Comic Strips

• I found a printout of this User Friendly comic strip while cleaning out my old desk last month. Ah, tech support! Help, I can’t send e-mail!
• XKCD on spambots vs. constructive comments (warning: language)
• Two comic strips about book collections: Wondermark and Girl Genius. I stumbled on the Wondermark strip at Long Beach Comic-Con (write-up should be done today is online) and it really hit home, between the fact that I grew up loving books for exactly this reason, and the impending arrival of the next generation. As for Girl Genius, I think Castle Heterodyne’s library could give the Beast’s a run for its money.
• Fake Science explains the difference between regular and decaf coffee. Insert obligatory “It was ground this morning” joke.
• C-Section Comics shows the difference between iPhone, Android and Blackberry users. For the record: Android user, picked up the link from an iPhone user. Hmm…

Photos

• Incredible star trails and a derelict ship at APOD.
• Usability study: Photos as Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• Amazing close-up photos of comet Hartley 2.
• Twitter Fail Whale Hat.

Other Stuff

• Someone wants to buy a cosmic treadmill from me: Umm…Not For Sale?
• Wrapping up Cyber Security Awareness Month at @sans_isc. If you use a computer, you should at least take the time to look through this.
• Gotta love the MPAA’s priorities. A brief scene of therapeutic swearing earns the same rating as an entire film full of graphic, gruesome torture: The King’s Speech vs. Saw 3D.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

I actually would have made it if I hadn’t decided to finish re-reading The Briar King. Three pages from the end — WHOOSH! Instant cloudburst!

So I finished the book, zipped the full-sized hardcover into my jacket, and proceeded to run from Coffee Bean to the parking structure, pausing under overhangs when I found them. There’s a surprising lack of shelter at the Irvine Spectrum, not counting the stores themselves. It wasn’t until I got to the structure that I realized I’d been running with a coffee cup in my hand.

Amazingly enough, even though I got soaked, I managed to keep the book dry!

(Reposted from LiveJournal.)

• Contact someone with a similar name, even when it’s clearly the wrong sort of organization — say, a student writing club and not the bookseller that’s been causing them problems.
• Ask a blogger for a job application for a company mentioned in the post.
• Ask unrelated tech support questions on a blog post because they used the wrong search terms for their problem.
• Ask for help creating Flash animations on a forum dedicated to the Flash super-hero, then get indignant when people have the gall to point out that they’re in the wrong place.

Now, usability guru Jakob Nielsen reports on a study showing just how much people don’t read. In the average visit, users only read 28% of your text if you’re lucky. You have to drop way down — to 111 words — just to count on visitors reading half of it.

Depressing, but it explains so much. And it suggests there’s a benefit to highlighting key phrases. If they’re only going to read ¼ of the text, you may as well make sure it includes the important stuff.

I usually avoid any sort of shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, online included, but I’ve been getting email from various online stores that are trying to get into Black Friday. Amazon is advertising a Black Friday Sale, and Apple is promoting a “special one-day shopping event” on their website—and annoyingly, neither of them is giving any clue as to what sort of deals are involved. Amazon keeps forwarding me to today’s deals, and Apple just says something’s coming. And neither site lists actual hours. Is it midnight to midnight? What time zone?

Speaking of Amazon, their entire home page is currently taken up by the announcement of their new eBook reader, Kindle. At $400 I’m not going to rush out and buy one, but it looks like they’ve solved some of the main e-book problems: it’s small, light and wireless, and they even bring up the reading-in-bed issue in the intro. The real question is going to be compatibility & openness: It’ll read plain text, HTML, Word, and a few other document formats (and they’re promoting its access to Wikipedia), so it should be possible for other stores to sell books for the device. And what about the e-book offerings themselves? Will they be loaded down with draconian digital rights management like the Adobe ebooks of a few years ago, or are they following the model of Amazon’s MP3 store?* In a nice change, their music downloads are entirely DRM-free and they use it as a selling point. Edit: Per Andrea’s comments and further research, Kindle ebooks are locked down with DRM. No, thanks!

The name, however, makes me wonder how soon they’ll offer Fahrenheit 451.

Finally, the Internet Storm Center has an insightful response to the statement, “There is nothing on my computer that a hacker would be interested in.” Let’s leave aside the question of your personal data for the moment. Just the fact that you’ve got a computer with an internet connection could prove very useful to someone who wants to cover their tracks or just add more power to their own distributed system.

* Amazon’s MP3 store is also surprisingly cheap. I replaced my old tapes of the original cast recordings of Les Misérables (Broadway) and Phantom Of The Opera for $9 each—they run upwards of $30 on CD.

When I was in college, I was involved with a creative writing club / literary discussion group called the Literary Guild at UCI. I built a website to post club information and collect our writing projects, and we set up a listserv for online discussion and collaboration.

After a while we started getting complaints from people about how they never received their books, or they were sick of getting junk mail from us, etc. and it became pretty clear they were complaining about the Literary Guild Book Club, which at the time didn’t have a website.

Now think: You’ve signed up with a company that lets you order books from a catalog. The website you find is all about college students and weekly meetings on campus. No mention of catalogs, or ordering books, or even customer service (oops, I mean “customer care”). Don’t you think you might wonder if maybe, just maybe this wasn’t the same group of people?

So we put up a note on the home page stating “We are NOT affiliated with the book club!” Over time it became bold, and then red, and when we noticed the “other” Literary Guild had set up a home page we added a link, and occasionally people would still send us their complaints.

Fast forward to today. The company I work for, SpeedGate Communications, has a fairly generic domain name, speed.net. Since it doesn’t match our name exactly, people will occasionally send tech support requests to speedgate.com by mistake. This is understandable to an extent, but always annoying, especially when they complain “we emailed you three days ago with this urgent problem and you haven’t done anything!” Of course I have to explain they sent it to Korea or Alabama or someplace where we never had a chance of seeing it.

Then there’s speed.net.id, an Indonesian company which either allows its customers to send spam or has never bothered to secure its mail servers. Every once in a while someone will get spam which originated from speed.net.id and complain to us.

Today I had two cases to deal with. One was someone who, two weeks ago, had sent a tech support request to someone who hasn’t worked here in months. You’d think the “Message could not be delivered: user is no longer with company” would at least have clued him in that it didn’t get anywhere, if not why.

And the latest was a support request sent through our website. A month or two ago we got a few requests from people who seemed to think (despite the fact that they were mentioned nowhere) that we provided technical support for SpeedStream routers and modems. Now think about this one: On one hand: SpeedGate Communications, Internet service and hosting provider. On the other: SpeedStream modems and routers. Yes, they both have the word “speed” in them. And yes, they are both network related. But given that you could find the exact name, type of product and model number at Efficient Networks’ website or the SpeedStream website (the names that are printed on your router, the box it came in, and the manual, assuming you didn’t throw it away), wouldn’t you at least check there first?

After two of these in one week, we added a note to our support request form stating that “we do not manufacture or support SpeedStream network products” and linking to their website. Right now this is the only mention of the word “SpeedStream” anywhere on the website.

So what happens? Tonight someone sends us a nasty all-caps note – with an email reply trail – about problems with their SpeedStream router. Given that the attached emails from Speedstream include a mention of speedstream.com, how the hell did this guy come up with our website? And how the hell did he miss the sentence right above the form, stating that we don’t provide support for these products? I guess I’ll have to make it bold and red…

I wrote that this wasn’t the first time someone had made the mistake – that’s why we put up the notice, after all. I very much wanted to add “But you are the first person to make the mistake since we put up the notice.” It was so tempting, but I knew I couldn’t do it.

Well, now in a way I suppose I could after all.