Tag: Anti complaint

Oh, have I got a treat for you

On October 13, I posted about a new soft drink called Enviga, and how I didn’t believe the marketing hype. On October 18th, I posted again about Enviga and how it sucks. On October 19th, I got an email from a guy who works for Manning Selvage & Lee, an advertising firm representing Coca Cola.

Hello, My name is Craig Eldon and I’m assisting in the launch of Coke’s new sparkling green tea – Enviga.

I’ve read your blog and thought detailed news about this new product might be a fit for your readers. I have pre-sale samples available for you and would like to provide detailed information about this new drink category.

What do you think? I look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Best, Craig

Today, I received three cans of not-yet-released-to-the-public “sparkling green tea”, Enviga. Coke calls it “The Calorie Burner”. Later tonight, the wife and I are going to try it. On Monday (Because no one reads blogs on the weekend), you’ll have a full report on the aspartame-filled beverage.

It’s interesting – I exchanged a few emails with Craig, and every subsequent email had a note at the bottom threatening all that I hold dear if I shared any information. I’m actually not going to share any of it with you. The reason for this is that they obviously thought about what communication they could and couldn’t keep privilaged. That is, they knew an unsolicited marketing email could hardly be called private, but once I responded, they had some reasonable expectation for my discretion. The fact that they made this distinction suggests that they are on firm legal ground in restricting what I can and can’t share, so I’m going to listen to them.

I will have you know that I have received only a few emails, some marketing documents, and three cans of Enviga from Craig. There is no money, nor promise of money, nor any other sort of compensation. The review of Enviga you read here on Monday will be honest, and it will be my opinion, whatever that turns out to be.

I hope you’re excited.  I know I sure am.

No substantial relationship

John Scalzi on gay marriage in NJ

Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose.

John Scalzi has a nice bit on the NJ Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage. The above is my favorite line from the quote from the decision. It looks like the Jersey Supreme Court has sent a nice not-so-subtle message that the government is not in the business of spreading homophobia and discrimination. I think “no substantial relationship to legitimate governmental purpose” is a lovely turn of phrase, and I applaud the court.

I’m not so sure I’m happy with their failure to rule on whether you can call it marriage – this is an important issue for many, and not calling it marriage leaves them open to “separate but equal” challenges. But I suppose that leaving some of the decision to legislators is what the whole system is about. Hopefully New Jersey’s legislature will work something out that most people can live with.

Everyone else is posting it

outside.in

outside.in is designed to change all that, as a bridge between information space and real-world space — a place to see in a single glance all the interesting things that are happening around you.

I’ve read about this on at least three blogs already, so I figured I might as well check it out. It’s user-based content, so there’s not much there yet, although with all the pimping it’s getting from big shots like John Battelle and David Pescovitz at BoingBoing, it shouldn’t be long before they have a good user community.

The idea is that you will go and provide local information about where you live, and be able to find similar information about other places.  Or you might find that little hole in the wall restaurant around the corner that you’ve never noticed.

Nice idea.  Execution looks pretty good, although I didn’t poke around too much.  It’s certainly designed better than HotSoup.

New stuff coming soon

I’ve been working this weekend to bring you some new features here. Once I get it all working, you’ll be able to submit your own complaints, and view the complaints of others. It will be pretty low-tech at the beginning. It will probably involve you emailing me through a form on the site, and then I’ll add your complaint somewhere. The goal eventually is to take me out of the equation, and allow you to interact somehow with the complaints of others.

To that end, I’ve been working in Prado, a PHP framework. I started using them because they offered AJAX support, and you can’t be a cool website without AJAX, right? But it turns out that AJAX was supported in version 2.X, and will be again in 3.1, but the current version is 3.05, and it does not really have any AJAX support. I thought about going back to 2.X, but then I’d have to redo things when 3.1 came out, which they claim should be in about two weeks. So, thanks to Mo for showing me how to upgrade to PHP5 on Dreamhost (Great inexpensive web hosting company, by the way), and I’ll get the new stuff out as soon as I can.

This also gives me the opportunity to say how much I like developing on my Ubuntu box using a lighttpd server.  For some of you, I know this is like a foreign language, but I honestly thought you stopped reading when I started talking about Prado.  Anyway, it was a real personal accomplishment for me to get PHP 5 and Prado installed on lighttpd and have a small web app up and running over the weekend.  I’m quite pleased with myself, actually.  While I do web development for a living, the server configuration and things like that are not my strong suit (Or even, really, my suit at all).  I never really learned anything about managing a server, and our enviroment at work was set up before I got here.   So I’m just going to pat myself on the back here for figuring it out and getting it all working.

