Gizmodo reports that Defective by Design, an anti-DRM group, is going to clog up the Apple Genius Bar this weekend with people complaining about the restrictive nature of the iPhone. This is an idea (DRM sucks) that I totally support, but a terrible way to protest it. I mean, when I see idiots from PETA dressing up like animals or throwing blood around, it just makes me want to go on the Atkins diet. When I see Truth.com’s super-obnoxious anti-smoking commercials, I want to buy cigarettes for minors. I support treating animals humanely. I support keeping kids from smoking (And encouraging adults to stop). And I support telling Apple and the rest that they’re a bunch of jerks with their insistence on DRM. But this isn’t the way to do it. The response to bad behavior is not more bad behavior. Apple’s anti-customer policies are not justification to make this much of a nuisance of yourself. Remember, when someone buys an iPhone, they’ve made a decision, based on their knowledge of the product, that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. For you, they may not. They don’t for me. And really, we all know the only thing that would make me buy an Apple product (Except as gifts for my wife, because she’s great) is if all of you stopped liking them. And yes, DRM is bad for everyone, and everyone who buys DRM-infected content or devices is making it tougher on the rest of us. But this is a free country, and that includes the freedom to make decisions based on your own relative needs and desires. Anyway, not that anyone listens to me, but I urge you to ignore Defective by Design’s request to mess with the Apple Genius Bar. It’s not the right way to protest DRM. I mean, really, does anyone think Apple cares?
Category: Uncategorized
A healthy debate on the internet?
My friend with the marketing background has a new blog, and he’s weighed in with his side of the full- or partial-text RSS feed discussion.
Setting up the baby’s room
Originally uploaded by thetejon
We just finished round one of setting up the baby’s room. Pictures are here. We had “Before” pictures, as well, but we’re having memory card problems. Hopefully we’ll recover them eventually. The wife did a ton of work on this. I did some work, but, as usual, she did the bulk of it. The dresser is mine, which we recently replaced. It came with bunk beds my grandmother bought for me when I was 10 years old or so. We painted it with leftover paint from the rest of the house, and it looks pretty awesome (Even better in person). The room is pretty awesome. It’s loud and vibrant, and gender-neutral without being pastel green and yellow. We’ve moved the futon out into the sun room. I’m not sure how we’ll like it there. So far the cat seems okay with it, so there’s that. And I’m not sure how houseguests will like it. We’ve had tons of people stay with us since we moved in, and now we don’t have a guest room anymore. Only six weeks or so, and the baby will be here. And now it has a place to sleep.
Terrifying acts of god
The wife and I were just sitting in the living room, watching the Orioles game and taking a break from Sunday chores, when the chimney of the building across the street got hit by lightning. I have a perfect view of the chimney from my spot on the couch, and I actually saw the flash when it got hit. The wife and I both swear we could feel it when the lightning hit. There was a loud crack of thunder and a big flash, and now a few of the bricks on the corner of the chimney look like they could come down in a heavy wind. I think we’re going to stay inside until the storm passes.
Yahoo isn’t as bad as Microsoft
Yahoo! Music Store Will Compensate Customers For DRM-ed Music Looks like maybe Yahoo will make it right for people who thought they were actually buying songs, rather than renting. Good for Yahoo. I hope the “compensation” details are actually consumer-friendly.
Possible site outages tomorrow
It is possible that I will upgrade to Drupal 6 tomorrow. If so, there may be some changes and some downtime for the site. Or maybe I won’t get around to it, and there will be nothing. But I thought I’d warn everyone paying attention, just in case. Edit to add: No upgrade today. Didn’t get a chance. Maybe next weekend.
Marketing your content
I have a friend with a background in marketing. He’s the one who sent me the Comcast complaining article. We’ve been talking about marketing and the internet. The two of us come from completely different perspectives on how we consume content online. I’ve just introduced him to Google Reader and the concept of subscribing to an RSS feed. He seems to be enjoying it, and even shared an article with other people on his GTalk buddy list. I complained to him that he shared a link to a NYTimes article that didn’t have the full text in the RSS feed. This is a pet peeve of mine – I read almost no websites that don’t offer full-text RSS feeds. Techdirt talks about how full-text feeds are better. Feedburner does, too. But NYTimes.com doesn’t do it. Are they stupid? I don’t know. A little Googling suggests that there’s a lot of disagreement on whether or not a partial-text feed drives more traffic to the site. That is, if you have a feed that doesn’t show the full article, do more people actually click through and come to your site, where you probably have ads? Or do most people (Like me) just skip it? Techdirt makes the point that the real bulk of your traffic comes not from your regular feed subscribers, but from them sharing it with their friends or on their blogs. Things get passed around on the popular sites – when something hits the front page of Digg, it’s probably going to show up on a lot of other popular sites. That can generate way more traffic than you’d ever get from your subscribers themselves, even if they clickthrough on every RSS item. My friend says that NYTimes is not dumb, and they’ve probably researched where they make their money, and decided that partial feeds are the way to go. I’m less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I realize that the way I consume content is not the way everyone does, and I’m probably in the minority. We may be a growing minority, but NYTimes doesn’t make its money on what people will be doing in 10 years. I will always provide a full-text feed. But I don’t make my living with this blog, so I have the luxury of doing what I want rather than what might drive more clicks. I can’t bring him around to my way of thinking, though. But I’m still working on it.
