Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Beatles Limited Edition Stereo USB released by Apple and EMI

Here's a neat package. The Beatles and EMI are releasing a Limited Edition USB shaped like an apple and loaded with the remastered audio for 14 stereo Beatles titles and 13 mini-documentary films.

The 16 GB USB holds music formats in FLAC 44.1 Khz 24 bit and 320 kbps mp3 formats.

Since there are only 30,000 units of this limited edition, I suppose the $270 they are charging will attract the true Beatles fans.

http://www.thebeatles.com/#/news/APPLE_AND_EMI_TO_RELEASE/

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Adam Samberg - I Threw it on the Ground

I love this video! Instant Classic! "Happy Birthday to the Ground!"

Friday, October 16, 2009

JetBlue spammed me

Dear JetBlue,

On May 21, 2008, I searched for flights to Florida on Kayak.com which referred me to JetBlue's website. I signed up using jetblue@(mydomain.com) as a trick I learned during my online marketing career.

July 4, 2008 I received a registration confirmation for my upcoming flight (July 26, 2008).

July 15, 2008 I received the following spam from "doyouhaveasecret.com" sent to jetblue@(mydomain.com).


A Google search for "jetblue doyouhaveasecret" brings up the following cached result. Someone else on Twitter experienced this same spam and knew it was from JetBlue. Very few people track and identify how spammers got their email address.


If you want further proof, here is the raw text format of the email.

I presented this evidence to JetBlue but I haven't gotten any admittance of guilt -- That's all I'm looking for at this point. I'm not saying that I believe a publicly traded corporation would intentionally spam customers this junk. This was probably done by some IT employee with access to the entire JetBlue customer database and either sold the list or used it to promote his or her own crappy business.

Dear Nicholas,

Thank you for contacting JetBlue Airways regarding your TrueBlue account email. We are grateful for the opportunity to address your concern.

In viewing your TrueBlue account you are set to receive promotions and emails regarding current sales. We are unable to explain the possibility of spam being sent to this address as only JetBlue emails are routed to it. We can only suggest you contact your internet provider with any further questions. If you would no longer like to receive promotions please contact us at 1-800-JETBLUE (5388-2583) and we can further assist you.

We are grateful to have you as a member of our TrueBlue family and look forward to welcoming you onboard JetBlue for future jetting!

Sincerely,

April
TrueBlue Customer Service Crew
JetBlue Airways
Crewmember 25211


Telling me to contact my internet provider is a pretty weak response. Here's another response:
Dear Mr. Lee,

Thank you for your patience as we looked into your claim. We regret any thing may have given you the impression that your unique email has been shared inappropriately or sold by JetBlue. We realize your privacy is of great concern to you.

We have researched your claim and found that we have only passed this to our internal automatic contact system for sending an itineraries and your TrueBlue statements to you. We show that you completed your TrueBlue registration on July 4, 2008 and at that time indicated you wanted to receive promotional offers.

We have also noted that you booked a reservation on May 8, 2008 with KAYAK services and at that time, this same unique email address was submitted as a contact by you. We cannot track what KAYAK has done with this information.

Although we understand and sympathize with your situation, we feel we have kept our word in maintaining the privacy of your contact information and respectfully deny any request or compensation.

We welcome you to our TrueBlue membership and look forward to welcoming you onboard many flights in the future.

Sincerely,

Shauna Seymour
Specialist, Customer Feedback
JetBlue Airways


Pointing the finger at Kayak.com is quite ridiculous. If you understand how Kayak works it simply redirects you to the airline company's website after selecting your flight. No registration information is given to Kayak.com. JetBlue's complete denial despite being caught red-handed is appalling.

This is a vulnerability any company, small or large, faces when handling customer data. Businesses have a legal responsibility such that each employee who is exposed to confidential data must sign a confidentiality agreement. At best it acts as a deterrent and most employees won't risk losing their job over it. Basically stealing company emails is theft and for those employees who have this level of access, it's as easy as stealing office supplies.

