Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

My email just stopped this morning. No warning, no notice. I tried to log into my bluehost.com account to reset my password and couldn’t get in at all. “Call us” it says.

So I called, waited in the queue, and the rep can’t help me. Transfers me to the abuse department. Abuse? I run a low-volume blog and some email.

The abuse rep finally comes on the line. Heather is her name. Her tone clearly says she thinks I’m scum. She informs me with McCainish contempt that I am in violation of the terms of service because I have “stored files” in my account. Apparently, they changed their TOS back in April to say any file has to be served as part of a website and they crawled all my sites and couldn’t find a way to get to those files.

I log in through ssh after she reactivates that part and find that the “offending files” are about 90G worth of music and picture backups from when I was upgrading to Leopard. I just forgot to delete them. She says she can’t reactivate my email and sites until the files are gone.

I type rm -rf * inside the directory and ask her to wait for it to complete. She has other customers and says I have to call back. Can’t she see the files going away? Sorry, can’t wait. I ask for a supervisor. Without even missing a beat “she’s in a meeting.” Yeah, right. I ask her how much of the data remains to be deleted. She doesn’t answer or even say goodbye — just hags up on me. The rm finishes.

My files may have been a violation of the TOS, but I didn’t know that. There was no urgent reason to deactivate my account when they could have sent an email.

I have sent email to their CEO since their support department no longer accepts email. You have to call them.

You know, maybe Heather is just a bad apple who needs to be fired and Bluehost made a bad hiring decision, but deactivating my account unnecessarily is the big crime here as far as I’m concerned.

My advice would be to avoid any company that treats your data with so little care. Based on my experience with them, Bluehost.com is definitely one to avoid on that score.

Required viewing:

Lawrence Lessig on McCain on Technology

MacWorld claims iTunes rentals don’t expire the same way that Unbox videos do. With Unbox/TiVo, you can’t watch any more after the 24 hours. With iTunes, you can actually pause the video and resume it again even after the expiration, as long as you don’t switch away from the video.

Excellent, if true. Can’t wait to try this out.

[via Fake Steve]

Microsoft has always had shareholders as it’s first priority. They make every decision based on how much revenue they can recognize and how soon. They are so eager to protect their bottom line (even at the expense of their users), that they have even disguised advertisements as news stories on msn.com. You click on a headline that looks interesting, but instead of a story there, it’s an ad. And the same get-the-money-now thing underlies their good-enough philosophy with respect to product design. Obviously, they can’t piss off their users too much, but it’s astonishing what people can get used to. After a while, you just get used to Office and IE and Windows. So if people will buy ugly things, why spend money making them beautiful?

So, Microsoft is all about shareholders. Isn’t every company? Okay, sure. But HOW do you create sharedholder value? At Apple, the belief seems to be that if you create well-designed, beautiful things, people will buy them and the shareholders will benefit. It’s a longer term vision, though. Sure, people will gradually get used to crappier products, but that downward spiral leads to bad places. Keep the vision and that spiral can go up. You have to think long-term, though.

Microsoft’s strategy is twofold: Job one has always been and remains protecting their monopoly. There’s a real limit to how user-focused they want to be — nothing that could potentially benefit another company is permitted. For example, when I worked on live.com, the execs made us pull a configurable-search feature entirely so as not to take traffic away from MSN search. I argued MSN search should have to earn that traffic, but they don’t care about such arguments. Protect the monopoly as much as possible is the rule. (I had been hired into the group with the promise that we were trying to do the right thing for the user as a way to save MSN, but when that didn’t pan out, I left.)

Things started to stagnate with just the one strategy, though, so several years back, they adopted another one: emphasizing developers. Everybody had fun with Ballmer’s little fit about that on stage. But developers are now yesterday’s beans and they’re on to the new thing: advertisers. See below. Yeah, that’s going to save them.

I genuinely worry about the Seattle economy. Microsoft is still expanding up here at a breathtaking pace. There are at least 10 new buildings under construction up here right now. When Microsoft finally runs out of things to try, it’s going to hurt. I’m sure there are a few years left, though.

It’s so worth reading the whole thing, but what makes me want to meet him is:

If you bought an iPhone and you think Apple should give you $200, you are an idiot. In fact, you are so stupid I am hereby cordially inviting you to come to Seattle so I can punch you in the face.

It’s time to finally start thinking about HDTV. I’ve got a space that’s 48.75″ wide max, so a 46-50″ screen is what I’m looking for (I think the ideal width would be 45″, leaving almost 2″ on space on a side). Seems like the new 1080p plasma screens are all 49.9″ wide, though, so they’re out, unfortunately. Ah, if only I’d been paying more attention earlier on. It’s funny but we had to pick a fireplace and frame it in really early in the project.

Anyway, there are 50″ plasmas in 1360×768 that would fit, and the new anti-reflective coatings seem promising. And, of course, 1080p LCDs are available at 46″ and at 50″, and there are several that would fit. I’ve heard that the 1080 vs 720 thing isn’t as big a deal as people sometimes say. At least not below 50″.

I should also mention that we’re going to be in a very bright room with lots of windows, so glare-resistance will be critical. So, a 720p plasma? 1080p LCD?

Your feedback is requested. Let me know what you think!

UPDATE: In the comments, Andrej suggests that LCD still holds the edge over plasma in bright rooms, even with the fancy new anti-glare coatings the plasma people are putting out. He suggests going over to Magnolia to see for myself. Now, I’m all for firsthand experience, but given that all these places mis-adjust their sets so badly, is it really possible to get a real sample of what you’re in for? I don’t have time to research how to adjust all the various sets and then go into Magnolia and “fix” their sets for them!

Still, I’m not a huge sports fan, and the new Samsung LCDs claim an 8ms response time. That seems pretty fast to me.

We picked up a Sonos system a few months back to audition it for our new home as a “whole house” audio system. I put that in quotes because we’ve wired for the whole house, but will only buy hardware for select rooms. The system is a series of distributed controllers that can read mp3 files from windows filesystems on the network. Great, I thought. I’ll plug a drive into my Airport Extreme base station and it’ll act like a NAS and I won’t need a dedicated server. Brilliant!

Unfortunately, Sonos has a little bug: it can’t connect to the Airport disk. My Mac can. My Windows XP box can. What’s wrong with Sonos? I called their tech support people and was told that they couldn’t connect to the Airport disk because of (I kid you not) a problem with Apple’s USB connector! I asked to talk to the next tier of support and was told that Apple messed up the Samba protocol. I asked why my XP box could connect, then, and they said they didn’t know.

I finally got a more-reasonable sounding answer on the forums: the Airport Extreme doesn’t properly support Samba user-level authentication and the Sonos doesn’t properly support unauthenticated/user-level authenticated access. Great. So much for that plan. By the time I finally discovered all this, the return period on both items had expired, so I’m stuck for now. I’ll probably have a server in the new house anyway, if only to serve iTunes content to the TV.

UPDATE: Thomas Meyer at Sonos wrote to tell me that they’d released new software to improve compatibility with airport extreme. I haven’t tested it, as I’m now serving my music from a dedicated Leopard server (which also serves for Time Machine backups).

[via FSJ]

How did Apple leave tasks out of iPhone? Is this something waiting for Leopard? I don’t know, but 37 Signals has something for now, Ta-Da Lists for iPhone!

Now if only they supported categories and priorities ordering, we’d be in business for GTD. I need my GTD!