Andreas Wacker

Eric Alba shows some shelfs

And -as so often- he has a point.

UK Audi spot

I am developing some exciting new features for INTERDUBS. I made the mistake of not testing the code I wrote for 3 days in Internet Explorer. When I check it again I realize that this cock-sucker of a browser just quits. So I had to roll through three days of changes to find out what exactly made this piece of shit simply quit. No warning, no indication. Nothing. Just fucking ended displaying the page. 6 other browsers were fine, and had been during those three days of development. There were no warnings, no hints of something causing a problem. Nothing. Turns out that a simple

Just too bad that Verzion isn’t. So I think I could use FiOS. The Verizon website however has a problem with the address that I happen to have. A message then claims that I could call to find out if Fios is available. Calling that number I just go through 5 menus only to be disconnected when the system tries to hand me over to the next station. On the internet that’s called a broken link. I am sure Verizon has spent some money on marketing to make me aware of Fios. They also have spent money to put the actual thing in place. Too bad that they are unable to make a sale since their sales tools just happen to be broken. I guess they need a bail out too pretty soon …

With a MacBook you pay around 50 extra to get it in black. Now with the iPhone 3G there will be a white version. But that will only be available for the larger 16GB version. I never ever have filled up the 4GB I had. So you have two choices now with the iPhone 3G: pay too much because you can and don’t show people (get the black one) or let people know that you don’t need to care about the extra 100. The new price of 199 is pretty low, compared to last years launch. But I would guess that the 20$ a month extra for 24 months rule is still in place. You pay AT&T or whomever, but you pay. That’s 480 dollars extra that any iPhone will cost you. So the price started out at 1079 for the 8GB / 979 for the 4GB and now has arrived at 879 / 779 respectively.

Turns out that the data plan is now $30 and not $20 any longer. So the total price for an iPhone2 is $1019 / $919.

In the Apple store I had a quick look and hands on with the MacBook Air. And I am quiet underwhelmed. Yes, it is light. Yes it has thin edges. Thin edges are probably a great thing when you would like to put your computer into an inter office envelope. Funny thing is, I never had reason to do that. Since six years I have been pretty on various laptop models for the greater part of my waking hours. I have use the thing in various places in in rather unorthodox ways I think. But, never ever did I say to myself: “Darn, the laptop does not fit into this interoffice envelope!”. If the 15″ was to big then I took the iBook aka Macbook. Works for me. If the 15″ is to small then I hook up another screen or get on a real computer. Yesterday I used the big iMac for instance and it just worked great.

I really don’t see the point to spend allot of money for a machine that has allot of drawbacks, and whos only upside seems to be that it does fit into an envelope.

Too bad, would love to justify a new computer.

BluRay would have been a better thing than this Air hocus-pocus.

That’s an actual quote of a client in an email received a couple of minutes ago. It is his first month with Interdubs, and he is not used to the fact that the bill will only arrive once the month is over. And then he can pay it. Or not. If he should feel like that. Which sounds ‘good hearted’ or ‘weak’. But it makes actually allot of (business) sense: Most of my clients have made more money with the site in their first week of using it, then it will cost them for whole month. A not so significant part of them actually takes just a few hours to make the 285 that the services costs them. Either by direct billing or by improved client relationships. I was aware of this when I designed the system and set the price. The price is solely based on the system working as well as it seems to be. It is arranged around my costs and the future potential of more clients. And maybe on the fact that I like to code fast.

I really hate the business model that tries to leach on to the success of its clients. Network Neutrality is one of those. Phone companies would sure love to charge more for important business conversations than for idle chit chat.

But back to Interdubs: having a super reasonable price that are people actually eager to pay makes everything much easier on everybody. So far people paid their bills. The majority of companies in record time. Thanks again and also from here. If I would try to squeeze more money out of the service, then I might need an accounting department that starts bugging people. I’d rather not.

On the other side with the latest feature additions the price / performance ratio is in danger to tip from “great” to “ridicolously great”. I have feedback from many of my clients saying that the service is too cheap. And I suspect that I could actually sign up more people if the price were higher. Most people think just because the competition is ten times more expensive it also would be better.

