Strongly Worded Letter

I Am Rich

Apple's Steve Jobs (or just God, to many of us) told the Wall Street Journal this week that more than 60 million iPhone applications have been downloaded from the company's website so far in about the one month that they have been available.

At this pace the company stands to bank at least 360 million dollars a year in new revenue from the AppStore. Jobs expects it to be a billion dollar marketplace one day adding, "I've never seen anything like this in my career for software."

Let me back up a step for non-Apple people which, inexplicably is most of you.

You've seen or heard of the iPhone, right? Well, an Apple App is a program you download that lives on your phone's desktop. It's like having a bunch of little internets on your phone working all at the same time.

So you can have, say, the USA Today news stories delivered continuously on your phone, or a permanent Soduku game at your fingertips, or an eBook reader loaded with all seven Harry Potter books if you want.

There are hundreds of applications, some made by Apple but many offered by third parties. Some are free, some are a dollar, some quite a bit more.

So far the most notorious App is one that Apple allowed, then deleted from availability after only eight sales. Here's the curious story, edited from something called www.CRN.com (links within the story are theirs.)

"Earlier this week the I Am Rich application went up, commanding a $999.99 price tag, the most a developer can charge through Apple's App Store. The program essentially loads a screen saver onto the Apple iPhone to remind users and alert others that the user has money to throw around willy-nilly. The 'status symbol,' once downloaded, does nothing but load a ruby red icon on the home screen, with the subtext  I Am Rich. When the user activates the program, a large, glowing red gem appears. That's all.

When I Am Rich first appeared in the App Store on Tuesday, the applications information page on iTunes read like this: "The red icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were rich enough to afford this. It's a work of art with no hidden function at all."

Apple introduced the App Store last month to coincide with the release of the Apple iPhone 3G. The App Store is designed to let iPhone users download third-party applications and lets developers sell the applications they've created.

As of Friday, the I Am Rich application was no longer available in the App Store, much to the chagrin of Armin Heinrich, I Am Rich's developer.

'I have no idea why they did it and am not aware of any violation of the rules to sell software on the App Store,' Heinrich told the Los Angeles Times in an e-mail.

The Times, however, said Apple was too slow to remove the high-dollar application. Eight people —six from the U.S., one from Germany and one from France— shelled out the dough for I Am Rich within the first 24 hours it was available.

Posts on several public forums and Web pages, however, call into question the validity of those purchases. In one instance, a screen shot of an App Store review, which has been circulating the Web, shows that one user mistakenly dropped the $1,000 for I Am Rich thinking it was a joke.

"I saw this app with a few friends and we jokingly clicked 'buy' thinking it was a joke, to see what would happen," the upset I Am Rich owner wrote. "THIS IS NO JOKE. DO NOT BUY THIS APP AND APPLE PLEASE REMOVE THIS FROM THE APP STORE."

Typepad S.O.S.

                                      here
Frankly, I've had it up to        with Typepad lately. I apologize in advance that this will not be a general interest post but I a) need to vent and b) am hoping for some help from more experienced bloggers than me who might be reading this.

Back in 2006, when I was writing my first blog, I used the free Blogger program. A few months in I realized one really does get what one pays for as I fought numerous crashes, bugs and service outages to get anything published.

So when I started over last October I test drove several of the pay services including Wordpress, Squarespace and Typepad, the one I ultimately chose.

I've had several annoyances all along that I have just learned to live with but some of the recent problems - especially since they introduced a Compose Editor "Upgrade" - have me wondering if I once again chose poorly.

I'm going to share what's going on and if anyone has tips that might help please post a comment below (preferred, so we all benefit) or email me privately.

1. The newest problem is that Friday and Saturday the automated Publish feature did not work.  I set my up my entries to post every morning between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. and yes, my calendar was set up properly. Yet, nothing went live until I manually did it when I logged on. 

