing is still silly as well: you can’t ask people to not include links on their templates then stuff your own links on every install of WordPress, no matter how justified you think you are in doing so; it’s an all or nothing thing, and not practicing what you preach to others does make you look like a hypocrite, but in a nice, non-personal attack way 🙂
Ars Technica
Got an email from Ars re my post on their linking policies. They point out that the case I highlighted was an oversight, and that they regularly link out (and provided examples). I still see a lot of Ars stuff without sources, indeed I’ve seen stories on stuff I’ve written at TechCrunch appear as a stand alone story on Ars two days later without links. However on the basis of the email I’m willing to accept that on the whole they are at least trying. Perhaps they could try harder, as indeed we all could, and there are times where you get a tip from a reader which doesn’t come sourced, meaning that you don’t know that it’s come from elsewhere; even I’ve been in that situation a couple of times.
So apologies to Ars. If it’s any help, I only noticed because it’s one of my regular reads, and a bloody good read most of the time at that.
Happy
OK, my lets right the wrongs of the world purge is over for now. Promises that I”ll be good again 🙂
News.com.au reports that Optus is joining Telstra in adding uploads to monthly cap limits, and that others may also start counting uploads.
As much as I despise the Australian ISP industry for having caps to start with, when in the US ISP’s are mostly all you can eat concerns, it does make sense that if we’re essentially paying for downloads, ISP’s should count uploads as well.
But here’s the problem: upload speeds from Australian ISP’s suck.
Take my provider for example. I get a 2mps download but only a 256kps upload speed, roughly 10 times the difference. Telstra Bigpong plans are similar, most only provide a 256kps upload speed, although for memory some may be as low as 128kps.
If I’m going to have to pay indirectly for uploading stuff to the web, the same money I’m proportionately paying for downloads, then simply I demand the same upload speed as I have for downloads. That would be the only fair and equitable solution, particularly when companies are quick to advertise their download speeds, but you’ve got to find the upload speeds in the fine print. Given that I’m a fairly regular uploader it would also make my life a whole lot easier as well.
Finalists are the top 3 in each category. For a State that is so remote from the rest of the world there’s an impressive lineup of sites.
The winners will be announced at the Duxton, Perth, August 17.
And incase I’ve failed to mention it previously: I was a judge for the awards. Suffice to say that there were a lot more submissions that finalists, but it was a good experience none the less. It’s amazing what people can come up with in terms of site design and delivery.
The Sky is Falling! Well it was 3 weekends ago when I took this. Not bad for a place that according to many is becoming bone dry, a place that is forever suppose to bare the burden of drought. Filmed on my Panasonic DMC FZ-50 still camera, great video quality for a still camera.
I’ve decided that the one thing I don’t like about Facebook is exerting effort for a small group of people; basically I don’t get why Facebook pages should be closed to all bar friends. It’s not that I dislike my Facebook friends; I appreciate every one of them, it’s just that in a society that values user generated content where there is a finite amount of time in a day, you only want to post or create on X amount of places, preferably ones that maximise the audience. Take for example photos: I post to my Flickr account what I want people to see, be they friends or otherwise, why cant I do the same on Facebook?
OK, so people rave about the privacy and closed networks, but how hard would it be to be able to provide the option “Private or Public Profile?”
If you do want to see what goes on behind the great privacy wall of Facebook (and it’s not that exciting…yet) add me as a friend on Facebook. I might have to have a friend-a-thon so I can play catchup with Robert Scoble…although I’ve got a bloody long way to go 🙂
I don’t even use MyBlogLog anymore, and yet I keep getting spam emails from MyBlogLog users; advertising networks, Nigerian style scams etc. Am I alone? I probably shouldn’t complain and just switch off the emails and resign my MyBlogLog membership properly..but I thought I’d check. Looks like Yahoo ownership still hasn’t improved things.
All that is old is new again. I’ve been following in passing the debate over sponsored WordPress themes over the last week or so (Jacob Gower has a good summary, Matt Mullenweg’s post here) and I can’t help but shake my head. As Jacob notes the folks at WordPress and other sites are entitled to feature or not feature what they want, but why the jihad, and why now?
I’ve always had a world of respect and admiration of Matt Mullenweg, but I’m starting to question my past loyalty. Remember this is a guy who got done a couple of years back for running spam on WordPress.org, not just a little bit but a ton of it. I defended him at the time, and I don’t regret doing so, but attacking hard working people from doing sponsored WordPress templates that include one sponsored link in return for a free product? WTF?
Of course there seems to be an aloofness creeping in to WordPress these days as well. I contacted Matt not long after I started writing for TechCrunch with a question about a site being shut down/ removed from WordPress.com, the response I got was terse and down right rude. I sent another email off, thinking that perhaps he’d forgotten my past loyalties to him (being one of the very few people to publicly defend him…heck, even his mother and sister contacted me to thank me for supporting him during the spam crisis) and all I got back was a shit response again. Suffice to say I didn’t send him any more email requests. Really weird though that I’m able to talk to CEO’s of multi-million dollar startups without a problem and yet the only serious grief I’ve had in 3 months at TechCrunch was from Matt Mullenweg.
If it smells like Old Mena and it quacks like Old Mena….
But of course that’s being unfair to Mena. She and I have moved past those dark days of MovableType 3.0 and SixApart is back in the good books, with MT to be open sourced this year. We all get older, wiser…and of course we all make mistakes. (so apologies to Mena if you do take offense at the comparison, none is intended, it’s all about the past, not the present).
I really hope that WordPress and Matt Mullenweg don’t repeat the mistakes of Mena and SixApart in the past…but it’s starting to look that way. What next: WordPress development stops to focus of WordPress.com alone?
And while we’re at it: if we’re on a jihad against links, how about the WordPress team stop stuffing their own links into the standard install of WordPress. WordPress is open source after all, and if we’re all about not benefiting anyone, lets be serious about it. I never want to see a link to Matt Mullenweg’s blog again in WordPress unless it’s linked to the dictionary definition of hypocrite.