Microsoft Embraces “I’m A PC”

A recent post on the Windows Vista Blog led me to a New York Times article: Echoing the Campaign of a Rival, Microsoft Aims to Redefine ‘I’m a PC’. It’s worth the read. The Microsoft ads weren’t being “cancelled” and the campaign isn’t a failure…they were just icebreakers…like they said.

About the new ads, via the NYT article:

What follows is an audacious embrace of the disdainful label that Apple, Microsoft’s rival, has gleefully — and successfully — affixed onto users of Microsoft products: “I’m a PC.”

One new Microsoft commercial even begins with a company engineer who resembles John Hodgman, the comedian portraying the loser PC character in the Apple campaign. “Hello, I’m a PC,” the engineer says, echoing Mr. Hodgman’s recurring line, “and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”

The strategy to use the Apple attack as the basis for a counterstrike is typical for the agency behind the campaign, Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

Crispin Porter, part of MDC Partners, relishes efforts to transform perceived negatives into positives. For another client, Burger King, the calorie-stuffed menu is portrayed to a target audience of young men as a rebellious personal choice to “Have it your way.”

Mr. Gates makes a cameo appearance in the new Microsoft spots, along with celebrities like the actress Eva Longoria, the author Deepak Chopra and the singer Pharrell Williams. (Mr. Seinfeld is gone, at least for now.)

But the stars are everyday PC users, from scientists and fashion designers to shark hunters and teachers, all of whom affirm, in fast-paced, upbeat vignettes, their pride in using the computers that run on Microsoft operating systems and software.

Among them are more than 60 Microsoft employees, who are accompanied in the ads by e-mail addresses — even Mr. Gates’s (bill@windows.com)

I would just like to point out that I thought the first set of ads were funny and I wasn’t afraid to say so. But you guys were absolutely off your rockers if you thought that was how they spent the $300 million. Seriously.

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As you may know, I recently decided I couldn’t wait any longer for my iPhone (I’m waiting until my T-Mobile contract expires), so I bought an iPod Touch instead. For the most part, this has turned out rather well. I can now try a lot of the iPhone apps that are available today with the exception of those that are location-based and require the iPhone’s GPS. Since most places I go have Wi-Fi, the lack of “internet everywhere” hasn’t been a huge drawback except for on a few occasions like our recent road trip to Palm Beach, where I was stuck playing games and surfing the horrid little browser on my Blackberry Pearl.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that an offline RSS reader would be an ideal app to add to my iPod Touch since reading through feeds is one of my primary activities…in life, it seems. (That has to change by the way, I want my life back). What would be even better than an offline RSS reader, I decided, would be an offline RSS reader that synced with my Google Reader account. I didn’t imagine this concoction even existed, but I searched through the app store anyway.

And then, there it was! An RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. It’s called Byline and it’s available in the app store for $9.99. Now normally, I don’t purchase paid applications, but this one sounded too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it was.

After setting up my account, the app began archiving 58 items. 58?, I wondered…why only 58 when I have over 900 feeds in my Google Reader? I can blow through 50 items in a matter of minutes! Then it occurred to me to delve into the settings. Surely, there’s a setting that says “take my whole dang reader offline,” right? Well, no. You can specify how many “new” items should display: 25 (the default), 50, 75, 100, or 200. I changed that to 200.  There’s also a setting under “offline browsing” to display “new items,” which is strangely set to “off” by default. I turned that on, too.

Now the app is archiving 376 items. (Where is it getting these numbers?) Although that’s better, it’s still not my entire set of feeds. And since there’s no way to customize which folders/tags are archived, who knows what I’ll get. I can’t browse by tags either, whether online or off.

While I am somewhat grateful that an offline Google Reader even exists, my affection for what could have been an amazing application is tempered by the fact that, quite frankly, it’s doing a half-a**ed job. I realize that not everyone would want to wait while 1000+ items are archived, but if I’m planning ahead for an extended period when I’m going to be away from Wi-Fi (road trip, airline flight, etc.), I see no reason why I can’t specify that in the settings and then wait patiently.

