Image by Victoria Jones
Follow the money and you’ll find that hot trends in design and search engine optimization are tied to our shrinking technology. What’s in your pocket?
For more, check out my latest article on the Geekly Group blog. It’s all about mobile, responsive design, SEO and the long tail
.
A Fox 40 whistle from the late 1980s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In early November I received my umpteenth call from Rachel at cardholder services. A few years ago I wasted time filing FTC reports on these jokers in a wholly ineffective effort to thwart their incessant nagging. Of late I’ve instead taken to passive aggressively nagging them back.
This time, as is now my custom, I pressed whatever number would get me to a consultant to discuss the urgent scam relating to my credit cards. I then pressed mute and walked away. A few minutes later, per my routine, I picked up the phone to hang it up, but this time there’s a guy whispering all sorts of awesome stuff still on the line. So I listened for a while. He’d just started at his call center job two weeks earlier and had yet to get any training. He was bitching about the people near him and how backwards and horrible everybody and everything about his job was. Very entertaining. (He was using more colorful language than I’m willing to recount here.)
I wanted to un-mute and talk to him but decided not to. What would I have said? “Become a whistle-blower!” These $#%^ing phone spammers are breaking the law and I’d love to see some convictions. Unfortunately I (and likely most call center drones) are unaware of incentive to blow the whistle on such illegal activity, if any even exists.
The FTC is planning to spend serious dough on “new and innovative ways to block these illegal calls,” and is soliciting fresh ideas via the U.S.A.’s official challenge website. They’re also offering $50,000 in prizes for challenge winners. But I recognize problems with most of the submissions. They’re either ineffective, costly, unproven, violate basic privacy or show other weaknesses. Solving this problem is as simple as the American dream itself and it’s a bargain too.
From aforementioned breathy undertones of the underbelly of the robocall world, I was able to infer that call center workers are overworked, underpaid, shown little respect and mistreated. What if we offered cash rewards for proof of illegal telemarketing activity? How much would it take? I’m guessing not much.
What person working at a thankless illegal job is going to turn down a four figure reward for ten minutes of work? IT WILL WORK. But how will we fund it? While there’s likely already a budget for this sort of thing, I understand that taxing and spending isn’t sexy these days and that we’re to rely on the private sector for things like… money. (?!)
I’ll start. If I win the challenge, I’ll donate 10% of my take to an FTC telemarketing whistle blower fund.
Won’t you join me? (Boring details for my FTC challenge submission follow. Thanks for reading!)
Q: What is required to stop robocalls and encourage whistleblowers?
A: Funding. A website to field scam reports. Small staff to review reports. Initial marketing push.
Q: What about robocalls that don’t provide an option to speak to a human?
A: There are still underpaid minions in these shady organizations. We can turn them from the dark side.
Q: What about robocalls from other countries?
A: People in other countries like cash too. We can turn them and stop the flow of robocalls.
Q: Harumph! I hate government spending! What else would we need to crowdsource the funding?
A: If the gov doesn’t have the ability to do it already, hire somebody to use free, off the shelf, open source scripts to accept donations. Initial marketing push.
When he’s not traveling or making music, Dan Dreifort likes to consult on search and usability. Dan also likes his wife even though she has neglected him for almost four years while she’s been at veterinary school. She comes back in three weeks. Dan is very happy about this.
This is what you’ll see after enabling your new favorite add-on
Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks is a great little add-on for both Firefox and Thunderbird. It makes Mozilla’s rapid release cycle totally tolerable.
If the keeper of your favorite plugin can’t keep up with Mozilla’s zany release schedule, worry no more. Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks does exactly what it sounds like it’ll do. Install it (no restart needed) and head to your Add-ons Manager where you’ll be able to enable previously dead-to-you add-ons. I’ve periodically posted links to several repacked add-ons in the past, but this plugin means I’ll never again have to edit an install.rdf file.
Occasionally a plugin really and truly can’t be resurrected by this method. Case in point, today’s update to Thunderbird 17.0 killed the Quicktext add-on for good. Sad times. I loved that plugin too! RIP little buddy.
