EGOPOLY

The other night I had a bizarre dream. I had to go to California for some reason, probably work related. But my family came with me, which never happens. There was this restaurant we went to that was supposed to be really good. It was either a sushi place or a burrito place, the dream kept changing it. The interesting thing was that the restaurant was owned by Larry Ellison, and it was popular both because the food was good and because a lot of tech industry celebrities ate there.

Larry was there at the restaurant, and it turns out that he’s this totally evil guy with weird powers. Specifically, he can switch his mind into your body, and put your mind into his. He came over to our table and I was nervous because he’s, well, you know, Larry Ellison. A badass rich guy who knows Kung Fu. Then all of a sudden he does the mind switch thing on me and I’m looking at myself, and Larry-as-me is giving me this shit-eating grin. He takes off and leave me (in his body) with my family.

Then I’m trying to explain to my family that it’s really me and not Larry Ellison, and they don’t even know who the hell Larry Ellison is, because my wife is a physician, not a programmer. And my kids are, well, little kids. So they’re freaking out, I’m freaking out. I’m wondering what the hell Larry is doing with my body, and getting really pissed off.

The I look a across the restaurant and see Robert Scoble at a table by himself, banging away on a laptop. So I think, fine, Larry is screwing with me, so I’ll screw with Larry. I walk over to Scoble in my Kung-Fu-knowing Larry body, and introduce myself, though I never really get to beyond “Hi, Robert, I’m…” and then he’s all effusive and shaking my hand. Then I tell him that I LOVE his blogs and all the stuff he writes, and offer to talk to him about Oracle’s secret plans. I start yammering on about how Oracle is going to buy Novell, Palm, Tivo, Sling Media and start competing with Apple. And how we’re going to start shipping database hardware with preloaded Ubuntu. All the craziest shit I can think of.

Then I’m back with my family, and we’re all freaking out again that I’m Larry, and I’m trying to explain to my 3-year-old that it’s me, but she isn’t buying. Finally Larry comes back and I grab him (me) with my (his) Kung Fu grip and make him switch our minds back.

I’ve been reading Valleywag and FSJ too much.

Thanks Jeff for the link.

http://jcornuz.wordpress.com/2007/11/21/phatch-batch-power-without-bash-hassle/

I had to get an OpenVPN install working on my boss’s Vista PC. I know, I know, but I can’t convince him to get a Mac and run Parallels.

It mostly worked, in that the client connected to our gateway server, but traffic wouldn’t go between his machine and our LAN. Then I found this article, which boiled down these steps:

Add to your .ovpn file the following two lines:


route-method exe
route-delay 2


Then reconnect, and everything works.

Google launched their iphone-optimized site today. Wow, holy crap. It looks nice, of course, as do most of the iphone optimized sites. (Facebook is a really good one.) But the amazing thing is how freaking fast it is.

First, they have links for the four services I use on google on my iPhone: search (of course), gmail, calendar and reader. It’s like they are reading my mind. (But I know they aren’t because I actually use Reader more often mobile than anything else.) Then, you click on a link and it’s, like, KABOOM! the reader page instantly appears. INSTANTLY. Same for gmail and calendar. It’s like they installed their servers in AT&T’s EDGE access points.

I read about Deutsche Grammophon’s music download site on Gizmodo. They said it was a good store with high-quality downloads and no annoying DRM. I love DG recordings, so I browsed over their to check it out. Within a minute I found a Beethoven piano concerto to buy.

The purchase process was a little clumsy; I had to link out to another shopping cart site, and it was hard to find the shopping cart link. Then I got sent into this extra level of MasterCard security where I had to choose a new online security code for my card. Fine. But I finished all that and got dumped back into the checkout process. Fine, so I go through the credit card entry again, and this time I *use* that security code i had made. But then I get dumped back into the checkout process again. Now I’m worried. Did I just buy that album twice? What’s going on? I guess there are bugs in their checkout system. I decided I’d just log a support case and see what happened.

But, guess what? There’s no way to send a help request. There are some stupid FAQ pages about how to download music once you’ve bought it, but there is no feedback or purchase problem help link. At least not that I can find after looking for 10 minutes. Are you kidding?

Where I work, we don’t sell anything; we make all our money through tiny bits of ad revenue. Our average revenue per visitor from ads is way less than $1. But we have feedback links ALL OVER THE PLACE. So if users need help, we give it to them, usually within a few hours, sometimes within minutes. So here’s a web store (DG) that is selling stuff that probably has a gross margin of 90%, where they average purchase is probably $5 or $10, and some people are probably spending a lot more. And you can’t even get help so you can give them money.

It’s sad. This stuff really isn’t that hard to figure out.

(Of course, this prompted me to go to Amazon.com, where I found the album in their MP3 download store. And it was $3 less, and I could buy it with one click.)