By Ron on January 16, 2008
I fired up my RSS reader last night after a long day at the office, and for the first time in memory the feed numbers in the “Mac” category outnumbered all other categories — to be expected, I guess, on the day of Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld, and the related new product announcements. I proceeded to do a quick screenshot of my RSS numbers to post as an icon in a blog entry. I then fired up MarsEdit to write a blog entry and upload the photo. BUT I was unable to upload the photo … a server error.
This was now my second server error in as many days, with the first one still not resolved. So I hopped over to my webhost’s site to check my support ticket and also check their blog to find out why I got a strange billing email earlier that day. What I discovered was a story about a typo that resulted in over $7.5 million of customer overcharges!
You can read it here (and see the fun Homer Simpson graphic as well), but in a nutshell: someone in the billing department attempting to reconcile some missed billings from 2007 typed in December 31, 2008 (instead of 2007) as a cutoff date. The billing system then ran billings as if it were already 12/31/08. Which means, it appears, that a big chunk of their customers were billed for account renewals that were not yet up for renewal.
To be fair, the company — Dreamhost — has been totally transparent in their explanations of what happened and what they are doing to fix it. And generally I have found them to be a great webhosting company. As for me, I’ll just see both the erroneous charge and a refund on my next credit card statement, and no worries. But as some of the 1270 (and counting) commenters on their status site have pointed out, it’s not so worry-free for those who were billed via an automatic transfer and didn’t have the funds to cover it (I was billed >$600).
I proceeded to amend my earlier support ticket regarding my server problems, adding the new server error and some related info I found in a Wordpress forum. The issues were cleared up in less than 24 hours. It’s good to see the outrage/aftermath of the huge billing snafu has not sidetracked the reliable support team.
As for Macworld, I was a little underwhelmed. The new Macbook Razr Air is a strikingly beautiful design, but it also is hobbled in many ways. It’s a premium price for a browsing/casual/travel laptop. I personally couldn’t see using it as a primary workstation. I think people are going to find the standard hard drives are slower than they will expect, which can make a big difference in some applications. And the solid state hard drive (base price + $1000), which should offer blazing performance and near-instantaneous bootup, is still way too high in a dollars-to-gigabtye ratio to tempt me to open my wallet.
I think the updates to the Apple TV will be the more significant news for Apple in the long run. I watch so few Netflix movies anymore that it might be more cost-effective to drop Netflix and just rent-as-you-go via iTunes. It’s certainly more flexible than Netflix, but selection will be the big question. The new Time Capsule backup drive is probably Apple’s best product name in years and is a perfect companion for Time Machine backups. And finally … every Mac blog and pundit on the planet was predicting a big upgrade to the operating system: Leopard 10.5.2. That announcement was notably absent, as has been any reporting on why this widely-anticipated update was a no-show.
Posted in blogosphere, mac
By Ron on January 11, 2008
I wasn’t planning on redesigning the Leather Egg logo when I launched the new redesign, but after looking at the new design a few days, I decided the old logo looked too plain. So what started out as a leather egg (to the right, existing only in Photoshop, however), became an egg outline swoosh, and now the swoosh has grown wings. I think the wings work on several levels, and I like mixing tribal with the swoosh style.
This was a fun little diversion. I enjoy logo design and the challenges it represents. I wanted to keep my version of a swoosh, even though swoosh is being way way overused. Giving swoosh a run for it’s money nowadays are leaf logos. Another ongoing trend is glossy spheres, which hit a low point recently with the new Xerox logo. I love the font, but the glossy sphere just reminds me of a Pizza Hut mint (if they still give out those red/white mints with your check … I haven’t eaten at Pizza Hut in years).
So there you go … the Leather Egg logo now has wings, and I’ll consider this version 9.1 of the site design. And if you want the full effect of the new logo, I just posted the brand new splash page.
Posted in blogosphere
By Ron on January 7, 2008
One evening last week, I had updated the photo in the blog banner using this shot. It’s a clever photo Marlin took of me while we were in Seattle. I really like the fact I’m looking at the camera through the small space between the panels that are either tinted blue or red. I think it’s a good analogy for a building political climate in the U.S. that’s more exciting than anything I have seen in my lifetime. But this isn’t an Obama blog … I’m sure there will be plenty of those.
Marlin got all excited because he thought it was the first time I was using one of his photos in the blog banner. I quickly corrected him — I used a Florida Keys sunrise shot he took several years ago as the regular blog banner in versions 3 and 4 of this blog. In fact, I showed him … I have a history page about the designs.
Of course, I started glancing through the history page and realized a few things: I should blog more often; I should redesign; and wholly crap — come February, it will be TEN YEARS since I started blogging. Granted, I was one of the early ones out there on the cutting edge before these online journal/log/diary things became known as “blogs” but still — 10 years!
And so I redesigned — welcome to version 9 of Leather Egg. I’m still cleaning up a few things and haven’t touched the gallery yet, but as I’ve said when introducing previous redesigns, it’s always a work in progress.
