collisionbend.com

About 10 days ago, Lori Kozey posted one of the most eloquent pieces I have ever seen in a blog. In her post, “What Would Jesus Do?” Lori postulated:

He wouldn’t blithely pilot his gas-guzzling Navigator one handed (other hand being occupied with cell handset) through unusually heavy morning traffic… bullying up from behind me after we’ve commenced the merge, not looking to be sure… Nor would he flip me off in response to my horn honking…

Lori, I’m sorry for your shitty day. Actually, I’ve had a number of them lately, and it’s the main reason I haven’t posted much of late.

But, I digress…

Having switched to daylight working hours requiring the daily lemming impersonation, I can relate. In fact, I have considered writing an anonymous blog devoted solely to this topic: I run into this sort of crap every day — and frequently twice. Sometimes even twice on the same drive…

I’m not going to say that all people in Cleveland drive like asshats, for that wouldn’t be true; I will say, however, that there are a good number of asshat drivers in the area, and it seems like most of them are out and about during the rush hour commute.

I really like the guy in the black Escalade that sweeps from the far left lane to the far right lane — and back — every morning about 8:10, usually somewhere on I-90 Westbound between Eddy Road and Martin Luther King, Jr, Boulevard (I almost wrote “Liberty Boulevard.” Sorry, my age is showing! No matter: the concept’s the same, right?).

Every morning I can count on this asshat to perfectly obstruct my field of view, almost clipping my bumper every time, long enough to almost cause me to rush blindly into the car ahead that stopped short because some other idiot did the same thing he did five cars further down the road.

See, I stay in the second lane from the right come hell or high water. It takes me where I want to go. I can stay in that lane until just after Dead Man’s Curve, where I’lll change to the left one lane to avoid East 9th Street so I can exit on West 3rd; at least I’m consistent. Get this: I leave the house every day at the same time, and I get to work within same 3 minutes every day — with damned little variation.

Yet I watch people dodge and weave in and out of traffic from lane to lane with a rapidity that would make a rabbit blush.

I’ve seen people blast to the right, right in front of me, just to see if they could get ahead in the line waiting to get around Dead Man’s Curve — only to have to settle for their original place. That is, if they could get it back. When they can’t, they stack up my lane, at a full stop, waiting for some kind soul to let them in, usually taking advantage of some poor sucker that looked away at the wrong moment.

And yet this goes on every morning in Cleveland, without fail. People just don’t want to learn; they don’t want to cooperate. They are more important than anyone else.

I’ve also seen many a senseless accident.

I remember one gal that checked her oil before going to work, only to have the hood pop up and obstruct her vision ahead. What did she do? She stopped in the middle of the highway in the heat of rush hour — like a total dork. The guy in front of me weaved out of the way at the last second, leaving me with the inevitable consequence. No way I could stop.

I swerved over just enough to allow my car to almost shave her mirror while the lady in the next lane blared her horn at me — and deservedly so — from the shoulder. I avoided the accident, but some poor schmo behind finally tagged this gal’s rear end — and not in a way that any guy would favor.

I can also remember one day, a man driving a pickup down the freeway at 80+, yelling and gesticulating wildly at his wife/girlfriend, never once looking at the traffic ahead, which had stopped for an accident. He passed me and hit a Mazda 626 at about 75, no brakes, and pushed him into a van — twice.

It was in the very next lane, to my left, and I could see the blood all over the inside of the pickup as I passed. Same with the Mazda. No seat belts used. I called the police later that morning, and faxed an accident report over to them. I remember asking the officer how the people fared, and his voice just trailed away… not good.

This reminds me: for a while, just before I got married, I used to travel south down I-271 from Route 91 in Willoughby down to Solon every day, and every day when I was driving through the spur, there was this asshat blonde chick with a beat-up, two-tone blue, Pontiac (Grand Am?), flipping the bird, pointing her finger and screaming at every car within a 100-foot radius, trying to push people out of her way.

