How about “nothing” ?

While reading this interesting post about the history of the Internet, I realized that Napster was hot more than 10 years ago. It started in 1998 actually. Now we all know what happened with Napster and we also know what the music industry did to steer people away from Napster: they sued.

During that time, Apple came and started its own store. Taking people by surprise I guess as I suppose no one thought selling songs for 99 cents would ever be a successful idea. Oh boy… Who’s laughing now?

The music industry had over 10 years to come up with a solution to online music sharing and NOTHING is here now. 10 years is long in “Internet years”. Too long…! When people get fed up, they take matters into their own hands. Technology wise, we went from CRT TV’s to plasma to LCD to LED LCD’s that can show Youtube content. We went from tape to DVD to HD-DVD to Blue Ray. What the heck have they done..!?

They sacrificed long term profitability by using short term scare tactics. And where’s THEIR solution now?

I guess we can say they get what they deserve… Should we feel bad about them? I think we all know the answer.

So what could be a good use for this technology? There’s plenty but here’s one that would ease the pain of billions of people: A plain language translator.

Wouldn’t it be great to point your iPhone at a Chinese sign while visiting Hong Kong and BAM! get an automatic translation of what the sign says? Restaurant menus, bus routes and all these signs everywhere could be instantly translated.

Now THAT’S augmented reality to me.

And while we’re at it, I don’t understand why Google isn’t doing Optical Character Recognition in Street view to allow “super local searches” (i.e. bread store on St-Laurent). Yes, businesses open ad close but it could be useful if Google were to drive around the busiest streets… Then again, it might explain why they bought ReCaptcha..? Will we see street-view-style captchas soon?

While I don’t recall everything, one thing struck me: the price (it was printed in very large size too..!) To call back home on that exceptionally low roaming fee, you’ll have to spit out 2 dollars per minute.

Yes, 2 bucks!

I immediately told myself that if I were the marketing VP, I’d be scared to lose my job. This is not advertizing, it’s corporate suicide.

In this rough economy, don’t go out and tell people that they have to pay a stupidly high fee (2$ per minute is nuts) to use YOUR product. Find a free or very cheap alternative or promote something else like how outdated your phones are…! Why couldn’t they promote Skype or something else like that?

Even if the regular roaming fees are crazy (up to 7$ per minute depending of where you are), don’t advertise a fee that rivals erotic chat fees!

This ad was obviously targeted at companies and we must remember that companies want to save money, not spend more! By seing that ad, it left me with a very bad feeling on how expensive cell phones can be and if I were a company president, I’d be looking at downsizing our cellular contract instead of looking at 2$ per minute roaming…

What a waste of advertising money from Rogers…

It’s really nice that Radio Canada shares their videos online. I really appreciate that aspect considering that many broadcasting stations are still in the dinosaur era.

But then I saw this:

The questions is: why bother reinventing the wheel? Flash video is pretty much THE standard.  Youtube recently introduced HD broadcasting and it works perfectly! If THAT is not good enough then what is good enough for Radio Canada? I don’t know… Why doesn’t Radio Canada inks a deal with Youtube to share revenues or something? Let the pros do their job and let Radio Canada do its own. Radio Canada is not and should not be a technological company. It is BTW a tax funded corporation and its mandate should be to investigate free or limited cost solutions in order to save taxpayers’ money.

Not only that but they are using SilverLight. ANOTHER technology… Why…? We’re already struggling to make Flash work on all browsers and platforms (including mobile devices & cellphones) so why cut yourself from the rest of the world?

Why be different? I’m not a Youtube fanboy but when there’s something out there that WORKS for millions of people, why make something different? And best of all, (listen Radio Canada) it’s free!

I go the Aeroplan site and apply for a card. So far so good. Next page is where problems really start kicking in. First of all, I don’t get a Captcha image!

Weird I tell myself so I hit the “get another image” button without any luck. Being a geek, I look at the source code and try to generate an image manually – no luck. Oh well, I guess the server must be down or something..?