I guess I’m still in search of a decent offline Google Reader, then. Any other suggestions?

I guess Apple forgot that not everyone uses a Mac.

Vista users got a nasty surprise when they went to upgrade to iTunes 8: a Blue Screen of Death, aka a BSOD. Say what you want about Windows, but I haven’t seen BSODs on my home machines since the early days of XP.

What’s Causing the BSOD?

You can follow this thread on this Apple forum to read the growing list of posts written by increasingly frustrated users. At one point, an Apple rep “Roy B” jumped in to offer assistance, but his questions clearly show that the issue caught Apple completely off guard:

Hello all,

If you are experiencing this BSOD when you have an iPod connected with iTunes 8 installed, please follow these steps and email me <royb@apple.com> with your answers:

    * Look in the Programs and Feature Control Panel. Do you have Logitech Setpoint software installed?
    * If so, what version is it? (To see version info in Programs and Features, right-click the column header, choose More, and put a tick mark by Version)
    * Does the issue go away if you remove the Logitech software and reboot the computer?

After his initial question originally posted on 9-9-08, neither he nor any other Apple representative has made an appearance in the thread. Instead, the posters in the thread have been trying to help each other out. The latest workaround they’ve discovered seems to be unplugging any HP Printers you have installed. That fixes the issue for many people, but not all.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott looks at the issue in more detail, and determines that:

STOP errors can only be caused by kernel-level drivers or system services. A poorly written program can crash itself but not the entire system. So how can a supposedly simple software update cause a fatal crash?

Maybe because this isn’t a simple software update. Once again, Apple is using its automatic update process to deliver massive amounts of new software to users, including a device driver that has a long and checkered history of causing the Blue Screen Of Death to appear. And it’s delivering this massive payload without even a pretense of proper disclosure and without asking consent from its users.

He goes on to test his system and his tests reveal that the driver GEARAspiWDM.sys is the culprit. Apparently, this driver is known for causing BSODs, which begs the question, why on earth would Apple push this driver to Windows machines?

Where’s the QA? 

One of the posters on the thread wonders, “…there’s not a single person in Apple’s QA dept with an HP printer and Vista?” Another scoffs,  “Apple needs to “invest more in QA and less in these events..”

It seems like Apple is learning the hard way that when you gain market share and popularity, you also gain a much wider user base..and when that’s the case, you’re dealing with thousands of systems running software and hardware configurations in a million different ways.

But the real question here is where’s Apple QA department on all this? Did they drop the ball or is this the kind of error that could have happened to anyone?

More importantly, where is the “official” response from the company? Perhaps, like with MobileMe, they’re going to wait until the situation gets really bad before they speak up.

On a personal note, I’m irritated that Apple is still auto-selecting Safari for me every time there’s an update. I don’t want Safari and it should not be checked by default. Or if it is, I should be able to tell it “no” one time and have it stop nagging me.

Sigh. At least this update will include an opportunity to uninstall MobileMe. Again, I’m not thrilled that they pushed MobileMe down to machine without my consent. An extra icon in my Control Panel for a service I never asked for nor use? Why is it again that Apple gets to have such a great reputation? They are just downright sneaky. If Microsoft pulled this kind of stuff, they would be accused of “bundling,” but Apple does it and everyone makes excuses for them.

I just wanted to send a quick thank you to Kevin Muldoon who thought it would be fun to interview me for Blogging Tips – it was fun! 

After Kevin read about my pre-problogging background here, he thought that my journey from office I.T. drone to full-time blogger would be of interest to his readers.

Thanks, Kevin, for the opportunity. I enjoyed it. And good luck to anyone wishing to get involved in this field.

You can read the interview here: http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/09/08/interview-with-sarah-perez-from-read-write-web

I just discovered Samepoint courtesy of Killer Startups, and I was intrigued. A social conversation tracker? Sounds like something I want to check out. The site allows you to perform searches across the social web including Facebook, Friendster, Diigo, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Yelp, Twitter, MySpace, Simpy, Mister Wong, Blogmarks, and Reddit…but oddly, not Twitter. The site also searches blogs via Technorati and by performing searches on Wordpress.com.

