“An easy to mail, mailing list of 27,000 people? It was nothing! He went down to networking events, took people’s business cards and then spammed them. He had about 2000 cards in all. And he planned to buy the other 25,000 from other spam artists like himself …”

Go read this: http://www.rachit.org/nice-clients-naughty-clients-and-some-horror-stories-with-them/

Apparently, there is this guy in Singapore, who goes to networking events to pick up name cards… and then spams them.

wtf.

Interfaces are beautiful, the exterior design is splendid (I still get stared at when I use my Macbook in public places). But there are issues:

1. Browser - Safari is not as feature rich as Firefox. Lotsa things don’t work right on Safari. Firefox, however, has become a pain in the ass. The last 5 times I shut down my computer, I had to “force-quit” Firefox.

Is it a crime to have more than 5 tabs open with one of them running youtube?

I have realized that sites that are heavy on the Javascript like GMail invariably crash my browser mid-session! I change tabs and *boom* I see the dreaded colour wheel (the mouse turns into a spinning colour-wheel on a non-responsive window).

The colour wheel now represents the equivalent of the BSOD.

2. Office-suite - OpenOffice for Mac is so so so bad! It takes forever to open, it crashes when it pleases and in combination with Firefox it makes my computer a torture device.

Over the past few days I have been using Neooffice. Pretty cool, a little faster, controls work nicely, doesn’t run on top of X11 (like OOo). But, 3 out of 5 times I have to force quit it when I shut down my computer.

3. Dashboard - Performance. Sucks. It is so damn frustrating! It took 7 seconds for the dashboard to show up after which it took another 5 seconds for my keystrokes to register on the calculator. This is with just 6 widgets.

4. Trashcan - Maybe I’m doing something stupid here, but why-the-f*** doesn’t the trashcan let me delete individual files permanently instead of emptying the whole damn thing?
I have to resort to “rm -rf” to get rid of specific files without also flushing out files that still have some value.

If there is a way to do this nicely, leave a comment. But I can’t see it. So it sure as hell isn’t intuitive. like Macs are supposed to be.

Update: There is a nice way. Hit Shift+Apple+Del. thanks for the comment. But you know what… every time you do that, it will ask you if you want to empty your entire trashcan (it will ultimately delete only the selected file). mein gott.

Update to the update: Shit. Shift+Apple+Del does in fact empty the damn trashcan.

5. Quicktime - I can’t watch videos in fullscreen mode without the Divx player or VLC? What the hell! I think somewhere along the way, the updater installer QT 7 and now the damn things wants me to upgrade to pro before I can watch videos on full screen mode.

Again, let me know if I screwed up. I don’t think I did.

6. VLC - Taking about Video… VLC for Mac is the shittiest app I have installed and run on this computer. It’s slow and it has crashed almost every single time I have opened it. I don’t why I still have it… oh wait, right because QT sucks!

Credit is due to Mplayer. It works really nicely on the Mac and has crashed only once or twice so far.

So, yes. this kind of sucks.

the genius, that Stephen Colbert is, replies “Bill, I am whoever you want me to be. … you know what I hate about people who criticize you? They critcize what you say but they never give you credit for how loud you say it… or how long you say it”

:D

Tapefailure, like any other web analytics service, lets you understand your site’s traffic. What makes it special is the fact that it records user sessions and replays them to you!

So instead of showing you aggregated statistics about where your visitors came from, what keywords they searched for to reach you etc., TapeFailure shows you what users did when they landed on your site. Not every single user - right now, TF can record at frequencies of 1 in 2, 3, 4 or 10 visitors (i.e. 50%, 33%, 25% or 10% of visitors are recorded).

These recorded sessions are called “tapes” (scroll down for a sample tape). Apart from the tapes, TF also gives you a variety of charts and visualizations to help you understand how visitors behave on your site (screenshots below).

Irrespective of whether or not this is useful, it is incredibly cool!

