…and I just saw three snow scraper trucks make rounds on the street in front of my apartment. It’s 5:50 AM. Compare this to 2 days of disrupted life in NC when the snow first strikes.
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A smart Google investment
I just registered my profile at dodgeball.com. It’s a pretty unique service that lets you take the whole online social networking thing offline. You can tell all your friends about your current whereabouts by simply sending a text message from your cellphone to DODGE. Not only that, the service allows you to broadcast simple messages like party reminders/invitations. It is integrated fairly well with Google Maps and Google Local, giving you the option to add reviews about places you go to through your cellphone.
The service is limited to very few cities at present, and luckily Minneapolis/St. Paul is one of them. Not to be taken lightly, the service also offers a romance angle in that you can admit a crush on your friend or even their friends, and then get the option to review their current whereabouts if they so choose to reveal! Everything is handled through text messages. I can finally see myself fully utilizing the monthly text message allowance on my cellphone. All I need is some friends!
The website was started by two graduate students a few years ago, and bought by Google early last year for an undisclosed amount of money. I think this service makes perfect sense for them as it allows them to integrate 4 of their services – Maps, Local, Mobile, and Orkut, to bring out a better user experience.
If you’re in the twin cities and reading this, feel free to send me an email to be added as my friend!
Lately, I have been getting a lot of spam emails in my inboxes (both gmail and gargs.com), inspite of the usually reliable spam protection provided by Google. A lot of this spam has attached images that I usually discard without looking. I decided to look at one of these emails tonight, and it was spam sent by someone paid indirectly by a listed company to coerce investors into buying their stock! 
As you can see, the company is not doing very well, but it has some good news in the form of about $275,000 in non-brokered private proceeds. It has also appointed a new President, and a new Mining Consultant. I believe this company has only recently been listed, but due to my limited investment and stock exchange knowledge, I am not sure if that is correct. Nevertheless, what took me by surprise is the fact that the picture has a legal disclaimer that says that the spammer was paid an amount of $25,000 to “publish” the “report”! I knew that email spamming was big business, but didn’t realize it’s so easy to earn 25 grands just by sending an image to random email addresses.
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It’s camping season again…
So, after a wonderful camping season last year, it’s that time again. Playstation 3 comes out this Friday (17th), and the Nintendo Wii comes out on Sunday. Already, the pre-orders for the $600 premium PS3 system are selling for as much as $1,700 on ebay!
Apparently, some people actually started lining up for the next-gen gaming console 4 days in advance, until they were made to leave. I bought an Xbox 360 last year. Maybe, I’ll get a PS3 this year!
Check out this funny video about a guy dropping his Xbox 360 last year while showing it off!
ADDENDUM: Click on this video to see the guys being interviewed before they were asked to leave!
ADDENDUM: “Entrepreneurs” in Cary, NC, are now hiring homeless people to stand in line for them for $100 a day!
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My horoscope for the day
My reading for today says, “Celebrate what is sure to be a good day by getting out and connecting with people.” Come to think of it, today is in fact a very good day. There’s lots of sun outside, and I do feel like going to the lake and talking to people. Maybe, I’d call up a friend today to catch up with them.
The extended forecast goes like this:
“Remember that it’s your duty to shine, so put away any excessive modesty. The stars declare that it’s time for you to share your talents. The world needs what you can give. What have you been too shy to declare?”
I am still trying to figure out how I could make the extended version more relevant. That’s the fun about reading horoscopes. They are usually cryptic messages that could be deciphered in a multitude of ways. What have I been trying to be modest about? Hmm…maybe it’s a signal that I need to stop doubting my capabilities, and just do it!
Horoscopes provide me joy…
Yesterday was election day in the US, something that happens every 2 years. The responsibility of electing representatives to the 435 House seats as well as 33 out of 100 Senate seats was given to the public today. As I sit here watching the Democratic party take control of the House for the first time in around 14 years, I find the election coverage very familiar.