2.  It doesn't matter how often I go to Design, then Change Theme, then Custom, none of the changes I make and save there translate to the Compose Editor. 

3. In Compose I can find no way to change the default font from Arial, 11. I can change it manually but can not save it for next time.

4. And when I do change my font size manually by highlighting the page I write, the changes only work one paragraph, and sometimes one sentence, at a time. In other words I had to manually enlarge #3 above from default 13 point to the preferred 14. And then I had to highlight #4 and change it separately.

5. One of the Known Issues I'd like to publicly complain about is the suspension of the Post Search feature too. Does anyone know if it is coming back?

6. There must be an easier way, and one with fewer steps, than what I go through to post songs on my Christmas music sister blog each day. Each song first shows up as a link to Download the song rather than stream it. I have to save that, erase that in the Rich Text screen and then add all the embedding code manually on the HTML screen. It shouldn't be that hard. Is it me?

7. In the last two weeks there is yet another new problem. When I click on Save at the end of writing a post, or just to back it up as I go along, it's supposed to save it right away and then let me navigate off the page. Instead, I now almost always get the warning screen that says something like, "Are you sure you want to leave this page? You have unsaved changes..." even though I don't. It is an incredibly annoying extra step to have to go though over and over again.

I'm sure there are more I'm not thinking of but that's all off the top of my head. Again, if you can help me, or direct me to a site or a source that might (except the non-responsive Typepad Help Desk), I thank you. For the 99% of you who understandably don't care how the blog is made, just that it is, I'll try to find something  you'll actually be interested in tomorrow!

  

"Everybody Likes To Cha Cha Cha...."

I was reminded of the Sam Cooke song lyric above when I got an email from blog reader Jennifer in Sacramento. She wrote:

"I heard about this cool website yesterday. You can sign up for free and then text message any question you want and get a text message answer back. The website is www.chacha.com  A friend who belongs to a club that I do told me about it. Check it out."

Thanks, Jen. Here's how the website describes its service:

"Ask any question in conversational English from a cell phone. Call 800-2ChaCha or text 242242 and get the answer as a text message in a few minutes."

Some of the examples of questions shown on the site are, "Where can I get pizza near Spring St. and 6th Ave. in NYC?" and "Is there a way to remove acrylic paint from jeans?"

So, not being too proud to beg, I tried it out. For some reason the very first question that came to my mind was, "How does the moon affect the earth's tides?"

About two minutes later, I got this text back on my phone, "Moon's gravity tugs on the ocean enough to make a bulge form in the sea below the moon. As Earth turns ocean shores go into bulge."

The Wikipedia page about the service says that real people answer the questions, not an automated search engine. So I was pretty impressed with the speed and the quality of my response.

Caveat! Thing One:  The site says, "standard text messaging rates apply" and I have no idea what those are and how much my little experiment cost me, if anything.

Caveat! Thing Two: If your wife sees a text message from something called ChaCha.com be prepared to potentially have some 'splainin' to do. I'm just sayin'. It could be misunderstood.

Something Store

SomethingStore is a fun new website that operates simply: We will send you something, an item selected randomly among many things from our inventory, for $10 (free shipping in the US) and you will find out what your something is when you receive it. What will yours be?

     

Your Something May Be Anything
It may be something you need, something you want or something you desire.
Yours may be a cool gadget, rare book, table game, handmade necklace, reverse clock, box of gourmet chocolates, set of shiny shower curtains, popular video game, big-box retailer gift card, the latest version of a software, a set of kitchen knives, a pair of designer jeans, garden tool, kitchen appliance, unique home decor item, electronic equipment, magazine subscription, office supply item, or ... Your something will most likely be brand new, though it may also be refurbished or antique.

Anything But ...
For legal reasons and per our company policies, some restrictions do apply. We do not provide any items or services that are illegal to trade in United States, for example. Full list of exclusions is here: Something ... Not .

Me here: Well, you have to know that as soon as I found this website, they had my ten bucks. My mystery package just arrived and here is what I got. 

