Rhett's Nullhole
Some wise words
There is a slightly disturbing trend I’ve noticed where every interaction with our fellow man seems to be viewed as a business opportunity. Let’s face it: we can’t all make our livings selling our opinions to one another. I don’t view my readers as consumers or potential ad clicks. I seek to inspire and to be inspired by them. The payment I receive is in new thoughts and new ideas.
These and other wise words from brainwagon.
Invention
Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
– Mary Shelly
Twitter vs. Facebook
They looked at it and Evan sort of nodded his head. Then he basically said that what I was talking about was interesting, but that he wouldn’t be doing it with Twitter.
I give him absolute full credit for that. Because here it is 4 years later doing phenomenally well. I sort of stopped using Facebook because I have 1200 FB friends, and there are 50 real friends in there and I don’t know anyone else. My news feed is covered with junk.
But I still use Twitter because it’s a very carefully curated list for me. I only follow people that I genuinely listen to and care about so it still is very high value for me. Thinking back, Twitter never “went viral” on me. Twitter never pressured me to signup, never spammed my account, never forced me to follow people, never made me add lots of friends. So I trust them for a highly curated experience.”
Great writeup on thenextweb.
The Facebook model has the fundamental problem that I don’t actually care what all these “friends” are doing all day. “Following” is so much more useful.
Blog Upgrade Complete: Fun with Multi-site WordPress
I’ve been running two instances of WordPress on this tiny slicehost machine for over 2 years now. Memory usage has always been a problem. Also, if anyone every actually read this blog I have no doubt this webserver would quickly burst into flames. So a little upgrade was in order:
- New slice with Ubuntu Lucid
- WordPress 3 with Multi-site
- Varnish for that extra umph
The results:
- Slicehost, though not the most bang for you buck as others, still has great management tools and documentation.
- Varnish is awesome, easy to configure and lightweight. They even provide some guidance on using with wordpress.
- WordPress Multi-site, pain in the ass
It turns out Multi-site means a few different things. WordPress seems optimized do do multiple blogs on the same domain. Everything else is a hack. There seem to be two methods people use for getting full domain name support:
MU Domain Mapping
After configuring your site to be a ‘network’, you can use the MU Domain Mapping plugin to sort of handle full domain names. However, this is sort of half-way there. If you want a blog like ‘rhettg.com’, you have to create rhettg.nullhole.com and your blog, then use the mapping to make rhettg.com work. BUT, all your media and links still point to rhettg.nullhole.com. Meh.
True Multi-Site
I found some instructions here that involve actually doing MySQL queries to add a real site. Not an easy task, but seems to get much closer to what I wanted.
It seems that though under network mode you have ‘Sites’ configuration in admin, but these are actually just ‘blogs’. Internally, WordPress supports multiple ‘sites’ and multiple ‘blogs’ Where a blog is assigned to a single site. A site is essentially your domain name so if you want multiple domain names, the only proper way to to do is to add a real site.
The instructions above successfully got multi-sites working, but didn’t really get my 100% there because my second site was still a second class citizen. I couldn’t get plugins or themes working easily without doing more hacks in MySQL. The key, it seems is to understand conceptually what’s going on here and get the terminology right:
- A ‘network’ in front-end terminology is a ‘site’ behind the scenes. So we really created a whole new network by following the above directions.
- A ‘site’ then is actually a ‘blog’.
- Users can belong to both sites and blogs, but a ‘Super Admin’ is only super on their own network.
To really get things working properly, you have to make yourself (and other users if you want) Super Admin’s on the second network. I added myself as a Super Admin on the new site by creating a new row in wp_sitemeta. Something like this worked for me:
insert into wp_sitemeta (site_id, meta_key, meta_value) value (2, 'site_admins', 'a:1:{i:0;s:6:"rhettg";}')
I would copy and paste the ‘value’ out of the corresponding value for site #1. I assume this is some sort of PHP serialization format.
Now you can login to the second network and set things up. Kinda awkward, but seems to work now.
Crisis
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper tise. What we don’t have are leaders.
This is one of the finest things I’ve read in weeks.
But I WANT to reply!!
The prevalence of the noreply email address is the worst thing to happen to customer service since robo-call
A while back, I signed up for redbubble.com to buy a t-shirt or something. Right away I got this really nice (automated) email that actually seemed personal because it was actually “from” someone. It felt like I was communicating with a person rather than a faceless company. Why thank-you Jason Michaels for welcoming me to this community. But then I realized the ‘from’ address is ‘noreply’ and I felt duped.
I suppose this happens because of the way companies are organized internally:
- Marketing is measured by how many people they can engage in the company. So they like to send out emails.
- Customer service is measured by how many people DON’T engage with them. Any additional customer contact is an expense.
