Big Trapeze

I post this for three reasons. One, to let you know I’m alive. Two, because it really confused me when I read this, and I wanted to see if it was just me or the author. And three, because it’s really annoying to read this on a “professional” website.

This blurb was found on the Major League Baseball section of ESPN.com. Headlines are meant to be quickly skimmed and comprehended. We shouldn’t have to read a headline more than a couple of times before we understand the point of the story. Read the offending headline highlighted below, and see how long it takes for you to figure out what it’s talking about.

“Rookie called up after kneecap KO’s 2nd Reds SS.”

Maybe it’s just me, but it took me three reads to figure out that a “rookie short-stop was called up from the minor leagues after two previous short-stops for the Cincinnati Reds had suffered knee-cap injuries.” Granted, that’s a lot to say in 10 words or less, but I think “Kneecap injury sidelines second Reds SS | Rookie called up” would have been better.

If you’re from another country that knows nothing about baseball, you probably wouldn’t be on this site–but if by mistake you had stumbled upon it, you would have no idea what that statement meant. You could look at the other headlines around it and easily infer what was going on with them. Maybe mixing two abbreviations (KO’s and SS) should be a no-no when writing headlines.

Yes, I have more important things to do with my time than to rant on ill-formed headlines, but for the sake of humanity I couldn’t help myself.

I pull for the little guy, I really do. But in this case, Firefox gives me more trouble than it does a sense of the downtrodden and oppressed sticking it to the man. So, I’m with Safari.

In its defense, Firefox may not be entirely to blame. I’m running Leopard on an iMac, and I have two plugins installed, Firebug and Adblock Plus. Your mileage may vary. But, I can count on at least 2 hangs/force-quits a day. I especially notice problems when exiting Gmail, but I don’t think it’s related to Firebug.

I haven’t used Firefox in two-weeks, and having used it since the first beta it feels very weird not to use it now. I’ll still use it to test my web designs across the board, but no more than I’ll use IE6/7 for the same purpose. And I do miss a few features too, like the way it restores my tabs and browsing session if there is a crash, or let’s me undo a tab close (Safari doesn’t do this for me), and I do find Firebug to be a very handy tool when debugging some of my Javascript.

I should be fair and let you know that while I was writing this post, Safari crashed. It happened while I frantically did a cut-copy-paste into a popup window, but I’m guessing it was a clever twist of Firefox irony, letting me know I can’t just depend on one browser–and for the little guy, that’s a good thing.

Geez I’m really tired of this. We’re not all corporate lackeys that have to entice someone with a tantalizing leader and follow it with a picture or ad then follow it up with the rest of the story. So why do I see people use “more after the jump” on so many posts?

Maybe I’m missing the point, but we’re supposed to be minimizing, not bloating. Just get to the point without any extra clicks or scrolling.

Today is December 21st, 2007–4 days before Christmas. You would hope the news of the day would be uplifting, but instead, CNN.com greeted me with this thoroughly depressing sidebar (I took the liberty to highlight the important points):

I would bet for every “bad” story in the world, there is at least one “good” one to counter-act it. Why is it, then, that we are constantly bombarded with depressing news? Why are the majority of news outlets littered with things to bring us down? In keeping with the Christmas theme, I’ll end this with a quote from one of my favorite Christmas heros–Charlie Brown: Good grief.

I believe in Karma. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of evening things about, but you can only be so bad or so careless for so long that eventually the world rights itself and pays you back. In high school I was one of the guys that went out on Halloween and smashed pumpkins with my friends. Karma has paid me back tenfold in my adult years. Every Halloween when I walk to my front porch and see my great carvings smashed along the curb, I can only give a knowing-nod to Karma and shrug it off–it’s my own fault.

And I can’t wait until the NFL world pays back the New England Patriots and Bill Belichick for being complete sports jerks. I’ve never liked Belichick, mainly for superficial reasons like his sloppy hoodie and grandma-like looks (seriously, just look at him). But now I have real reasons, like cheating and running up the score on people just to pad stats and break records. I hate the Patriots so much that I actually cheered for my second least favorite team, the Eagles, Sunday night against the Patriots. It felt weird, like cheering for Stalin in a cage match against Hitler. Speaking of Stalin, Tom Brady isn’t off the hook either. He’s been slowly taking on the persona of his coach and turning into a complete tool. By the end of his career Karma will take away the supermodels and aspiring political career and hand him back an average Stepford wife, a minivan, and a sideline gig at a Punxsutawney Phil showing.

That’s why it’s only fitting the Miami Dolphins lost last night to the Steelers. The Dolphins were the last team to go undefeated, and now that the Patriots are on the same road, it would be poetic beauty if the Dolphins’ first (and only) win this season came against the Patriots on December 23rd. Whenever or wherever it happens (and it will happen), Karma will exact its toll on the Patriots in a wonderful way, and the world will once again be right.

I try to stay away from just posting someone else’s work, but Coding Horror has a good article on the art of hyperlinking we could all benefit from. I posted it because it’s a good reminder to keep links simple and intuitive, and because I really really really (really) hate SnapShots-styled links like this:

First–Leopard is fine. This isn’t a rant about Leopard, more of a rant against myself for doing breaking a very simple rule (again): Never mess with your development machine when you’re trying to launch a product.