Snapshots

After you run a search, you can narrow down your options using the “Search Within” feature in the right sidebar. Here you can select any one of the sites to see just results from the site. Now, you would think that in doing so, the main page of search results would be updated to display the filtered items, but instead, you’re presented with a “snapshot” of searches from that site just beneath the “Search Within” box:

Snapshot of searches for “sarahintampa”

Searches

The main search results attempt to aggregate the conversations around a particular topic to show you the source and the comments of that particular convo. For testing purposes, I ran a few searches on some of my favorite terms: “Greasemonkey,” “Twitter apps,” “FriendFeed,” and, of course, the requisite vanity search for “sarahintampa.”

I have to say, the results were confusing.

I don’t know how it determines how to group conversations, but the results were always in the format of “search terms” + “other word(s).” For example, a search for “Twitter apps,” returned conversations around “Update Apps” + “twitter apps,” “Chrome” + “twitter apps,” “Android Apps” + “twitter apps,” etc. For Greasemonkey, I received results like “Active Digg Users” + “greasemonkey,” “Que Hay” + “greasemonkey,” and “having” + “greasemonkey.” And even when I looked at the search results for one of my keywords and the apparently arbitrary other word paired with it, I couldn’t determine where or how the conversation even related to the terms.

Search Results for “Greasemonkey”:

Can I just say HUH? Clearly I’m doing it wrong.

But I don’t know how to do it right, then. I thought a search engine, social or otherwise, was for querying on keywords. Apparently not. So how this site is actually useful – or rather, how it’s more useful than a Google search, a Twitter search, a Friendfeed search, or a Google Blog search, etc. - I’m not entirely sure.

For goodness sakes, if you are looking for a universal social search engine, just head to Yacktrack’s Chatter page instead.  It makes a lot more sense.

This post is for my readers who aren’t uber-early adopters on the bleeding edge of tech. Many of you will want to just bypass this one. Every now and then, I write something for those only moderately obsessed with technology and social media.

If you’re thinking of starting a blog, one of the first things you need to think about is whether you want a blog or whether you actually want an online journal…or something else entirely. You also need to give careful thought to how public or private that site should be, which depends on the content you plan to write. Although nearly all sites offer a way to make them “private,” sites like LiveJournal and Vox cater to those who journal as opposed to blog. What’s the difference? Some would argue that there’s none – the words are interchangeable – but I would disagree.

Journaling is the recording of your thoughts, activities, and the other minutiae of your everyday life and publishing it to the web. In a style similar to the “dear diary” format, journalers, (lets not call them “journalists,” too confusing!) chronicle their daily lives in an open fashion, and have communities of friends that do the same. Of course, anyone’s blog can have personal entries from time to time, but the difference between a journaler and a blogger is that the entire content of a journaler’s site is personal content. The most notable community of journalers are the “mommy bloggers.” I have to admit I don’t follow these sites, but the starter pack at moms.alltop.com can give you an idea of who’s hot in this space. One of the most memorable sites from this genre is dooce.com whose author, Heather Armstrong, ended up adding a phrase to the blogger lexicon: “dooced,” a reference to when she got fired from her job for blogging. Although that happens less often these days, it’s still good to think about the kind of content you plan to write before choosing your blogging platform. The more personal the info, the more likely you are to want a platform that offers some form of privacy control.

Journalers vs. Bloggers

Journalers love to share their full lives online. Instead of reporting news, commenting on trends, sharing informative tips, or arguing about politics, etc., a typical journaler’s post will often be a recount of some event that just took place or random thought that just popped into their head. Some of the journalers’ sites, yes, mommy bloggers included, are well-written, humorous, and insightful. They offer the refreshing commentary that many newspaper columnists used to provide – before we stopped getting the paper, that is.

