Rod Trent at myITforum.com : Chimpin'

Google turns adSense into potential smut distributor

rodtrent — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:36:00 GMT

How far is Google willing to go sell advertisements?

Google and Creator of ‘Family Guy’ Strike a Deal

While, “Family Guy” can be funny at times, there’s a part of the show that doesn’t sit well with me as the father of 3 kids - with 1 or 2 more on the way (we’ll find out the exact number on Wednesday!). I may need to employ a parental chip on all my computers just to block out Google web page spam from here on out.

Time Warner has a busy signal for customer service?

rodtrent — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:25:09 GMT

Anyone that uses Time Warner for Internet, Cable, and Digital phone – have you noticed how the service has gone downhill dramatically over the last 6 months?

Time Warner pushed out a digital cable box upgrade yesterday to us, but is continuing to do so for all Time Warner customers in this area. Its a neat upgrade, and it seemed to work well for us. However, calling Time Warner today on another matter, their customer service line has a busy signal. This isn’t a small company we’re talking about here.

Business 101: How to lose your customer base in 1 easy step

rodtrent — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:24:36 GMT

Time Warner Cable tests metered Internet service

We must keep in mind that this is the same company that thought purchasing AOL was a good idea.

Definitely not formatted for the TabletPC

rodtrent — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:05:56 GMT

I went to the “Show us your Wow” web site today to check it out. Microsoft is usually pretty good about developing web sites that are formatted well for the TabletPC screen. This one is horrible…

http://www.showusyourwow.com/

Finally -- someone else notices

rodtrent — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:48:55 GMT

Digg.com is in trouble… (now, how long have I been chimping about this?)

Troubles in Diggville

I guess the Portable Media Center is dead or dying?

rodtrent — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 04:47:36 GMT

I love my PMC. It provides video (movies, television, and DVDs), music and audio (in a wide variety of formats), and pictures and photos. The iPod only offers audio. So, the news of Microsoft releasing an iPod competitor by Christmas is a bit confusing.

I own the Creative Zen PMC. A quick look on Creative's Web site shows they are no longer producing PMCs - only a new product called the Zen "Vision".

Too much

rodtrent — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 16:51:20 GMT

Ebonics didn't work. Why would this?

http://vzw.msn.com/news/news.aspx?id=NATL&sid=2&fn=natlnews3.xml

Blog flair

rodtrent — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 04:47:16 GMT

What is blog flair?

If you've watched Office Space, the movie, you know how Jennifer Anniston's character was blasted by her boss for not wearing enough flair. But, do you also remember how her co-worker was so dang annoying? He was obnoxious and wore a LOT of flair. You wanted to punch him in the face.

Have you seen blogs, lately? The majority of blogs these days contain more buttons to 3rd party blog services than Jennifer Anniston's co-worker. A lot of blogger's throw every blogging service's button on their blog page, hoping to build traffic for their web blog, a thinking that this is the way to become the next Scoble.

I have some flair on my blog, but I took the time to consider which options were valuable, instead of just placing each and every piece of flair on my web blog.

Samsung i730: Finally, a gripe

rodtrent — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 05:13:55 GMT

I've found my first gripe with the i730. The spot on the screen where I use the stylus the most has become worn. I wonder if Verizon will replace it.

Where's the Beef?

rodtrent — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 18:32:43 GMT

Remember that Wendy’s commercial where the old lady says, “Where’s the Beef?”

Well — I’d like to propose that this phrase be used from now on when finding a technology or company that just doesn’t quite “get it.”

Chris Mosby posted today about Symantec starting up their own web blog (finally):

Looks like Symantec has jumped on the blog bandwagon..

When I read this post, I immediately jumped out to the link in Chris’ blog to see if I could grab the RSS feed for the new Symantec web blog. I have to admit I was really excited.

Guess what? It is not clearly evident where the feed is. There is no RSS icon and you have no idea which subscription formats they allow. Instead you have to look at the far left for the word: “Subscribe”. Huh? Is Symantec once again showing they have no clue what the rest of the world is doing?

This simply isn’t a web blog.

What Symantec has done here is to use an internal collaborative tool that posts externally and CALL it a blog. Interesting. So, basically you can’t comment, you can’t read the new posts to the “web blog” in a Feed Reader, you can’t interact like you would with a regular web blog, you can’t have direct communication with the company or person posting — what’s the use?

“Where’s the Beef, Symantec!”

P.S. I agree with Chris. The Symantec pseudo-blog is slow!

Ron posts it -- I shake my head...

rodtrent — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:11:46 GMT

This is a great find:

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rcrumbaker/archive/2006/06/22/21433.aspx

These are some of the apps I’ve been chimpin’ about for years (along with Adobe). It’s good to see I’m on the right track. If only they had listened to me in the first place <wink, wink, nudge, nudge>.

Adobe buys Flash. SMS Admins are left wondering why Flash can't be installed using SMS.

rodtrent — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 19:25:06 GMT

This topic has come up on the SMS list over the past couple days. SMS Admins are trying to install an update for Flash (used to be owned by Macromedia, now owned by Adobe), and there are problems.