There’s the usual reporting of live precincts, live interviews, the usual anxiety, and the usual rejoicing by the winners. I am a big fan of the statistics and graphical analysis, and it seems that not much is different in the way newscasters and reporters function in India and the US.
Now, if only I could vote in this country…
After the Xbox Live snafus two weeks ago, Micro-Soft has done it again! This time “less than 1%” of the Xbox 360 owners (roughly 6 million at last count) had problems getting the latest firmware update released a couple days ago. Apparently, the engineers forgot to incorporate cross-checks for the unlikely possibility that someone might have avoided applying all the previously released updates to their system before downloading this latest update. These people are now left with an expensive paperweight, and Microsoft deserves some credit here as it is trying as hard as possible to provide them with new consoles. A newer update to the update has also been released.
I am glad I am safe! 😀
In other news, a strain of California electronic voting machines was found to have a “featured” flaw that enables multi-voting by the same person. The developers claim that this is an expected feature as the button responsible for the flaw is supposed to be never pressed during actual operating. Yeah right! All this after the infamous Diebold fiasco. I am sure global voting machine developers could learn something from India, where there have been no Electronic Voting Machine exploits to date.
I am starting to get critical of people who diss software development outsourcing to India as buggy.
UPDATE: Looks like xbox.com is down once again for “scheduled maintenance”. Uh oh!
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Rich Nannies
Want to use that college degree to make higher than average money? It’s simple – become a live-out nanny! I used to think that nanny jobs were typically low paying teenager jobs until I actually made a friend who worked as a nanny. Now, this girl was college educated and could have probably found at least a receptionist job at an office, but she really loved her nany job. For one, she enjoyed spending time with kids. The benefits from her job weren’t too shabby either. She made about half a grand a week, and perks included paid leaves as well as gasoline for transportation! You could say she was getting the perfect training in being a future mom, and getting paid for it. Sure, she was making less than 50 grand a year, but it was more money than being a homemaker.
With the couple having their own day jobs, child care and development has become a very important issue for the new age parents with lots of disposable income. This is more true for celebrity or executive parents. These are the people with personal jets and a payroll for the domestic support staff. The live out nannies (those who don’t live in with the family) make as much as $50k a year on top of the regular benefits like health insurance, paid leaves, and sick days. This is no small change.
A casual Internet search would reveal at least a dozen nanny agencies specializing in training and placing them. This is especially interesting if you consider that Phillipine women remitted over $7 billion to their country in 2001, creating the country’s second biggest source of hard currency after electronics exports. There is tremendous demand for bilingual qualified nannies.
Another way to think of this would be to appreciate how you actually save $50k a year by marrying a homemaker, and how she deserves at least part of those savings!
I have a couple of friends on my contact lists that love to remain “invisible” while they’re logged on those instant messaging programs. I have no problems with that, but my biggest pet peeve is getting sudden IMs from such people. I can understand if they’re very busy or just do not wish to be disturbed, but I don’t get why anyone would give the illusion that they’re very busy or just unavailable, and yet send random IMs to their friends. If you’re not straight forward enough to make your online presence known to me, what makes you think I appreciate that abrupt message from you?
I decided to seek the help of psychology to understand why people display this kind of behavior online. Turns out that we humans have been exercising such behavior since the time we started forming societies. The name of this phenomenon is – Ostracism. Traditionally, ostracism has been practiced at a social scale through the act of shunning villagers, throwing people in jail, or even exiles. It does, however occur at smaller scales, like a husband ostracizing his wife in public to avoid confrontations out in the open. It is believed that ostracism has biological substrates, and is a natural trait of many different living species.
