After Barack Obama rejected public campaign financing, John McCain and conservatives criticized him for going back on his word. Shouldn't they be happy? Here we have a black man finally getting off public assistance, and the Right still isn't satisfied
I just read this about an exciting new violent Christian video game. These people are sick:
This game immerses children in present-day New York City — 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).
To think, I had somewhat gotten over my insane hatred of MySpace. Well, that is over. Look, I understand that MySpace is “cool” and it’s “social networking” and, no offense to my girl danah boyd, but yes, it’s a relatively safe place for kids to have their own, well, space. I get that the design is somewhat intentionally ghetto. But my current frustration goes beyond web design snobbery.
Answer me this simple question: how can a site that’s all about social networking and communication make it impossible to send messages to people?????
GOOODAAMMIT I HATE MYSPACE SO MUCH RIGHT NOW!@#!@#!@#
I cannot find a simple way to COMPOSE an email message within the system. Sure, I can look at someone’s profile and “send a message,” but how do I find their profile?! especially if they have a common name, like John.
Oh my god, I can’t even explain how asinine the system is, it’s gotten me so upset. To all those people who say MySpace is superior to good old email, you can suck my postage stamps!
Let me try again from the beginning.
I want to send a message to a MySpace friend of mine. How do I do this?
Here’s what I tried.
I went to the “Mail” tab, which showed me my inbox.
I looked for an option to “create” or “compose” or “send” a message. I clearly ask too much of a messaging system. There is no such option.
I click on something promising called “Address Book.” I think, “this must be where all my happy socially-networked MySpace friends are!” I am wrong. According to MySpace, my address book is empty. I have 417 MySpace friends, but my address book shows zero. Please explain to me how this is “cool” or “hip” or “Web 2.0″ or “indie.” It’s neither of those things. It’s pure crapola.
So then I think, “well, I’ve sent this person a message recently. I’ll just check my ’sent’ folder till I find that, click on the profile and send a message that way.” Wrong. According to the rotten placentas at MySpace, “Sent mail is automatically deleted after it is 14 days old.” Wha??? Why would they do that? There is no good reason for this. This is not cool. This is dumb, and don’t tell me it’s about saving space on their hard drives. We’re talking about simple text-based messages. Meanwhile the company is hosting, probably MILLIONS of hours of audio and video files.
I go back to the Home page and look for other possibilities. There’s a section that’s all about my friends. I choose “Edit Friends.” This takes me to a page showing my first 20 of 417 friends. There is no apparent order to the listing (though I’ve been told they’re ordered by their sign-up date with MySpace). There’s no way to sort by name or even search. So I’m supposed to manually flip through my friend list, 20 at a time, for all 417??? So, the more friends I have, the HARDER it is to communicate with them??
It’s way too late for this bullshit. I swear, all these statistics about how much time people spend in MySpace is not a positive thing. It’s an indictment against the whole structure of the service. I mean, people spend MAD time in line at the DMV. That doesn’t mean the DMV is the hot new place to kick it. That means they suck at what they do.
update 12:02pm ET: clarification. the “dying for no reason” is shorthand for an inexplicable hard drive failure which results in the loss of ALL music on the iPod.
For the FIFTH time, my girlfriend’s iPod has failed. Five. Different. iPods. This last one we connected to a different computer and used a different FM transmitter in the car to try and isolate the problem. This product sucks.
I’m a big fan of Apple. The machines are pretty. They’re like the Priuses of the computer world. Having one of their products makes me feel better than other people. But there is something seriously wrong when you can have FIVE different pieces of hardware all suffer the same fate.
That’s the sign of a company getting by on undeserved reputation and not investing enough in quality. We all need to get this through our heads: Apple is no more noble, ethical or “good” than any other major company in existence. They are around to make money. Period. It’s about shareholders and value and other buzzwords. If a good product comes out in the process, great.
But, apparently, they are willing to sacrifice truly good products in order to maintain profits and an image. I’ve watched with interest as several product issues and bugs pop up on the blogosphere, from overheating MacBook Pros, to deadpixels to battery problems and more. The consistent response from Apple is usually no response at all — no acknowledgement that the all-white, clean room, perfect company might have a smudge or crack.
Instead, they may quietly release a patch or, worse, ignore the situation and let their fanatical base rip apart anyone who dare question the infallibility of His Majesty, Steve Jobs. The Catholic Church claimed infallibility forever, and we know how that turned out right?
I’m not saying Apple is out to rape little boys, but I am saying that for too long, I know I’ve been blinded by the white. I’ve endured frustration at the hands of Windows for so long, that I assumed the enemy of my enemy was my friend. Well, Apple, friendship isn’t that simple. It needs to be earned.
Where does that leave me? Hopefully, I’m in a more honest situation, at least with myself. I still like Apple products, but they’re made by imperfect people with imperfect motives. My own fervor has been severely dampened by this iPod situation.
