Originally uploaded by LeoL30.
Originally uploaded by LeoL30.
Originally uploaded by LeoL30.
Originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.
Originally uploaded by kerry extraordinary..
Originally uploaded by Buratto.
Today is the fifth anniversary of All This ChittahChattah, although it admittedly bears little resemblance (visually, content, focus) to its earliest days. Man, how time marches on!
Thanks to some great technical sleuthing and hacking, we’ve got some good improvements here on the blog
– an “email this post” link with every post
– an improved “tag cloud” off the right that links to other postings, rather than back to Technorati (who seem to have stopped indexing this blog 55 days ago)
– The blog title is now All This ChittahChattah rather than Portigal Consulting both on the page and in feeds
– I got rid of CoComment because it was (as others had suggested when I started using it) causing some problems. It was slow and was messing up pingbacks (i.e., posts here that refer to other posts here)
Please let me know if you see any weirdness or broken stuff that needs to be fixed!
The new blog is here!
Not only a new blog, but now the entire site is in WordPress – this makes for some interesting things (like trying to have separate feeds for FreshMeat and this blog; or titling this page “All This ChittahChattah” while titling the rest of the site “Portigal Consulting”).
FreshMeat is definitely not working right now, but maybe within 24 hours we’ll have them all back up and sorted out (they are still up, under the old URLs, but whatever)
If you see other weirdness with the site, let me know
For my class in Design Research Methods at CCA, I’ve asked the students to start either blogging or adding pictures to flickr. They are ideally doing this regularly, at least weekly, but I think it’s taking some time to ramp up.
I’ve asked them to think like design researchers and use this as a way to practice noticing stuff, and telling stories. They can blog whatever they want, but at least one piece per week should be something interesting they noticed – something funny or odd or curious or unusual – in their daily lives. An experience, a design, a need, a person doing something odd. Just to learn to pay attention to that alerting part of our judging selves. Ideally, this will help build the muscles they’ll need for making sense out of the fieldwork they start doing.
Anyway, I’m going to link to ’em all here and maybe some of the folks who read this blog will check out what the class has done. Maybe offer some comments or encouragement. Once they got their feet wet, the hope is that having an audience will actually provide some inspiration, motivation, momentum.
http://blurr1e.blogspot.com/
http://cupanoodle.blogspot.com/
http://dcarchitect.blogspot.com/
http://shambacca.blogspot.com/
http://thegumbyproject.blogspot.com
http://thenbalmer.blogspot.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/weberdesign/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dearjy NEW
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12187480@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14812574@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37212535@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/74386819@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/91006549@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benbassat
http://www.flickr.com/photos/justjump/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/samdidnotknow/
http://www.myspace.com/homelesswombat
http://www.optionsf.com/blog/
Here’s some recent searches that led people to this blog:
‘war and peace and steve’
simpsons marge
name smurf receivers for Washington redskins
we’re gonna need another timmy
‘data deposit box’ partner
cream puff tree for holidays
exploding zit
plantidote face serum buy
portigal environmental problems
homeless signs
3 apples high cartoon
ogoplex myth
kaboom cereal sale
Simpsons Marge
‘jim spagg’
marge simpsons
Anakin becomes Darth Vader photos
ikea rants
www.ebpp.wellsfargo.com
Four years ago I started blogging here. Man, time flies.
Just wanted to acknowledge my anniversary 🙂
I blogged previously about trouble commenting on BusinessWeek blogs. Turns out that my ISP (which is SBC) has been blacklisted for some nefarious activity. Trying to submit a comment redirects me to a horrible page
DSBL: Listing Data
If you’re not sure why you were referred to this webpage, please read this page first.Status
IP: 68.127.18.86
State: Listed
Listed in unconfirmed (unconfirmed.dsbl.org): yes
Listed in singlehop (list.dsbl.org): yes
Listed in multihop (multihop.dsbl.org): no
Record last changed: 2004/Oct/29 05:03:49 UTC
Reverse DNS identifies server as: adsl-68-127-18-86.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.netHistory
2004/Oct/29 05:03:27 UTC Listed in Unconfirmed (view message)
2004/Oct/29 05:03:27 UTC Listed in Singlehop (view message)
2005/Oct/11 15:05:52 UTC Removal Confirmation Sent EMail address: postmaster@pacbell.net
Requestor IP: 68.127.18.86
Message Report:
207.115.57.16 accepted message.
Remote host said: 250 2.0.0 j9BF4f7
and of course, it’s up to someone at the ridiculous monolith at SBC to fix this. Yeah, like that’ll happen.
