However, this video is brilliant and just happens to involve one of my favorite Friends episode of all time. Coincides well with the fact that I just visited the bar in Seville where I watched Friends reruns for a couple of hours every Sunday afternoon, just to watch TV in English.

Anyway, here you go:

This blog used to reside under the Google umbrella over on a blogspot domain before I shifted it over to my own domain, and I still get email directed to that account every once in a while. Most recently, I received an email from Wikio asking if I would insert an RSS button for their blog feed service into my site. Here is a quick overview of what it entails:

The Wikio button allows your visitors to subscribe for free to your news feed on Wikio. Once installed, you need simply test the button out. Clicking on it should bring up a Wikio page with the option to add either a new or existing page.

So, basically, visitors to my site would be taken to a Wikio page to subscribe to my feed, giving them brand impressions and possible retention of visitors if my readers decide to stay on their page and click around.

Anyway, the problem with the email was the subject:

Subject: Wikio RSS button for .::.

I immediately trashed the original email based on this alone. You see, the “.::.” is what I had in the “Blog Title” field under the blogspot CMS because I had hacked the layout and used a custom thing with a logo but the CMS wouldn’t let me leave the title field blank, so I used this stupid little text thing to take up the space and satisfy that requirement.

This made it blatantly obvious that the gentleman, who shall remain nameless, had just used a data scraper of some sort to get my email and prefill the subject with whatever was in the “Blog Title” field in the blogspot CMS. This is the wrong way to go about this type of campaign for several reasons:

1. It shows an obvious lack of personal attention and blatant spam mass emailing, something that no blogger or human being enjoys receiving.

2. It would have taken literally five seconds to visit my actual site to grab the real name, nobody would look at that “.::.” and think that it was the actual title of my blog.

3. It would also have taken literally five seconds to visit my site and grad my real name, or at least my nom de plume. I would be cool with either.

4. Doing either #2 or #3 would have made it obvious that my site has moved and an email to the contact info on my new site would have been a lot more productive, since that’s where I would actually put a Wikio button anyway.

Moral of the story: If you are going to take the time to execute a “community outreach” program to generate traffic, introduce a new product or pitch a story, take the time to make sure that you get your information right.

I understand that you don’t always have the time to “build a relationship” with each individual blogger. Despite what the leading industry experts are repeating ad nauseam when it comes to blog outreach, that’s not always a realistic goal. Ideally, you would build a rapport with the influencer blogs in your niche with the long term goal of introducing ideas, stories and suggestions that could be mutually beneficial without coming off really spammy. But if it’s a quick hit to introduce something (like an RSS button) that has no specific niche, at least take the extra 10 seconds to make sure that your effort does not go to waste. That can go a long way.

I may have just left this whole thing alone if I had not received a follow-up email from the same person with the same subject asking if I had any questions. I do: Why?

To honor this, here’s the song Impossible Outcome by The Get Up Kids because approaching community outreach like this makes positive outcomes almost impossible. Clever? Not really, but it gave me an excuse to post a good song…

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

Oh, and while I’m at it, don’t comment spam my blog. Or, if you do, at least don’t be so stupid as to use the name “Link Building Staff” on your comment. That makes it really, really obvious.

So, you may remember the earlier post about poor customer service experiences with Comcast, Atlanta PD and Denon. Well, to give props where props are due, Comcast responded to my blog post and apologized for the delay and the telephone mix-up. They couldn’t change my date because of the number porting issue with AT&T, but they did waive my install charges and the guy who came to set it up was super nice and had teh internets and my phone up and running in no time.

Sidenote: After I decided to switch, my AT&T modem quit working and I couldn’t figure out why, so I called them and they overnighted my a new one to use for the few days before I ditched them. I used full disclosure with the agent on the phone and she couldn’t have cared less if they were shipping it only for three days use. The new one showed up and I plugged it in and it immediately started smoking….seriously. So, I was without internet until the Comcast install. Turns out the original modem quit working because the phone line got zapped by lightning and fried the modem. Unfortunately, it also zapped the WAN port on my Airport Extreme Base Station, meaning I had to go buy a new one today. The technology gods really hate me right now.

And now to shit on people when shitting on people is due. The Denon receiver was taken into Norman’s Electronics and “repaired.” Got it back on Friday and hooked it up today and, to make a long story short, it is actually worse than it was before. The audio sounds awful and the choppiness has spread to other channels and speakers. And now the video pass-through keeps coming and going.

Urg.

