Entries Tagged 'Internet' ↓

Why would I pick standard shipping when I’ve got Amazon Prime? Get that crap off my checkout page before I accidentally select it.

Sweet! My beloved Yahoo! Mail will not die. Microsoft backs away from Yahoo!. Pretty crazy.

I’m no famous tech blogger so get your info from these good peeps:

• Sarah Lacy
• TechCrunch
• Mashable

There’s a thread on the Music Man about someone’s grievance with a Guitar Center salesperson.

Here’s a recap:

1. Dude goes to GC looking for Music Man guitars.
2. Salesperson says “I didn’t know they made guitars”.
3. Saleperson then quotes the customer a bad price after looking it up. Also says the price may go up $100 before the guitar is delivered.
4. Saleperson hands the customer an Ibanez and says it’s a way better guitar.
5. Customer is annoyed and posts experience on the Music Man forums.

This is par for the course. People like pissing on Guitar Center on forums. I moderate the EBMM (Ernie Ball Music Man) forum so I see, read & deal with this kind of stuff all the time.

Here’s the main issue: Those who frequent online message boards about guitars and basses know a ton about gear… we read about this stuff all day. Now, the salespeople at big retail outlets like Guitar Center aren’t always/usually as knowledgeable about boutique/non-standard brands like Music Man. Most of these employees are standard people (non gear-nerds) and know the some stuff about run of the mill gear: Fenders, Gibson, PRS Guitars and stuff like that. It’s not common for GC employees to know a ton of stuff about the smaller brands. Also, some of the younger types have the “youth attitude”… ya know: “Only old fucks play strats” and “If you play metal you have to use an Ibanez or ESP”.

When these two worlds collide you have the makings of a pissing contest. The gear nerds kinda get a hard-on telling salespeople that they’re dumb (or telling stories about these experiences) and the sales people just want their commission and some just like pushing their favorite brand.

So anyways… this thing gets posted on the MM forum. Sterling Ball, owner & CEO of Ernie Ball Music Man, chimed in with his 2 cents… The Marty Albertson, CEO of Guitar Center, cruised by to try and address the issue (scroll to post #54). So here you have 2 CEO’s, each from multi-million dollar companies, hopping onto the front line and interact with their customers “face to face”.

I really gotta tip my hat to these guys. Sterling and Marty don’t shy away from stuff and will step into a shower of bullets in order to represent their companies and try to “fix” situations… or at least provide some insight. I’ve met these 2 (Sterling’s a friend) and their both super nice and really care about their companies and customers.

Customer support matters. I consider these guys as mentors in that aspect of business. Props guys!

So now that I’m liking Netvibes I thought I’d see how it performs as an RSS reader…

The little RSS widgets are cool enough but I want all my feeds in one “panel” or whatever it’s called. I don’t wanna bother with clicking one after n another after another. So, I wrote a quick and dirty script that will mash them all into 1 monster RSS feed. That way I can use 1 RSS widget in Netvibes.

So far so good… my Netvibes reader is picking up stuff pretty decently and even quicker than Safari. The monster feed’s big so it can get a little slow but somehow it’s still doing fine.

So far NetVibes is kicking the other contenders’ asses. My Yahoo can go to hell with their adds and their lack of support for 3rd party widget. And iGoogle can go to hell for being ugly. Check out the NetVibes and iGoogle screenshots. The Digg, Twitter, Notes, Yahoo mail widgets all look way better in NetVibes.

Also… I did check out pageflakes and their RSS reader thing is cool but otherwise it lost out to NetVibes. Maybe I’ll check it out more this weekend to have an in depth opinion.

Where’d the Amazon Prime logo go? It took me some scanning to figure out if this lens was eligible for prime. Why’d they ditch the cool lil logo they used to have?

I was just checking my spelling of “Eleanor Rigby” on Google and this wikipedia page was #1. So I checked out the page for shit’s n giggles and thought “wow, some people are bored as shit”.

Seriously, check out the page that’s a ton of information for a single song. I think they list every band who ever covered that song and what color shirt the guitarist was wearing and what day.

Who’s ever contributed? I haven’t. I mean, I’m glad people take the time but is it overkill sometimes? All this fucking info and no lyrics? I assume its a copyright issue or something but isn’t that an obvious thing people would wanna read if they made it past the 87^th paragraph?

I just setup mod_expires for Craig’s Little Buddy. It’s pretty nice. Now images, js and css files are only re-requested one month after their mod time.

The quick little lines of magic are:

Good times.