full fathom five: Category Web

Appledrama: I want my Mac (don't care what I have to do)*

Michael Studman — Fri, 06 May 2005 23:00:00 -0400

So I decided to make the big leap into the Apple world. Actually, it turned out to be more like a sideways wobble.

Suffering from the Apple halo effect, I was quite happy to throw down £1100 for a nice new 12” Powerbook at the online Apple store. On their site, they state it’s ready to ship in 24hrs. With the 3-7 days of delivery time that should have meant I received my new baby at most a week after purchasing.

So I key in my credit card details and click submit faster than I’d accept a blow job from my gym instructor (Sammy, are you reading?) The first confirmation email I recieved gave a shipping date 48 business hours later (but I could have forgiven them that for just that).

And then came the 4 days of Applean silence.

After a rather shirty call to the Apple control centre and some fluffy appeasment by a call center operator with exactly the same information to hand as I had on my account screen at apple.com I was assured it would be ready to ship the next day.

Well, if “it” meant “disappointing news” and “ship” mean “send via SMTP” then exactly that happened – I received an email announcing that there had been “unprecedented demand” for my product, that the were “shipping as fast as possible” and were now likely to ship on or before the 11th April (9 days after I ordered it not including delivery time).

All of this I can forgive (I’m quite a forgiving kind of guy) except for one slight detail – Apple are still advising their potential customers by way of http://www.apple.com/uk/thestore that the 12” PowerBook Superdrive ships in 24hrs. This is patently not true so Apple are, by way of incompetence or intent, misrepresenting their shipping times. Since Apple haven’t yet taken my money I imagine none of this is illegal but as a Mac newbie this is clearly a very bad opening to what I expected would be a thrilling and empowering (if costly) relationship.

Anyway, once I get my Mac-fix I’m sure my mouthy opinions will quickly retreat back into Cupertino crack haze.

* Regarding the title, any self-respecting UK or Antipodean child of the eighties should remember Bananarama and their brilliantly plastic pop hit “I wan’t you back (don’t care what I have to do)”

Are RSS Feeds the New Tear-a-Page Desk Calendars of Our Time?

Michael Studman — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Tear-a-page desk calendars - I'm sure you've owned one - maybe a Dilbert or a Far-Side strip every day for 365 days a year? Except if you're anything like me you loose interest in them or don't integrate the daily ritual of the tear-a-page into your life and end up in May with 5 months of dead tree to toss out. I'm starting to feel like that with RSS feeds - when I miss a day or two or ten of checking a busy feed (typically through Bloglines) the task of scanning 300 or so blog entries becomes too much and I fall behind - way behind.

The Sydney Morning Herald just doesn't get RSS

Michael Studman — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

It seems like some dumbfuckards at the Sydney Morning Herald don’t like the hoi polloi syndicating their Really Simple Syndication feeds.

So I thought I’d add the SMH RSS feed to my bloglines.com account since it’s far more friendly than the HTML mess fairfax choose to vomit up every day. It seems that in doing so I may cause bloglines to violate SMH’s terms of use:

http://www.smh.com.au/rsschannels/
These channels are for personal use and only in news reader applications. You may not publish headlines from these channels to a web page.

And if you thought little old you could easily licence their headlines you’re out of luck:

http://news.f2.com.au/cgi-bin/SynApp.cgi?sy=smh&ac=initial
Please Note: Sites with less than 2,000 monthly unique users and intranets accessed by less than 100 employees will not be eligible.

A spot check at The Guardian shows a similar policy.

Of course, completely free RSS feeds directly challenge the existing syndication and advertising model of newspapers. And we know how much established players hate having their business models challenged. A unique group of 2000 monthly users (typically clustered around a topic) is a great source of targeted advertising as is a group of 100 employees or more. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, it’s just that this ugly love child of technological bandwagonism and business model protectionism ought not to bear the RSS acronym when it is so blatantly at odds with the spirit of that technology.

And while I’m on my soap box, SMH would you please turn that auto refresh off your front page. I’ll refresh when I feel like it!