On the other hand, bloggers, especially the ones hanging around these days, tend to be more like citizen journalists than anything else. Few have traditional journalism training, but they still report the news nonetheless. The difference is that bloggers tend to offer opinions alongside the facts. And the facts themselves aren’t checked as rigorously as a “real” reporter would check them. In the blogging world, the audience of blog readers does the fact-checking and posts their findings in the comments. Good bloggers will then go back to update the post (usually with strikethough) to notate the corrections. Great bloggers rarely have to do this…but it’s nothing to be ashamed of when it happens – it’s just part of the process.

Other types of web writers include everything from fan fic/short story writers to personal diaryists, who use the web as a place to post their “dear diary”-esque thoughts, but keep everyone but themselves (or themselves and few close friends) shut out from reading their thoughts. Journalers tend to be more public than diaryists, if you really want to split hairs. Sites like the above-mentioned Vox and LJ cater more to these two types of bloggers. Diary.com is a new site that caters more to diaryists.

If you’re just starting a blog or, as an experienced blogger yourself, have offered to set up a site for a friend, you should really think about what that blog is going to be used for. As tech bloggers, we tend to think: WordPress! It’s the best! But the fact is that someone who just wants to chronicle their thoughts – and isn’t all that tech-savvy – may not think WordPress is as great as you do. That’s why when my sister asked for a recommendation for a blogging platform which she could use to blog her thoughts, videos, and photos for her 2-year Peace Corps volunteer effort, I recommended Vox. It’s not about what I like – it’s about what worked for her, keeping in mind her tech skill set and her need for ease of use.

In the end, no matter what type of blogger you are – a citizen journalist, a new media journalist (oh perhaps that’s a later post!), a journaler, or a diaryist, all that matters is that you keep posting and have fun.

Ha! You have to appreciate the ingenuity of something like the Firefox extension YouTube Comment Snob. This plugin hides the horrid and profane comments written by the adolescents, griefers, and other freaky creatures that seem to inhabit YouTube waiting to leave their grammatically incorrect, foul, and otherwise unreadable comments underneath all the videos on the site.

The extension works by blocking any comments that are in ALL CAPS, have no capital letters, don’t start with a capital letter, use excessive punctuation (!!!! ????) or excessive capitalization, or contain profanity. You can even customize one option to block any comments with X number of spelling the mistakes – the “X” being the number of mistakes you decide qualifies someone as troll-worthy.

Can I just say…genius! (Now, can we have one for Digg, too?)

As you know, I still have a Blackberry as my phone. I can’t get a 3G iPhone until my T-Mobile contract expires next year, so I opted for an iPod Touch instead. Since I’m stuck using the BBerry when wi-fi isn’t available, I’m interested in finding apps that can do what the iPhone/iPod Touch can do. Although they don’t even come close in terms of usability, speed, and sheer glamour, there are a few apps that get me through the wi-fi dead spots. I’ve already got a flickr app for my blackberry, a Facebook Blackberry app, a new-and-improved Twitterberry client, and a funky browser from Zumobi.

Recently, I came across an app called BBMetaBlog. Although designed for Lotus Domino, it apparently works with WordPress or Movable Type (or any blog that uses the MetaWeblog API). I haven’t tried it out yet, but I think I’ll install it in case I get the urge to tap out my thoughts on the tiny keyboard of my Pearl. It’s worth noting that other blogging platforms offer Blackberry apps, too - there’s the TypePad Mobile BlackBerry app and Blogger for BlackBerry for those that use Google’s blogging system. However, for the 90% of the tech world that already switched to iPhone, the WordPress iPhone app is the tool to have. Now, if only we had a decent keyboard with which to use it.

If you follow my blog via RSS or email and had wondered what had happened to my site, then you must have missed the story I documented via Twitter and FriendFeed last week. The shortest explanation is that my dear ol’ dad accidentally killed my website, but the longer story involves a tale of webhosting nightmares, complaints, desperation, and finally -  at last -  a working website again. I documented the saga over on my posterous blog, which will now be known as my “emergency blog” from this point forward. I’m not going to rehash it here, but I urge anyone who still seems to think DreamHost is a safe place to host your site to go and read it.