However, since I don’t use Internet Explorer, I decided to give it another try with the devil’s browser. And guess what? The image appears! Nice usability work guys…

Now look at this. This is the crappiest Captcha I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not a Captcha, it’s almost brain washing. Trust me, when you click “Try another image”, you get all kinds of funny messages like “2000 PaRTnerS wHo LoVe YoU Wo0t!!!11!!” and so on. And as you can guess, it’s pretty hard to type as you need to constantly switch between lowercase and uppercase.

BTW, is there really so much frequent flyer card fraud that you need to put captchas to prevent this? I’d like to know.

Oh well, let’s continue shall we? After all the work spent, let’s not stop here. Not that I really need the card but I might as well finish what I was doing…

Here comes the submit button – all looks good! Oh wait… another error? This time it says that my “street number” is out of range?

What kind of error is that? I live where I live, and my address is a 4 digit number. My address is not THAT big, how can it be out of range? So just for fun, I removed some digits until I eventually tried a one digit address – still no luck.

WTF?

Well at this point, I’m pretty upset but I still want my damn card. I have no idea what else to try… I guess that 99% of people would’ve quit at this point BUT NOT ME! :)

So I tried a few things, you know, basic try and error process… I finally changed the street name and added “rue” in front of it and guess what? It freaking worked! 

So you tell me: how could a normal person (i.e. someone like my dad who is not computer savvy) could EVER figure out that error message? How can a normal person know that “street NUMBER out of range” really means “we couldn’t lookup your street NAME in our cheezy database”…?!?

What kind of shitty programming is that? What if you live in a new development where your street name might not be in their database yet? You are SO screwed!

I finally got my card and I hope I’ll never have to go back on that site. Anyone got any scary stories like that?

It’s quite simple: we live in this world together and if we all act selfishly, things won’t go very far. This thinking works in all aspects of life: business, health, society, etc.

I consider myself a semi-earth-friendly person. This is my way of giving back. Not to you or anyone around me but to the future generations. To my kids and their grand kids. What I do now might not have an immediate impact (it might not have any actually) but I hope it will in the end. It’s karma. If you’re mean, people will be mean to you. If you’re nice, people will be nice to you. Although I don’t believe in any type of god, this is sort of my religion.

• I could live in a large house in a suburb but I decided to live in a tiny place close to a subway station.
• I could drive into a nice heated parking spot in downtown but I decided not to (although some of my friends say I’m crazy)
• I could drive for 30 mins and go to big malls and other club-style warehouses but I decided to buy local (I walk most of the times to do my groceries).
• I recycle everything I can, including batteries. 
• I donate clothes and other items to charity.
• etc.

I’m not a green-nazi person but I try to be careful. It’s common sense. Why? Because we’re in it together and we don’t own the earth, we’re just borrowing it.

One day I felt pretty sad. I heard about the existence of the 7th continent. For those who don’t know about it, it’s a giant “island” made of trash in the ocean between Hawaii and California. It’s the size of France and some believe that over 100 million tons of plastic float, forming some sort of an island. You can’t really walk on it as it floats but it’s quite disturbing as it affects the marine life. Of course, no nation will take the first step as the clean up cost will be enormous. So this island will keep growing…

I don’t want you to change your mind or your views but please take a second to read about it. Educate yourself about these things. If you think it doesn’t affect you then it’s not true. We pretty much all drink water and many eat fish. Numerous chemicals have been released in the ocean as plastics don’t fully biodegrade, they break down in smaller pieces (and are often eaten by fish). Read about Bisphenol A and how dangerous it is. That “soup” is filled with this and other chemicals. If anything, please forward this to one person and ask that person to forward to someone else. We must spread the word.

There’s a simple phrase to remember and if anything, I hope you simply remember this simple phrase:

What goes around, comes around…

I received an email (maybe some of you did too) from Scott Annan, great guy at Mercury Grove. They’re working on a new project called Dex. The problem is that they received a “Cease & desist” letter from another company called “Dex Media”.

“Dex” is a popular word. Many companies use that word. There is a Dex skateboard company, a Dex insurance company, numerous other software companies, Medical equipment, Dex clothes, Imaging, Concrete work, etc.