The curious thing in this specific incident is that after I notified JetBlue about this problem, I haven't received any further emails from doyouhaveasecret.com even though I didn't "unsubscribe". Spammers don't stop emailing you or selling to other spammers once they have your email. Perhaps my issue caused a stir internally leading to the employee quietly removing my email from the spam list? It seems likely.

Please, JetBlue, do the right thing and apologize and admit that there was a possible breach of privacy.

Thanks,
Nick

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Photoshop Hand Tool stuck

When working in Photoshop I would frequently get stuck on the hand tool and it would not change no matter which tool I selected. Some searching on Google gave the advice to restart Photoshop but that did not work. Sometimes it would go away on it's own if I did something else. I have now discovered that all you have to do is press the space bar. I'm using CS3 and it's been mentioned that it occurs in CS2 as well. Let me know if this happens to any CS4 users. By the way, I'm looking forward to CS5! Maybe I will get a copy :)

Friday, August 14, 2009

Dammit, I should have moved to Cityplace.

http://www.mytelus.com/cityplace/index.vm

With a fibre optic network going directly into the building, at every third floor, more or less and then being distributed by ethernet, this is the fastest residential Internet access at 100mbps (50 times faster than cable and 2,000 times faster than a 56k modem).

It's the most technologically advanced Digital Neighbourhood in Canada with $30 million spent on a high-capacity fibre-optic network.

If I had just known this two weeks ago, I would have moved to Cityplace!

Here is another great blog about it along with great comments.
http://www.blogto.com/tech/2009/03/bringing_fibre_to_toronto/

Here's why you need to hate Bell. They are ruining the internet. Thanks to CRTC for increasing the stranglehold that the monopoly has on Canadian internet.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/08/12/bell-crtc-internet-usage.html

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Does Citizen's Arrest Exist in Canada?

I ask the Government of Ontario if there is such thing here as citizen's arrest? Does Section 494 of the Criminal Code of Canada not exist? Do you have to wear a fancy security uniform, carry a baton, a GUN or some other weapon in order to perform citizen's arrest? Please tell me how can one avoid a kidnapping charge while restraining a suspected thief until the police arrive? Maybe I should become a shoplifter because I have learned that you can get away with it. When accused of shoplifting in Canada, you can just walk away.

TheStar.ca: Grocer wouldn't chase thieves again

Visit here to sign the petition and support David Chen
http://www.vracommittee.com/

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Microsoft releases May 2009 AJAX Control Tookit -- and wastes everyone's time

So I googled for an HTML editor to see what's out there and I found out that Microsoft released an updated AJAX Control Toolkit that includes an HTMLEditor. Sounds like just what I needed! I could go for FCKEditor which I've used before but an HTML Editor supported by Microsoft sounds pretty good, right? Wrong!

As I was on my way to downloading the new release, the first few comments I saw were
Poor because have bugs :( Please fix this bug for next release

dated just today, Sunday June 14th.

Here's some more complaints:
Don't you people test this stuff. I am so sick of debugging your code. My managers look at the little samples expecting it to do that and doesn't realize it don't quite work like the sample in a real world application. Again, I am soooooo sick of spending hours in the forum and google to find some OFF THE WALL FIX to make it work in a real world situation. Test your code...I do.

Release build will crash VS 2008...

How about an installer? How about some instructions on upgrading from prior versions? There are a lot of nuts and bolts to this stuff and a readme that says, "just copy and go" just AIN'T ENOUGH! My system is almost completely screwed to the wall, following installation "instructions" like that.


Following the entire slew of complaints was this post:
We posted a minor update to the AJAX Control Toolkit to address several of the issues described below including the issue concerning performing a build in Release mode.


Needless to say, it sounds like I should hold off on the ASP.NET Ajax update until Microsoft gets their act together on this package. Who the hell wants to spend hours debugging Microsoft's code and have nothing to show for it? I sure don't!

