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Archive for: April, 2008

Finally another song

Apr 18 2008 Published by Ben Chong under Music & Books

I’ve been playing the same old Green Day songs on the guitar for something like a year. So it was a relief, especially for those around me, when I finally learned another song.

The nice thing about playing power chords is that if you have the right tabs (“tablature” for you), it’s quite easy to pick up a new song. I found the tabs for All-American Rejects‘ Swing Swing on Ultimate Guitar and was off and power chording in less than 5.

Of course, the solo parts still need some work. Well, to be honest, a lot of work. But the basics are there.

Some songs are simply easier to play on the electric guitar, especially if you lack skills of any kind. My Chemical Romance is especially difficult because of the way their songs are mixed. Even their live concerts don’t sound like they do on their albums.

Green Day is easy. My favorite, Basket Case, is one song that looks like it was written for the newbie power chord player. The lyrics are fun too.

Maybe when I’m especially brave (or foolhardy), I’ll do a youtube video playing and singing Basket Case.

The pic below is from last year, when I was in the throes of my Green Day craze (and Finance class).

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The Craigslist Police

Apr 16 2008 Published by Ben Chong under The Daily Geek

Craigslist or Craig’s List is a free, online classified ads website that is eating the lunch of traditional printed classified advertising.

The first time visitor might be tempted to think that you can find anything on Craigslist. Just like on Ebay (famously illustrated by that scene in Men in Black 2). Nothing is further from the truth.

Craigslist is a pretty small outfit so employees themselves don’t do the policing.

Instead, the site depends on the “community” (i.e. users) to “flag” inappropriate ads.

To put it unkindly, the community police are like your nosy neighbor. You know, that guy down the street who is always peering through the window blinds and who calls city hall every time you park more than 18 inches away from the curb? I used to have a neighbor like that and he denounced everyone living in the street to the point where he had no more friends. During WWII, these people would have denounced young Jewish girls to the Nazis.

The good thing about Craigslist, is that they use a democratic system for removing posts. They don’t depend on complaints from just one single, cranky person. Instead, a post needs to be flagged many times before it can be removed. Which is nice. I wished the San Jose city hall would do that.

Obviously, to be removed, a post needs to violate posting guidelines. I had a post removed once and it was in violation of some very obscure rule which even the Craigslist community forum folks had trouble figuring out. Which goes to show that some people need to get a life that is outside of memorizing Craigslist posting guidelines…

Anyway, the reason for this post is that I found out the office hours of the community police.

Some Craigslist newbies tend to put up the same car ad multiple times, listing them as being sold in different cities/counties in the SF Bay Area. This violates one of the posting guidelines: thou shalt not put up multiple posts to sell the same item within X hours.

At 7am this morning, I found multiple violations which had not been removed. Wow!

At 7.45am, the posts had been removed.

My guess: folks wake up at 7+ in the morning, turn on their PCs, make coffee, skim Craigslist. And start flagging ads for removing.

So if you are a newbie advertising on Craigslist, put up your ads early in the morning. Preferably before 7am.

The problem is: the people you are targeting probably keep the same hours as the Craigslist community police…

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Utter stupidity and the Windows experience

Apr 14 2008 Published by Ben Chong under The Daily Geek

Last Friday, I left a Windows Vista notebook running over the weekend because I needed to download an ISO image.

For the non-techies, an ISO image is a copy of a CD that exists as a file your hard disk. You can use the ISO image to re-create a copy of the CD. ISO images tend to be very big. The one that I was downloading was more than 600MB in size.

This morning, when I came into the office, the notebook had been powered off.

What the….!?

I found out that Vista had downloaded an update and had automatically powered off the notebook after that update.

Needless to day, my download was 95% done when that happened.

Think of this: the download was for work. Now I have to restart the download and WAIT for it to complete. Think of how much money this is costing my company in terms of manhour costs.

Multiply that by the number of Vista users and you can imagine how much Vista is costing businesses in wasted time.

This automatic-shutdown-after-an-update feature of Windows is of a monumental stupidity.

I have had that happen to me while I was running virtual machines on another PC: the host operating system (which was XP) shut down by itself after an update. All this without first shutting down the guest operating systems that were running on the virtual machines. This is like powering off a PC without first shutting down the operating system. A big NO-NO.

I cannot imagine what must be going on in the heads of those people in Redmond when they came up with this scheme. Were the technical aspects of “doing it right” so daunting that they had to take such a shortcut?

For this is an engineering shortcut. There is no doubt about it.

Unfortunately, it just kills the user experience and wastes everyone else’s time and money.

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Do you still Yahoo? Part 2

Apr 13 2008 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

I had a conversation with a classmate yesterday and we got down to talking about Yahoo.

Apparently, there is now an effort to make the search bar more obvious on the Yahoo home page (URL: www.yahoo.com).

This really surprised me.

My question is: How many people are using a search engine’s home page to do a search on the Internet?

Most popular web browsers today have something called chrome search. This is the little text box next to the address text box. See picture below of the chrome search box on FireFox. This is on the top right corner of the web browser application window.

Most people would be, by now, accustomed to using the chrome search box to do Internet searches. All you need to do is to click in the search box, type in your search text and hit enter. You can do this while you are at any website. There is no more need to navigate to www.google.com or www.yahoo.com to do a web search.

So what are these Yahoo folks thinking?

Or do they think that people still go to www.yahoo.com explicitly to do a search?

I go to www.yahoo.com multiple times a day. But I do that because I like the news and informational articles. See below.

Do I go to the search box on the page and do a search after reading the articles? No. I use the chrome search feature.

Perhaps the Yahoo folks know something I don’t. Perhaps they have done some usability surveys.

The Intel anthropologist that came to our class a few weeks ago brought up a very good point: people don’t use technology in a vacuum. In this case, you don’t surf the Internet in a vacuum. You use a web browser that runs on an operating system on a physical computer. How you surf the Internet is affected by the web browser, the operating system and the computer. Who knows? Perhaps the kind of mouse you use can affect how you surf.

I am also doing a usability survey for some of the same issues. The survey is here. There is no cost to participate In fact, you get a chance to win an Apple 8GB iPod Nano of the color of your choice.