I guess I won’t be joining in on the BusinessWeek blog dialog anytime soon!
Robert Scales was blogging the CanUX conference. His page about my presentation is here, without a lot of detail, and with some corners seriously cut.
Some of the research items Steve included in his presentation included:
* mprovements to existing products and services
* ideas for new products and features
* new applications for existing technologies
* specific implications for design
I’m not sure what a research item is but that is text (badly copied-and-pasted) from my website, not particularly relevant to the talk. He suggests looking at my site for more info, but his link to my site appears to be broken.
It’s nice to have someone write about your presentation, but this just seems shoddy. And I wouldn’t take notice of it, except that Robert was at the conference to promote his own event at the Banff centre later this year, about blogging! Ironic!
Virginia Postrel blogs a nice analysis of my recent entry about Target’s wire-filled ad imagery through the lenses of her work on glamour and an essay by Grant McCracken in his brand-spanking-new book, Culture and Consumption II. Cool!
Recent search engine queries leading people to AllThisChiattahChattah
LAW OFFICE OF DAVID ZANARDI ESQUIRE
WWW.EBPP.WELLSFARGO.COM/MORTGAGEPAY
PUFFA PUFFA RICE
ebpp.wellsfargo.com
tony the tiger tiger power
sleep inertia nap
PUFFA PUFFA RICE COMMERCIAL
David Binkowski
Pickle Paraphernalia
yourwellsfargomortgage.com
‘robert Limbrick’
‘horse blow jobs’
stan smits pilkington
Cooter is warning Dukes fans to stay away from the new movie, saying it’s sleazy. ”
Peel-O-Matic
“clydesdales across america”
bicycle racers urination
delorean portland
wellsfargo.com/mortgagepay
In a previous post I told a story about receiving mistaken invoices from my online backup service. It was a LOT of money and I made the mistake of reading my email during a bit of insomnia, and of course, my adrenalin surged unhappily even though I convinced myself it was probably a mistake (but it was tricky; the first review I read about this service, Data Deposit Box, explained how if your software creates temp files in the target directory, you may find yourself uploading HUGE HUGE files to their system and being charged for it – and at least once in that previous month I found that my DVD software had put some several gigabyte file down without telling me, etc. etc. so I had some rational basis for concern), and eventually they let us all know that they had sent these three invoices out by mistake.
So I blogged the story, because, hey, I’ve got a blog and I’m going to use it.
But the company I blogged about wasn’t too happy.
From: “Peter Carroll”
To:
Subject: The Data Deposit Box problem
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 09:43:07 -0400Steve,
We are again very sorry for the error that caused you to receive those emails. It was an embarrassing mistake that will never happen again.
I read your blog on the topic with horror this morning. We have all worked hard to communicate with our customers and clean up the mess this caused. These were only internal reminder emails for our accounting people to manually bill a couple of our very large clients. No customers were billed.
Clearly this was a dark day in our history that we would all like to put behind us. Unfortunately, with your blog showing up in Google I fear we will be reliving it over and over for months or years to come.
Would you consider removing your post in exchange for 3 months of free Data Deposit Box service? I assume you are otherwise happy with our service. This gesture would be greatly appreciated by everyone at Data Deposit Box.
Sincerely
Peter Carroll, CTO
This really threw me for a loop. I’m supposed to feel bad for them? I guess I do, but what about me? My monthly bill is about $20.00, so they’re asking me to basically censor myself in support of their corporate goals, for about $60.00. I don’t want to go off on a major integrity high-horse type of deal, but really? $60? Maybe they should offer me the three free months as a gesture of good will in apology for the upset. But not make it contigent upon me zipping my mouth.
Further, there’s an element of quiet coercion here, and really, isn’t a backup company’s core offering involving trust? I don’t feel they are behaving in a trustworthy fashion. And what if I refuse to take the posting down? Will that mean that maybe my data might (oops! We are SOOOO sorry) go away? Probably not, but even the fact that this exchange has raised the spectre of data loss suggests their approach to me was a wrong one.
I’m not out to change the world with this blog, and I’m still getting used to the fact (after nearly 4 years) that this blog can have some impact, but I stand by what I wrote.