Here's the Codeplex link for more details:
AJAX Control Toolkit May 2009 Release Reviews

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

WordPress TV: How-To Create an eCommerce Website with WordPress in under 5 minutes

I just saw this great 5 minute video from WordPress TV on how to create an e commerce website using WordPress and the free plug-in WP E-commerce. This plugin creates a shopping cart, account information and you can hook it up with your PayPal account among other choices like Google Checkout.

http://wordpress.tv/2009/06/08/create-an-ecommerce-website-with-wordpress-in-under-5-minutes/

It's Definitely a must-watch!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Google Android laptop comes out Fall 2009!

Acer netbooks to run on Google platform

This is going to put a dent in Microsoft Windows prices. Whether or not it performs better than Windows 7 is irrelevant. This free operating system from Google is certainly going to entice the general public to move away from Windows and make it even less justifiable to pay for premium Microsoft OS prices.

It's exciting how this announcement comes at the heels of the release of the search engine Bing, Microsoft's challenge at putting a dent in Google's search engine.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Sims 3, get it while it's hot!

The much anticipated Sims 3 is available for download on torrents weeks before its retail release on June 2, 2009!

The pirates are saying it works fine and it seems so judging by the popularity of the torrent.... :)

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/05/sims-3-leaked-to-torrent-sites-weeks-before-retail-release.ars

Hope you're having a good weekend! I know I will!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

AdBlock is great, but use with caution

If you get annoyed with ads like me, you probably use Firefox with the Adblock Plus plugin. It's a great way to get your content without the fuss of advertisements. However, as a marketer I also run ads on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter.

I ran into a problem when I logged into Yahoo Search Marketing on April 25, 2009 when I could not see any charts nor could I do any administration on my account nor could I manage my keywords. Since there was an alert at the top mentioning site maintenance I just left it. Then when this issue persisted to Tuesday April 28, 2009 and support was saying they didn't have any trouble seeing my account I realized the issue must have been because of my Adblock plugin. When I disabled my Adblock for Yahoo and refreshed the page I could see everything again. Doh!

Yahoo Search Marketing and Firefox Adblock used to coexist nicely before so an update must have come with either the new 1.0.2 Adblock update or my EasyList USA filter subscription.

So as a warning to all Firefox Adblock users... be careful when using Adblock. You could lose important content at any time. Be sure to unblock from time to time, even on websites you frequently visit.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Binding an Enum to a DropDownList in C#

I find it useful to keep common dropdown lists such as "categories" in an enum. Here is a useful function to bind that enum type to a DataTable in C#.


public static DataTable BindToEnum(Type enumType)
{
String[] names = System.Enum.GetNames(enumType);
Array values = System.Enum.GetValues(enumType);

DataTable dt = new DataTable();
dt.Columns.Add("key", typeof(string));
dt.Columns.Add("value", typeof(int));

int i = 0;
while (i < names.Length)
{
DataRow dr = dt.NewRow();
dr["key"] = names[i];
dr["value"] = (int)values.GetValue(i);
dt.Rows.Add(dr);
i++;
}

return dt;
}



Here is how you would use this function.

DataTable lo_dt = BindToEnum(typeof(Categories));
ddlCategory.DataSource = lo_dt;
ddlCategory.DataTextField = "key";
ddlCategory.DataValueField = "value";
ddlCategory.DataBind();

Friday, April 3, 2009

WebTrends Most Recent Search Engines Organic

While double checking how much organic traffic comes from search engines in WebTrends, I came across this in my reports (both in my Export to CSV and my WebTrends ODBC results.



I've blocked out my keywords to protect the innocent.

In this example the highlighted AltaVista visits sum up to 11 which is the same number of visits as the AltaVista total.

It's easy to filter this out. I recommend using just the Totals fields (in WebTrends ODBC this is (MostRecentSearchPhrase IS NULL).

So the lesson is to be careful when aggregating your data, otherwise you may be double counting your visits!