My experience - Screenshots & Sample tapes
I setup TF on this site almost immediately after I got my invite to try the private beta. I embedded a Javascript into my site and immediately, I had my first tape! Click below to check it out:

Opening screen

I didn’t understand my “heat map”. First, how is it generated? Is it based on mouse movements and scrolling behaviour? My heat map was uniform throughout… which is impossible, obviously most people would not have scrolled to bottom portions of this page. This might be a bug.

And a whole slew of other aggregate visualizations:

And finally, here is the settings screen that lets you set up the trackers. Very intuitive.

To-do:
1. As the FAQ mentions, it would be cool to have more filter criteria (perhaps search engine source, time of day etc.).
2. I’m not sure how the individual tapes are useful! Individual tapes are not representative, so why not just have the aggregate behaviour tracker?
3. The player does not have a timer (how much time has elapsed and how time is left on the replay).
4. The visual attention map maybe buggy. Not sure how it calculates attention information.
5. For now, TF is really fast. But this is with 150 users, hopefully it’ll scale nicely.

btw, for those who are interested, this is the prospective pricing plan:

Technorati: TapeFailure, review

2. Analogies galore - Factual, unbiased information can be powerful. But, analogies can blow facts out of proportion and evoke visceral reactions. And therefore, propaganda is full of this stuff.

So when you read Andrew Roberts as he compares British colonialism to American hegemony and portrays them as beacons of civilization, you know you should watch out.

3. Music to set the mood - Music is an incredibly powerful psychotropic agent. Here is a great ad that explains what I mean much more lucidly than I can:

4. (unnecessary) Use of authority - Statements from the “Chief Editor of the Journal of Research” sound more reassuring than ones from me. But, is the authority relevant? Is it being used to push an agenda? What is at stake for the person issuing the statement?

5. Editing: concealing circumstances - The way a video is edited and pieced together indicates biases. When someone makes a statement, is it possible that the statement is incomplete? Could it be part of what the person said? Under what circumstance could that statement have been made?

6. Strong polarizing language - This ties in with the point about opinions over fact in propaganda. One specific kind of opinion that propaganda often uses is the black-or-white opinion. You might be familiar with statements like:

“You are one of us or you are a heretic”

These are strong statements that in effect don’t carry much meaning. Are you really a heretic because you, lets say, don’t believe in the war on terror? Perhaps not. Does making that statement add anything to your knowledge about the situation? No.

7. In summary, ask yourself this - does it affect you emotionally? If the answer is yes, then it might be worth questioning the motives of those that created that video, audio or text.

I decided to write this because I was watching this. You should too.

“Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out,” he said. “But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you’re going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.”

Read the rest of it here.

Go check it out.

“… an interactive portal that enables small businesses, entrepreneurs and independent professionals in Asia to generate more business opportunities by building meaningful professional relationships in a marketing-oriented community.”

As soon as I entered the site, I started giggling like a… I started giggling really hard

“Our system works best with Internet Explorer 6 and above”

hahahhahahhaahhaha. ok! cookie points for making me laugh so hard.

anyway, I’m on a Macbook running firefox and I could sign up with no major issues. so credit is due to IconE for making that happen despite the .NET frontend, backend and everything in between.

Once inside, everything looked like crap … just like I expected. I mean, it’s a site that runs on .NET, that is designed for IE. Some links don’t work; fair enough its beta.

You what’s crazy? They have fake ads in placeholders…. …. … wait for it…

“Sample Advertisement” hahahahahhahahahahhaha .
as those irritating smiley ads would put it “OH MY GOD! NO WAAAY!”

how about some Lorem Ipsum text while you are at it!

anyway, this is a first impression (who cares about those anyway?). Also, its 3.10 am and there were 2 “anyways” in my previous sentence. Therefore, I shall stop now and come back after I have used IconnectE for a while longer.

P.S: wasn’t it the trend to name stuff “i-SOMETHING”? maybe “IconnectE” (with the capital I) is a sign of the impending emergence of Web 3.0!

hahahahaha. should. stop. eating. sugar. late. at. night.