I am not exactly sure what this is but it appears to be a bag made out of zippers sewn together by someone named Alan Stuart.

It’s kind of neat, not something I would ever buy for ten dollars but I don’t feel ripped off.  And there are probably some hipster teenagers out there who would love it.

Let me know if you order from the Something Store and what you got! 

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam

Not too many years ago nearly ninety percent of the content on the World Wide Web was in English. No more. Increasingly, I come across blogs and websites in Spanish, German, Farsi, and Chinese, to name just a few.

This week I received this spam email whose sender's name was in Japanese. The links in the email go to a site in Japanese. But what is going on with the rest of the text in the body of the email? This is not even a real language, right?

Re: 携帯で簡単おこづかい
 

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http://74-75.info/mobafpc/?rf=bkc

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http://74-75.info/mobafpc/?rf=bkc

Perhaps this is the Asian equivalent to the word salad that appears in so many English language bulk emails.

"semaphore nuclei bazaar paraphernalia glow beg ambition embassy optometry thump feedback fill scrotum mutter alcove inadequacy vise chalkboard bestseller angle concertina what'd stablemen drier erosion garner monkish sandblast tenneco vignette embryo detente filler grover cute e'er ligget polkadot toad buzz pallid confectionery scowl doorbell blumenthal somerville harrisburg it glisten methylene upsetting botanist sedimentation depict garrison filled bema"

The tactic here is to include words that normally do not appear in spam messages in order to get a message classified as not being spam.

 

Hell Computers

I've been an Apple guy for the past seven or eight years and besides really, really loving their computers, I have been uniformly happy with their customer service. I can get them on the telephone. They speak English. They even have several retail stores in Seattle with competent, knowledgeable employees who seem eager to help.

Unfortunately, my job also requires me to have several Dell personal computers in my home and that's where today's post picks up.

Last Thursday a power surge somehow knocked one of the computers out of commission, despite being plugged into a surge protector. A little research revealed that the machine was still under waranty so I called and scheduled an appointment for the next afternoon, between 1:30 and 5:30.

Friday, Day One: Around 5 the tech guy showed up - as an aside, does anyone know anyone who has ever gotten an appointment near the front of the window? - and he replaced the PC's internal power supply which did not fix the problem. Turns out he needed another part to try Plan B, a part which he did not bring with him.

I made an appointment for the next business day - as an aside, why couldn't they offer support on weekends? - and proceeded to wait.

Monday, Day Four: Still waiting. And waiting. Then a call came in from Dell alerting me that the missing part had not been ordered in time so there would be no appointment that day either.

Tuesday, Day Five: Again with the 1:30 to 5:30 appointment window. Again around 5:00 the phone rang and I was told - get this - that the part had arrived but had been sent to a different tech person than the one who was scheduled to come to my home!!!  Then I was told there was no way to get  Part A to person B so they would have to reschedule the appointment for  the next day!!!!

Wednesday, Day Six was yesterday. Miracle of miracles. The tech guy came in the middle of the afternoon window, had the part, and finally fixed the problem. Now I am back up and running. 

If I had bothered to do a Google search for "Dell Computer customer service" I would not be so surprised by my experience.

Turns out Dell, despite their nearly continuous television commercials  that cheerfully claim the opposite, is far and away the leader among all technology companies in complaints to the Better Business Bureau. 

After scanning site after site dedicated to what many call Hell Computers I learned that their disregard for customer service is  legendary  and that I was apparently lucky to get my hardware problem resolved at all!  I saw stories of PCs that were dead on arrival and hours spent on hold on the phone to talk to "Wendy" in Calcutta.  Among the  pages I found:

Why Dell Sucks 

I Hate Dell

the Dell page of ConsumerAffairs.com

and the Dell page of Epinions.com.

I didn't have any choice but to bring Dell products into my home but you do. Buyer beware!