Creative Commons – not just for hippies

MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos | PBS Link via John Batelle

“I think Creative Commons is a huge thing and I attribute a lot of my success to it,” Krug said. “Since the beginning I’ve given all my photos away on the Internet and they’ve been used by other bloggers and people all along the way and it’s gotten my name out there.

Article is about a photographer who has shared his high quality photos under a Creative Commons license, and how it’s gotten his name out there.  Are you listening, music industry?

I have about 1500 photos shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.  That means anyone can use the photo for whatever they want as long as theygive me credit, don’t make money from it, and keep the license the same.  I’ve never had anyone I don’t know use a photo (To my knowledge), but I know at least one friend has used a few as desktop backgrounds, which is cool.  And I’m not a professional photographer or anything, but I have an expensive DSLR and I more or less know how to use it.

Anyway, good to hear Creative Commons success stories.

Its interesting to live near D.C.

Wild Blue Wonder – washingtonpost.com

The wife and I were driving from her office in the city to Arlington to take my grandmother on some errands when we passed this new monument, and what looked like a circus or something or other happening at the Pentagon. I didn’t know anything about it, but apparently she had heard something about a new monument. So we surmised that this was the dedication ceremony. I have to say that, from 395, the monument is kind of dumb. I mean, it’s big and shiny and sharp, and I guess it probably strikes fear in the hearts of terrorists or something. But it’s sort of ugly.

But, whatever. Art is subjective, and I’m picky about my art. I’m happy to honor the Air Force, as they’ve done a great deal to protect my way of life.

Anyway, my real point was that part of the ceremony is an air show. As I was turning off of Spout Run Parkway, we heard a loud plane overhead that turned out to be one of these.USAF B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber Plainly visible, right overhead through my open sunroof on this sunny and brisk day, a friggin’ stealth bomber. I’m not usually one to get all worked up over something like this, but these things cost $2.2 BILLION each. And, it’s a stealth bomber. That’s pretty awesome. We saw a few other planes (And heard even more), some that I recognize from video games and whatnot. But the stealth was the highlight.

Anyway, I hope that hotlinking to airforce-technology.com isn’t going to cause any problems. At least they aren’t likely to goatse (Link to worksafe explanation, for those who don’t know) me.

Edit: Didn’t realize that the image was too big for IE, since I avoid using IE as much as possible. So I made it smaller.

Space Invaders is awesome

Teenager moves video icons just by imagination Via Futurismic

The teenager, a patient at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, had a grid atop his brain to record brain surface signals, a brain-machine interface technique that uses electrocorticographic (ECoG) activity – data taken invasively right from the brain surface. It is an alternative to a frequently used technique to study humans called electroencephalographic activity (EEG) – data taken non-invasively by electrodes outside the brain on the scalp. Engineers programmed the Atari software to interface with the brain-machine interface system.

So this kid is not only helping us learn how we might deal with epilepsy, but can also play Space Invaders without a controller.  That’s just one step closer to the end of computer input devices as we know them.  Wouldn’t it be cool if your interaction with the computer wasn’t limited by the speed at which you can communicate with it?

More on Googles purchase of YouTube

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Some thoughts on the Google Purchase of YouTube:

Some interesting speculation here.  Jeff Pulver thinks (hopes?) that this could mean a real step forward towards internet TV.  The combination of YouTube’s community with Google’s developers and resources could be the start of a real alternative to cable/satellite TV.

That could be really cool.  An entirely new model for distributing mainstream video entertainment.  Maybe we’d finally stop being stuck with this antiquated “this show is on at this time” system.  You’d think that the popularity of Tivo and DVR would suggest that maybe people don’t like being forced to watch a show at a specific time, but the networks don’t seem to want to deliver what people want.

Working from home

Our office is all but closed today, and I got permission to work from home (Mostly because I’m pretty sure I’m technically supposed to do the combination lock on the office door every time I go to the bathroom if I’m the only one there).  And what’s even better is that my assignment for the day is to get IntelliJ up and running with the Google Web Toolkit and see if I can get an environment set up to write some web services.  I’m thinking I might try writing a little something for Complaint Hub if I can get it working (And playing nicely with the WordPress php theme that I’m using).  Maybe I’ll put up a little Nano progress bar so you all can yell at me if I start falling behind next month.