What occurs in the case of Internet messengers is somewhat of a “reverse ostracism”, if that’s the right way of defining the phenomenon. In this case, one particular individual ostracizes the rest of the “online society” to provide some psychological succor to him/her self. Researchers and psychologists have often concluded that ostracism is a self-destructive mechanism when used as a defense against perceived rejection. Does this have to do anything with my friend being invisible while he’s actively looking for someone to converse with? Intuitive reasoning would say yes. When quizzed, these people declare that they prefer to be invisible to avoid unsolicited and mass messages from friends they have long forgotten or have been trying to forget. Some also mention that they remain invisible so that they only have to talk to someone when they want.
Psychologists say that such behavior is most likely to be exhibited by people low in self-esteem. They use social ostracism as a manipulative tactic rather than true disengagement. I bolded the latter part of the statement because these people still do not want to truly ostracize their peers, but choose to selectively distance themselves away to provide the illusion of a permanent ostracism. The fact these people have low self esteem can be proven by the fact that people with a high self esteem are actually more likely to go through with true disengagement or termination of relationship.
So, does this mean that I have people with low self-esteem on my online contact lists? Maybe. It is hard for me to tell. They are all normal people, and I like the fact that I know them, and that they sometimes send me online messages when I expect them the least. What amazes me is the psychology that might be responsible for such an unintuitive behavior.
Some things never change. Xbox Live has been down for “scheduled maintenance” way beyond the original announced “schedule”. Does it even count as scheduled if your service is down for about 120% of the intended downtime? Has this become a part of Microsoft culture – not delivering a promise on time? I am usually very supportive towards Microsoft, but this is getting way above head level.
I pay $35 a year to host 2 of my domains. That is about $15 less than what I pay for Xbox Live. Even then, I get a very good uptime on my hosting, and in case it’s down for an extended period of time, I get the freedom to constantly bug the person in charge to bring it back up. In the case of Xbox Live’s downtime, I have no point of contact at all, besides majornelson.com, and that too has been down for some time. No one else knows the state of the “scheduled maintenance”, and “Major Nelson” has already suggested not to call Xbox customer service about the downtime in one of his podcasts.
Is this arrogance on the part of Microsoft? Am I not entitled to some answers about an outage I am effectively paying for? I think frenzal said it best on majornelson.com:
one key part of marketing and public relations:
NEVER promise something unless you know you will deliver on it. It’s better to underpromise, than overpromise.
If MS said ‘XBL will be down for approximately 24 hours. We apologise if our works continue on after this, but we will be keeping you updated’. No one would complain. If they say, as they did, XBL will be down for less than 24 hours, and it’s even 1 minute more, people start complaining.
Same thing with demos.
I hope Microsoft gives up its habit of never making its own deadlines. Compassion towards the customer goes a long way, especially in the face of overpriced basic services.
I could seek “reparations” in the form of refunds or points, or I could just forget this whole incident, although I believe this has also happened in the past. From Microsoft’s perspective, they are working hard to manage this service, which is definitely the best online setup for any console out there. What appalls me is that they maintained so much secrecy about this whole affair, at the same time promising to make the service a whole lot better.
Why the secrecy? Does it suit a big company like Microsoft to hype up its improvements even if it means coming short of expectations? We’re all paying customers, and too grown up to be excited about surprises like this. The same thing has been happening with Vista. So much was promised that there’s only scope for reduction and shortcutting. Just take note of all the cool stuff that has been pulled out of Windows Vista’s final release. And, now it’s more than a year behind schedule.
Trying to justify an erratic downtime with promises of drastic secretive service improvements does not impress me one bit. That’s like Cingular cutting off my service for a day while promising to deliver a 10Mbps Internet connection the next day. Granted, I don’t pay as much for Xbox Live as I do for my Cingular service, but the point still stands.
When is Microsoft going to learn?
UPDATE: About 11 hours past the original 24 hour “schedule”, Xbox.com is still down, whereas Xbox Live is flaky.
UPDATE: It’s now about 44 hours since the service went offline and people are still having issues. Xbox.com is still not up and running like it should, and Live is kicking off people from the servers.
UPDATE: Everything seems to be back to normal now, approximately 48 hours later! I don’t see any “cool new features” besides some parental controls.