ClintAndrewHall.com

Ok, this really bothered me.

I was directed to a CSSZenGarden design created by Outline2Design that is rather beautiful… I was really impressed, so I looked at their homepage.

Their designs are extremely artistic, and valid XHTML, so I was even more impressed; I wanted to know more about their work and where they manage an office, (mostly to determine if they were a small shop, a front for a larger shop or just “a person.”)  I noticed a copyright link to Zertle, LLC.  Clicking that, I saw that Zertle owns two shop fronts, Outline2Design and PSD2HTML.

That’s when I was absolutely disgusted by the pricing strategy at PSD2HTML.

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I recently bought “Stranger Than Fiction” from Best Buy, figured I’d watch it tonight.  I put it in my DVD player, a Sony DVPCX995V, and it began to read the disc.

Then, the damn thing shut down.

I was really confused.  I messed around with it for a few minutes, then I jumped into a chat session with a Sony representative.  After suggesting the DVD was scratched or the wrong region, (uh huh, sure), he THEN recommended I reset the whole player.

Now, the thing is, this player requires you to manually type in the names of DVDs where it can’t read the standard demographic information.  I’ve got 300 discs in that player, I’d rather not lose that information.  So then he gave me a phone number to tech support and wished me luck.

But you’d better believe I started searching the Internet for any other reports of this nonsense.  It didn’t take long before I found this Amazon discussion and a blog post on erkkila.org.  A number of DVD players, a number of new DVDs… sounds fishy.

Here are the numbers I have so far:

Sony Pictures: (800) 860-2878
DVP-CX995V Support: (800) 222-7669

This does not bode well for Sony.  Is there some kind of write protection on these DVDs?

When Google introduced their online Calendar solution, I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email soon after containing an upcoming event, GMail offered to “Add it to my Calendar.”  Obviously there were parsing rules in place that recognized a date and/or time, even guessed correctly at the name of the event.

Unfortunately, as in all rules assumed in parsing, mistakes can be made:

My guess is that it was looking at “7.50 ea” and translated that into 7:50 Eastern, but I can’t be sure.  All I know is that it interpreted three items a friend of mine ordered into appointments.  No big deal, but it just reminded me that, even when some parsing rules seem simple and straightforward, someone is going to have a use case that breaks them.

Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks so:

Comedy Central clips back up on YouTube
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8126.html

Hopefully they’ll be smarter this time, (and next time, eh?)

;-D

Regarding: Viacom asks YouTube to purge certain clips

Many are speculating on the latest request by Viacom (read: Comedy Central) that YouTube (read: Google) take down clips of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report and South Park. I’m not speculating on the business dealings… it’s typical copyright protection by a popular source. I’m just disappointed that such “hip, young sources of entertainment,” that are usually so clever and cutting edge with their business dealings, missed such a fantastic, progressive opportunity.

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A few coworkers and I have traveled to Boston, MA for The Ajax Experience conference at the Westin Waterfront. It’s running today thru Wednesday and is covering the gamut of Ajax patterns, techniques, bells, whistles and hare-brained ideas in the industry.

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I mentioned a while back how I would post a blog on my loss of faith in Internet Explorer. I’ve been asked to elaborate, so… here’s why.  This is a draft (for now) because I’m realizing that a lot of the code and other tags I’m attempting to put in haven’t been styled properly.  Thus are the perils of learning and creating one’s own WordPress site style.
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Want to know what power is? Power is getting people to change their web server configurations to support your new beta experiment. Gotta tip my hat to Google… they really have clout.

It’s amazing to me… Google comes out with a Web Accelerator that basically caches the page to their server like static content, which isn’t really new, and releases it as a beta. Oh, and they also only give it out to a limited number of people.

Next thing you know, you’ve got people out there seeing that the service doesn’t work on HTTPS connections, and they change?! I mean, wow.

I think the real reason that this is happening is because Google is really effin’ smart. The concept of remote page caching is, like I said, not that new… Sprint PCS did it, Earthlink does server-side compression and caching, so why is Google’s so popular? Because “they’re Google?” Nope. It’s because they’re the first service to actually put a quantifiable number as to how much time you’ve “saved.”

People like numbers and results. People don’t trust something if it simply proclaims itself to be what you want. It’s smart, and once again, I’m privately jealous of Google, it’s clout and it’s brilliance.

Damn.