Get this: she used to exit at Wilson Mills Road and drive right straight into — you guessed it — the Progressive Insurance parking lot!

Kinda makes you wonder where people get off, huh?

Last Sunday, my bride and I went to the grocery store for our weekly groceries. As always, she carries coupons to help save a few bucks on the bill.

This week, she carried a $1.00 off coupon for 2 96-ounce plastic jugs of Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice. Cool. I’ll take the Low Acid variety; I live on Prilosec OTC. In fact, I’ve taken Prilosec every day for the last 5 years or so, from right before the allowed it to be sold over-the-counter.

Last Sunday, I personally went to three different Giant Eagle stores, in both Cuyahoga and Lake Counties, in search of Tropicana Pure Premium Low Acid Orange Juice in the 96-ounce jugs, in order to take advantage of a marked-down price AND the coupon.

It was a waste of time: all three Giant Eagles were out of the Low Acid. They had every other flavor, just not Low Acid.

So I visited their website. In the “Contact Us” area, I wrote:

I went to three GE stores today to purchase 2 96oz jugs of Tropicana Pure Premium Low Acid Orange Juice, which you had on sale (with all the other types of this product), 2 for $7. I went to Willoughby (6381), Willoughby Hills (1225), and Willowick (216). In fact, this is a frequent occurance. I had to go to Wal*Mart to get it, and they don’t take coupons.

I really resent having to make three (well, four) trips just for one product. It doesn’t seem to me to be very customer-oriented. If you’re going to put something on sale — and advertise that you’ll have it on sale — please be courteous enough to have enough stock so that those of us who need to use this product (health reasons) can purchase said product!

This is just one more thing that displeases me that GE bought out Reiser(sic) Foods: lousy service and poor product availability!

A “Janet Coy” of Giant Eagle called me back the other day (I wasn’t home, so she left a phone message — which was the wrong thing to do!), saying:

“I’m sorry, but that product has been discontinued by the manufacturer. We have five other flavors available…

… and thank you for shopping at Giant Eagle.”

I queried Tropicana about this via email. No quote here, but you can get the gist of my drive: I’m concerned that they have disco’ed my favorite juice, my morning quaff. Disco Low Acid?????? No F’ing Way!

Well, Theresa in Customer Relations at Tropicana emailed me back:

“Our records indicate Tropicana Pure Premium Low Acid Orange Juice in the 96 ounce bottle is available in your area at Tops Markets. Generally, stores do not order product directly from our company. They order and receive their products from an individual wholesaler or supplier…”

(Here’s what you don’t want to know if you’re a Clevelander and shop at Tops: they’re being sold to Martin’s. The unions possibly might be forced out — make your own judgment on that, as I’ll keep out of it — and there’s not a lot of truth going around about the merger, who owns what, etc….)

So there you have it. I’m a number. I’m not worth catering to. I’m just another worthless asshole with not enough money to make a difference (I’m really doing quite well, thank you very much!).

I don’t count.

This is classic bullshit, in my honest opinion. I can’t help but feel that “Big Money” came into my beloved Cleveland — from Pittsburgh (of all places!) — and now chooses to inconvenience me by making me go to two grocery stores to get what I need, rather than having everything I need in one stop.

Actually, I thought “one stop shopping” WAS the point.

There’s considerable buzz going around — again — these days about browser use and server stats. Dave Shea recently posted an interesting article on this very topic, which prompted me to take a more-than-cursory look at my own web stats, and compare them to the last time I actually ran a detailed analysis. I came up with some interesting — and, I’m sure, unique — numbers:

The December 27th figure below was the actual analysis I ran on January 5, 2005, and the end date for the period was December 27th. I will refer to this as the first of the year (FOY) date, as the figures are close enough for government work.