The other day I rented a car since mine was in the shop. The rate was reasonable. Actually a Chevy whatever it’s called is pretty quiet for what it is. National was just accross the street from the shop that my car was in. They really wanted my phone number. I should have known why: They called twice wanted to know how the service was. Thanks for caring. Service had been good, until they started to ask about it. Same with GoDaddy. Their SSL certificates cost 40 while others want 150. It’s still a rip off since it is just a simple script and a tiny little bit of administration to weed out the evil people. Of course they called. And then called again. At 7am. Made me feel real good about filling out the form where you indicate when you like to get called.

And then on the other side of the spectrum there is AT&T. Or actually what appears to be a rather obscure business division of theirs. I picked AT&t as a vendor for my 800 number, thinking that they would be a bit more expensive but easy to deal with. The 800 number is just a little aspect of what I am doing, so why waste much time on it. So I thought. The division provides the service. But is otherwise basically unreachable. They don’t even have a phone number. Nor can I reach them via the internet: Their web forms stopped working. And there is no way that feedback would get to them. Amazing.

It really must suck to be Microsoft these days. Their attempt to buy Yahoo for more money that they actually have was a desperate move to begin with. And now they even got rejected. Who know that Yahoo! of all companies had choices. In this whole M$ bid media frenzy everybody seem to have forgotten about the layoff story that Yahoo had coming out. Yahoo is ailing. But they seem to have decided that they rather disolve like AOL or Netscape than to be part of would have been the worst merger in the history of Internet companies. Hitting on the ugly girl, since you think you have a chance is bad enough. Getting rejected leaves you with a little less than nothing. Not that I would know anything about that.

750,000 HD DVD players and 2.7 million Bluray players have been sold in the last 18 months that the formats have been available. In those BluRay numbers are about 2 Million PS3 consoles included. 4 Million Bluray discs have been sold, 2.6 Million HD-DVD ones. Which comes down to 1.5 Bluray and 3.5 HD-DVDs per device.

The DVD of “Knocked up” alone sold more often than all HD-DVD and Bluray formats combined. I wonder how the marketing budgets would compare.

In 1998 9.8 Million DVD Discs had been sold. Almost ten discs for each player that was out there. People loved DVD. They still do. As for the two replacement formats they could care less it seems. And that’s only partly a problem of the rivaling formats. I think that DVD is good enough for people. Most simply have neither the hardware setup nor the desire to spend allot of money for the extra resolution that the new formats provide.

Here the DVD hardware sales:

315,136 1997 (April-December)
1,089,261 1998
4,019,389 1999
8,498,545 2000
12,706,584 2001
17,089,823 2002
21,994,389 2003
19,999,913 2004
16,147,823 2005
19,788,279 2006
10,252,893 2007 (January - July)


sources: current HD numbers past DVD device numbers, reversed via the linux ‘tac’ command. I had no idea it did exist. DVD disc numbers Warner DVD sales in 1998 DVD sales in 1998 and 1999

Steve Jobs certainly takes no pictures. At home, the task for the day: to get the pictures off the Samsung snapshot camera onto the iPook. So that my wife can take new ones. Not thinking much (always a bad start) I directed her to iPhoto to manage the digicam images. What a piece of junk. iPhoto.

If iPhoto would be an application that people were supposed to be money for, then it’s prices should be minus a couple of hundred dollars. Seriously. Nothing works as expected. It seems to have it’s own little logic. I seriously think it as big of a piece of junk as iBackup. Or whatever that pre Timemachine pretend-ware was called. The one with the red umbrella icon.

I heard (in horror) that iViewMedia got bought by Microsoft. If I have to deal with iPhoto for 2 more minutes then I am ready to buy my first Microsoft software.

via IM, earlier today:

just wanted to tell you: we were training a new freelance producer and she said; "you use Interdubs? I love interdubs!"


Hit the 40,000 mark today. Nice.

pretty horrible

Matt Cutts , the google quality czsar, explains why they reduced the importance of weblogs participating in pay per post programs. I feel the same way and block them since May in BlogsNow.

Interestingly, and extremely simplified, I admit, it seems to be the business model of Google to sell the truth. Which makes it valuable. They steer most of the internet traffic. But if they would fail, people would notice. As long as Yahoo and MSN still exist and could in theory kinda half ass a hypothetical un-ethical google if it came to it, it’s good busyness for for Google to stick to the truth.

Which is not what usually is going on:

A question asked, and no answer:

Same pattern here:

So, my simple reaction is, if people like politicians and Apple-PR are not answering questions, then I will not listen to what they are trying to say. Why should I?