UPDATE: I made one of those “I should have known better” mistakes: I didn’t test the design at 1024-pixel screen width. At that common screen size, the banner photo disappeared at the right edge of the page just before the iris of my eye … leaving a spooky white eyeball. I’ve since re-cropped the photo. One of the things about the new design is that it is fluid, functional and legible even up to very wide screen sizes. But I have make sure my banner images work equally well at both narrow and wide screen sizes.
Posted in blogosphere
By Ron on January 2, 2008
Reading through Christmas cards and letters this year, I was delighted to discover my friend Debbie (aka Beanie) is blogging at woven and spun. We go way back to our days as Penn State undergrads, so it was fun reading her blog entry about discovering that Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, went to school with us at Penn State.
I had also read this recently, and (at the time) filed away a mental note to look into this a bit further because her name has always rung familiar to me. So this evening, I dug into the Collegian archives (the Collegian is the daily newspaper at Penn State), and discovered that I was on the Collegian staff with Valerie Plame. At the time I was Editorial Editor, which was the third-highest position in the news division, Valerie was Marketing Manager in the advertising division.
I found this Collegian masthead (below) from December 1984 in the Penn State Libraries digital archives. I’m sure I would have met her and/or talked with her at some point during my time at Collegian (I practically lived in Carnegie Building), but I don’t have any specific recollection of her. In any case, it’s kind of cool that I probably knew a famous/infamous future spy, way back in the day.
Posted in my life
By Ron on January 2, 2008
Until I need a new iPod, I will stick with my 5th-generation video iPod and it’s 60GB space limitations. This means, for instance, that come Christmas time I have to de-sync a lot of albums from the iPod to put Christmas music on the iPod. And on the long drive home to my parents for Christmas, Marlin and I discovered my album covers on the iPod were sometimes wrong. We were listening to Crosby Stills and Nash “Daylight Again” album, but the iPod was sometimes displaying the Thompson Twins. So I played a game for a little while, bouncing around on the iPod. Thompson Twins “Greatest Hits” sometimes had the album cover for Jet (the band made famous by the iPod commercials, not the Paul McCartney album). Jet sometimes displayed a Morrissey album cover. And so on. It was as if some iPod gremlin shuffled the album covers.
I couldn’t find any solutions at Apple’s web site, but a web search eventually uncovered this post at fonzo.biz: iPod Nano Artwork – Fixed
The posted fix is a couple years old, so apparently this problem has been around for a while, and a scan of the comments seems to indicate that moving large numbers of albums onto and off the iPod triggers the album cover shuffle. The post is also outdated for newer versions of iTunes where the option to enable/disable album artwork display on iPod is now on the Music tab for the device, and not in the Preferences section of iTunes.
As far as I can tell, the fix worked fine for me, but it took a long time re-syncing the album covers. Long as in a few hours.
Posted in music
By Ron on December 18, 2007
How’s this for customer service … Intuit (who makes Quicken, QuickBooks, and other software) pushed an auto-update out for QuickBooks users on the Mac platform and the update deleted all the files on the user’s Desktop: QuickBooks Pro bug leads to data loss for some. But wait, it gets better … while Intuit fixed the problem for those users who had not yet run the update, they are still working on a solution for the folks that lost all their Desktop files. In the meantime, Intuit says, just turn your computer off and don’t use it!
This news makes me very hesitant to continue using Quicken once I switch all my stuff over to Mac early next year. I’ve been using Quicken on Windows forever, and I probably only use the application to 25% of it’s potential. I don’t use any reports, planning, graphs, etc. I need just basic bank and credit account registers, reconciling/balancing, loans and investments.
If you’re a Mac user reading this and have a recommendation, please leave a comment. I’d love to take a look at a couple Quicken alternatives on the Mac operating system.
Posted in computing-web, mac
By Ron on December 12, 2007
I remember when sites like CSS Zen Garden first appeared, offering beautiful CSS designs and inspiration to designers. I haven’t looked at a lot of CSS gallery sites recently, but a couple design projects on the horizon spurred me to add some new CSS/Design feeds in my newsreader last night and I found Cascading Style Shit | Showcasing the Showcasers to be a fantastic resource. It’s a showcase of showcasers — a portal to dozens of great CSS design galleries.
Unfortunately, not all the linked sites have given as much thought to their RSS feeds as they have to their design and content. A gallery-themed site needs an RSS feed that includes images, and sadly, some of these sites have old school text-only (and sometimes headline-only) news feeds.
Posted in computing-web
By Ron on December 11, 2007
The new banner image is also posted in the gallery (linked on the thumbnail) — it’s a cactus flower from the backyard at Marlin’s family home. It bloomed the day before his mom’s funeral last month. Marlin said the flowers are notoriously short-lived and sometimes only last a few hours, so I snapped some photos of it as soon as I had a chance. The funny thing, however, is that this flower looked just as beautiful the next day when friends and family were stopping by at the house after the funeral.
Marlin has posted her obituary over on his blog. As per her wishes, there was no viewing — the service featured simply her photo, some plants, lots of flowers, and a handful of the awards and citations she had received throughout the years. It was a beautiful display honoring a woman who had received accolades from the local community development association all the way up to the U.S. Senate. And I suspect the award from the local community improvement group meant more to her than the citations from mayors of Los Angeles and other famous names. But that is what so many people loved about Ethel May. Godspeed.
Posted in friends-family, obituaries
