For the Love of Technology

Taylor says don’t leave voice mail–she has your number from the missed call.  She’d prefer that you text her instead.

I say the exact opposite.  If you call my phone, leave a voice mail if you want me to call you back.  If you call and don’t leave a message, I’ll assume you only called me because you were bored and I’m the most entertaining person you know–you didn’t really want anything in particular or you would have left a message.

And don’t send me a text.  Texting is for communicating at loud places (like concerts), quite places (like church), and talking in front of people who you don’t want to hear your conversation (like people at concerts, libraries, and churches).

Sending a text message to and from a mobile phone is like sending a fax over a land line.  If you don’t need to fax it, you don’t need to text it.  Just leave me a voice mail.

And please, enough with the naked photos.  Until you get a phone with a higher resolution camera, use a real camera and email me the pic.  Or buy a Polaroid and snail mail it.  Or fax it.

Microsoft To Pay People To Search

Microsoft in 1978Here are the basics of how the program is structured:

Use Microsoft Live Search to find whatever it is you are looking for, buy it, and a percentage of the price is put into your account.  When your account hits $5 they put the money into your PayPal account.

Here’s why it won’t work:

You have to sign up for both Microsoft Live and Paypal.  That’s enough hassle on its own, but that’s not the kicker.  The real reason it won’t work is that they are trying to get people to use a search engine they don’t really want to use.

Microsoft continues to not get it.  People aren’t using Google because it is cheaper or more financially rewarding.  They aren’t even using Google because they provide better results.  They use Google because they are Google people.  They use Google because they’ve come to trust it.  They use Google because that’s just what they do.  They Google things, they don’t Microsoft Live Search them.

Microsoft seems to have the mentality of a gas station owner who can (and does) attract customers away from the station across the street by offering gas $.02 cheaper.  It may work for gas stations, but it won’t work for search.  Search engines users are loyal.  Most people don’t search for something on 3 or 4 different search engines to find what they want unless it is something really bizarre that can’t be found.  They use the SE that they use and get on with their business.

What Microsoft is asking people to do is change their loyalty–permanently.  Changing someone’s loyalty from Google to Microsoft is akin to getting them to switch from Coke to Pepsi.  People just aren’t willing to do that for a few pennies.  Maybe once, maybe even a few times, but not permanently.

Firefox 3 Running Well

Firefox.  Yeah.I’ve been using the beta 5 version of Firefox 3 all day today, and I must say that I can tell a pretty big difference in speed between it and Firefox 2.x.  I always suspected knew there were (a few hundred) memory leaks somewhere in Firefox 2, but I’m still not sure if most of those were in the browser itself or in one of the extensions I was using.  So far I’m running version 3 without any extensions, but I’ve been running it since this morning with no slowdowns, lockups, or crashes.

Of course, I’ll have more to say when Firefox 3 is officially released, but you could always install
. It’s free, and that way you’ll be automatically notified the instant version 3 is officially released, right?  I mean, for all of its minor issues version 2 of Firefox is still far superior to Internet Explorer.

Found–Another Good WordPress Resource

I’ve been spending the last few days working on a couple of new projects that I plan on launching later this week or early next week. On Monday I put my first WordPress plugin out for the world to, uh, bash. Just kidding (not really).

I’ve been lucky enough to find a few people who are willing to run it through the wringer and show me the problems and what can be improved. The unexpected bonus is that these guys have great resources on their own websites, and I may not have discovered them otherwise. For example, I was checking out Leland’s site, themelab.com, and ran across a really good article on improving on existing WordPress themes which instantly solved a problem I’ve been having on one of my new projects.

It’s really encouraging to find people who are willing to help out and make these projects go more smoothly, and it’s really cool when you find a resource like themelab.com that you can refer to again and again down the road!

RSS Awareness Day

RSS Awareness Day May 1st has been declared RSS Awareness Day by, uh, some folks who want to raise awareness about RSS. I was actually surprised to learn that only 5.4% of internet users are currently using RSS. I’m pretty vigilant about watching my subscriber numbers, so I would LOVE to increase RSS usage to somewhere closer to 15%…that would theoretically triple my readership.

So for those of you who read this blog regularly and don’t use an RSS reader, let me again emphasize how cool of a technology it is, and how it will change the way you read on the web. For instance, using RSS, one could gain the ability to subscribe to and read a site from work which has been blocked by their company’s IT department, if one were so inclined.

And for those of you who are bloggers and/or webmasters yourself, help spread the word by promoting RSS Awareness Day on your own site. I truly believe that together we can make a difference in the way people surf while looking super-smart in their eyes at the same time. 😛

Me Fit? Maybe Not. How About Wii Fit?

So the other night I was watching Chelsea Handler and she had Tina Yothers on. You know, the girl from Family Ties who wasn’t Mallory? Anyway, she was pretty hard core about being on Celebrity Fit Club, and seemed like a pretty cool woman, so the next time I saw Celebrity Fit Club was on I watched about 10 minutes of it.

Still with me? Ok, during the commercial break there was a commercial for the Wii Fit featuring Tina Yothers working out. I sort of assumed that the Wii Fit or something like it already existed, but the commercial said it was coming soon. I went over the Amazon to check out this video for the Wii, which isn’t quite as cool as the Tina Yothers commercial, mostly because Tina Yothers isn’t in it.