Now I’m pissed. Of course, there is no 24/7 customer support, so I will have to call tomorrow between the super-convenient hours of 9 and 5:30.

In honor of being driven to the brink of madness, mainly by Denon at this point, the keyword music search for today is “insane,” and its derivative “insanity,” because that’s my state of mind. Otherwise known as the place I’m being driven out of.

I typed the root “insan” into my iTunes and these are my song choices from the selections given to me:

Dinosaur Jr. - I’m Insane

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

Red Animal War - The Insanity

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

Black Sabbath - Am I Going Insane (Radio) (From ‘Sabatoge’)

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

I welcome keyword suggestions for future incarnations of this series, please contact me or leave a comment below. If you feel the need to disagree with my choices, I would also like to hear from you, so that you can be promptly ignored.

(Insanity certificate courtesy of DeviantArt.com)

Enjoy while you can, all mp3s will come down when the next installment goes up…

The USA Today Coaches Preseason poll was just released and the Georgia Bulldogs are sitting smack in the top spot. Does this raise expectations higher than I’m necessarily comfortable with? Yes. Will I cancel plans to sell myself on a street corner for tickets to home games? No.

It’s not that I don’t think they can pull it off, by no means. I am, however, fully aware of what has happened in the past to overconfident teams in the first few games (eh hem, Michigan), and it’s not like the schedule this year is a cake walk.

Anyway, 22 coaches thought highly enough of the Bulldogs to cast a first-place vote for them, courtesy of some very positive reports from spring practice about Matthew Stafford’s ability behind a rapidly improving offensive line, the selection of new superstar running back Knowshon Moreno as a preseason All-American and high marks for a defense that returns a lot of playmakers responsible for stifling Heisman winner Tim Tebow in Jacksonville and embarrassing a high-powered Hawaii attack in the Sugar Bowl last year. No. 2 USC and No. 3 Ohio State each received 14 first-place votes. Oklahoma, wound up with three first-place votes, and Florida received five, making them fourth and fifth in the poll, respectively.

The Bulldogs meet four teams ranked in the top 25 from this poll as part of that brutal schedule this year. They visit No. 16 Arizona State on Sept. 20 and also have dates with defending BCS champion No. 6 LSU, No. 11 Auburn and the aforementioned Florida Gators down in Jacksonville. If both Florida and Georgia play as they are supposed to this year, then the “World Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” could become a grudge match with national title implications featuring the No. 1 and most likely the No. 2, or 3, teams in the country. Especially, after the “dancing” incident at last year’s game.

This year will either be ecstatic or heart-breaking, only time will tell, but they’ve got the talent and dammit people like them.

See you in Athens….hopefully.

Anyway, I’m asking anyone reading this for WordPress advice. I’m gunning for Google News inclusion on one of my projects, but that requires that each article URL have a unique three-digit code. The URLs for that site look very similar to what I have on this site.

So, I can use the %post_id% tag in the default permalink settings, but that will change all URLs on the site, effectively breaking all incoming links to older posts and giving me a headache of 404 errors. What I need is the capability to keep the old URLs the way they are and update to the new structure for all posts going forward. And I would really like to do it without having to use a 301 redirect, either globally or on each post.

I thought I had found a plugin, “Advanced Permalinks,” that would let me designate a block of post ID numbers to follow a specific URL structure, and it did work. Right up until I changed the default permalink structure to include %post_id% and then all the URLs broke, returning 404 errors even though they were exactly as they should be. My PHP knowledge is not good enough to figure out what happened, so I’m back to square one.

This is where you, the reader who is not my mom or wife, come in. I’ve had no lightbulb moments so far and using mod_rewrite on the .htaccess file falls one step too short for doing what I need.

Thoughts? Advice? Commiseration?

UPDATE: <sarcasm>Hey! Thanks for all the help everyone, really appreciate it!</sarcasm>

Ended up having to use a 301 redirection (boooo), which shouldn’t hurt anything as it should retain the PageRank, just wasn’t necessarily what I was looking for. Everything should be kosher going foward.

So, I typed the word “science” into my iTunes and these are my song choices from the selections given to me:

Screeching Weasel - The Science of Myth > classic. hello high school.

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

Say it Stranger - Science Will Find You a Cure > mellow deliciousness.

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

Maritime - For Science Fiction > poppy deliciousness.

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

Party of Helicopters - Science Reasons > new addition to the library and a good choice if I do say so myself.