I don’t know what’s wrong with Dex Media but they don’t like the Dex Application. Too similar it seems…

Changing the domain name is the easy solution but this type of cyber bullying should not even be possible. Some people register domains like FordSucks.com and that’s fine. It’s called liberty of expression in a free world.

The fight over nissan.com is a good example of this democraty. The good guy won over Golliath. Help Scott spread the word. Even though he might not win, people will know how pathetic DexMedia’s business practices are.

Here is the email along with my comments (or what I was actually thinking while reading it)

Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta of Amazon CloudFront (cool!), a new web service for content delivery (hmm..? You mean S3 version 2.0?). With CloudFront, you can distribute content using a worldwide network of edge locations that provide low latency and high data transfer speeds (is this distributed S3..?). CloudFront works seamlessly with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 (Ah so it must be different than S3..?), and like all AWS services, is self-service with no up-front commitments, no long-term contracts and pay-as-you-go pricing. (Sounds good, but what is it exactly?) You can sign up for CloudFront – and begin using it today – at aws.amazon.com/cloudfront. (Yes, but what is it??)

The initial release lets developers and businesses deliver popular, publicly readable content worldwide. (like my web server..?)  CloudFront has a number of exciting features (Exciting yes, but what is it exactly?) that differ from many traditional (woah, is this http ng?) methods of content delivery. It:

• lets you get started easily there’s no need to contact a sales person or negotiate a contract. Anyone can get started in just minutes with only a credit card. (Wow! but what is it again?)
• works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – you can start delivering your files stored in Amazon S3 through CloudFront edge locations in a matter of minutes. (Cool! So it’s really not S3 then?)
• is simple and easy to use – a single API call is all that’s needed to get started delivering your content.
• lets you pay only for what you use there are no minimum fees and no long-term commitments. (So I don’t need S3 anymore then, or do I?)
• To Use Amazon CloudFront, all you need to do is store your objects in Amazon S3 (make sure they are publicly readable), then, make a simple API call to register your bucket with CloudFront. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location used by Amazon CloudFront for fast delivery of your content. No negotiations, no upfront fees, and no volume commitments. It’s that simple. (Oh, looks like I still need S3 after all…)

You can learn more about Amazon CloudFront and get started using the service at aws.amazon.com/cloudfront. (I don’t want to click there to find out more. I should know everything by now!)

Sincerely,

The Amazon CloudFront Team (oh well…! [deleting email])

I always managed to keep up with local events. I made Montreal and friends feeds a top priority. Then it was the rest of the world. Just like an addict, I always told myself that I could eventually catch up. That I would read all my feeds. I was wrong.

So I declared RSS bankruptcy.

Unlike email bankrupcy which is a more severe form of social exclusion, RSS bankrupcy will only affect me. No hard feeling if I haven’t read your blog, ok? Then again, chances are you will never know…

So earlier today I did what I thought would be impossible. I zeroed all my feeds. I have nothing to read now. I don’t know if it feels good or not yet but I feel like I can move on to something else. I also had to kill some heavy feeds and I had to change the way I management my feeds. I guess I should take some time to catchup with old emails now :)

The application was removed from the Apple store after 8 idiots persons downloaded the application (one by mistake? ). That’s close to 8000$ in pure profit. I’d say, that’s even more profit than many startups will ever make in their entire life. The publicity just started to kick in. That guy could’ve easily made 100 sales. 100 sales means $100,000 of free money from rich err.. mentally challenged people who have nothing else to do with their hard earned money. I say free money because although there was some initial investment let’s not fool ourselves: there was probably less than 3 to 4 hours of work involved, and I’m being generous… Most of it was probably put on the "ruby" image – if not taken directly from Google.

I get rather upset that I don’t have those type of ideas that are so dumb that people fall for it. Just like the million pixel page or the pet rock, these ideas require so little time and yet are financially rewarding. I only have ideas which require gazillions of dollars and a team of 50 developpers.

Since many great ideas work well in other domains, is anyone willing to buy a $1000 ruby picture from me? You’ll look really cool and people will know you’re dumb err.. I mean rich…