So, I needed an 1-800 number. There are lots of vendors. I picked AT&T. They were not the cheapest, but in telco services there are lots of odd offers and services. And it’s not crucial that number. Just something you also need to have. Getting the number itself was alright. They sent an email that it would take a nebolous amount of time (”several weeks”) before they were able to execute my order.

Months passed. No word from Ma Bell. Diving into voice-system-hell. Finally I got somebody that was the right division etc. He simply proclaimed that the number already worked. Which is great, and it actually did ever since. But they could have let me know.

Then I got an email telling me that I had not logged in their Buisness Website for a while, and that they would disable my login should I not do so within 30 days. So I logged in. A question that is innocent enough came up. AT&T would like to know which state I am. Not that they could deduct that from my address. But hey. Of course entering the info brings me right back to the same screen. Oh, Firefox quirk. Can happen.
Safari: Same result. So, do I have to buy a PC to tell them that I am in California? Of course, there are no links where you could contact that division of AT&T and let them know that they website is simply broken.

Neither is there a way to get in touch with AT&T mentioned in that email announcing me to lock me out of the website unless I would log in in the next thirty. Sure, I could spend an hour on the phone tomorrow with AT&T. Like everywhere, once you reach a human things are not even that bad. There are often ways to fix things.

But the problem is deeper than that: AT&T used to be a technology company. They invented the transistor and a couple of other important things. But in 2007 they can not even run a simple website. It fits in the picture that they spend billions, yes, billions not millions, for rebranding. Making them look to good to the outside. While everybody knows that internally it’s just barely good enough. Since they other telco’s suck equally bad they even get away with it. Time for a company like Apple to get into the cellphone Business. No, wait. Ok, nevermind.

Yes, the T people think they own Magenta

They actually picked when they started the T-stuff so that they could have color in News Paper ads but only pay for one. Since Magenta is part of CMYK they saved millions in the production of newspaper ads.

“Newswhat?” you might ask. Well, it’s that stuff from the last century

the strike has it’s upside

Somebody should sponsor 1 z-year. It’s probably less than car makers spend on crafts services of their commercial shoots in any given week.
No joke.

LA Times’ grid of how TV shows are impacted by the strike

Rushed to the airport. Packing took longer than expected. La Cienega made up for the time lost. It always does. I love La Cienega. When I park at Red Rabbit I have to turn once!

Of course the flight is delayed. Four hours delayed. Luckily I get a ten dollar NWA mail-in voucher. Score!

The next time Northwest will get in touch to sell me something I will remember that they could not be bothered to contact me, when I could have gained from it. They have my email. It’s freaking computers running airlines anyway. Why can’t they just
send an email out to let me know that the flight is been delayed. Hell, I would not even mind when they always would send me an email. 21% of this specific flight is actually on time. While they are at it they could also let me know which movies they will be showing. Which gate I will arrive where (so that I can forward this info to a person that picks me up). Sure, they could be somewhat smart and allow me to give them an email that would be notified about any changes in the arrival.
Once set up these things cost close to nothing to run.

Reading this it sounds like “middleware” is this big deal. I wonder, if it’s not just something that a mediocre perl script could do??? It probably could.

That whole ‘think different’ campaign:

had to come out and haunt them. Once they stopped doing so, and sold their image to peddle some ringtones. Apple is just like AT&T or Exxon Mobile for that matter. They all are just trying to make as much money as they can.

Callwave and EVDO are certainly my best technological friends: Getting of a plane, in the hotel room, there would be an ethernet, but why bother? EVDO works. Even here. Then there is a voicemail from somebody that called while I was on the plane. The automatic transrcipt gives me an idea, the company that called shows up, and best of all, all those call back numbers are transrcibed right there. If the iPhone could maybe read a phone number with it’s camera and then dial it, we would be in good shape.

So, my iPhone fell down. And the ‘volume up’ button got stuck. Bad luck. Then Apple lowered the price and the 4GB Version gets sold for 299 right now. So I thought I get a new one. I asked in the Apple store if I would need to renew my contract to activate the new iPhone. They said this would not be necessary. They said that I just would need to replace the SIM card from the old to the new phone.

Of course that is not the case. Calling Apple got me the answer that AT&T would be responsible for this. Well, it’s not me that did choose AT&T. It was Apple that did that for me. Calling AT&T they told me that the only way to activate the new iPhone is to restart the two year commitment with them.

