Monthly Archives: May 2009

Quality vs. Quantity – You Are Not A Guru

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How´s My Blogging?

I'm vulgar. Call someone who cares.

With the huge rise in social networking popularity across the web, “social media” and whatever other bullshit buzz word the next “guru” has coined; comes the huge influx of people hopping on the bandwagon as the next self-proclaimed savior to the mediasphere-addicted masses. I’m really at my wit’s end with the amount of “professionals” bombarding me on Twitter with crap like:

“10,000 followers in one month!”

“How to make money with Twitter!”

“Make money at home!”

Ugh, just shut the fuck up already (sorry, late warning but this post has vulgarity). We get it. You’re some elite genius who has risen from the ashes of MySpace and other half-assed, master-minded, millionaire-making mounds of shit – otherwise known as social networks. Alright, fair enough. Everyone has to have an angle, right? Sure, whatever. You’ll tell me anything if you think it will sell me.

Okay, you’re burnt out at your bland desk job. Like a lot of savvy web users, you’re always using things like Facebook, Twitter, Brightkite, etc. You think to yourself,

“Man, I’m pretty snazzy when it comes to this social networking stuff. Look at all the people I’ve got following me on Twitter! I must be on to something…”

That’s when it hits you. You’re going to write a book and then build a website, maybe even start doing videos promoting your new techniques and start holding seminars. It’s going to be AWESOME! YOU’LL BE A MILLIONAIRE IN NO TIME! There’s a huge flaw in this idea though: 10 million other annoying people have thought of the same exact idea. Those same 10 million people are currently shoving their idea in peoples faces in the form of tweets on Twitter or whatever the hell else there is out there.

YTMND

The one that annoys me the most are the ones that are always talking about how you can gain 10,000 followers in a week or whatever insane time frame they lay down. Of course you know if the first guy said a month, the next guy with the same brilliant, original idea is going to say 1 week. Whatever happened to quality over quantity? I really have respect for the Twitter users that have built up their following by putting in the sweat and tears required. More power to them. They’re obviously interesting people and thus others want to hear what they have to say.

Quality vs. Quantity

But then there’s those users that do absolutely nothing but push theirs and other peoples “make money fast” products, and rehash links/material/etc that someone else put hard work into creating. The ones that just RT (ReTweet) the crap out of anything they think people will read. There’s no originality in any of it. It makes sense on some degree. For example, if you’re selling a product that you’ve really put your heart and soul into and people really love it, then sure, bombard us about it. But if you’re some self-proclaimed social media guru who just goes around tooting his/her own horn, posting crap people have read 300 times over from another source, then please go away. Find a new angle (there’s that word again!) and GTFOH (you’ll have to figure this abbreviation out on your own).

Complete US Guide to Update Your G1 to Cupcake

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Via @IamLugo on Twitter, I was able to update my T-Mobile G1 to the new Cupcake firmware without having to wait for T-Mobile to release it to my corner of the US. It was dead simple and does not require your G1 to be rooted. I’ve compiled these steps from Android Central and I’m also including a link to the US OTA link for Cupcake. I’ve also included a couple steps that weren’t outlined in the things I’ve read. Here goes!

  1. Grab the US Cupcake update from here. I suggest you have a USB cable to connect your phone to your computer to transfer the update file.
  2. Rename the downloaded zip file to “update.zip”. The phone will not recognize the file if it is named something else (I learned this myself).
  3. Connect your G1 to your computer and throw the update.zip file onto your SD card. Do not place it any folder. Throw it on the root (outside of all folders you see on your SD card.)
  4. Disconnect your phone from your computer (make sure to eject it if you’re on a Mac!).
  5. Turn your phone off like you normally would.
  6. Reboot your phone while holding the home key. Make sure to continue holding the home key until you see a triangle icon with an exclamation point in it. You don’t have to continue holding the power button. Just tap it to start the reboot process.
  7. When you see the triangle icon press ALT+L on your G1 keyboard to bring up a system screen that shows some options.
  8. Press ALT+S to update your phone using the update.zip file that it will automatically locate on your SD card. Let the update run. You’ll see it following through with the installation and you’ll see a progress bar.
  9. When prompted press home and back at the same time to reboot your phone. You only have to tap them, not hold them. You will see the phone reboot a couple of times, which is completely normal. When you see the new Android boot screen logo, you’ll know that your phone is running Cupcake.

