Confusing Analytics 0 comments

i had 8 visits from pelotas, brazil yesterday in google analytics.

but i've been doing some work and the site didn't have analytics installed yesterday.

11 Awesome Features Of Google Chrome OS 0 comments

via woot

1. Your family photos are accompanied by text ads for skin care and diet plans.
2. Removes all Falun Gong references from your files.
3. Every month, the hard drive is automatically defragged and investigated for anti-trust violations.
4. Invests in, develops, acquires, and abandons your best ideas.
5. Integrated tax preparation software includes "I'm Feeling Lucky" deductible button.
6. Changes your icons daily, forcing you to look up which obscure scientific figure is having a birthday.
7. Spends 20% of its time on tasks not related to work.
8. Prevents all evil activity unless it is deemed to be for the good of the shareholders.
9. Masseuse comes by every Monday afternoon.
10. Constant crashes won't bother anybody as long as it's labeled "Beta".
11. "Beta" status won't expire until 2038.

Google Chrome OS: Ars Operating Systemica 0 comments

So my anecdotal frustrated rhetorical question of the morning is, "What the hell are people smoking so as to make them write such odd opinion pieces about Google Chrome OS?".

Deep breath. Ok, now that I have that out of the way, let's take a look to see why this not only makes perfect sense, but also, makes perfect sense.

• The computing cycle has been heading back towards the fully thin client paradigm for years.
• If you can play recent good video games in real time with no console, the pipes are fat enough to support daily operating system procedures.
• Shipping more complex processing to a cloud is more efficient, as well as faster.
• The google web drive will be like your current hard drive. Except. You won't lose all your photos like the last hd that failed spectacularly.
• Google has so much dark fiber that it could set up its own ISP if it needed to beef Chrome OS performance.
• Your devices can be lighter and focus on quick data transfer and display.
• Your devices may have their lives extended a few years.
• Apple has softened the general public's opinion of alternate operating systems.
• Android is too linked to failed cellphones and the idea of Linux. It was a good shot, but dead in the water.
• Microsoft shot itself in the head with Vista.

Ok, so the last three are pretty much opinion, but you get the idea. Shame on you tech writers for commenting on anything about Google's business strategy. If you were qualified to make those kinds of determinations, you'd be business strategizing.

Gamefly: What is FastReturn™? 1 comments

Gamefly's game turnaround average is bordering on two weeks for me. Not super happy with that.

But I did get an interesting email about how my next game will ship. Apparently they've set up a deal with the post office to ship from postal center instead of Gamefly central warehouse.

FastReturn™ is a service, in partnership with the U.S. Postal Service, we developed to improve delivery times to GameFly members.

FastReturn™ will start the processing of your next game as soon as we receive confirmation from the U.S. Postal Service that a game has been returned in the mail. If we receive a valid U.S. Postal Service scan, you will no longer need to wait until we receive the returned game in our warehouse before we send the next available game in your GameQ!

NOTE: GameFly may not receive scans and we will not process a FastReturn™ if one of the following occurs:

Your mail is processed at a U.S. Postal Service facility that does not have scanning equipment.
Your mail is not processed according to U.S. Postal Service standard operating procedures.
The barcode on your mailer is damaged.

Also, Gamefly doesn't offer an RSS feed of what's currently out, what's in your queue, etc. Some standard stuff I think would make the service look a little more legit.

Adding Microsoft Sync to Your Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes, etc. at syncmyride.com 0 comments

Please wait for a Sync Agent to respond.
Thank you for contacting the Ford & Lincoln-Mercury Sync Support Center.
You are now chatting with 'Scott'

How may I assist you?

you: can you add sync to a vehicle that did not come with it?
Scott: Unfortunately no.
you: so, syncmyride is a bit of a misleading website name
Scott: It is for SYNC customers.
Scott: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
you: nope, thanks
Scott: Thank you for chatting with the SYNC Support Center.

Please let us know how we did today by clicking on the word "Close" in the chat window and filling out our exit survey. If you have not already done so, please create your SyncMyRide account to personalize your experience.

iPhone 3GS Pricing for Current 3G Owners is not currently living up to my expectations 0 comments

So if you want an iPhone 3GS, but ended up jumping on the 3G bandwagon last year, the upgrade is $200 bucks more than if you have an original iphone.

