Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988
Web design and development for small and large business, e-commerce, b2b, b2c, SAAS, and community websites. User experience design and usability testing.
My friends at AT&T must have been partying in the phone “office“ down the street and tripped over my wire, because our Internet was shut off for nine days.
After much troubleshooting with our ISP, I had disconnected all the interior wiring, everything down to the wire coming through the wall from the outside and the power pole. This means the fault was with outside wiring, which is your local telco’s responsibility (AT&T) to fix.
Stupidly, my ISP’s contract with Covad (which does all the interior installations and wiring service calls) requires Covad to send out a guy to any and all service calls, regardless of the fact that my ISP (Speakeasy) told them we’d isolated the problem to the outside wiring and tried to bypass the requirement.
So I had to wait many days, then the Covad guy (a retired AT&T guy, btw) comes out and tells me exactly what I already knew: that it’s AT&T’s problem. So I wasted a full day (took off work) waiting for the Covad guy, and the AT&T guy still needs to come the following day (Velma waited for him instead).
Needless to say, nine days after we reported the outage, the AT&T guy shows up and fixes it right away by going down to the "central office" and hooking up the unplugged wire.
All parties get a fail:
Speakeasy fails for having a stupid contract with Covad that allows Covad to push them around in such cases just so Covad won’t lose any service call fees. (Too bad, because I’ve really liked Speakeasy for many many years. Their phone support is generally way better than most.)
Covad fails for having such a stupid contract requirement with Speakeasy.
AT&T fails for causing the problem in the first place, not to mention giving people a service call window of 8am to 10pm. That’s just plain unprofessional.
Posted by espd at 3:48 PM |
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Wednesday, March 24, 2010
The photoblog is back
In preparation for the shutdown of Blogger’s FTP service in a little over a month, I’ve started the long process of converting all my blogs to WordPress. This is a rather involved process, as it first requires doing several things that aren’t even related to the blogs.
For example, my web host, Media Temple, has been urging me to upgrade to their Grid-Service for over a year, and I’ve been putting it off. However, in order to take advantage of MT’s one-click WordPress installation capability, I had to do the migration first. So I did that over the weekend, and it went without too many hitches; I had to reset a bunch of passwords and some other paths and things, plus my two Pixelpost photoblogs (mine and Velma’s) broke. It took me a couple more nights (Monday and Tuesday) to fix mine, and I’ll get to Velma’s photoblog soonish.
To fix it, I had to reinstall the Pixelpost software and move it to a new directory, hook up the new installation to the old MySQL database containing all the old photos, thumbnails, and metadata, and then copy all the old images and thumbs over to the new directories.
I haven’t had time to check through it much, and my old template doesn’t work anymore so I’m just using a basic one that comes with the Pixelpost ZIP (it’s pretty good though). However, upgrading the Pixelpost software did fix my commenting system and the browse function, so you can look at my photos by category again. Like “green,” for example.
Posted by espd at 1:03 AM |
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Thursday, March 18, 2010
Thursday Top 5
New York Times: Tainted Tap Water
Thirty-five years after Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act, some regulators and environmentalists say the law is now so out of date that it fails to protect people from the most obvious threats. The NY Times has been reporting on water issues for a long time now in the series Toxic Waters. More:
The Future of Publishing
Book publisher DK on the dialog surrounding the future of their industry. [via Aaron N.]
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
Posted by espd at 8:51 PM |
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Thursday, March 11, 2010
Thursday Top 5+5
My Internet connection was down for almost nine days so I’m a bit behind in posting this Top 5. To make up for it, here’s an extra helping of interestingness, lols, and shenanigans.
TED Talks: Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling science
This is why I love science. “Even as mega-banks topple, Juan Enriquez says the big reboot is yet to come. But don’t look for it on your ballot — or in the stock exchange. It’ll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. Our kids are going to be...different.”
Captain Kirk deals with a strange alien culture
Trololololols.
Adam Carolla Project, Episode 1
I miss Adam.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Barbican Centre, London
Very interesting art installation. Olya will like this one. I bet she’s never seen such musical birds before. [via Jason]
Dante’s Inferno
Amusing review: A scholar of medieval literature wonders if feminists wrote the video game Dante’s Inferno.
On the Media: Facing the (Free) Music
This was a really great OTM on the state of the music business (MP3 available): “For 10 years, music execs have waged a war against digital file sharing — and software like Napster and websites like The Pirate Bay — which have decimated the industry’s profits. But recently, there are signs from Europe that the battle over free music may be changing.” I haven’t mention it in a while, but this is one of my two favorite radio programs; I hate to miss an episode and often listen to them twice.
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
Posted by espd at 10:37 PM |
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Tuesday, March 09, 2010
The myth of the fold
In web design and development there is almost always a desire to surface as many items of content and functionality above “the fold”* as you can possibly cram in there: Top news, latest blog posts, branding, primary navigation, secondary navigation, customer testimonials, carousels, search box, Twitter stream, log in box, and of course at lease a couple ads.
Below is a brief catalog of the many years of user research that debunks the concept of the fold.
Let us be free of this burden once and for all. Our users already are.
* The fold is the viewable area of a web page seen by a visitor upon first landing on the page, without having scrolled. The concept comes from newspaper design. Since newspapers had to be folded in half to fit in racks or on newsstands, the attention-grabbing headlines and photos had to be placed “above the fold” to entice people to pick up the paper.
“Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby)” by Jedward, featuring Vanilla Ice
These two young guys were apparently controversial participants on “X Factor,” one of those TV talent competitions. As I never watch those things, I hadn’t heard of them until this music video hit my radar. It’s actually a pretty good performance/mash-up/parody, for what it is. Inviting the real Vanilla Ice to appear in a version of the song that was so controversial*, and which practically ended his musical career, was a stroke of sheer genius, and kudos to him for taking it on with a bit of self-mockery.
* If you’ve been paying the least bit of attention for the past 20 years, you know that Vanilla Ice’s song was slammed for sampling/ripping off the 1981 Queen and David Bowie hit single “Under Pressure.” Sadly, the Wikipedia article on Jedward’s song did not mention this.
Council of Responsible Advertisers Promoting Accepted Digital Solutions
“Rich media can literally kill you.”
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
New York Times: Tainted Tap Water
Aaron
Alexis
Anne
Anya
April & Matt
Ari
Bo
Brian
Bryan
Chris
Cousin Carol
Dave & Terri
Dave H.
Debby
Drue
Fibu
Four Waters
Fwegan (aka Ynnej)
Gary
Holly
Hilary
Internet Rockstar
James & Eric
Jason
Jen
Jesse
Jessica
Joey
Kansinee
Karl
Kelly
Laura
Leah
Marc
Martin
Matt
Mike
Morgan
OkayDave
Olya
Paco
Peter
Rick
Rocky
Ryan
Stellah
Tatum 
Trent
Velma
Veronica
Whiskey Media
Yuliya
Yu-Po