Leopard came to my doorstep at 10 AM on the 26th, and being the early-adopter I always am, it was promptly on my machines by 2 PM. It is now a week later, and I still haven’t gotten all my development stuff fixed that I broke as a result of the upgrade. Basically, if you already have

• Name Based Virtual Hosts (NetInfo Manager, which made this easy, is gone…)
• SSL
• MySQL, and
• GD support

a Leopard upgrade will probably hose it. MySQL was easy enough to get going, but it’s taken me an shameful amount of searches to get the first two issues fixed (see all the searches), and now I’ve just stumbled on a 30+ step guide to getting GD support back, which looks like will require recompiling Apache, and probably break the virtual hosts and SSL support I just got working.Again, it’s my fault–never do a major OS upgrade on your development server in the middle of a big project–it’ll cost you.

I was driving with my daughter today, and we passed a homeless man picking up cigarette butts. She said, “look–that man is picking up litter!”

Do you remember the time you lived without cynicism or prejudice?

I’ve spent the better part of the frustrating day trying to figure out the new YouTube APIs in relation to PHP. I have a project where I need to retrieve thumbnails from various YouTube videos, and I’ve been making it too hard (I’ve tried integrating the Zend Framework with PHP, Javascript, SimplePie RSS–which is a good tool, it turns out, and all sorts of DOM-reading PHP plugins).

It turns out, the easiest way to retrieve the standard thumbnail for a YouTube video is:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/2.jpg

This sucks. A couple of months ago I prepaid for a year of Sunrocket VoIP service…. I noticed last night I got a weird signal when I tried to call my house, and today when I tried to call it it rang incessantly with no voice-mail pickup. As of today, it seems, they’re dead. I never saw it coming, or never saw the rumors about them struggling, and now I’m left with no home phone–though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can read more about the shutdown in Wired.

I called the Sunrocket customer support line and get a pretty abrupt “We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls,” followed by a disconnect. That’s going to make getting $200 back a little tricky.

What really irks me is that there was no warning… we were never notified about the immediate shutoff. Would it have been a bad thing to let their 200,000 customers know that they were going to have to close their doors, and at least give us a few days to find new service? Let’s not forget the Sunrocket “Member Bill of Rights,” particularly the last, regarding “Integrity and Trust.”

• Integrity & Trust: We endeavor to fully inform you of available options so you can make timely and informed choices. We will never abuse your trust through deceit, exploitation, neglect, manipulation, or discrimination.

They forgot to fully inform me of available options, unless this doesn’t cover “Screw the customer and totally shut off service.”
So, what’s next? I decided to find out who runs the joint–because I’m not going to get burned by them again. It turns out, Sunrocket was founded by 3 people with lots of telecom experience: Joyce Dorris and Paul Erickson from MCI, and Robert Mainor from Bell Atlantic. In February of 2007, they left Sunrocket for then unspecified ventures. Enter Lisa Hook, current (as of yesterday) CEO of Sunrocket. Hook is an ex AOL’er, as are several of the new managers of Sunrocket (most from AOL as well). She worked in the AOL wireless division during her stint there, and she’s also served as legal advisor to the chairman of the FCC.

But, somewhere along the way she forgot about the little people. I don’t know where I’ll head next for my VoIP service, but you can bet it won’t have anything to do with anything associated with Lisa Hook. More research and rants to come…

UPDATE 7/18/07 INTERNAL EMAIL TO SUNROCKET EMPLOYEES

• Unfortunately this email contains very bad news. We have just been informed that any and all last ditch efforts to keep operations running as well as a potential sale of the company have not gone through and that SunRocket will cease operations at COB today. As such, today is my last day and everyone else you may have worked with at SunRocket. … Regarding outstanding and future invoices: Sherwood Partners out of Palo Alto will be handling the close down of all invoices, current and outstanding.

And of course, it’s never official until The Times reports it…

UPDATE 7/19/07 EMAIL TO SUNROCKET CUSTOMERS

• Dear Customers,

  After significant effort by the Company to avoid this result, SunRocket is in the process of closing its operations and therefore will no longer be able to provide you with the phone service that you have been accustomed to. Â However, this email provides you with an opportunity to sign up with select service providers who we believe will offer outstanding replacement service

  In order to assist you, we have entered into negotiations with a number of service providers. Â As a result of those negotiations, we have entered into agreements with 8×8, Inc., provider of the Packet8 service, and Unified Communications Corp., provider of Teleband service to offer you the best options and we are proud to recommend the following alternatives to you. Â Please make your decision to move to a new service provides immediately as future service is uncertain.

That’s it… no “if you paid a year in advance, we’ll be happy to refund a partial payment to you,” or even “if you paid a year in advance, we regret to inform you that you’re screwed, and we’ve taken the money and flown to Mexico.”

My favorite slogan from the Sunrocket website is still SunRocket, the “no gotchaâ€? phone company…