By now I really hate both companies for their blatant ways of trying to rip people off. Even though they seem to win this time, I will make god damn sure that they will not come out of this on the upperhand in the long term. They neither can run nor hide, and I will get both of them. With interest, and fun-bonus. They deserve it for been taking for a ride, as they try to do it with their customers.

Suddenly the NYTimes regained her relevance again. They could have done it all the, and become really great, but the very same corpo-idiots that tried to charge for the normal page think that there is subscription revenue in the years 1922-1986. Idiots. Idiots at the NYTimes. What a funny thought.

So, trying to talk to AT&T about those outragous data charges is a complete waste of time. Their client service is as nightmarish as it always has been. I will now start telling Apple at all possible moments how badle AT&T sucks. After all, they forced me to deal with them. AT&T does not care. They never did, and will never. But Apple got where they are by caring. One would like to think.

Over here everything is high tech. Pointless or not. Of course there are ads on the paper towels. Not real time printed blog content (yet). Missing urinal feature: real time analysis of blood alcohol. Bonus for womens restrooms: instant pregnancy test. Imagine the possibilities: Google could place ads for abortion options and/or pregnancy products on the paper towels. Right now health insurance companies could track your lifestyle a little bit via your credit card trace. Technically they could. Not sure if that is legal, and if they are smart enough to do so. But with personalised mini lab in every toilet you would get an interesting trace of activities. Of course lab technology does not follow the trend of hard drives of other micro electronics and computer related stuff. So this brave new world option will remain scifi for quiet some time. Possibly forever, since we just might run out of cheap energy -that is the basis for all of your lifestyle after all- before high tech might become that sophisticated.

Update:
Like with any sci-fi story there is a google angle popping up minutes after I ramble about it. Coincidency? Of course. Almost everything is. Actually. Get used to it.

The nice people at Brand New School released their New Balance spot “Zip” online. They are a great company to work with. Very creative and still hands down and respectful to the matter. It was a pleasure to work on this job. A truly amazing team! Not sure why they wrote something about me in their copy for the spot: Everybody else deserves the praise that I got there.

so, got an iPhone. Pretty much had to: one in 150 hits on Interdubs is from those devices. Wouldn’t I have been so busy with a job that could not be rescheduled then there would be a special Interdubs version for iPhone already. But at least I know now that Interdubs does work with iPhone. If you drank enough cool aid and read enough Apple press releases then you will drop ‘the’ from a sentence like then one before this one. I don’t. The, the. Just to make up for it. The the the. Take that Steve. The!

Sure, sliding your finger over the surface and the content moves along, that’s kind a nice. Of course that screen is really pretty. Really bright too. Glaring california sun? Phew, it shines right back atcha.

As a phone the Razr worked better though. Reception is not good. Bad in many cases. Not sure if it is AT&T or the device. Holding that big (and occasionaly pretty darn hot) thing to your head needs some getting used to. The head phones can be used as a headset. But I don’t want to run around like that, and they pick up a decent amount of ambient case.
Visual voicemail leaves me unimpressed, since I had callwave before. Which stopped working. And there was no way to make it work again. Thanks, AT&T! Idiots. Let’s see how roaming will do, and how much it will cost.

Telco’s in general seem to be the modern day incarnation of a Kafka book. They sell two things: technology and service. First one does not really work that well after all. Second one is a joke beyond belief. I spare you the details, but having dealt with Sprint, Cingular and AT&T as of late I think they are all the same. Verizon was not any better either.

Enters the iPhone. And everything was supposed to get better. Yeah, right. Still a cellphone. Edge is pathetically slow. While it’s taking a minute or sometimes 3 to get my gmail email people calling will get voicemail. Which I will receive. Maybe an hour later. Using Wifi is kinda ok. Other things aren’t. I have allot of international numbers. Those start with +. At least they did on the Razr. Not so in AT&T land. Even though they get recognised as caller ID I have to add 011 in front of them. Maybe there is a setting for that, but why should there be??? Changing a number is not possible where you have the interface. You have to go back into contacts. Not even Microsoft writes such cumbersome interfaces these days. There are countless examples where the the iPhone (double the on purpose to rub in) is more stupid than -let’s say- a zune. Which is supposed to be pretty dumb+dull.

