California just called Amazons bluff

California just called Amazons bluff.


In March, Amazon told California tax officials that "it will cut ties with thousands of California affiliates if the state passes pending legislation requiring the online retailer to collect sales tax from California customers," Internet Retailer reported.

I guess we’ll see what happens from here.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2083119/California-Affiliate-Tax-Becomes-Law?


Cheers,
Dean

A dogs life

lol it's a dogs life, Lou Lou hanging out on the deck in the shade.

End user report about NBN in Australia

Makes me a little sad to be living in New York today :(

http://www.raajmenon.com/2011/06/the-nbn-is-here-an-in-depth-review/

In case you are wondering about pricing
http://www.internode.on.net/residential/fibre_to_the_home/nbn_plans

So basically 100/40 with 200gb download $140 a month......hmmm time to move home maybe?

Cheers,
Dean

Melissa Ferrick - Rubin Mueseum of Art

Jodie and I got to see Melissa Ferrick play at Rubin Museum of Art on Friday.

You have to go and check out this museum and see someone do a gig in their music room, its amazing.

Basically the entire room is quiet, I don’t mean, sort of quiet, I mean you can have 100 people in there and it’s acoustically perfect, they’ve done something with the sloping roof and baffles to make it perfectly quiet, I mean in between songs I could hear the girl next to me breathing kind of quiet

Because the walls are all solid wood you can hear what the performer is playing without any amps etc at all, basically Melissa just played un-mic’d and with an acoustic guitar and although we were at least 10 rows back you could still hear her perfectly even when she was speaking to the room between sets with a normal speaking voice you could hear everything.

I'm not quite sure how they do it but it's an amazing experience to hear, even for someone who is as "natural" as Melissa Ferrick you still pick up on nuances, lol especially when she was in such an upbeat and funny mood.

Only problem is because they turn the air-conditioning off….gets a little warm with everyone after an hour or so.

Cheers,

Dean

BTW yes the normal gender bias was in the audience, jodie counted 7 guys in the room including myself. I dont get it, i think she's got an amazing talent so dont understand why she is seen as so lesbian niche. 

MsTags ....still suck regardless of what Microsoft brand evangelists tell you

MsTag evangalists for Microsoft are hitting LinkedIn 2d code groups trying to convince people over to the dark side....

My response;
Nick, if Microsoft really wanted to add value they could have deployed a backend analytics solutions with QR codes, (better still built the management platform into an IIS module.......) but no they chose to be painful and deploy proprietary.


MsTags offer NO value to end users 'except' they can be 1/4 the size (roughly) based on the colour shifts.

The url shortening etc offers no advantages not available from any other vendor, and when offset with the lack of deployed readers and proprietary code generation....is painfully a waste of space and just confusing the market.

Microsoft are never benevolent and learnt nothing from Denso.....i appreciate you have a job to do but consultants also in the space also have a job to do in advising their clients to stay away from MsTags.


I cant advise people stay away enough from this disaster enough.
Cheers,
Dean

dumb twitter/facebook users

lol someone worked out you can send twitter posts that steal your username/password by sending you to a phishing domain (and then sending out 150 dm's from your account).

I've received 4 of them in the last 5 mins saying "I saw this funny video of you at http://XYZ.com/1234 etc"

Come on folks it's 2011....surely there aren't the many idiots left in the world for these basic spam traps??

You aren't getting to see anyones boobs and no one is sending you $12.5m dollars (not unless weiner is in your twitter friend list anyway...).
 
Lets step up our game folks.

ICANN suffix announcement

I read the ICANN announcement today and thought hmmm I wonder if there is a possibility of buying any names then selling subsites


Eg http://deancollins.ninja/  or http://deancollins.rockstar/  and other stupid things like that (eg at $200k setup you’d need some big throw around money to see if it would work) however basically thought, interesting but nothing to worry about.

Then while reading engadget today came across this post

moonshadow101 19 hours ago
There really should be a 3-4 character limit. ".programming" is stupid as hell.

Ahhh crap, I never even thought about this. How many apps out there are going to break because of 15 digit domain suffixes in the signup page or other related issues.

Has anyone looked at their own code to see what is going to break once this is introduced and people start using email@DeanCollins.genius


Cheers,
Dean

We've got it easy regardless of what the Unabomber thinks

i was reading this article and thought how easy we really have it.


http://gizmodo.com/5813329/what-happened-to-united-airlines-last-night
The scene was apparently bedlam at airports in cities across the country last night as United Airlines' computer system totally failed, leaving thousands of flyers stranded for hours. So what the hell happened?


Someone commented;
NorthernRoamer: It's just that we seem to have walked through a door that locked behind us.


My comment back
.... we are in a room with benefits you could never have benefited from if you didn't go through that door in the first place.
People say we are too dependant and shouldn't have move from self supported agrarian lifestyles....bullshit who are you kidding, do you know how hard it was back then.
So what 10,000 people or so couldn't fly on Friday night....big deal, try crossing the country on wagon where it would take 3 months and 30% would die on the way....sleep toasty my friends.
 
So think about that as you sip your iced triple latte machicino this morning :)

Want to know why America is going to get all fucked up

Want to know why America is going to get all fucked up and join England/Spain as "has been" world super powers.....

$858.60 for routine bloodwork associated with an annual physical....what a joke.

Cheers,
Dean

Casey Anthony will be found not guilty on murder charges

WOW!!! Stunning news announced today, basically prosecution is on their last 2 witnesses and will wrap up tomorrow.
I cant believe the prosecution doesnt have anything more...??? I've been watching every minute of the raw video footage live at http://www.livecourtchat.com/  and been expecting the smoking gun any day now....basically they haven't proved hardly anything apart from lying to the police.

I'm calling it now, Casey Anthony will be found guilty of obstruction (eg lying to the police) and Child endangerment etc but will be found NOT GUILTY of MURDER.

Ajax in Iraq

The Flux Theatre Ensemble is one of the things in New York that make me never want to leave.

In a shitty lower east side building in what can best be described as a big black empty room with minimal props and home made stadium seating with really uncomfortable chairs they put on some of the best theatre I've ever seen (I saw Dog Act here back in Feb 2011).

Last night i got to see Ajax in Iraq, telling two stories in parallel, soldiers in Iraq against the battles of the ancient Greek gods.

I do think the play could be edited down by about 15 minutes though....or find a theatre with real seats.... but for 2 hours you hear nothing and see nothing but the raw emotion of acting sans almost all props, it put most tv i watched this week to shame and for $12 was a bargain.

It would be easy to say something snappy about the depiction that war is always SNAFU but why dont you go and see it and post your own thoughts. Last night had less than 25-30 people in the audience (for a cast of 10+). It's crazy people pay $100-200 a ticket for broadway when off off broadway is where the real acting is sometimes at.


Cheers,
Dean

Free versus indirect QR codes

Article written by the CEO of Neomedia one of the 2 biggest QR vendors in the USA

"It means providing an appropriate level of service and delivering the ROI that both brands and agencies have come to expect from their mobile bar code marketing initiatives.

For mobile bar codes, it is a decision between whether to leverage free bar code services or fee-based barcode services in a brand owner’s deployments. What does this mean? And why should you care?" http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/10152.html  

All i can say is wow i hope someone is given the opportunity to write an alternative view in response to correct the many "slightly inconsistent" points made by this article.


Some are correct but some are just plain old false.

As you know i dont have a "dog in this fight" and no commercial reason to disagree but a statement like "QR code size may also be physically larger in direct implementations" is just plain misleading.

Everyone knows it's related to the number of characters in a URL eg http://ACME.com/XYZ123 is just as good as http://NEOM.com/XYZ123

It's crap like this that gives vendors a bad name.

More QR stuff located at www.Cognation.net/QR


Cheers,
Dean

hey Walt Mossberg, you suck :)

http://www.cultofmac.com/walt-mossberg-tells-adobe-ceo-to-his-face-that-flash-sucks-on-android/98231#more-98231




So Walt Mossberg is upset he cant watch cat videos on YouTube from his iPhone
Mossberg: What’s the deal between you and Steve Jobs? He was here last year, and he had a chance to expand on what he had previously written about [Flash], and summarized, he said “Well, I think our duty is to pick technologies in the ascendancy. We feel like Flash is not on the ascendancy, we think HTML 5 is, so that’s who we decided to go with for iOS Devices. What’s your response to that?


My response would be, hey Walt, you suck-get a real phone :)

The funniest part of reading this article is I’ve never receive so many email support requests to http://www.livefanchat.com/ than in the last 2 weeks.


We setup this side project on a whim for the #CaseyAnthony trial on http://www.livecourtchat.com/

Basically people are addicted to watching this thing (about 2000 visitors today alone with 12m 20sec averages) – the only problem is because it’s flash YouTube video we are streaming people are asking us how to view the trial on their iphones, on average about 5 comments a day for the last 8 days in the chat or via the support email address.

Ascendancy my butt, people want to watch cat videos now.

Cheers,
Dean

Confessions of a QR Code Virgin

I read this technorati article today Confessions of a QR Code Virgin
OMG are they really paying WordsOnTheFly to write stuff like this? my comments will probably get deleted so i've posted them below.


Mindfull of your instructions to commenting "Personal attacks are NOT allowed" all i can say is "ugh" is this really the best you can do.....?

What personal information are you worried about giving up?

Even the most cursory research would tell you that the only information available to the QR code provider is similar to that from your desktop browser eg "ip address"/handset type/browser type etc.

Unless you are sill enough to enter your social security number of your mobile phone number into a form (after reading the article...highly possible), my point is i think you should turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall just to be safe i'm not stealing your identity just by posting this comment.

To anyone who took the time to read this authors article I apologise on his behalf. If you invest 60 seconds reading www.Cognation.net/QR you'll probably learn more than reading this article.


As for the writer..."Personal attacks are NOT allowed" ....I tried.


Cheers,
Dean

Men in Black 3

They are filming Men In Black 3 around the corner from our house in Brooklyn Heights tonight.

No sightings of Will Smiths two story mega-trailer yet though.