In the long run, they came to their senses and re-enabled my account. Dallas from DreamHost left a comment on the Posterous blog that read:

You are right that this situation could have been handled better by us. We have to deal with a lot of credit card disputes and we have a cookie cutter process to handle them. Honest mistakes like this do happen, though, and we need to be better at recognizing that.

I’ve just re-enabled the account for you. Sorry for the trouble!

Dallas (of DreamHost)

I also received an email from him which read:

Hello,

Your credit card story
(http://sarahintampa.posterous.com/webhosting-issues) was sent to me and I’m sorry for the problems you’ve had with how we handle credit card
disputes.  I definitely understand your frustration and it’s unfortunate that we have to be so intolerant of charge disputes.  Our credit card processors have basically no understanding for our side of the situation. Credit card fraud is a very big problem for us and we have to take charge disputes seriously and act quickly.

I’ve re-enabled your account just now and I’m going to start an internal discussion about how we handle situations like this one.  Honest mistakes do happen and we need keep that in mind.

Sorry again!

Dallas Kashuba

I would like to publicly thank whomever alerted Dallas of DreamHost on my behalf. I could not reach them in the way that you did, so thank you. DreamHost essentially ignored my plight for the first day of my outage – support tickets went unanswered, and they have no phone number to call. The next day, they then treated me as an unwanted customer whose account they would only re-enable long enough for me to back up my data and get the heck outta there. I personally had done nothing to deserve that treatment, which increased my outrage 100 times over.

At the moment, though, this site is still on DreamHost…but now it’s backed up in case they have a change of heart and decide to kill it again. I have, however, hired some help in my transition to a new webhost. I actually have numerous websites to transition and since dad’s paying (since he’s to blame for all this!), I know it will go a lot faster if I leave it to the experts.

I received a lot of suggestions for new hosts, but I decided to pick BlueHost. Their uptime is probably no better than DreamHost, but the price was right, the cPanel is easy to use, and most importantly, they have a telephone! And if you call it, a human will answer! That was a big consideration this time around.

I don’t have any sites that receive tons of traffic, so I didn’t really need a fancy (and pricey) solution, which is why I decided on BlueHost. Before I make the huge commitment, warn me now if you have any BlueHost horror stories to share. I had been with TypePad forever before transitioning to WordPress and had been with DreamHost since that move, so, frankly, I’m a little out of my element when it comes to picking hosts. Let me know if you think BlueHost will be OK.

P.S. I’d love to know how many RSS subscribers I lost thanks to the outage, but the Feedburner numbers are crap these days. Yesterday, I had 600, today it’s 1100+. Who knows how many people really subscribe. Grrr.

When a friend showed me the Twitter app he was building not too long ago, I was pretty darned excited. I knew for a fact that this app would greatly appeal to Twitter users who would  like to keep track of their followers, especially in the wake of the great Twitter follower drop of 2008, courtesy of Twitter themselves.

The app is called Tweeple Twak and it lets you track your Twitter followers and keep an eye on trends. You can see when someone un-follows you and you have the option of sending a discrete message to that person to find out why they decided to do so. It may not win them back, but it certainly would provide some valuable insight into who’s unfollwing you and why. 

In addition, Tweeple Twak provides some nice charts and graphs that help you keep an eye on follower trends. Did you get a big bump in followers one month? Now you’ll be able to visualize when that spike happened. Lost a lot of folks one day? Maybe it was something you said. The service also promises other tools too, like individual reporting queues and email alert responders.

OK, now the bad news: the app is still in alpha. Private, you-can’t-get-in-yet alpha. However, there is an emailing waiting list on the homepage, so at least you can be notified when it opens up.

Update: David Risley has his review up now, too. Yep, it’s OK to blog about it. Josh tweeted it back on the 15th when I told him another site had discovered it.