Why is it so common that major corporations (CNN, NBC, FOX, et al.) have such horrible websites? I’d figure they probably spend a lot more in the way of budget than many other sites for what’s obviously a horrible experience. Over half the time I can’t even access their content because their implementations are so poor.

Just a couple of quick examples:

NBC.com has about six ways of accessing their video content. About one of them works for me at any given time and even then I usually have to get to the page through some silly method (copy a url, create a local html document with a link to the url…switch my user-agent, and turn off my adblocker, etc.) Their backlogged videos for a particular show may be listed by ‘favorites’ or ‘most watched’ which does nothing for me. I may have to watch the same lame advertisement four times before I actually get to view the video I want (after which I see no advertisements at all) Overall it’s just a crap implementation.

CNN.com just plain doesn’t want to work and I’m usually too lazy to bother with firefox for win32 under wine or IE for linux. And the best part here was I took the time to give them feedback. They ask for no email or other credential, and yet after submitting my feedback they had to tell me “we can’t guarantee a response.” If I get a response they’ll have performed their first of three miracles to qualify for Sainthood.

Most of the time I don’t really care about these companies or their content. I just think it’s peculiar that given how much they must spend on their internet presence they’re getting completely ripped off. I tend to think there’s a lot of that going around in the world with regard to IT/Software/etc. (That is, big budgets that produce inferior results due to either laziness or ineptitude of the implementers.)

Peace,

Adam

First I’ll let you a link to the YouTube video if you’re not familiar. It’s here.

I’m keeping myself from posting the lyrics and trying to do a line-by-line interpretation, but I’ll do some quoting which I’ll separate for clarity.

And now I’ll press play and start. Thanks to TayZonday [site still under development, redirects to his YouTube account] for this song. People may criticize it for the repetition of the title lyric, but I think that it’s such a broad concept and its perpetual inclusion between the content lyrics just drives down what it’s really about.

Okay. Chocolate Rain is very much like the so-called American Dream. It’s this drive of nations and men toward wealth and power despite the consequences. Now here’s some of the lyric to back that up:

Those are hopefully in order. Those were some of the major lines that brought me to the conclusion of ‘what is Chocolate Rain?’

It’s especially apparent in lines like Build a tent and say the world is dry. The implication being that most people focus mostly on themselves and if they are okay the world is okay. That’s a fair accusation, I think.

The chocolate rain that falls and we try to catch it is the other big clue here. Imagine you are in a field with 1,000 people and chocolate rain, or maybe a little more effective for my case, $100 bill rain, begins to fall. Look at the parade scene in the first Batman movie. People would start trampling each other for the value that is all around, even if, maybe especially if, there’s enough for everyone.

And that seems to be the nut of this song as far as I can tell. People I know and the internet I normally come across doesn’t especially discuss the meaning behind songs or works that much so I’d be interested in hearing your take on what this song means.

Thanks,

Adam

One thing I’ve noticed from time to time (and just now, hence this post) is pastebin entries showing up in search results.

Never mind the fact that they usually expire quickly (and then only to remain in the results until the search engine does a recrawl), they shouldn’t be there at all. At least, that’s the easier solution.

The more difficult solution would require everyone who uses them to create addenda to their pastes describing what their results were. People use pastebins to show others their code/logs/etc. and usually in conjunction with a discussion or bug. Seeing a pastebin entry for a term you’re searching for means someone else probably had the same issue and may already have gotten it resolved.

But ultimately the right thing to do is for them to exclude search engines. Seeing the paste of the exact thing you search from, while reassuring that you’re not crazy, does not help.

-hobo

First release. See this page for more details. Only 17 days after I started on that page, so not too bad. Still buggy, but it’s come a long way and now I’ve got a couple thousand items in my google reader queue to add and go through.

I’ll say this about bookStack: it’s not ideal yet. There’s still a kind of general point I’ve not hit with it that I want to reach before the 1.0 mark which is to make it as simple as swatting flies to deal with massive amounts of content. The idea is to help the user filter all of it in as few clicks as possible, and that will ultimately probably mean either a sidebar or some other more advanced dialog.

This is a learning experience for me, and I’ve gotten a lot of chrome under my fingernails which makes me a bit more comfortable going forward in revamping and reworking this extension. That said I’m still a bit nervous about how changes affect the browser when they’re installed over, so for now I’m asking that anyone who tries this please REMOVE old versions before upgrades just in the hopes to make things sane and simple.

Good luck and hope you like it,

Adam

I’ve still not seen Vista in the flesh, and I’ve neglected to write up a ‘linux one year review’ (it’s been over a year since I switched), but I thought I’d chime in briefly on one aspect of Microsoft’s OS that always bothered me and is among the things I love about linux.

Powertoys. These were little applications that made it easy to tweak or customize the behavior of the operating system to provide alternatives. For the most part (speaking specifically of TweakUI) they just modified existing Registry keys, but it’s always nice to have that up front and center in a nice application.

And here’s the twist: I always felt like the developers at Microsoft did that in their ’spare time’ as it were. That they felt like these were things they wanted and went out of their way to get it approved and posted for the rest of us to use. I felt like there’s this creative spirit that still lives in the hearts of Microsoft Employees, but that they are not free (like the Googlians are) to harness and express it… at least not directly.

That’s one of the amazing thing about Free Software. There’s probably been something like 1/256th (really I have no idea what fraction) the code of the whole of Free Software written that never made it. That’s a shame, but it was when individuals had a tweak or patch they wanted, but upstream said ‘no thanks.’ But for every 1/256th that got dunked there’s probably at least another 15/256 that got added.

The heart of Free Software is people that want a function or want an application or want a library, and they go to it. And then they put it up somewhere and say “this is here if you want it get it, if you change it tell me so if it’s good I can add it to mine.” With Microsoft not do they not want you to do that with their software, they don’t want themselves to play either. It’s far too rigid.

If Microsoft had more of the powertoys extensibility in mind and built in to their operating systems and software I think the world would be a lot mellower and sharing place.

And with all that wind let out, bookStack is nigh. It’s probably actually in the state it’ll be in when I ship it, but I’m still thinking about some of the quirks I’d like smoothed and features that I have in limbo for the moment. So if I don’t decide anything in a week it’ll be out.