Then I dropped it. In a way I dropped my Razor daily. Of course it hit the little volume up button. And now the button is stuck, which means that I have the ‘Volume up’ overlay on the screen. I went to the apple store. They told me that I could by a new one. Such were my options. They are all gluttoning about ‘their’ success these days. Apple people are pretty full of themselves. Some are. Well, they don’t have to use that darn phone, since they will wait since they get their free one that Herr Jobs has promised to them. When they have one, there might have been even be an update that fixes all those idiotic problems. Like safari crashing. Like trying to make a call and the thing jumping into your face like a bad windows popup asking which closed wifi network you would like to join. Like not being able to bookmark a location in Maps that you have navigated to. Like Weather information going away if you are not connection to Edge. Like not being able send to photos with one of these Apple error messages telling you: “An Error has occured”. No shit. Coverflow, great. Actually not. It would be nice if the stupido phone would play podcasts one after each other. Like all the iPods do that I owned. Battery life? We need shorter days. Like 18 hours? So that the phone lasts a full day. Wifi seems to be biggest battery eater, followed by listening to the iPod. Not sure about Cover flow: I don’t use it. And frankly I think it’s pretty darn stupid. Like so much on this phone. As I am writing this aapl is at 138. I will not give the phone back. But it aint so great - right now. It just gets to show how low the phone bar actually is. Oh, on my razor I was able to change ring tones. The camera in it is a joke. They are all bad. But this one in particular. The Razr could record video. Maybe the iPhone should have an audio recording capability?? or how about GPS? At least via triangulation. It’s pretty lame that I have to tell it where I am. Since it knows, when it has connection to cell towers. The calculator? Another Dieter Rahm rip off. But, please, can we have a bit more functionality? Maybe if people turn the phone they get a scientific one? The stop watch if ok. I need one. Of course it is dumbed down like crazy.

Overal I would say that the iPhone is about 17% there. Make that 17.3%.

youTube player on iPhone
This was the 12th icon, missing so far.

While on wifi through connect via local internet connection the iPhone might be a cute little viewer. Much like the Sony PSP was back in the day: 480 x 272 is the resolution on Sony’s device, while it is 480 x 320 on the iPhone. Somewhat tragic, that the actual hardware path (internet->wifi->device) was already available on the PSP. Two year head start. Wasted. Well, they sold 10 million PSPs in the US.

The real innovation would have been GPS. I think that devices should be fucking aware where they are. I would like the next MacBook Pro have EVDO
built in. Including GPS support. I am sure there are ample applications one could think of, once devices are location aware. It takes only 2 floats to store this precisly. Without any compression applied it would take a mere 10GB to store my location since I was born. One record for each second that I was alive.

a Motherboard get’s produced

Being a child of the last century, and having built machines, that, well, actually build machines, I might have unusual high interest in things how actually get made. Looking at America in 2007 you might think that it needs is marketing and malls to provide people with ’stuff’. But there is this little -often ugly- detail: ’stuff’ needs to get made. And before that, it has to be engineered. Mostly elsewhere.

BlogsNow is back. The added spam detection seems to work. Since I never trust new code, especially not when I wrote it, I pay a bit more attention to which blogs get flaged as spam. Once they are flaged they are ignored. This shows the blogs that google had seen updates for in the last ten seconds. Good luck finding a legit one. There are in there. Somewhere.

Today I thought I had found another bug. Blogs like these: example example example example example example started showing up being spam. Although they are written by people. After looking into it I realized that these people participate in a ‘pay per post’ scheme: They get paid if they blog about something. Sandwich men. I decided to ban all those blogs. No matter if it’s a spam bot or a human being getting paid to write his/her own copy and flagging it all-so-PC with ‘paid post’: The effect is the same. Links from those sources can not be trusted. I am aware that I delete lots of mid range blogs with that. But then, I don’t care: There is no short supply in blogs. BlogsNow can afford to look for the pure ones. Interesting how spam-detection can be a good training ground for other, yet related, schemes.

no comment on the ending. OK. Maybe just one: lol. Of all people why are those saying this? They are the worst offenders of what they critisize.

images of fast food: ads vs.reality

I would not be surprised if you would ask people what they just ate and showed them both pictures they would pick the one from the advertisement. Not the one from reality. The romans left their vast cities for centuries to people that had no clue how you could make such things. The Colosseum was actually a housing complex for most of the 2000 years it existed. Our civilisation will leave billions of silver discs with all sorts of ‘realities’. Like movies, TV shows and games. People might not be able to make new ones, but they sure will inhabit our cultural spaces. Fake or not: we don’t care today. We eat the burger from the billboard rather than the one in our mouth. Why should people care more in 200 years when realities might have deterioated even more.

Want fries with that?