I watched the long version of the video, and I gotta tell you…I can’t see anyone getting fit with this thing for a few reasons. I can see where it’s better than just hanging out on the couch, but I don’t see it getting anyone truly fit.

The “heavy bag” is just punching the air. If you’ve ever spent any quality time with a heavy bag you know exactly why it wears you down–because it’s heavy. I don’t have the exact numbers, but the density of air probably isn’t anything close to the density of a heavy bag. How is this different from the regular Wii boxing game?

Then there’s the strength training program that has you doing push-ups and torso twists. Again, better than nothing, but do you need a trainer for this? And jogging in place? Really? The balance games looked pretty fun, but I don’t see how you can practice balance without actually having to balance. I mean, without actually feeling gravity, they’re more like leaning games than balance games.

I guess I’m saying that there’s no way I’d buy this game. Then again, I don’t even have a Wii.

Test Driving Flock

Is anyone else using Flock exclusively yet? I downloaded it after I saw an ad for it (I can’t remember where) and checked it out. It looks a little smoother and full-featured than Firefox, but I haven’t really hooked in all of my social networking accounts and really tested it out yet. There’s a pretty good writeup about it on linux.com that makes me want to try it again when I have the time to really use it. I haven’t seen enough personally to convert, but there are some pretty cool features described there.

If you’ve tested it, what’s your favorite feature? Is there anything there that I can’t do with Opera or Firefox by using plugins?

WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate

I am very crunched for time today, but tonight I’ll be installing the WordPress 2.5 release candidate on one of my development blogs and give a full report here–probably posted sometime very early Wednesday morning.

WordPress new interface

From the looks of it, the “Write” section of the dashboard is going to be much improved, which is an area I think WP needed to catch up.  Another great new feature will be a customizable dashboard.  Both of these features should work out great for me, as one of my projects in the works is going to have scores of contributers.  I want to be able to limit the functionality for experienced users and also make it as easy as possible for newer users to contribute using WordPress.

Speech to Text Software

We’ve been contemplating buying the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software so that The Missus can “write” content for our new project while holding a baby.  It would also be a lot easier for her to dictate everything–she’s an excellent speaker–as fast as she want to go.  I can go back in later and edit if needed, but the reviews I’ve read of NaturallySpeaking say it does a good job of punctuating on its own.

I’m also thinking it would be great for my dad.  He’s losing his eyesight rapidly, and can hardly read a computer screen anymore.  I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this software.  A guy I used to work with swears by it, just because he can’t type.  It says it can handle over 100 words per minute of human speech.  Being from the South, that should be plenty for my family and me.  🙂

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Sort The Viewers, Not The Movies

My buddy IB sent this article to me…very interesting.  Netflix is running a contest for data crunchers and offering $1M to anyone (or any team) that can beat their current recommendation system by 10%.  One of the leaders is a psychologist working by himself who is looking less at raw data and more at human nature.

One such phenomenon is the anchoring effect, a problem endemic to any numerical rating scheme. If a customer watches three movies in a row that merit four stars — say, the Star Wars trilogy — and then sees one that’s a bit better — say, Blade Runner — they’ll likely give the last movie five stars. But if they started the week with one-star stinkers like the Star Wars prequels, Blade Runner might get only a 4 or even a 3. Anchoring suggests that rating systems need to take account of inertia — a user who has recently given a lot of above-average ratings is likely to continue to do so.

I think this guy is onto something, and I’d like to see this move a step further.  Associating movies using k nearest neighbor is relatively straightforward, but attacking the other side of the equation (the viewer) is a lot tougher.  Here’s an example…

“The Outlaw Josie Wales” is one of my favorite movies, but that doesn’t mean that an algorithm could spit out a bunch of westerns and give me something I like.  Clint Eastwood movies wouldn’t do it either, but it would be a little closer.  The real way to suggest movies for me would be to look at some other factors that aren’t so obvious.  You need to be able to draw conclusions from my other favorites–“Fight Club”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Smoky and the Bandit”, and “Swingers”.  You may peg all of these as “guy movies”, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to like “Gladiator”.  In fact, I hated “Gladiator”.  A movie like “Thelma and Louise” is a much better suggestion for me than “Gladiator”.  Why?  Because it is much more quotable, and that’s something my favorite movies suggest that I like.

Just an example, but that’s the direction we’re going.  In order to make a powerful suggester for anything (books, movies, music, raincoats, etc.), it is now necessary to consider the individual making the purchase instead of a one-size-fits all approach.  How else can you help a guy like me who hates sci-fi but loved “The Matrix” and can’t stand to watch horror flicks but has seen “Scream” several times?

I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but this is a very difficult problem.  You’re basically tasked with generalizing a solution which has to consider literally millions of individual problems within the problem.  It’s very tough to quantify so many parameters in so many dimensions.

What amazes me most is that this is such a simple task for us to complete in our heads.  Computers are still so far behind us in our ability to do something as simple as watch a movie and think to ourselves, “That movie sucked, but my buddy really likes movies like this…I think I’ll suggest it to him.”