As much as I love to dis Microsoft’s efforts or Real Networks or Creative, I actually want them to do well. Because if they do well, it will force Apple out of its clearly complacent, dominant, untouchable realm. Look at how lax Microsoft got in the browser world when it dominated. Look at the history of the telcos or any other monopoly. Only when forced to compete, do they start to improve.
I’m officially in an abusive relationship with this company. I keep coming back, and they keep failing me. After five times, Apple, you need to seriously rock my world, or I might just leave you for real this time.
afterword.
I don’t know what to do about my girlfriend’s iPod. I hate to reward the company by purchasing a newer model. I have obsolutely no confidence in the replacement units. And I don’t want to switch around the entire music management situation. I’m kind of invested in Audible and iTunes and more Mac computers in the house.
Laughing Liberally is coming to many cities soon! I’ll be in shows in Boston and Vegas in the next month, and some other great folks will be hitting up Los Angeles.
So last year, you guys may remember that I interviewed Relentless Aaron (Front Porch Podcast, episode 6, a super prolific street lit author from New York. Since then, he’s been featured in the NY Times. I’d like to think I broke the story a little bit.
Well he or someone on his crew remixed the interview with a video slideshow and some info about me. It’s pretty interesting. BTW, I ran into Relentless at this year’s BookExpo but didn’t have time to interview him. The man was, predictably, busy busy busy!
UPDATE 3:46pm My friend Uche works at the Apple store and told me it would be better to ship back for a replacement rather than take it to the store. I just got off the phone with Apple, and they’re emailing me the shipping labels. Once they see that it’s been picked up by FedEx, they’ll send my new unit out.
I asked him, what’s the wait like for these Black MacBooks now? He said, replacements are prioritized above all other orders. My man! That’s tight. Will keep yall posted.
peep the shitty screen.
not only do they need to replace this, but they need to COMPENSATE ME for the time out of my life this is taking.
why do companies hide their damn PHONE numbers on their websites???
anyway, not sure i can take this to the Apple Store since it was a mail order machine with a 120GB drive with 2GB of RAM.
the tech gods continue to hate me. i don’t have time for this. if anyone knows of an intern that’s free, holla.
I’ll be blogging about BookExpo America (BEA) throughout my visit to DC, but won’t have any updates during the day because of the WHORISHLY EXPENSIVE WI-FI
this panel:
Premium Publishing in a Web 2.0 World: Finding Paths to Profitability via Merging Media Channels
presented by Shore Communications, I think.
verdict: booooring, mostly
main points:
discussion of various web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, RSS, mashups, been there and done that
customers are willing to spend more for edge or niche content than mainstream stuff
evolution of the publishing industry
How to make money
concentrate on contextualization, not content
develop talent and help it grow. use web as a “farm” system
What is a web 2.0 book
original works of authorship that gain value over time
packages as specific users demand it
sourced from one or more multiple contributors and media
easily transferred from one personal device to another
easily upgraded and archived
I can’t even remember the rest. I used this session to plan the rest of my day
Rule: Wi-Fi access at conferences should never, ever, cost more than the conference itself! Ever.
I’m in Washington, D.C. (my hometown) for my annual pilgrimage to the great meetup and mashup of the publishing industry: BookExpo America. Here booksellers, publishers, authors and wannabes of all those categories descend on a city’s convention center to find out what’s coming out in the Fall, issues challenging the industry (Google, Internet. Plagiarism anyone??) and just kick it.
This is my fourth year, and I was looking forward to posting updates throughout the day, but there is something rotten in the state of Wi-Fi. The entire, new, DC convention center is wired (or unwired, whatever) with the most WHORISHLY EXPENSIVE WI-FI ever. Yes, WHORISHLY EXPENSIVE.
courtesy of Instant Internet (brought to you by Smart City):
$25 per day for 64Kbps connection speeds??
$50 per day for 128Kbps connection speeds??
Dude, my friggin cell phone is faster than that? How can they even call that Wi-Fi? It’s neither Wi, nor particularly Fi!
As for “Smart City,” here’s what their website says:
Smart City is a full-service communications provider across the nation and one of the world’s largest communications providers to convention centers and hospitality venues. Smart City provides technologies that make our cities smarter places to work, live, and play.
and their motto is:
Making the world smarter.
One city at a time.
How about this instead?
Making the world dumber.
One overpriced kilobit at a time.
For a four-day conference, that’s $200, and it only cost $150 to be here.
The point of a conference is to connect people, to hype the rep of the conference itself, and to make the experience as exciting and productive as possible for the attendees. ALL conferences should include wi-fi in the registration, for MAYBE $5 per day. They should assume bloggers and reporters and vigilante pundits want to file their stories and thoughts and ideas. They should expect that I’ll want to check out the website of the publishers and other industry folk I meet.