So the compromise is to send out emails, but do everything you can to keep them one-sided. I wonder how these companies are coping with their twitter/blogs/getsatisfaction ?
On a related note, MySpace no longer has a human face.
Please take my money!
As both my girlfriend and mother will tell you, I don’t enjoy talking on the phone.
So I was particularly excited to have these two events transpire today:
The iPhone Upgrade
ATT finally got their act together and enabled their premier site to allow online upgrades to the 3GS. Fantastic, thank you AT&T, you were only a couple of days late. Anyway, I placed the order, goes great, no problems. But then 2 minutes later I get an email:
Thank you for your recent purchase on the AT&T Premier Online Store. We’re pleased that you chose AT&T as your wireless service provider.
Unfortunately, we cannot validate your credit card number. Please call us at your earliest convenience with a different credit or debit card number so we can complete your order: 1-866-499-8008, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Time.
Oh great, 3 cheers for online ordering. Well I still want my phone so 2 minutes later I’m on hold listening to the same 8 bars of crappy jazz music playing over and over, interspersed with messages about how much they appreciate my business. Finally, after a full 10 minutes of hold I get to talk to a real person. Of course I have to tell them my phone number, again, I’ll never understand what the automated system does with the phone number I gave them earlier. She starts looking for orders and can’t find me.
“Sorry, it says you’re still elegible for an upgrade, so the order must have come through yet. Can you call back again in about an hour?”
Somehow I feel better sending this email reply the no doubt automated email address:
I just called, but they couldn’t find the order.
This is really poor customer service. I order stuff online all the
time, why don’t other companies have this hard of time. I’m trying to give you money!!
The Amp Assembly
My JBL Amp Assembly blew up a few weeks ago. Thankfully, I can buy a replacement part for only $120. So I called up the parts department today, part number in hand, excited to watch Jurrasic Park again and rattle the windows.
“Let me place that order for you…….Oh, sorry sir, my computer just crashed”
“Hmm ok, that sucks.
60 seconds later
“Sorry sir, I don’t think this coming back anytime soon. Can I call you back ?”
Why is this commerce stuff so hard!?!
All Hail the Superior Craftsmanship of JBL!
It’s very impressive how quickly after the 1 year warranty on the electronics of my JBL Venue SUB12 decided to melt down. Not sure when it happened exactly, but one day I thought to myself, “self, there isn’t much bass going on here anymore, is the subwoofer still on ?”
RIP Subwoofer, Sept 2007-Sometime in the spring of 2009
Quality Follows Popularity
I’ve been a dedicated reader of Scott Adams’ (of Dilbert) blog for quite a while now. Today he put up a post trying to sort out ,mostly from a entertainment/pop culture perspective, how it takes being popular to have to time to make something quality.
So here is the key learning. If you are planning to create some business or other form of entertainment, you will need quality at some point to succeed. But what is more important than quality in the beginning is some intangible element that makes your project inherently interesting before anyone has even sampled it. That initial audience will give you the luxury of time to create quality.
I’ve heard this principle described in different ways in the software world: “Ship early and often.” But it’s interesting to hear this so well generalized.
On a related note, while reading this blog post at work, my CEO stood up and announced he just received a signed Dilbert cartoon from Scott Adams. More evidence, as Scott Adams says, that life could be an illusion.
Jamaica 2008: Blue Harbour
If I were to return to Jamaica it would be for one reason: Blue Harbour
This place was amazing, and came totally by surprise. This was the one thing we had booked ahead of time, but information we were going on in no way did it justice. The views were amazing, the place was amazing. Full of history, totally comfortable. I was completely relaxed in a matter of hours.
The place sleeps something like 10 people. There is one main Villa and two smaller one room Villas. Meals are traditional jamaican food, homecooked by the staff who are super friendly but very non-invasive. On Christmas Day, we had the WHOLE PLACE TO OURSELVES.
For me, one of the most thrilling aspects was the history of the place. Blue Harbour was the Jamaican party house of Noel Coward, a English playwright and actor. I had no idea who this guy was, but some research proved enlightening (note: All this research was done after I returned, I was laptop free for two weeks)
- Years after the war, Noel Coward finally admitted to being in British Secret Service, MI5, just like his neighbor Ian Flemming.
- He was listed in the Nazi’s Black Book, which would mean had they invaded England, he would have been executed.
- Sir Noel Coward knighthood for his service during WWII was delayed from 1941 to 1969 due to his rumored homosexuality and party reputation making him too controversial.
- Was offered the role of Dr. No in the James Bond film of the same name, but replied, “No No No” to the telegram from Jamaica.
- Stewie Griffin of Family Guy is supposedly loosely based on him.