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

I welcome keyword suggestions for future incarnations of this series, please contact me or leave a comment below. If you feel the need to disagree with my choices, I would also like to hear from you, so that you can be promptly ignored.

(Picture from MIT.edu)

Enjoy while you can, all mp3s will come down when the next installment goes up…

I’ll go through these in alphabetical order…

Atlanta PD:

This one is short. Our neighbors house was broken into on Friday night. Called 911, redirected to a different emergency number because we live in some sort of vortex of public services between Dekalb County and City of Atlanta. Told there was no dispatch available and we were low priority (is there a way I can prioritize my taxes? 1. Schools, 2. Infrastructure … 99. Police Dept.). One and a half HOURS later, a cop showed up….and basically said there was nothing they could do.

To put it into perspective, about a year ago we thought there was an abandoned car parked out in front of our house (it hadn’t moved for two months and we thought that some of the shadier people in our area had just dumped it there…has happened before) and called the non-emergency police number to report it and were MADE to call 911. Cop showed up less than five minutes later and proceeded to yell at our sweet old neighbor, who has lived here since 1967, for leaving her car outside our house. I’m pretty sure she is still mad at me.

AT&T:

Thought I had upgraded, several times over the past year, to a faster DSL package (xtreme, ludicrous speed or possibly even plaid) only to find out that I’m still only getting 1.2mbps of download speed; was supposed to be at least 6mbps. Called customer service and was told, very abruptly, that they don’t offer anything faster than what I currently have in my area. Turns out that the previous reps had just gone through the motions to get me off the phone and never touched the account, because they couldn’t. So, instead of telling me that, they just did nothing. I wasn’t charged for a faster package because the computer wouldn’t let them upgrade me. Just like that, I washed my hands of AT&T. Being lied to does not a happy customer make. Now I’m switching to cable broadband through Comcast, which leads me to…

Comcast:

The sales person I spoke to at Comcast was great, super nice and friendly, and I ended up going with their base broadband package (which at its slowest runs at 6mbps, all the way up to 10mbps at peak, so waaaay faster than AT&T) and porting our home phone over, which I was told would be no problem. This would cost $49.90 for the first 6 months and would, obviously, go up after but still be cheaper than AT&T. Install was set for August 2, a Saturday, so that I wouldn’t have to miss work, and we were good to go. Or so I thought.

Get home the next day to find two very, very mumbled messages on my home phone that have something to do with third-party authorization for my phone number and my install being rescheduled. Without any clue what they are talking about, I call the number given to find out that my install has, indeed, been rescheduled to August 20 because they have to get authorization to port my number and they tried to reach me twice but I didn’t answer the phone. At home. On a weekday. At 11am and then 3pm. After being given a work and mobile number at which to reach me. Just f*&$ing lazy.

My August 2 date had been given away and there was absolutely nothing available and sooner because they needed at least 5 to 7 business days to process the number porting. After delicately explaining to the rep that their laziness in only calling one of the three numbers given to them was not particularly my problem, an appointment on August 5 magically opened up. A Tuesday. So, I will need to figure out how to work that out (I’m guessing I won’t get a credit on my bill for having to miss work). Just so that I can have them install service with which I will most likely have problems and for which I will overpay.

When asked if this was going to be any indication of what my service with them was going to be like, the rep replied that she could not guarantee what kind of service I would receive in the future. Ha, based on that answer I’m pretty sure I can guess, but I have no choice because I need to have TV shows download from iTunes a little quicker than 3hrs an episode.

Denon:

Back at the beginning of December I purchased a Denon AVR-1508 so that I could be a nerd and have nice surround sound at my house. Two hours after hooking up my Apple TV last weekend the speakers started popping, then there was a really loud static noise, which just got louder and louder. So, I shut it off, started it back off, unplugged, replugged, reset the microprocessor (per instructions from the owner’s manual), but nothing. Sweet f&@$ all, just the same screaming static out of the right channel speakers.Seems to be mostly when the Dolby Digital processors are pushing the sound…

Went to the website to see if there was a customer service tech support number. There was and it was open between the hours of 9 and 5:30 pm Mon - Fri, so really useful. Oh, and it was a local number, no 1-800 for them. Then I noticed that tech support was open with NEW EXTENDED hours until 7pm Mon - Wed.

Anyway, first thing Mon morning, I call and the tech support guy says the unit has a 2 year warranty, just take it to Norman’s Electronics and they’ll fix it for free. Cool, that works. Go to the website for this place and find out that they are only open from 9-5.30 Mon - Fri and are located about 40 mins from my house. Brilliant. So, I would need to take off work to get my product, that I paid good money for, fixed. Classic.