Big kudos to Kris Maglione for making one add-on to rule them all. Thanks!
Firefox. Love it. Hate it. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Remember back when Firefox 3.5.17 came out? I’ll give you a clue; it was 2011.
It’s just a year later and the latest version of Firefox (15.0) ships with new features under the hood, including better memory handling for plugins and new “Silent, background updates,” but it’s not enough. When Mozilla switched Firefox to a faster release cycle in 2011, users relying on extensions and plugins suffered. Many jumped ship for Chrome and Safari. Those of us who have stayed either suffer or update extensions on our own. I’m in the latter camp.
Head here to download a zip containing the following usability extensions updated for the current Firefox release:
I’ve posted links to other updated Firefox plugins in the past but I don’t make a habit of it. If you’d like updated versions for any of those, drop me a note in the comments.
Image via Wikipedia
Google places a real live email link to pat@example.com on the Google account login screen. Though I’m sure it’s intended to improve usability it has the opposite effect. They placed the pat@example.com link smack dab in between the email (login/username) field and the password field. Keyboard savvy users normally use the tab key to move from one field to another. And if you save your login credentials in your browser, you can just type the first few letters of the username into the correct field, hit tab and then hit enter. Following that standard keyboard login procedure on Google’s page doesn’t log you in; it brings up a fresh message in your default mail program addressed to pat@example.com. Lame.
If you don’t use Firefox, you should. (Well, Chrome‘s OK, I guess.) This fix only works for Firefox. Install Stylish – it’s a great add-on that allows you to easily fix broken pages… like google.com! You’ll need to restart Firefox.
Then install this pat@example.com Stylish style I just made. You’re done.
I used to like digg.com but then they kept “improving” things. I stopped liking Digg. I’d poked around on reddit.com before but it’s so hideous that usability suffers. I found some decent Stylish options to fix things but they weren’t quite right. So I tweaked some existing reddit Stylish styles to make the site more than bearable. If you use Reddit, try my Reddit Stylish effort.
Dan Dreifort helps businesses with usability and search. He enjoys traveling, sugar, fat, scuba, making music, writing blurbs about himself in the third person, whining and other stuff too.File this one under Microsoft usability nightmares. I was visiting one of my W3 standards compliant pages using Internet Explorer 8 to check for cross-browser layout/rendering consistency when I noticed that IE8 served a pop-up. I was not pleased to learn that I could press the compatibility view button to fix problems in pages made for older browsers. The page looked fine to me. What the hell, I’ll click the button.
Naturally, clicking the IE8 compatibility view button destroyed the layout. It wasn’t illegible, but it really no longer looked professional.
I found this gem to force pages into standards mode
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE8″ />
Works like a charm. No more annoying pop-up.
Consider adding this to any page/site that’s built to W3 specs.
Internet Exploder
This from an old friend of mine on the private “guys list” mailing list.
So, I was trying to get a couple of E-books from the pirate bay.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5362753
The pdf I downloaded did not work, so I put up a comment and I noticed they were not un-escaping single quotes.
So I tried a double quote in the comment and it gave an error.
So I tried this in the comment box
“; SELECT * FROM `users` –
And it didn’t break. I’m pretty sure it selected all the users. Didn’t print them out, but it selected them.
So, what I’m saying is. Thepiratebay.org is currently wide open to sql injection attacks.
Have fun, let me know what you do.
Is this news? Maybe not. This article outlines how TPB was hacked over a month ago. Close the door man! It’s wide open.
Sorry, wrong version in the image. It was easy to recycle this image though.
I updated some great Firefox addon extensions again so they’ll work with the latest greatest. My previous post about Google PageRank Status and SEOpen has the links to the files. Enjoy.
My mostly spiffy new Acer 1810t laptop uses the Intel 4500 video chipset. It’s fine for video as long as you’re not a modern gamer. If you like playing older games, it works fine. However, unlike older integrated video processors, there’s no easy way to directly change the amount of shared memory allocated to video. The Intel 4500hmd uses new fangled Dynamic Video Memory Technology (dvmt) to control memory on the fly. Problem is, it doesn’t work well.
