Hilarious video for help desk people: introducing the book

Anyone who's ever worked on a help desk will love this video, which now has over a million viewings:

Global warming, local freezing

Trafficking in domain names finally nets me a few dollars

Over the years I've registered a number of Internet domains hoping to cash in. One of the first was:

northwestsucks.com

I never expected Northwest Airlines to go bankrupt and its stock to fall to 50 cents a share. I thought they might offer me a couple thousand dollars or some frequent flier miles so they could take over the domain. Think about it; you can buy a round trip coach ticket, or you can own a few hundred shares of an airline.

At some point I expected NWA to send me a cease and desist letter, or maybe offer to buy northwestsucks.com and park on it. I never did much with the site, and NWA never called. (Memo to NWA: phone number upon request; please call on your dime.)

Other investments included firejohnlsmith.com, Michigan State's football coach who was fired (but who never called me) and granholmamendment.com, homage to Michigan's Canadian-born governor who, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, can't run for president unless we amend the US Constitution.

A few months ago someone offered me some sort of virtual credits if I'd donate zerofootprint.com to his cause -- as in zero carbon footprint, reducing global warming. I registered that domain years ago when I learned of the idea of a personal computer suitable for a call center cubicle -- you hang the PC on the wall and all that's on the desk is a flat panel LCD, a keyboard, and a mouse. Zero footprint, right? I give Mr. Zero Carbon Footprint credit but I don't accept virtual credits.

Now I have an offer from another person interested in the same cause of reducing greenhouse gasses, and he's actually offered me some money for the domain. He's not proposing to spend a lot, but it would pay for one night at a nice hotel.

So finally, after all these years, I will perhaps enjoy a minor windfall for my domain adventures. My net investment remains seriously negative.

So does anyone need granholmamendment.com or northwestsucks.com?

A one-way conversation with Congressman Mike Rogers

Congressman Mike Rogers, in whose district I live, sent out a political mailing just before the State of the Union address. I questioned the timing and the content of his message, so I hit Reply and typed him my thoughts. This robotic reply came back:

Dear Friend:

Thank you for your electronic message. I appreciate you contacting my office.

This mailbox is for outgoing mail only and is unattended. If you have comments, questions, or concerns, please email me through my website at http://www.mikerogers.house.gov/Contact.aspx or call my toll-free number at 877-333-MIKE.

If you wish to remove your name from my Legislative Email Update list, please click on this link: http://www.mikerogers.house.gov/unsubscribe.aspx

Again, thank you for your message. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Mike Rogers
Member of Congress

I grumbled about the temerity of the Congressman sending constituents e-mail from a mailbox that wouldn't accept replies, and I pasted my message into the Web form. Wouldn't you know that the Web form also isn't open for business:

A can of spam with no spam

Today I've received several spam messages of this form:

%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER
Subject: %SUBJECT
Sender: "%FROM_NAME" <%FROM_EMAIL>
Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME
%MESSAGE_BODY

This is pretty funny; they forgot to insert the actual spam into the template. You'd hope that anti-spam detectors would catch on to this pretty easily.

Colbert explains progress since 1984 breakup of Bell System

Stephen Colbert does a hilarious take on Cingular Wireless changing its name to AT&T:

A Cingularly sad but true tale.

Apple announces iPhone; Cisco sues; no one notices that neither owns the domain name

Today Steve Jobs announced in famous fashion the iPhone, a very sleek device that appears to be a very cool cell phone, an OK music player that carries music, though much less than we'd expect, and a pretty good video player.



This thing looks way cool. Without understanding the details fully, I think I want one, and I think several million others will too.

But Jobs didn't announce that he'd reached an agreement with Cisco Systems to license the brand name for "iPhone" or "Iphone" or however you spell it. He didn't announce that for a simple reason -- because he had not reached an agreement in negotiations with Cisco to let Apple use the name they trademarked.

So Jobs just went ahead with his black turtleneck announcement -- and then Cisco proceeded to sue.


Here's the funny part: Apple doesn't own the name iPhone, despite Jobs' announcement. But Cisco Systens, just up the road, registered that mark years ago. Perhaps more importantly, none of the players -- Apple, Cisco, Cisco's subsidiary Linksys -- none own the Internet domain name iphone.com.