From site inception in April 2004 to December 27, 2004, I had 109,000 total visits: beginning value was about 1,100 visits/month (V_mo); end value about 10,000 V_mo). In October 2005, this number increased to 205,000, or a V_mo of just over 20,000 V_mo. I’m now pinging about 1,100 people with my RSS feed — that I know of.

I guess this is healthy growth.

FOY Browser use for collisionbend.com:

• about 65% Gecko users (Firefox, Safari, Netscape)
• about 33% IE users (Windows and Mac)
• about 2% other (Konqueror, etc.)

October 2005:

• about 55% Gecko
• about 43% IE
• about 2% other

FOY Operating System:

• about 70% Windows
• about 28% Mac
• about 2% other (Linux, BeOS, Unix; OS/2, Web TV and Amiga in there too)

October Operating System:

• about 82% Windows
• about 16% Mac
• about 2% other (same as above, but including 1 regular Windows CE visitor!)

I expected, as readership grew, to see the increase in MSIE use; it was inevitable. What I didn’t expect to see was a mere 10% increase in IE use as readership doubled. At first blush, this didn’t make sense to me; the actual figure should have increased more like 25% — or even higher. Then I took a look at my referrer’s list (Top 16):

• 1. Google
• 2. Eric Meyer
• 3. Yahoo!
• 4. MSN
• 5. Brewed Fresh Daily
• 6. Organic Mechanic
• 7. Bloglines
• 8. Blo.gs
• 9. Jeff Hess
• 10. Technorati
• 11. Alta Vista
• 12. Google
• 13. Bill Callahan
• 14. Jen Funk Segrest, Very Big Design
• 15. Democratic Underground
• 16. Jerry Ritcey

Now it begins to make a little sense:

Google is #1, but Eric Meyer is close on Google’s tail. I expected Yahoo! and MSN, but I figured that Brewed Fresh Daily would be higher. It probably was earlier in the year. Adam, Jeff, Bill and Jerry round out local favorites, interspersed with more Google, Technorati — and two others: Democratic Underground, which is a new site to me — never saw the site until I saw it in my stats, and I still can’t find their link to me on their site; and Very Big Design, independent web specialist Jen Funk Segrest, who is in Cincinnati, if I’m not mistaken. She linked to Disposable People in August of ‘04; I haven’t found a link to me on her site, although I did find one to Brewed Fresh Daily.

(IP analysis displays the vast majority of users as being in Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Washington State, Montana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachussetts and California. Is there a pattern here? Yup: I have relatives in all those states, as well as friends, former classmates and professional colleagues. Time analysis shows that my slow times are from 11:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. Eastern; busiest times are from 8:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m Eastern. Pattern here? Of that I am not sure, except more folks read my blog during the middle evening than during the day.)

As far as those referrers go, I haven’t looked at Democratic Underground enough to determine its validity, but I have seen Jen’s site: it’s very cool. Jen is a Mac Mentor, which I infer to mean that she works primarily on a Mac — and helps folks learn how to use Macs as well. Eric Meyer is my #1 person-as-referrer, and he’s on a Mac. George Nemeth is my #3 person-as-referrer, and he’s on a Mac, too. Further, many in my family use the Macintosh platform; in fact, I’m in the minority as a Windows user in my family — by a long shot! All three of my siblings, one cousin in Florida, and my bride’s brother and sister-in-law use PCs; most of the rest, numbering close to 20 cousins, use Macintosh.

This begs some questions: do Mac users tend to clump together as far as Internet use goes, or do they merely go to the sites they can access readily? Do they communicate with each other more — and therefore visit similar sites — because they have to, or because they can more easily? What this all goes to show, in my best estimation, is that your particular web site’s audience is a greater indication of how you should design your web site, and which browsers and/or operating systems to support.

My question is: how many Mac users permanently turn away from a site because the designer — intentionally or unintentionally — didn’t consciously support Mac users in the design process?

Personally, I can’t see turning away the traffic; there’s far too much at stake.

I recently read that only 5% of Internet users currently use RSS.