There are plenty of gamers complaining, “the 4500mhd won’t allocate the maximum memory for my game!” But usually, more memory won’t help them. The Intel 4500mhd isn’t meant for modern gaming. Poke around on Google for threads re: what games can be played.
Some people have suggested changing the settings under: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator Driver for mobile -> 3D Settings -> Driver Memory Footprint – but everything I’ve read has been telling people to set it to “high” whereas the Intel site indicates that setting the driver memory footprint to high will unconditionally limit the amount of memory, maximum allowed texture size, depth buffer precision and amount of textures kept in memory. FAIL.
No wonder everybody trying “high” hasn’t noticed any improvement. To be fair, Intel really dropped the ball here. Yes = No ?! High = Low ?!
My problem is exactly the opposite of the 4500mhd RAM gaming conundrum partially solved above. I don’t use my rig for gaming, and I want to be able to use as much of my four gigs of RAM for things like Photoshop swap files and whatnot. So… I’m going to set Driver Memory Footprint to “High” – restart – and hopefully I’ll notice more than 3 of my 4 GB RAM available to me.
More from the Intel site:
Normal (Default Value) – Driver automatically determines memory based on available memory.
LOW – Driver does not reduce memory footprint.
Dan Dreifort usually complains about tech here. But sometimes, he finds solutions to problems and shares them with YOU. What a mensch.
(Updated 3/25/2010 below) If your Verizon Wireless connection does not load bing correctly. Please leave a comment here. If you’re not having a hard time viewing bing.com in both firefox and internet explorer over a Verizon Wireless air card EVDO connection, then you’re going to be really bored here. Go visit uncool instead. Verizon Wireless support won’t open a ticket for me to fix this bing problem unless I can find another customer having the same problem. When I load the bing page from my Verizon Wireless connection, all I get is a white screen with one line of orange text – Tell us what you think – and some white on white text visible if I use the mouse pointer to select and highlight. But when I take my computer to any other connection, things are fine. It is only the Verizon Wireless card that won’t load bing.
Back when Alltel still had a hand in my connection, I contacted support about a Verizon Facebook problem. After I found other people having the same problem on Verizon Wireless, Verizon fixed the problem. But they blew me off until then. Same thing here with Bing Verizon Wireless. It’s not working. Verizon Wireless support is blowing me off. They won’t even open a ticket for me. Verizon told me to contact Bing… but naturally couldn’t tell me how I should go about doing that. How rude.
I wouldn’t hesitate to leave Verizon Wireless for another company, but I’m stuck with them. There’s no DSL or cable at my location. No other EVDO options. Satellite’s latency is too high for the sftp and other stuff I do. ISDN is a sketchy pain. Dialup… ugh. So I just need Bing to load, but Verizon Wireless as usual is not taking any responsibility. How I long for the days of Alltel’s comparatively incredible mediocrity. Please contact me in the comments or by emailing verizonsucks at uncoolcentral dot com
My earlier post declaring Webposition a giant pit of suck still holds true, in that I was complaining about the terrible “support” they provide. So this is not a mea culpa apology. But I should note: I’m MUCH angrier with Verizon Wireless’ terrible “support” than I am/was with webpo’s. As far as I’m concerned, until both companies reimburse me for my wasted time, they can suck it.
I’ve spent the past several months communicating with others experiencing the same problems. There’s power in numbers. Eventually Verizon started replacing modems. After hearing from others that upgrading to the um175 fixed most problems, I purchased a used Verizon Pantech um175 online to replace my Alltel um150. I took the 175 into the Verizon store a couple of days ago and asked if changing to a new modem would change my plan. Nope. I’m still grandfathered in on the unlimited plan for the time being. I can now access Bing.com. (no thanks to Verizon. Boo!)
Book reviews with a healthy dollop of snark
Digital strategy | Social business | People-centric biznology
