Sports Blackouts Are Stupid

I don’t understand the concept of sports blackouts. For those of you who don’t watch sports on TV, a blackout is when a sporting event is not televised in the market that it is taking place in. The only possible reason for this would be to encourage people to attend the game live. But I wonder how many people are like me. A minor fan who is highly unlikely to attend a game anyway and doesn’t get encouraged by lack of television access. Instead I become less of a fan. I don’t get to watch the game, I don’t get to follow the team this week (and in football there is only one game per week) and I don’t get to increase my level of fandom. In the end I am less likely to watch future games on TV, attend future games in person and spend any money on team. And to top it all off, TSN decides to televise a game from 2004 with the exact same two teams, Calgary and B.C., thus confusing matters even more. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Oh yeah, could some one please tell me who won the stupid game.

Update: Arggggh. 45 - 45 in double overtime. So not only has my interest in the team decreased, but I’m now really annoyed that I missed what the reporter called ‘the most exciting game of the season’. Blackouts are stupid.

Microsoft Lawyers Threaten MVP

In another example of Microsoft being more about legal wrangling than software development, Jamie Cansdale has been threatened for making TestDriven.Net work with Visual Studio Express. TestDriven.Net is a very popular unit testing addon for Visual Studio and one that Cansdale earned a Microsoft MVP award for developing. I can’t believe the morons in Redmond are making a stink about this. How stupid.

Google - Customer Service for the 21st Century

Considering I’ll have a lot more to capture on video come August, I decided to look into purchasing a camcorder several weeks ago. I read some reviews, went to a few stores and generally did my research. I ended up deciding on the JVC Enverio line of HDD products. JVC has been building hard drive based camcorders for a while (and I think they were the first) and this line seemed pretty mature. I was all set to make the purchase.
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Vista a Spectacular Failure?

I haven’t even run Vista. Even though I’m a developer and make my living off Windows application development, I am frankly just not an OS tire kicker. I didn’t buy a Mac until Tiger came out, I still run the stable (_sometimes_ the testing) release of Debian and I haven’t tried Ubuntu as a possible replacement desktop OS. Add to that that I’ve heard way too many nightmare stories about Vista and compatibility issues with old hardware (which I’m not prepared to upgrade just yet) and you see why I’m apparently behind the techy crowd I’m usually up there with. However, as a sideline observer, I have to say, I’m worried and definitely not planning to upgrade to Vista anytime soon, if ever.

This editorial caught my eye. It posits that Vista is a huge failure and is the latest in a serious of unmaintainable code bases that Microsoft has produced.

Says Jewell:

I believe there are a number of factors working together here, principally the high cost of the OS, the need to buy better hardware, driver/hardware incompatibility issues and the plain fact that – sexy party dress aside – it’s the same old tart underneath. Contrasting what was originally promised with what was finally delivered, Vista (nee Longhorn) has spectacularly failed.

That’s quite the statement, but I’m sure Microsoft will continue trucking along. They’ve got a lot of money and a giant share in the corporate desktop OS market which will enable the dough to keep coming in for quite a while.

But that really isn’t the point. The point is that it appears there is a growing distrust of Microsoft products and Vista in particular in the media and among developers. I’m just not sure I can trust Microsoft anymore. Dell certainly is backtracking on Vista, citing customer complaints, although I wonder how happy Dell is with Vista. Think about this. This is _Dell_. One of the leading pre-built PC manufacturers. This is a huge concession. This is just the latest example though.

Knowing what I know about software development and hearing what I hear about Vista (even if half of them are false), I just don’t think I am willing to plunk down the cash they are asking for. I really can’t see myself ever running Vista and I don’t think I am alone. Perhaps Microsoft is counting on the unwashed masses not having enough information about their OS choices and all the issues on every side to know any better. But sooner or later they will catch on. If I’m an early adopter of distrust of Microsoft and Vista then eventually we will cross the chasm at which point Microsoft is going to have some big problems.

Better Software

Now that the March issue of Better Software Magazine is long out the door, I can post the pdf of the article I wrote for that issue. As soon as I get two minutes to sit down and think, I’ll post something about the overall article writing experience, which I think was pretty positive considering it was my first time.

System Calls

I’m not generally one to wade into the OS religious wars. I use all of the top 3 major OSes on a daily basis and all of them have benefits and drawbacks. However, these pictures comparing the system calls for a webpage request to Linux/Apache and Windows/IIS are quite eye opening. The opportunity for security breaches in overly complex systems is obvious and, in this case, Windows/IIS certainly demonstrates a level of complexity that just seems unnecessary. Conclude what you will.

My Latest Program

Here’s something I’ve been working on for a little while….

#include <mammal.h>

class Human : public Mammal
{

  friend Human &operator+(const Human &a, const Human &b)
  {
    return pro_create(a, b);
  }

}

int
main(int argc, char **argv){

  Human andrea();
  Human tim();
  Human x = tim + andrea;

  cout << x.dueDate() << endl;

}

And the output …

falcon:~$ ./a.out
Thu Aug 9 00:00:00 MST 2007
falcon:~$

Silly Customer Retention Policy

So in the last few weeks I’ve experienced two examples of inane customer retention policy which basically goes something like this. As soon as the customer looks like he is going to leave, start spamming him with emails, snail mail, and phone calls to try to get him to stay.

The first example is register.com. I’ve recently started to transfer all my domains away from register.com to save some money. As soon as I started this process I began to get phone calls and emails advertising special deals on the domains that I had yet to transfer. Then I got some snail mail offers on a domain that is in a different register.com account, but obviously has the same contact info as the account I’m transferring domains out of. I had received a few email offers in the past but for the most part, had not heard much from register.com in the last three years. That is until I started to transfer away from them. Then they annoyed the hell out of me. This only confirmed my decision.

Second example is First National. We just bought a new house, so we’re looking for a new mortgage. We went to several banks to see what we could get and one of them was with First National. Our current mortgage is with First National. For the past two and a half years we have had no advertising from them; No email, snail mail, nothing. That is until just the other day when we applied for a new mortgage. Sure we had received account statements now and then, but other than that, I had never communicated with this bank at all. We just made our payments on time and never heard from them. I actually really liked this relationship. They lent us money, we made our payments, and we didn’t bother each other. But now, when it looks like we will be cancelling our mortgage and moving to another bank for our new mortgage, they start to send spam telling us how great their service is, resulting in an annoyed customer who will likely not go back to them in the future.

I’m no customer service expert, but here are the two questions I want answered:

1) If you know a customer is leaving, is it really good to be burning your bridges by annoying them? Especially with things like domains and mortgages, which I’m sure I’ll have need for more of in the future. Thanks to all this spam, I likely will not be going back to either of these companies in the future because of this.

2) Shouldn’t customer retention be an on-going effort for a company? Why just react to signs customers are leaving you? Why not be building a customer relationship over the long term? I don’t mind the occasional offer or ad from a company I have a relationship with, but being barraged in a short period of time will likely put off most customers. Isn’t when a customer has decided to leave exactly the wrong time to be telling them how great your company. I wonder what percentage of people actually change their minds once these ads and offers get sent out. I know I didn’t change my mind. In both cases, they just bothered me and strengthed my resolve to find other companies to deal with.