Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Well, I certainly can't fault him for preparing this in the first place. Leaving it where someone can use it to ridicule and generally add insult to injury - now that's a different matter. I am, of course, referring to the premature (by several lifetimes) launch of Team Romney's Transition Website, screen-captured in all its glory by Taegan Goddard and shared on his Political Wire website. See more pages on Political Wire , including a jobs page (you too can join Team Romney!), and Mitt's plans for his inauguration. Taegan Goddard says, "The site was quickly taken down but I saved screenshots ."   I can't thank Taegan enough, no to mention the low level web tech who forgot to take down the site right after Mitt conceded. As a web pro, I don't fault him for creating a site - things like this don't happen overnight. What I do object to is the pompous, arrogant tone, which screams, "You people have had your fun - the grownups are here...

[UPDATED AFTER MY INITIAL TANTRUM] Updated on 6-29-2014 - I looked over this post which I wrote a couple of years ago and felt like it needed an update now that I can look back on things more calmly.  For quite some time now I've bought all my tunes from Amazon. One of the reasons is that my primary desktop in my  home office is a Linux box and they provided a native downloader for album purchase (so you wouldn't need to download each song one at a time). I buy a lot of collections ("The Best 99 Songs to Clean your Bathtub, etc), and downloading the files one at a time is strictly a non-starter. I've been doing this for some time now...at least 3 or 4 years. Not long ago, they started their "Cloud Music Player" where you stored your purchases on their cloud service, where you could play them or download them. Today I went to download an album I bought a couple of weeks ago and no longer saw "Download this Album" as one of the options. Aft...

I confess - even though I have an iPad, I've really been wanting a 7 inch Android tablet. And I'm sort of a cheapskate. So when earlier this spring I read about the upcoming Google tablet, I was consumed by gadget lust. Alas, when it was finally rolled out I did a double take and then said, "No thanks." I had the same experience earlier in the year when Amazon introduced their Fire tablet. The Google device has a lot going for it - fairly decently powered CPU, good screen resolution, access to lots of apps (not like the bastardized Nook Color and Nook Tablet), good battery life; even had a front facing camera. It kicks the Amazon Fire's ass, and the Fire is not too shabby a product either. The deal breaker for both? Only 8 GB of internal storage (a 16 GB Google model is now on the market) and no expansion capacity. Google and Amazon want you to use the cloud - more specifically, their clouds - to store everything. Buy music, buy movies, buy books, and ins...

Now that 2011 has come and gone, I've decided to take some time before heading back to work to come up with some New Year's resolutions for 2012. I've never had much luck in the past with keeping resolutions, so my first resolution is to only resolve to do things that I stand half a chance of achieving. That being said... I resolve to lose 20 pounds by the end of the year. This sounds hard but isn't. What's hard is keeping it off. Amazon's MP3 store has a slew of weigh-loss auto-suggestion audio files which you listen to while going to sleep at night. I managed to lose about 10 pounds before the holidays doing this - time to get back on track. I resolve to paint more. I've got a MFA in painting, and these days I hardly ever pick up a brush. To go along with that... I resolve to clean out my studio and keep it clean . This means getting rid of a ridiculous amount of crap that currently live in my studio. The problem is that I'm a world class pack ...

I have to hand it to Netflix: they may be witless, but they aren't complete dunderheads. After the tidal wave of criticism from their customers and a free-falling stock price, they've figured out that just maybe they should not split the streaming and DVD-by-mail businesses asunder. CEO Reed Hasting (how much longer will I be able to make that statement?) posted on the company blog today that: It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs. Bravo - that man must have an MBA. So, again this plays out more and more like the saga of New Coke . By the way, in case you've forgotten how that ended, Coke actually gained market by re-introducing Old Coke, er, Coke Classic. Other than looking clueless by tampering with a classic, the whole "fiasco" solidified Coke's place in the market. So who's to say how ill-advised all this seems in th...

Once upon a time, Netflix was touted as a case study in the emerging world of dot-com startups. Now it's an object lesson. In case you've missed the drama, Netflix, not satisfied with pissing off its customer base by splitting its DVD-by-mail and streaming subscription services (net result: nearly doubling the cost for both services), continues its campaign by announcing the two services will be split into two distinct companies, with separate billing and customer accounts. If you were a Netflix customer and hadn't dropped one or the other service in the wake of the price boost, this will likely do the trick. For those of you out there who were never customers, here's a little background. Netflix launched its original DVD-by-mail service in 1997 using a traditional $4 per rental model. By 1999, they'd moved to a subscription service that featured unlimited rentals without due dates or shipping fees (the different tiers of service revolved around how many disk at a ...

Here, in one easy-to-read place, is the timeline for Thursday's Amazon Web Services FAIL in their Northern Virginia data center. In case you are interested my phone started ringing at 3:15 AM, CST, about 20 minutes after the error (still not disclosed) that started this whole sorry mess.

By now, if you keep up with all things geekish, you may have heard about Amazon's big outage yesterday . No - this wasn't their online store: this was their other business --  selling their excess capacity as "cloud computing" services. So-called "cloud computing" (also known as utility computing) is all the rage today, and like a lot of things, it's not an entirely new thing. It works by setting up virtual machines in Amazon's massive datacenter. Usually everything works just dandy. But not yesterday . I got a call from one of my internal customers in the UK at 3:00 AM (my employer, the Sisyphean Corp is a global operation) who, in a panicky voice, informed me his Amazon-hosted site was gone. I spent the next 15 hours working to recover it. Amazon has not yet offered a detailed explanation of exactly what happened. My sources, however, have found the reason for all the trouble: