10 posts tagged “opinion”
I have been an AT&T wireless customer for more than 10 years. Unlike many cellphone users, I have actually had a satisfactory time and have not even considered leaving.
NOW EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED.
I have to give Kudo's when I run across the rare instance that a company meets or exceeds my expectations.
Quite a while ago, I was having connection issues with my internet provider, Sprint DSL. I contacted them and went through the ringer trying to get them to replace the modem. They would not do it unless every conceivable issue OTHER than the modem was ruled out. Talking about a pain in the A$$. After hours of testing and ruling eveything out, I ended up buying my own modem off the shelf which fixed the issue.
Fast forward about 2 years, and once again I am having connection issues. Sprint has since been purchased by Embarq. I Twitter my Embarq issues and am contacted by an Embarq employee with advice the same day. I also submit a support email and immediately they send me out a new router based solely on the email.
Now I have not gotten the new DSL modem, so I do not know the final results of my issue, but based upon the reaction and response of Embarq, I have to say Thank You!
Received my Chumby via UPS direct from China yesterday. Did you know that when they ship from China, it actually arrives in the US before it was shipped?
Anyway, I ordered the white version since that would look best in the bedroom where it will reside. Upon opening the Chumby packaging, the "white" is more of an off white or light tan color. But it still looks good next to the bed.
It is fun checking out all of the widgets and adding them or removing them from the Chumby. You can view what is on my Chumby here. Set up was easy including the networking. Putting in my network passphrase was a bit tough based upon how the Chumby virtual keyboard works. Other than that, it is simple and quick.
So far my only complaint is that there is no SmugMug widget. I am sure other widget wants will arise, but new ones are being added all the time. Looking through the Chumby forums, it looks like a pretty active community as well.
This morning, the Chumby woke me to a pleasant alarm and immediately I was viewing my Twitter feed and weather before crawling out of bed. I just love this thing.
I have been using Twitterific for a while on my Macbook, but have gotten sick and tired of the constant errors, how it loads, lack of tweet history, and the overall feel of the application.
So I went on a hunt. The first application I found was Snitter at http://snook.ca/snitter/. It is an Adobe Air application similar to the Pownce App. So you need to install Adobe Air first to run this application. I would encourage everyone to install Adobe Air because of the many good multi-platform applications being developed.
Upon installing and running Snitter, it is the familiar interface you get with these types of applications. Looking at the basic interface, there are a few things of note. First is the small link icon in the lower right of the text entry portion that you can click and make a webpage url smaller. Although Twitter itself has this ability, it makes me think I have to use this button in Snitter vs. relying on Twitter itself. Since I don't like "test" tweets, I am not testing it, but will find out one way or the other via my everyday use.
From the drop down menu, it gives you direct access to alot of choices including Following, Followers, Search, Profile, Options and help. So I selected Options. Here you can control Snitter's polling of Twitter, Whether you want to view the Public timeline and something called Search Tracking. The options under Search Tracking is time based and there is a Keyword search field. Not sure what this is yet.
You also have the ability to change the display of Snitter with a number of built in colors (I picked Terrific Gray), Always on Top and determine transparency %. You then have Desktop notification preferences and General preferences that includes sounds, emoticons, and "fortune cookie" tweets. Interesting.
Last it gives you the ability to use user-defined styles and edit user styles. This makes it quite interesting. You can view some of these at a flickr site. http://flickr.com/groups/snitter/
I did have a few issues. When I tried to select Always on Top, it would not let me. Nor would it let me change the transparency from 0%.
Snitter also loads at the bottom of the tweets you view about 20 replied tweets to you which leaves about 25 current tweets. I would rather have the last 45 tweets to view. When you hover over a tweet, 3 options pop up to make it easy to reply to that tweet, do a direct tweet or to mark as a favorite. I call the "favorite" button the Merlin Mann button.
So far overall, I do prefer Snitter to Twitterific. I wish I could get some of the user defined styles I have seen. Specifically Brian McNitt's Glass of Milk theme.
As soon as I posted on Twitter that I was giving Snitter a try, I received a tweet to try twhirl. http://www.twhirl.org/
Twhirl is also an Adobe Air application such as snitter. Upon launching the program it looks like you can have different accounts loaded in Twhirl, so those that pose as themselves and as their pet, or even as Darth Vader, can have one interface in which to log in and out from. Twhirl also allows your to change the interface color (I picked Into the Dark), as well as Twhirl allows you to select a language. Currently it only allows English, German, Italian & Spanish.
Wheres Snitter has the input section on top, twhirl has it on the bottom with a rollup screen to view timeline, replies, favorites, archive, directs, friends, followers, lookup and search. I am not sure what Archive does. I selected archive and it showed both my tweets and replies to my tweets for that day. There is also a shorten URL link as well as a filter button to filter the tweets you are viewing.
Within the configuration section there are 3 tabs, Appearance, Notifications and Connection. Under the Appearance tab it has options for opening this account when twhirl starts (why is that here?), always on top and hide when minimized, auto-hide tweet input area (like this), and prefix tweets with sender name. It has defaults for profile lookups, what opacity and when (such as when inactive), font styles and Retweet format. ON the notifications screen it has the sound, notification windows etc... And under the connection section is where you can set the number of requests sent per hour and fine tune your auto-refreshing.
When you hover over a tweet, it gives you 4 options - Reply, Direct, Favorite and something called Re-tweet.
It as wells shows the last 20-25 tweets in addition to about 20 reply tweets to you. I do not like this that much, but it looks to be in all applications.
One unique thing twhirl does, is when you do send a reply to someone, it shows both your icon as normal with a smaller icon of who you replied to in the lower right of the icon space.
Overall, an excellent app which I like better than Twitterific as well.
Bottom line, one of the things I dislike the most in Twitterific is not fixed in either of these applications - the ability to view more history instead of older tweets that people replied to me regarding. If I do not use any of these apps for longer than a day, I can not go back far enough to catch up. I must go to the Twitter website directly to do this.
I know it has been awhile since part 2 of this review, but I have not had as much time as I would like to devote to the Vudu. It seems, that when I ask my wife what movie she wants to watch since we can watch almost any movie with the Vudu, she answers by wanting to watch one of our Netflix DVD's. This, in fact, may be important as you will see later in this review.
I am still having the yellow network light issue, as well as my network connection is always full-on active sending and receiving packets. I have confirmed that this activity is due to Vudu and can only assume it is downloading and sharing movie content all the time.
I did have one experience over the last few days. After work one evening, I was searching through the Vudu catelog to find something to watch as I had an hour or so free. I found a Babylon 5 movie that I was not sure if I had ever seen and it was only $2.99 to rent, so I went for it. It initially said that the show would be ready to view in 15 minutes. Hmmm. I thought I could view immediately. After about 10 minutes it did switch to view mode so I began to watch the show. It was in widescreen and filled up my HDTV nicely, however I could see a lot of artifacts similar to standard definition tv - not as nice as DVD quality. After the intro of the movie, my wife came home and needed some help so I paused the movie with the intention to finish it later. Later ended up being after work the next night. I turned on the Vudu, went to "My Movies" and guess what? No movie. It expired. It seems that anything you rent expires within 24 hrs of starting the movie! Yes, Vudu gives you 30 days to watch it, but once you do, you better finish it!
Needless to say, I did not know about the 24hr rule and I am not happy. I look at the Netflix DVD sitting on the table in front of me and think about how I do not have any such issue with it. Although I do not have the ability to watch any netflix movie within 10 minutes unless I use their streaming service, I do have the flexibility to watch the DVD's I have rented when I want to watch and start & stop anytime without the DVD going bad. Even in the old days of renting movies from Blockbuster, you had 3-5 days with the movie to watch as much as you wanted when you wanted. Vudu needs to change the 24hr rule to 72-120 hrs. Otherwise I feel it looses alot of the value it could provide. Especially if it wants to compete with Netflix. Even On-Demand movies via cable or satellite can be rented and recorded with your DVR to watch when you want. Vudu is the most restrictive regarding the "life" of rented movies.
Part 4 will be the final part of this review. Stay tuned.
Since installing, I have had some interesting times. After about 24-48 hrs, the network light changed from green (connection is good enough for immediate movie watching) to yellow (connection is slow and unable to watch movies immediately). Therefore I started checking my network, running bandwidth tests, etc.. with no solution found. Everything seemed fine. I then looked on the Vudu forums and found that at anytime there is a connection issue (something else using up the bandwidth, a disconnect, Vudu servers down, etc...) that the light stays yellow until you tell the Vudu to "Clear bandwidth history". So I did this and it turned green again. So I can only assume that once there is a bandwidth crunch on your network, once it is no longer an issue, the Vudu does not recognize that it is back up and running by itself.
I have also noticed on my router, that the wireless led and internet led are flashing constantly with activity since installing the Vudu. Nothing else in my house is on and the Vudu is always actively sending and/or receiving packets 24hrs a day. I assume it is pulling in movies even though I have not purchased or rented any as of yet. It would be nice to somehow monitor that activity to be sure what is happening.
After another 48 - 72 hours, again the network light changed from green to yellow. Again I selected to "Clear bandwidth history" and it fixed it. This seems to be a bug unless I can find a logical reason for this activity.
Stay tuned for Part 3.
An interesting reading from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America VP. Here is the interesting portion of his article:
I am sure this will start an interesting conversation. Not sure if I would want this joker to represent me if I was a writer. Can't wait to see a response from Cory Doctorow.
Why, with two eastern time zone teams in finals, do they play on a Monday night starting at 9pm? Why do they cater to those on the west cost? The bigger audience is east, yet they make it hard for those in the east to watch. How Stupid.
At some point, the music industry will need to decide if they want to live in the twentieth century and die, or move on to the new century and embrace technology and all of the options is gives consumers of their products. Instead of telling me how and where to consume, they need to help me explore new and expanding ways to consume so I would want more, thus buy more. Instead, they hold tight to old business, sue their customers, and force people to become "pirates" in order to move the media they purchased from disk to computer to TV to iPod, etc...
These people are not pirates. They do not do this in order to create an exact copy in order to undersell the music industry and make money. These are just you and me who wants to use what we bought, were we bought it. Everything that the industry will try in order to lock down the media will be broken by those that do want to pirate and make money off copies. It does not stop the pirating. It only stops normal consumers from using what they own. Which in effect, often pushes them to obtain the pirated material in order to by-pass all of the digital right management restrictions. Other consumers do so as a boycott to try to force the industry. So the use of DRM promotes piracy. Not to mention a whole lot of ticked off customers.
Fortunately, some do understand this. There are a few websites in which you can purchase non-DRM music such as eMusic, Magnatune, Zunior, Bleep and others. If you know of any, let me know in the comments so I can post a complete list of sites in the future.
What I would like, and it may exist but I am unaware, is a site that combines the content of all of these non-DRM music stores in which I can search and get recommendations (Pandora like) on music. That would then link to the appropriate site to purchase.
Lately there has been some cracks in the record companies in the news regarding DRM. But I still wonder if we will still have to wait for this generation of media execs to retire and the new social generation to take over? I would rather it happen sooner than later, so I am praying the current leaders crack.
What do you think?