For those of you who aren’t aware of this technology, RSS stands for either “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”; what it does is really quite simple, actually: if you frequent a website, how often are you frustrated because the site hasn’t updated since you last visited? Wouldn’t you like to know in advance if there has been an update so that you don’t waste your time checking and re-checking?

Well, that’s what RSS does: an RSS/XML feed is a small data packet that, in essence, is sent to a syndication server that basically tells it to ping your RSS news feed reader (or aggregator) to alert you to new content. Not really, but that’s close enough for government work. The upshot of this is that you no longer have to visit a web site every four hours or so to see if there’s new content — and if there is, you won’t have to weed through dozens of articles before you find what you want to read. RSS sorts all of this for you.

Neat, huh?

The real frustrating part of this is that very few web sites that offer an RSS feed actually offer a primer on how to use the feature. And if you look real hard, you’ll find that I don’t, either — and I work for a company that promotes this technology! So, as partly a make-up for my sins, and as a primer to the point of this post, I’ll explain how to use RSS.

All too often I hear about someone who actually clicks on the RSS link and sees a file that looks like this.

The usual response, quite naturally: “WTF is this?”

What you were just looking at, Dear Constant Reader, is an XML file that describes the feed. What the file is to you, for the most part, is immaterial, save for its function; what is important to know is that an XML file of this nature is essentially a list of attributes that describe the document in question.

I could get more technical about it (and this Wikipedia article has a lot of good information and supporting links), but it would probably bore you to tears, so I won’t; it’s just plain-old boring stuff, and as the moniker RSS implies, “Really, Simple, & Stupid.” The simple fact that it exists and it works is all you ever need to know or care about, aside from knowing what to do if you want to subscribe to the content feed.

Obviously, when you open that file, you get a hash of gobbledy-gook. So don’t try to open the file. Don’t even click on it.

What you need to subscribe to a feed is some sort of RSS aggregation program. Sounds technical, right? Not really; it’s just a program that collects this kind of stuff for you, that’s all. Sometimes they call this kind of program a “news reader.”

There are several software packages that you can download to do this for you, both for free and for fee, or if you use the Firefox browser or Thunderbird email client, you can add one of several free extensions to your program to handle this for you. Alternatively, there are web-based aggregators that you can use, as well, although I have found most of these to be cumbersome and difficult (even constipating!) to use on a regular basis. More on that later.

I have used Feed Demon (pay software). It’s nice, and it works a lot like the Sage plug-in for Firefox, except that it will actually deliver a rendered page for you to view rather than a stark, divided text page. It’s fairly easy to use and maintain. My gripe with it is that you have to pay for it; in this day and age of rampant, open-source software that works as well as pay software, why pay?

One Firefox-based plug-in that I have used most frequently (and effectively) is the aforementioned Sage, which will open the list of my feeds in a side panel in my browser. All I have to do is click on the search button and it starts to cycle through my feeds. When a feed name goes bold, I know it has found new content; click on the name and the Sage page loads in my browser window, showing me the last ten (or so) articles posted by the website in question. Click on the title of an article, and you’re taken directly to that post. No bold print in the RSS pane? No new article — move on and save your time. Adding a feed is easy: if you have the Sage pane open, and you’re at the web site you want to subscribe to, then all you have to do is click the search button in the Sage pane (it looks like a magnifying glass), and it’ll find the feed for you. Click on the “Add Feed” button and you’re all set.

If you’re a Mac OS X user, just open Safari and start looking through your menu bar — you’ll find your RSS aggregator built right into the browser. It’s just about as simple to use as the Sage plug-in for Firefox.

I have also used the standard RSS feed extension in Thunderbird, my email client at home. It works well, and not only will it bold-type the feed name when there is a new article, it’ll also give you a number as to how many new articles exist since you checked last! My gripe is that it is separate from the browser, like Feed Demon, requiring you to move from one program to another in order to catch the actual web site. The Firefox Sage plug-in, I feel, is more efficient for the way I work.