Voilá! Your phone is now running the official OTA US release of Cupcake, thanks to Android Central and @IamLugo! One thing I noticed is that the update erased all the icons I dragged onto my G1 desktop. No big deal but at first when I saw no icons loading, I thought something was wrong. There’s nothing wrong though. Just drag them all back to where you desire. I found this to be a tiny issue to get the awesome new Cupcake update (which I must say really is awesome, especiall the video recorder and the global interface appearance and effects updates).

A New URL Registration Scam

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Soldier´s goodbye & Bobbie the cat, ca. 1939-ca. 1945 / by Sam Hood

This picture is completely irrelevant.

We received an email the other day at work from someone trying to sell a URL for a bloated price. It’s a pretty common practice and I’m sure any web designer reading this has encountered it at least once or twice in their career. Companies or individuals that solely make a living off of buying and selling domain names. Fair enough.

This latest method was kind of comical and at the same time it was clever; in a dirty, annoying care salesman kind of way. It starts off like you would expect. “I see that you are the owner of [DOMAINNAME].org…” blah, blah, blah, and then it goes on to the sender talking about how they have ownership of the same domain but in .com format. “Sounds awesome! How much are you sel….50 bucks??” (well, it didn’t really go down like that but I had to make this less boring). To be fair, $50 was a whole lot lower than what I expected the “seller” to want for it. Usually they get greedy.

Out of curiousity, my colleague decided to open up Terminal and run a whois on the domain, just to see if we could get some insight on this “company”. This is the kicker: the domain was available for purchase. So what happened next? I’m sure you’ve already figured it out for yourself, smarty pants. My colleague purchased the domain for 8 bucks. He even had a discount code! Following his victory, he proceeded to send back a response to the aforementioned email. It went something like:

“Thanks for the heads up on the domain”, “We’ve purchased it…”

Hilarity ensued. We never received a reply (wow, shocker) but between me and him we found it to be pretty hilarious in a nerdy kind of web guy way.

In your face!

“Research” Is The New Solicitation

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Why Didn´t You Call Me?

Ring, ring!

As I’m sure plenty of you have done I added my phone numbers to the “do not call” list long ago. Doing so has since served me well and I haven’t received any solicitation calls of any sort at home. Peace and quiet! Until now.

I received a phone call that came from a company with “research” in their name. Caller ID saved me the headache of having to listen to the stupid recording that followed. Basically the culprit identifies themselves as a “marketing research” company and the message even goes as far as to say that they are legally allowed to contact various people because it is not a solicitation; and also that they represent other large companies. To be removed from the call list they provide you with a completely separate phone number to call, which I’m sure is a call center armed with employees waiting to ask you a bunch of questions.

Fail or Win?

Who knows? I may be completely off and they may very well be a legit marketing research company simply gathering information for large corporations and nothing more. Solicitation-esque phone calls are probably not the best way to accomplish this. Being in an industry that relies heavily on marketing and campaigns, I’d probably be more than happy to answer a few simple questions. Getting a call from a recording is not going to get me to do so.

Talk Warranty to Me…

While we’re on the topic of mischievous phone messages and calls, the worst ones of all are the illegitimate vehicle warranty companies.  I’m sure you know the ones I’m referring to. They call you up and pose as the warranty department for whatever dealer you purchased your vehicle from. I’m pretty sure they prey on those who have recently paid off their vehicle, are about to or otherwise. It seems like these phone calls have sloped off considerably though, which is great because I’m pretty darn sure my 6-year-old Ford Ranger is way out of warranty and I really don’t care.