I call up there to see about getting it fixed and they tell me sure, it’ll be about 3-4 weeks. 3 - 4 WEEKS!!!!! Are you kidding me? What kind of warranty is that? That’s like 1/6 of the entire time that I’ve owned the receiver. And, it’s the only Denon authorized repair place in the entire state of Georgia. Plus, the woman on the phone seemed less than interested with helping out, makes sense since they seem to have a monopoly, and the Norman’s reviews on Google are less than stellar.

Also found out that a good friend of mine has to take his same unit there too for a different problem and was told 30 days for a repair. That’s just ridiculous and unacceptable. Calling Denon again tomorrow to see what happens and possibly ruffle some feathers. Not got a good feeling about it though.

————

Each one of these seems like no big deal, but combined they caused me to spend way too many hours listening to godawful hold music after getting home from work every night, if I got home before they closed. The straws that individually break the camel’s back, as it were.

Lesson learned: I wish I could work a customer service rep’s hours.

Lingering question: What good is customer service if your customers can’t get to you to receive that service? And, if your customer service inconveniences your customers, is that really a service at all?

Ok, so maybe something a little more lighthearted later this week. Urgh.

So, this evening, I sat down and typed the word “wrong” into my iTunes and these are my song choices from the selections given to me:

Archers of Loaf - Wrong > what’s not to love about this song.

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

Sounds Like Violence - Wrong > catchy as hell.

Get out of your feed reader to listen to this…

I welcome keyword suggestions for future incarnations of this idea, please contact me or leave a comment below. If you feel the need to disagree with my choices, I would also like to hear from you, so that you can be promptly ignored.

Enjoy while you can, all mp3s will come down when the next installment goes up…

Sorry for the drought in posting (more than the usual drought lately), but I’m living working in Vegas at the moment for a certain client that is involved in a certain event that lasts for seven weeks. I’ll see if I can sneak in some posts about my random adventures in Sin City.

In the meantime, go listen everything Stars has ever recorded. Start with “Take me to the Riot.” Poppy, almost 80s-like nostalgia flashback song.

Enjoy.

Anyone wanna hang out in Vegas?

As you can see from the screenshot above, I have mine set up to access my Facebook, Twitter (feel free to follow me), Flickr, Pownce and Digg accounts. There is also a del.icio.us utility built in, but that doesn’t display over in the People Sidebar (that’s what that mess over there on the left is called). I also hid a couple of other toolbars and what-not that aren’t really fit for public consumption as they deal with some client stuff.

As well, as keeping me updated on the statii (word?) of my friends and connections, the browser is completely interactive, allowing me to update my Facebook status, send tweets, Digg stories and upload pictures to Flickr. I can also post directly to my blog from within the built-in blog editor, which I don’t do because of the way this thing is set up. But I could, that’s the point. So, forget about which Twitter app is going to clutter my desktop, this solves that problem immediately.

Flock also detects your friends media streams and allows you to favorite them so that you can pull them up to view new pics, videos or whatever without having to visit their page to do so. It also allows you to immediately share pictures, videos and links by just dragging and dropping them onto the People Sidebar. All in all, a ridiculously simple and efficient way of keeping up with this tangled web I have woven for myself.

The best thing of all is really the most geeky. Flock is powered by Mozilla and as such functions off the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox. For the layperson, this means that it is just as secure and stable as Firefox and has the capability to handle most Firefox extensions and add-ons. In fact, I have yet to find an add-on that doesn’t work. You just have to go to the Firefox add-on page and cheat fight the extensions into installing on Flock, which it does automatically because both browsers function in the same way.

Needless to say, I’m now a Flockstar (that’s what Flock fans are called) and am spreading the word. If you find yourself spending the better part of your free web time (is there such a thing?), logging into a bunch of different accounts trying to keep up with everyone, this is the answer for you.

I’m currently using Flock 1.2 beta, which features the new Pownce and Digg capability, and I have read rumors that MySpace and Last.fm hooks are being written in for an upcoming release, or at least I really hope they are. Actually, I could care less about MySpace nowadays, but Last.fm would be sweet. Are you listening Flock team?

Don’t forget that you can find me on a bunch of different places on the web, just click the fancy little icons over near the top of my sidebar.

Enjoy your social media browsing and feel free to drop me a line and let me know how you like it.