In fact, the DC Convention Center should never contract with a company like “Instant Internet.” What kind of name is that anyway? How is 128Kbps instant?? Convention Centers should include Wi-Fi for all conferences of a certain size just as a cost of doing business.
The point for you readers is that you’ll have to deal with these batch uploads of posts, where I submit like three to five THOUSAND entries at night when I have a more powerful and more affordable signal available.
In a few weeks, I won’t miss their stinking whore-y wi-fi because I’ll have EV-DO from Sprint on my Treo 700p paired with my Blacbook.
In the meantime, I’d like to thank Tryst in Adams Morgan for providing the FREE WI-FI which makes this post possible hours upon hours after I wrote it.
Oh, and just a minute ago I met two other BEA attendees. Denise, from a Latino literacy group and Tony Diaz from Nuestra Palabra which hosts the largest book events in Houston, and they’re all about Latino literature.
peace people. I’ll see if I can bang out a few more entries tonight, but no promises!
I just got this email. For those who don’t know, Deval Patrick is running for governor of Mass. I’m a big fan, and here’s why. I’ve bolded some of the key sentences but otherwise, am printing in full:
Dear Friends,
I am writing today to let you know about my decision to resign from the Board of Ameriquest’s parent company. I want you to hear from me directly before you read about this in the newspaper tomorrow.
As you know, I believe that leadership is more than grand announcements. It’s more than press conferences and photo ops. Sometimes leadership is the slow, steady, unglamorous work of making reform real.
That is the kind of leadership that I brought to Texaco, where I helped transform their employment practices in the wake of devastating allegations of workplace discrimination. That is the kind of leadership I brought to Coca-Cola, where I was involved in steering the company through a crisis of public confidence in its internal control and accounting processes. And that is the kind of leadership I brought to Ameriquest, when I was asked to join the board of its parent company in 2004. Ameriquest was facing very serious charges about its lending practices at the time. I became a part of the solution.
I have spent a lifetime fighting against discriminatory lending practices. Here in Massachusetts, I led the charge over a decade ago against predatory lending that targeted elderly and African-American borrowers, achieving the first statewide settlement and also mediating subsequent cases by appointment of Scott Harshbarger. As the head of the Civil Rights Division in the U.S. Justice Department under President Clinton, I implemented the most far-reaching fair lending enforcement program in American history. Millions of people got a fair chance to own a home because of the work we did.
So when officials of Ameriquest asked me to help them learn from their mistakes and institute internal changes to ensure that unfair lending does not occur again, I was glad to join the company’s board. I served as the board’s point person for the company’s management in their negotiations with attorneys general from 49 states and helped the company reach an agreement that both holds Ameriquest accountable for past behavior and sets new industry standards for all lenders. I have also been involved in review and development of the company’s efforts to improve its internal oversight and controls. There is more to do. But these changes will place Ameriquest at the forefront of transparency and accountability in the sub-prime lending market. Since that’s the fastest growing segment of the lending industry, that’s good news for working families. I am very proud of that.
No company is immune from general economic trends and Ameriquest was hit hard by the recent slowdown in home sales and refinancings. Just two weeks ago, the company announced it was closing all its branches across the country and consolidating operations in its four servicing centers. Layoffs resulted, including some employees here in Massachusetts. But instead of leaving our folks to fend for themselves, I went to work. I am pleased that every one of those employees has an opportunity to join a rival lender. Employees who are losing their jobs through no fault of their own now have a means to cushion the blow.
The sad reality is that the same economic realities that are squeezing Ameriquest’s business are also squeezing Massachusetts families. At times like these, mortgage foreclosures tend to increase. That’s why I am pleased that Ameriquest will bring credit counseling and foreclosure avoidance programs to Massachusetts that the company has developed elsewhere, and has offered to partner with Mayor Thomas Menino’s task force on foreclosure avoidance in Boston. These are tangible ways that, by rolling up my sleeves, I have tried to help keep hard-pressed families from losing their homes.
I understood from the outset that my work with Ameriquest would make some people uncomfortable. Progressives are sometimes uncomfortable in principle with people who work for large companies. Political rivals try to make it an issue. But leadership to effect real change sometimes requires more than a critique from the outside. Sometimes it requires that you bring your judgment and your conscience inside.
Unfortunately, that spirit is largely missing from our current political culture. Many of our political leaders prefer to concentrate on getting and keeping office rather than performing the hard work of devising real solutions to our most difficult challenges. That’s why we need a change.
Ameriquest is on a path to be a better company now. The changes I helped develop will make a real and positive difference in the lives of borrowers and in the behavior of the company. Confident that this progress will continue, I will be stepping down from the board. Besides, I have a campaign to win. But my lifelong commitment to fighting discrimination and unfairness is unchanged. I still believe that lasting reform requires good people both outside and inside. Whether at Texaco, Coca-Cola or Ameriquest, I have never left my conscience at the door. And you can count on that when I’m governor, too.
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