Then we have the web-based services like Bloglines. Bloglines aggregates just about every feed out there. If you create a free account, you can subscribe right there in your browser window to the feed you like, and read the article right there, no muss, no fuss. Problem is, there are close to 18,000,000 blogs with RSS feeds alone right now, not including thousands of news sites like CNN with a number of feeds of their own (CNN has somewhere around 34 feeds)! That’s a lot of feeds to wade through.

To check out this service, I recently went to Bloglines to find my own feed to see how it looked on their site. I looked into the “C” section (that didn’t sound quite right, now did it?), and paged through to find Collision Bend. Guess what? Four hours later, I found it; the search function didn’t (which is why I had to search manually in the first place). Great idea, but not real convenient to use, if you ask me — and I read close to 100 feeds every day.

And because everyone browses the Internet differently, uses their computers differently, etc., there are many options here, so don’t go thinking that bloglines is the only choice just because it’s the only one I’ve listed here so far.

Yesterday, in fact, we were presented with another option — Google Reader. I’m currently testing it to see how well it works; I’ll report on it later to you. So far, I like its interface: it’s clean and easy to read, and the menuing system is quite slick and well thought-out (so far). It’s fairly easy to use; all you have to do is copy-paste the address of the feed into the little window in the page and hit Preview. If it retrieves the proper article (probably the same one you were looking at before), then you click on “Subscribe to the feed,” and it’ll appear in your subscription list. The next time you log on to Google Reader, it’ll show you the latest posts.

To make things even nicer, if you use Firefox, by right-clicking on the little orange XML logo, or the text RSS link like I have to the lower right, you’ll see a menu item in the contextual popup menu that says, “Copy Link Location.” Click that and the address is automagically placed on your clipboard, ready to paste into a text box. Cool, huh? (Now do you see why I am such a proponent of the Firefox browser? Simply, they think of everything!)

One issue I have with Google Reader already is the simple fact that it’s Google: if I have Gmail, the Google toolbar, Google desktop search, and now Google Reader — isn’t that telling Google a little too much about my habits? Aren’t they getting a little too close to home? TMI? What if I like to search for extremely kinky “pr0n” on Google — and I have a job with super-ultra-high importance?

It could be a crash waiting to happen, and I don’t like the sound — or feel — of that, for me or anyone else. Not that I search for that kind of stuff, mind you; I have barely enough time to blog! But I’m one of those who like to surf the web somewhat anonymously, and I really don’t want others to know what I’m up to, as it’s none of their business. That’s why I don’t use the wallet functions on either my Windows or Mac boxes: I just don’t trust people on the Internet.

So I’ll test Google Reader for a while and let you know how it works. For a lot of folks on the web, I’m sure it’ll be a true time saver and a Godsend — just as RSS has been for me.

I took it back.

That’s right, I ditched the idea of printing from the iBook over the network when I learned that: a) Linksys doesn’t support Mac in any way, shape or form; b) that I had to buy a network driver that wouldn’t support my Canon i850’s really nice photo printing capabilities — to the tune of about $115US; c) that I would lose some of the functionality printing from Windows.

I exchanged it for a 512MB Compact Flash card to use in my DiMAGE 7. Seems like a fair trade, as now I can take more photos when I go out to shoot panoramas. I even got a few bucks in return.

I also recently purchased the firmware upgrade to my camera, which has made it leaner and meaner on the shoots. It’s faster and uses less battery power, and also has a real-time histogram display that comes in real handy for those tough shots. It came with the latest version of the DiMAGE Image Viewer to help with the DiMAGE 7’s larger-than-normal sRGB color space. Technically, it’s now a DiMAGE 7ug…

Next up: a) a wireless router; b) another Canon or Epson printer that will do extra large photos (like 13″ x 19″) and take the 100-foot Epson photo paper rolls so that I can use the Canon on the iBook; c) another as-yet unspecified upgrade to my home computer, possibly a second monitor (like a 19″ flat panel) and video card for twin monitors for an expanded desktop while working in Photoshop.