If you own an iPhone: iPhone 3GS is $199/$299
If you own an iPhone 3G: iPhone 3GS is $399/$499

But even if you suck it up and take the plunge, you still get...

denied!

Comcast In San Francisco sucks is not currently living up to my expectations 1 comments

So Tuesday night, Tasha and I were settled down to watch some streaming Netflix. It's tough to find series that we both like so we compromised on Jericho, which is presented in Netflix Streaming HD. After about 30 seconds of what I presume is "powerboost" quality picture, Netflix cuts out with a note about how my internet connection "has slowed". Netflix rebuffers the signal to a lower bitrate. So while I'm not happy, at least we are able to check out the show to see if it's worth watching.

But after another minute of the degraded video quality, the same "connection slowed" message comes up and the signal "adjusts" to literally the lowest quality streaming Netflix I've seen. We ended up trying a couple other Netflix HD movies in the queue and finally just watched some SD Dr. Who that we'd missed.

We've just moved less than a mile from our previous residence where we had AT&T Uverse, which never had any Netflix HD Streaming Issues, but did kill torrents regularly at about the same Mbps service level (18 Uverse vs 16 Comcast).

16mbps is Comcast's fastest website-advertised speed. I know there's a 22 Mbps and a 50 Mbps; they're $80 and $190 a month, respectively. I had initially thought I'd try out the 16 speed and upgrade pretty quickly, but 16 Mbps should certainly be able to run Netflix Streaming HD. I mean, we're in San Francisco 94107, the Mecca of interweb civilization.

edit1: found this guy's experience very similar to what we're experiencing.

edit2: In what has been a very interesting sequence of events, Comcast has commented on my blog, emailed from the regional office, emailed from Comcast Corporate, and even personally phoned from Executive Customer Support. I had Comcast for a few years in MD when they were overadvertising their ability to deliver HD content to a set top box, so the Streaming HD yips weren't really that surprising, but the quick response from the Comcast team has been very impressive. Apparently I'm going to get one more call to schedule some line testing and a swap to a newer modem. I'll update as the story unfolds.

ISP Comparison Chart 1 comments

I hate pretty much all ISP's. I'm waiting for Google to turn on its dark fiber network and create teh interwebs 3.11 for workgroups. But I'm moving and have to figure out the best internet service provider for the occasion. We're currently (20090425) on u-verse, but the residential gateway doesn't support UPNP, and torrents are routinely killed outright, aaaaand apparently they're about to roll out bandwidth caps.

I wanted a comparison chart but couldn't find one. Here's a stab at homemade.



Explanations:

Comcast Throttling:

"Sustained use of 70% of your up or downstream throughput triggers the Best Effort state (as opposed to the Priority Best-Effort State), at which point you'll find your traffic priority lowered until your usage drops to 50% of your provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for "a period of approximately 15 minutes." A throttled Comcast user being placed in a BE state "may or may not result in the user's traffic being delayed or, in extreme cases, dropped before PBE traffic is dropped."

So you can never use 100% of what you paid for? I'm so confused by this.

I'll update the chart as I get more info or as things change. Remember, I'm in SF area so speeds, whatever blablabla could be different in your area.

AdSense video units to be retired 0 comments

Check out the video adsense units while they're still there. Underneath the Netflix queue on the right side bar.

Hi,

We're writing to let you know that we'll be retiring AdSense video units at the end of April. After reviewing this feature, we've found that it hasn't been performing as well as we had hoped, so we've decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites.

We recommend that you begin removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible, to ensure that you can take advantage of the available ad space on your pages. At the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units will begin directing users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won't generate earnings from them once this change occurs.

If you'd still like to display free video content from YouTube, you can do so through YouTube.com directly: visit any specific video page for the embed code, or sign in to your YouTube account to create a playlist. For more information about embedding YouTube videos, please visit http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=57788. Alternatively, if you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

Although video units are being retired, other video offerings within AdSense aren't affected. Video ads may still appear on your pages and AdSense for video is still available for eligible publishers. If you'd like more information about the retiring of video units, please visit our Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12182.

Thanks for your support of video units in the past, and we appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.
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If I torrent something that I can get from Netflix... 1 comments

is that still illegal?