Thus years before this dust-up, a ways up the Silicon Valley, another company, albeit a small one -- but we all know that small companies in that valley make big things happen -- registered iphone.com.

Registrant:

The Internet Phone Company, LLC

3856 Willowview Court

Santa Rosa, California 95403

United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)

Domain Name: IPHONE.COM

Created on: 24-Aug-95

Expires on: 22-Aug-08

Last Updated on: 16-Jul-06

Administrative Contact:

Kovatch, Michael mike@NET-READY.COM

3856 Willowview Court

Santa Rosa, California 95403

United States

7075260852 Fax -- 7075690880

It was interesting to see the U.S. Apple and the Beatles' U.K. Apple Corps fight each other. It will be interesting to see who owns the Iphone trademark. It will be equally interesting to see to whom the courts award the domain name. No matter what happens, many millions of dollars are at stake.

Amazon sells second edition ahead of third

Today I met with my friend and co-author Lou Rosenfeld. He mentioned that the third edition of the best-selling book he and Peter Morville wrote, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, is in bookstores and seems to be doing well.

So while sitting there at anAnn Arbor coffee shop with dueling laptops (his a Mac, mine a Thinkpad, natch) I went to Amazon to check the sales rank. To my surprise I saw the book twice:

Click to see full-size screen shot

Now the funny thing is, Amazon lists the second editon first, ahead of the current third edition.

This is just fundamentally goofy. You would think that Amazon, of all companies, would "get" the importance of getting search right. As an author, you'd want to see only the current edition of a book. As a buyer, arguably there might be times when you explicitly want to buy the previous edition of a book -- but odds are you want the most recent, and that's the item that should show at the top of the hit list. Any previous editions should be labeled as such with links to the most recent version.

Also note that the most recent edition costs more -- 4 whole cents more -- yet the Amazon discount is slightly greater for the newest edition. Curiouser and curiouser...

"Heart and Soul" - cool NPR story on origin of the piano duet

I remember kids at church and at family parties playing this piano duet. Turns out it's a simple but infectious love song from the 1930's.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6703987

The Bouncy Joy of 'Heart and Soul'
by Sara Fishko

Bea Wain was the first to record "Heart and Soul," which became a No. 1 hit in 1939.

All Things Considered, December 31, 2006 · It's holiday season, and that means it's party time. Parties make me think of a particular song that, like no other, insinuated itself into almost every social gathering at one time.

It doesn't take more than a couple of beats to tell what it is, and the impulse is to just join in.
And that's what traditionally happened when anyone started playing the jaunty bass part of the song "Heart and Soul."

Somebody was always around to run over and play the melody. You just had to. One person told me she lived next door to omeone and they both had pianos; so they'd play "Heart and Soul" -- through the wall. One playing the bass in one apartment, the one next door pounding out the melody in octaves. It was infectious...

I've reached Gmail's 2.7 gig quota

When Google launched Gmail on April Fool's Day in 2004, folks couldn't believe they were giving every user a quota of 1 gigabyte. They doubled the quota a year later, and thereafter the quota grows automatically every day.

Soon thereafter when a Google PR person gave me a then-coveted invitation, I made Gmail my primary e-mail service for all things work and otherwise. I've let mail accumulate, wondering when my archives would approach quota.

Click to see full-size image (and Google's bad math)

Well, it's happened. With large Powerpoints, images, and some sound and video files, I keep bumping against the limit. Of course I could've gotten there artificially by sending a single large video file, but I hit the limit just following Google's advice.



I wonder if this is just me, or if the natural size of the average attachment that folks send and receive is growing faster than the Gmail quota? Digital camera resolution, USB hard drive, and thumb drive capacity continue to increase at an astonishing pace.

Google turns a business school into a blog

Google offers a blog search feature. Today it picked up a news item from the home page of the Broad Business School at Michigan State University:

Click to see full-size screen shot


If you look at the home page for MSU's business school you will see a couple of columns of news, but it doesn't even feature an RSS feed. Wonder what fooled the Googlebot?

Google REALLY wants you to install their toolbar

I've got the Google Toolbar installed on most of the computers I use. While using a computer that doesn't have it installed, I was surprised to see this:

Google, which famously doesn't clutter its home page with extraneous links or ads, shoves a huge pitch for the toolbar right in your face. An in-your-face change to the interface, you might say.