I didn’t bother to share with people, by the way, my “icon” experience. Here’s a support request I sent in
Admittedly, this is a low-priority request, but I wanted at least to request it…
Every once in a while the icon in the system tray disappears and then reappears. This causes all the task bar entries to shift rapidly back and forth – in other words, it’s a fair amount of motion along the bottom of the screen. It’s VERY distracting. It’d be great if that didn’t happen, if it just stayed live all the time, or I’d be willing to disable the icon if that meant I could avoid this problem. I’ve seen this happen with other programs (I think PopFile had it with a recent version) and it cosmetic, but it’s also impacting concentration and productivity, so it is important in that way.
They responded nicely, and quickly
We had a problem with our icon in that it would disappear and we were unable to determine why it was happening. We decided to destroy and recreate the icon periodically to stop this from happening.
I will add a registry setting to the client application to allow you to disable this. The option will not appear in our options program, but will be only available via registry changes.
I will let you know once this is ready and send you instructions on the name of the key.
I’m no programmer, but a tech friend of mine was aghast at the problem and also the kludgey solution. Didn’t give him faith in their technical chops. Anyway, shortly thereafter they sent the registry key instructions. Playing with the Windows registry is sort of a dangerous manipulation of the secret guts of how things work. One typo can ruin stuff. Anyway, they told me what kind of key to create and what to put in it. And there was a typo in their instructions.
Under Software/Acpana/Backup/username please add a ERG_SZ value with the name DoIconRefresh and set the value to 0
ERG_SZ should be REG_SZ. I didn’t know that, but I figured it out. Still doesn’t give you the best confidence in them.
Anyway, back to the issue at hand – the blog entry. I wrote them back
Peter, I’m awfully surprised that you’d ask a customer to delete a posting they made about your product! And further that you’d offer me roughly $60 to do so!
Moreover, this sort of thing really impacts the feeling of trust between me and Data Deposit Box – if I refuse, what will happen to my data? For a service that provides backup, I would suggest that the trust is pretty important and this exchange kind of threatens that trust.
Steve
and heard back
If you refuse, nothing will happen to your data. I only ask that you please consider removing your post because of the ongoing negative impact it will have on our company.
As you point out, trust is a very fragile thing. Nobody understands that more than we do. There was nothing malicious in our action. It was an honest mistake and we have worked very hard to repair the damage it caused. My fear is that your post will continue to show up in Google and new damage will continue to happen.
Expression of individual opinion is very important right. But please consider what the effect is when they are amplified by Google. IÔø?m sure you do not intend to cause us ongoing damage to our reputation. If you did, I am sure you would no longer be a customer. But negative comments are may times more powerful than positive.
I offered you some free service only as a gesture of good faith. I had no other intentions. If you are not comfortable with that I understand. Was our response to our customers not sufficient or appropriate in you mind? Is there anything more you feel we should do?
I truly hope you can forgive us for this mishap. If not, I apologize again and wish you all the best.
I don’t want to be a villain, or hurt this poor company. Discussions of forgiveness and malice and all this seem very emotional and very personal. Perhaps I need to be more judicious of my stories of bad service or bad experiences. I don’t think I’m using this a bully pulpit, though. Even though they won’t be happy to see their exchange with me also blogged, I feel it’s important. Look, this isn’t Disney sending a cease-and-desist letter or anything dramatic like that, but it’s a request to stop saying something bad about a company, because an honest experience (and really, that was NOT a screed, I’ve written screeds, that was mostly sharing an experience and sharing my own horror at it) is just that. What happened to me. My truth.
I’m still a customer of Data Deposit Box. They offer a unique pricing advantage (you pay what you backup, not by choosing from a variety of sizes that you think you need to store) and a unique backup process (you backup files pretty much all the time not on a schedule). They claim to offer multiple copies of files (versions 1 2 and 3) that change over time, but I haven’t figured that out. It may be working, or may not. I don’t know yet.
And, I’ve had a frightening billing mistake with them, and I’ve had a somewhat slapdash if effective and rapid support for something very cosmetic. I’m laying it out there for you to decide for yourself.
My friend Alan has a blog that I’ve just been checking out. It’s kinda funny on several levels. Each post is a strange or disturbing comedic observation, most of them rather terse. You might compare to Steven Wright but I’m sure any serious student of late 20th Century comedy could explain why that presumption is incorrect.
What amuses me is that each entry is several days apart, and when one reads through the various entries it almost begs the question of how it took Alan so long to make yet another pithy observation.
Alan, of course, is much funnier than his blog. Even though he may make the same kind of comments, the flat tone of the blog is completely different than his intense delivery. And the minimalist tone of the blog isn’t as funny as his detailed storytelling.
Somehow I should also mention that he has a talking vagina animation on his website.