Where’s my love from Comcast?
NYTimes.com | Griping Online? Comcast Hears and Talks Back
From a sparse desk dominated by two computer screens in the new Comcast Center here, Mr. Eliason uses readily available online tools to monitor public comments on blogs, message boards and social networks for any mention of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company. When he sees a complaint like Mr. Dilbeck’s, he contacts the source to try to defuse the problem.
A friend pointed out this article, which describes a blogger complaining about Comcast, and getting contacted by a “digital care manager” from Comcast, who helped him with his problem. I bitch about Comcast ALL THE TIME. Where’s my digital care manager? This is a load of crap. I’m angry with Comcast pretty much every time I turn on my tv, and especially when I get my monthly bill. Or when our tv and internet was out for three weeks, and the techs kept either being unable to fix the problem or leaving their equipment in our living room. But I get nothing. Thanks a lot, Comcast. As an aside, the fact that the NYTimes mentions the guy’s blog by name but doesn’t bother to link to it is complete and utter horsecrap. It’s incredibly rude. Not that it’s hard to find Brandon Notices via Google, but I shouldn’t have to do that.
Where Microsoft went, Yahoo will follow
“All those years the music industry spent insisting that the only way they’d sell music is with crippling DRM attached managed to totally discredit the idea of buying music at all.”
could [Yahoo] seriously not have noticed the massive backlash that Microsoft received for telling people that it was turning off its DRM servers, effectively locking all the songs people had “bought” to their current computers.
I thought I’d written about it a little while back when Microsoft decided that the servers that check to see if the music you’ve “purchased” from Microsoft’s music store is legal or not were no longer necessary. That meant that all the music you thought you “bought” from Microsoft was really just being rented, and now they’d decided to terminate your lease because they didn’t feel like complying with the deal they made with you anymore. And now Yahoo is doing the same thing. All the music you “bought” from Yahoo won’t work anymore if you move it to a different computer. I’ve said this numerous times, and I’m not alone – if you pay for ANYTHING that has DRM attached, you are NOT buying. You are RENTING at the discretion of whoever is taking your money. Some people may be okay with that. I’m not.
Dinner at The Heights on a lovely Thursday night
Birthing class got out early tonight, and we don’t have any food in the house. It’s a combination of my bum foot and the wife’s almost-full-term baby that leads to us not going to the grocery store. So we went to The Heights for dinner around 8pm. Thursday night is generally a nice night out, and tonight is some of the nicest weather we’ve had in a while. The Heights was full but not overcrowded. Most of the seats were taken, indoors and out. It was a diverse crowd – a pregnant couple with a friend on one side of us, a gay couple on the other. A woman and two young boys were being seated as we left. A couple walked in just in front of us, apparently having walked from somewhere nearby (I choose to believe that they walked from home rather than parking in the neighborhood). The food and the service were good. The wife says she’s not sure that we’ve ever had a bad server there, and I certainly can’t think of anything to contradict her. And I was impressed by their mixed greens salad that comes with all the entrees. It was plain lettuce, but it had cherry tomatoes, jicama, and beets, which is pretty exotic and healthful for your average restaurant. The buffalo shrimp appetizer was delicious, although a little light on shrimp. I recommend saving some bread to mop up the extra sauce rather than eating it with a fork, as someone at my table for two did this evening. Their rotating beer taps were not entirely exciting this time – Brooklyn Lager and a Sam Adams seasonal – but the idea of rotating taps is cool. The table next to us was raving about the bread pudding sundae, which we didn’t order because we were both full. And we found that Merkado, a restaurant in Logan Circle owned by the same people, is closing at the end of August. In its place will be “a neighborhood place” called Commissary, hoping to emulate Busboys and Poets and Tryst. They hope to grab all the trendy kids who will move into the new building across from Whole Foods and take all their money. I’m a little sad that Merkado is closing – the wife and I had a lovely dinner there for my 29th birthday – but this sounds like an interesting replacement, although calling it “Commissary” is a little too hipster for my tastes.