Of course, my first instinct is to blame Adobe. They still can’t seem to develop a sound installation method for any of their products — even after all the complaining from their customers. I remember Duncan chatting with them a couple years back, and the Adobe folks promised to improve. Adobe made some steps toward helping out the folks that needed to deploy their products Enterprise-wide, but soon fell back on their promise.

I may be off about this, but I’ll still keep you updated on the resolutions — if any.

Here’s hoping that the MS replacements for Adobe products take hold in the industry, and we can finally rid ourselves of the “plague that is Adobe”.

Do you believe?

rodtrent — Mon, 29 May 2006 23:18:28 GMT

I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage: “You can’t believe everything you read.” Well, I guess some people either forgot that phrase or are just too young to have heard it. Generation X could learn a lot just listening to the phrases of old. Why do I say that?

Well, last night, I heard something that totally blew me away. Someone actually believes that the Da Vinci Code is completely true — even though it’s a fiction novel. They are completely OK with, basically, using the Da Vinci Code book (and, movie, I guess) as the new Bible, believing every little conspiracy within is fact. What shocked me most was who believed it. I won’t even go into that.

If you’ve read any of Dan Brown’s books, you know that every book he has written is based on one conspiracy or another. The man has gotten rich off of conspiracies. Do you think he knew that the youth of today would take his writings to heart? Do you think that’s what he meant to do? What a great marketing scheme! The Da Vinci Code is the new Santa Claus. If Dan Brown believes even half of what he writes (or copies), I bet he’s a nervous man.

The Da Vinci Code story isn’t anything new. Folks hail this book like it’s unique. A lot of what Dan Brown wrote was plagiarized. Lewis Perdue wrote “The Da Vinci Legacy” and “Daughter of God”. If you are familiar with these early works, then go on and read Dan Brown’s book, you’ll be amazingly astonished how similar the story line is. You’ll also see where entire excerpts from Lewis’ writings look like they were copied and pasted into the Word document with which Dan Brown wrote his book.

But, even so, how could anyone believe a fiction novel as fact? What’s next? Maybe, Dan Brown will write a new novel that tells us that this is his life. We are just scenery. When he closes his eyes, we’re not really there.

Don’t get me wrong — Dan Brown’s book is written very well, and tells a great story. But, that’s just it — it’s a STORY.

Blogging from Word 2007

rodtrent — Wed, 17 May 2006 01:34:24 GMT

If you’ve spent any time on the MS blogs over the past few days, you’ve probably read several MS employees’ Web blogs, where they are raving about being able to blog from MS Word 2007. OK, OK, enough already!

Here’s one example

It’s nice to see that MS is adding this kind of functionality to their Office apps, but I’ve been thinking about this for the past few days and I’m not sure this is worth the development cycles they are putting behind this new feature. At least not in the way they are going about it.

Think about it. Who really uses MS Word as their email editor in MS Outlook? My wife does, but, hey, that’s my wife. Anyone with any serious computer aptitude (and, no, I’m not saying my wife is computer illiterate) knows not to use MS Word as your email editor. It’s slow and cumbersome.

So, now, why would we want to use MS Word to post to our Web blogs? Seeing that most of the MS bloggers only post, maybe, once every 6 months, this seems OK. But, what about the prolific bloggers? Do they really want to keep MS Word open all day long, chewing up CPU cycles and potentially eating virtual memory? Do we really want to sit and wait for MS Word to open up EVERY time we want to post something new? I don’t need a MS Word splash screen popping up every 10 minutes.

Again, thanks MS for thinking about us bloggers, but why not put the blogging feature into something we all use every day? Why not embed the feature into MS Outlook — which pretty much stays open from morning to night? Make it so all you have to do is post to a folder in MS Outlook, or send an email straight to your Web blog and it’s automatically posted. This seems a bit more logical to me than using MS Word.

Then, there’s the whole corporate policy thing. How many companies are really going to enable this feature for their end-users? Could this accidentally or on purpose, cause sensitive corporate data to fly straight out the network pipes to reside somewhere on the public Internet? With Office 2007 looming, I can see a delay on deploying the new version just because of this feature alone. How many months will it take for a new corporate policy to be created before the thumbs-up is giving for deploying Office 2007? Oh — and how long do you think it will take that crazy Gartner Group to release one of their half-thought out releases telling companies to not deploy Office 2007 until 2010?

But, hey — that’s just me. Sure, I’ll probably still be Mr. Vegas and take my chance a couple times on using the MS Office 2007 blogging feature — but, right now the logic of using it as my sole posting mechanism is beyond me. I’ll just keep on using Blogjet and hoping I don’t roll snake-eyes.

Agreed...pay for news sites have to go

rodtrent — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 13:31:00 GMT

John posted this earlier, and I have to agree. This is a big chimp category. You SHOULD NOT have to pay for news sites. This drives me nuts. When I click on a link in an email and am dumped to a pay site, I immediately close the browser window.