Service Provider Journal

This blog is five years old today

Of course, I was blogging before that, using Userland's Radio service, but all that's long gone from the Web.

InfoWorld hangs in there, online

Congratulations to InfoWorld for making a successful transition from print to online. Some of the editorial nowadays strikes me as a little silly (the recent April Fools stuff fell flat for me) but it's great that the InfoWorld editorial brand lives on in this new age.

No more GYM, just GM?

I had a funny thought: Google-Yahoo-Microsoft may become Google-Microsoft, which when shortened is GM, and of course what's good for GM is good for the country. :)

Wiimodeling?

After Thanksgiving dinner tonight at a family friend's house, out came a Nintendo Wii on the big screen, and two guests, teenage brothers, went at it for the first time with gusto. Someone made a comment about needing a room big enough to play these increasingly athletic video games plus the big screen they deserve, and I think I coined a term. Don't thing remodeling, think Wiimodeling.

8GB iPhone out of stock for today at Apple Store Palo Alto

I happened to be in the Apple Store in Palo Alto at around 3 p.m. today when they ran out of 8GB iPhones. I was just there to observe the general frenzy, and there will be more 8GB iPhones there probably tomorrow, but I just wanted to note that not only AT&T stores are running out of iPhones during the day.

Yahoo! privatizes my local park

411sync locates various services in your zip code by texting keywords and the zip code into a Web page or into your mobile phone. But it's not perfect. "Parking 94705" found a bunch of auto parking operators via Yahoo! Local, but one of the results was Willard Park, a public park in Berkeley, California. The fault here appears to be Yahoo's. If you click on "hours of operation" for Willard Park, one ad-selling question it asks on the results page is, "Own this business? Guaranteed top placement." Great, now the local public park has been privatized by Yahoo!

Now THIS is a conference grid

A random piece of e-mail sent to me today directed my attention to the 121st Audio Engineering Society convention. Pretty interesting stuff, but what really rocks are the pop-up session descriptions built into the conference schedule grid on the Web site. I'm guessing this is all straightforward Javascript, but wow!

Hold-music podjacking

There's a new form of podjacking. It happens when the podcaster, during a live recording, invites guests to call in to a conference call, the call starts and is being recorded, and then one of the participants puts the conference call on hold. Hold music commences, and the podcast degrades into unlistenability. Jerry Michalski experienced this on his Jan. 23, 2006 podcast, which you can find on this page. A show two weeks later was "rescheduled as Call 75 due to 'music on hold' issues." There's a business opportunity for the confererencing service that can automatically detect and mute hold music.

Beating the Windows title bar blues

Michelle Johnson has the answer for your Windows title bar blues, when a window's title bar has wandered up past the top of your screen. Bravo! Sometimes, just opening a new browser window was causing these windows to appear. It's great to have a way to drag the windows down as necessary.

In case this link ever breaks, the answer is: Alt-spacebar-M-down arrow.

Upcoming.org should be upcoming.com

Followup to my previous post here: Upcoming.org should be upcoming.com. Especially because Yahoo! owns upcoming.org now. (Upcoming.com is currently parked at a domain squatter.)