Ken’s Sandbox

I have been giving a lot of thought to the idea of microblogging as a replacement for the email conversations I find myself having all the times. Things like setting up a tee time for golf between two or three friends. This currently happens in close-to-real-time email with everyone ccd all of the messages.

My microblogging clone would allow my “followers” to look at my personal tags (areas of interest) and follow only specific tags. For example, my golf buddies could follow my golf tag and would not have to put up with my musings about technology or business updates. A gold friend who is also a client could follow my golf and real estate tags. This would allow me to throw out a  “any one interested in playing” post, tag it “golf”, and my gold buddies would get it  but  clients and business associates who could care less about my golf would not.

I have not joined twitter, so I can’t say you could not use it to do this, but the NIH factor is enough to cause me to want write my own.

I just left the Home Depot site where I was trying to locate a strip light for behind a valance in our living room. Working from home I am on a not-so-broad broadband satellite connection and every page load is painfull. Especially considering the site would probably take 30 seconds to load on my 7mb fiber at the office.

I managed to get to lighting ok but nothing in any of the categories or manufacturers seemed like a good fit for my search so I chose the under $50 category. The first 9 of 300+ entries came up. At the top are options to sort, change to a grid view and change the number of results per page. I changed the sort and the page reloaded. I realized that changing to grid view or changing the number of results per page were both going to result in a page load. So, which do I select first? My decision, close the wuindow. Screw ‘em, I don’t need to find it that bad.

If you are the webmaster of a large site like this (or the CIO of the company), you definitely should visit your site through a dial up connection and try to actually use it. When you finally get fed up, go back and add some simple ajax to the site to eliminate those full page loads and make your site usable for those with slow connections and really nice for those with fast connections.

Well, I’m off to Lowes .

Ken

From Tom Peters This I Believe:

32. Branding is for … EVERYONE.

Whoever has … THE BEST STORY … takes home the most marbles. “Branding?” “Branding is a character issue. Next question?” It is almost that simple. And, thus, that hard. (more…)

I just discovered one of the best essays I have ever read. Although it talks specifically about software development and marketing but I can see how it would apply to almost any business. As you read the essay, think about your role in your company. Is your job to support someone else’s (the company’s “programmers”) productivity or are you a producer of your product? What is your company selling and how can you make your product or service more transparent to your customers/clients?

Do you need an abstraction layer? I now know I do.

In a typical case of investors living only for the short term, they dumped on Google’s stock after the company reported quarterly earnings were up only 28%. Here is the AP article.  I realize Google is an expensive stock. But this definitely falls under “what the f__k” in my book.

I have been following Marc Andreessen ’s blog recently, and in very good post about blogging, he announced that he would no longer be allowing comments on his blog. Given the prominence of his blog, I can appreciate the time it must take to moderate the comments. But it has caused some interesting discussion on the subject.

Another post I ran across mentioned that if you are going to allow comments you should have a moderation policy. The post mentioned the very simple moderation policy of Push Button Paradise. Consider it adopted.

I have had comments turned off on this blog for some time. I am going to begin leaving comments enabled. It may inspire me to find a better way to manage them.

The city of Bandon Committee for Community involvement had an agenda item about a community blog a month or so ago. It sounded interesting so I attended to contribute my $0.02 worth which amounted to a lot of encouragement. As a result of the meeting city manager Matt Winkel polled his newsletter readers as to whether they would like to get his newsletter in the form of a blog rather than via email. According to Matt, the response was less than overwhelming. I attribute this to peoples lack of understanding of exactly what a blog can do. (more…)

I love it when a storm impresses even the National Weather Service. This from the weather forecast discussion this morning:

“GEEZ…WHAT A MESS! JUST KEEPING THE WATCHES/WARNINGS/ADVISORIES
STRAIGHT IS A HERCULEAN TASK THIS MORNING. SEE THE BOTTOM OF THIS
MESSAGE FOR THE HIT LIST.”

Florence has had power problems earlier this week. Wish the failover was ready. And even more, I wish I had the weather station up.

and it’s not fun …

Well ATT is trying to put us out of business again. It would not be so stressfull if it was just the RealWorld site and Assessor tax information. But having client sites down is absolutely not acceptable.

As I write this the problem (what ever it is this time) is still not fixed. About 3 months ago a wire pair in the local loop corroded through and the RealWorld site was down for about 4 hours. Today (Thursday) it went down at about 3 PM. It’s approaching 6:30 PM now and Qwest promised to have it fixed within 90 minutes about an hour ago.

I’m beginning to understand what salesforce.com felt like during their recent outage problems. At least we’re still ahead of them for uptime for this year.
(more…)

My mother is one of the first test homes for the new ComSpan fiber to the premises (FTTP) project in Bandon. Late last week the hooked up her TV and internet connections. Though I don’t have any experience with her old (Charter) TV quality she says the Fiber TV has a noticeably better picture quality.

I did stop by to make sure her new internet connection was properly firewalled and ran a couple of speed tests on her new 1 megabit connection (the slowest offered). Acording to www.dslreports.com speed test, she is getting 890 K both up and down. Including the TCP overhead the connection tests at the full advertised speed. And the browsing experience is incredible. Pages load instantly. My Verizon DSL just tested at 1234 K and is not anywhere near as responsive.

The bottom line is, if you are signed up for FTTP in Bandon, I’m sure you are going to love it.