Oh, yes: and a new server account to display the panoramas on the web without breaking my budget (which will come with a new site design). ;-)

OK, here’s the scenario:

I have a Win2K box linked to a Linksys BEFSR41 wired router connected to my DSL modem. Attached to the BEFSR41 is a Linksys PSUS4 USB Print Server with a 4-port switch, to which is connected a Canon i850 Photo Printer.

On another linkup, I have an iBook, running OS X 10.4.2, connected to the BEFSR41 through a line through the wall, through the floor, and into my office.

I have the i850 Mac OS X driver properly installed on the Mac; the Mac sees the print server, but cannot tell that there is an i850 connected to it, so I cannot print. The PSUS4 is too stupid to be able to communicate with the Mac, or so it would seem…

The folks at Linksys tell me that they don’t support Macs, and that if I want to connect my iBook to the PSUS4, I’ll have to call Apple for support — for a Linksys unit! Talk about passing the buck…

Anybody have experience with this? It is possible to do…

If I can’t get the iBook to print through the Linksys PSUS4 Pint Server, I’m going to take the stupid piece of shit (yes, I used the s-word!) back to the store for a refund — and write a nasty letter to the folks at Linksys, telling them about how rude John, #10711, case #051003-016931, was to me when he found that I owned a Macintosh…

The problem is that Linksys won’t care one bit.

One other thing: MacMall.com sells a ton of these things, but if you want to write a negative review, do you think they’ll post it? Not on your life.

That’s called “customer service.”

You know, if you’re not going to support a particular product line, then you really shouldn’t sell to a retailer that specializes in that particular product line — you’ll end up with a lot of unhappy customers and a really bad viral reputation.

I’m going to restart a meme. Why? Because I don’t believe that people’s iTunes folders stay stagnant — mine doesn’t, that’s for sure — so I want to get a feel for how things are growing on the Internet, and see if there have been any changes in musical tastes since the last time this meme went around, some five short months ago. What interests me most is how the last meme may have influenced your listening habits. So if I ping you, please respond and pass it along, o-tay?

Here we go:

Total volume of music files on my computer: 553 songs, 1.5 days, 2.05 GB.

The last CD I bought was: Abbey Road, The Beatles (today).

The three most interesting recent additions to my collection:

• The Beatles (The White Album);
• Beck (Guero & Bootleg);
• Eric Clapton (The Cream of Clapton).

Song playing right now: I Want You (She’s So Heavy). Damn, this is a great tune… Ringo is such a steady drummer; he musthave perfect rhythm… So bluesy… so powerful… damn… what a great band…

Five songs albums I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order): see my last post, as this really hasn’t changed much.

Music I have started listening to since the last time this meme went around that I picked up from someone else’s responses from the last time this meme went around (link your source if it was from the original meme): Beck (Guero & Bootleg), Richard Cheese (although this was from work, not from this meme — the man is hilarious — and only for mature, adult ears), The Lounge Lizards (also from work, not the meme), and Moby (ditto).

Things change. Time changes things. iTunes changes, too, and so does your music folder. C’mon now, spill!

(NOTE: if I have pinged the incorrect url, I apologize; that means that I searched your site and got no correct correlation in the first set of responses! Just delete the ping and post, then pass it on))

I hereby pass this baton to:

• Eric Meyer, because he sent it to me first, and this is my revenge (hehe);
• Lori Kozey (just because);
• Jeff Zeldman (an industry link)
• Dave Shea (another industry link)
• Derek Powazek because I know more than a few local ladies really want to know ;-)

So, as I finish this post, George Harrison’s haunting, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (featuring Eric Clapton on the lead guitar) is currently playing. That’s how long it takes me to make a quick post, folks — no interruptions, just from Abbey Road to White Album, as they currently follow each other in my iTunes folder…