There’s an interesting item you can find here about a blog that was started for a public agency in Orlando, Florida. The blog had a brief life until it was ordered shut down by the powers-that-be, apparently because they didn’t like the criticism they were getting. Imagine that; public officials that don’t like criticism.
There’s a piece in the Guardian (via Blog on the Run) that features an interview with a 107-year old veteran of WWI. You can read the whole thing here, but here’s an excerpt:
We got as far as their
second line and four Germans stood up. They didn’t get up to run away,
they got up to fight. One of them came running towards me. He couldn’t
have had any ammunition or he would have shot me, but he came towards
me with his bayonet pointing at my chest. I fired and hit him in the
shoulder. He dropped his rifle, but still came stumbling on. I can only
suppose that he wanted to kick our Lewis gun into the mud, which would
have made it useless. I had three live rounds left in my revolver and
could have killed him with the first. What should I do? I had seconds
to make my mind up. I gave him his life. I didn’t kill him. I shot him
above the ankle and above the knee and brought him down. I knew he
would be picked up, passed back to a PoW camp, and at the end of the
war he would rejoin his family.Six
weeks later, a countryman of his killed my three mates. If that had
happened before I met that German, I would have damn well killed him.
But we never fired to kill. My Number One, Bob, used to keep the gun
low and wound them in the legs – bring them down. Never fired to kill
them. As far as I know he never killed a German. I never did either.
Always kept it low…On September 21, the
night I was wounded, the battalion had been relieved at 10 o’clock and
we were going back over open ground to the support line. The shell that
got us was what we called a whizz-bang, which burst amongst us. The
force of it threw me to the floor, but I didn’t realise I’d been hit
for a few minutes. The burning hot metal knocks the pain out of you at
first but I soon saw blood, so I put a field dressing on it. Then the
pain started.I
didn’t know what had happened to the others at first, but I was told
later that I had lost three of my mates. That shell killed Numbers
Three, Four and Five. We were a little team together, and those men who
were carrying the ammunition were blown to pieces. I reacted very
badly. It was like losing a part of my life. It upset me more than
anything. We had only been together four months, but with hell going on
around us, it seemed like a lifetime.I’d
got this piece of shrapnel right in the groin. It was about two inches
long, half an inch thick, with a jagged edge. I was taken to a dressing
station and I lay there all that night and the next day, until the
evening. The wound had been cleaned and they had smeared it with
something to keep the lice away. When the doctor came to see me, he
could actually see the shrapnel."Would
you like me to take that out of your leg?" he asked, but added quickly,
"Before you answer ‘Yes’, there’s no anaesthetic in the camp. None
whatever. It’s been used on people more badly wounded than you are.
Yours is only a scratch." So I thought for a minute or two, and said,
"How long will you be?" He said, "A couple of minutes." So I said,
"Carry on." Four fellows grabbed me – one on each arm and one on each
leg – and I can feel that bloody knife even now, cutting out that
shrapnel. When he pulled it out, the doctor asked me if I wanted to
keep the shrapnel as a souvenir. Officer or not, I swore at him, "I’ve
had the bloody thing too long already. Throw it away!"…Last year I went back
to Ypres, where I met one of the last surviving German veterans of the
war, Charles Kuentz, who was 107. It was very emotional. We had both
been on the same battlefield at Pilckem Ridge. For a while I hadn’t
wanted to meet him, but I got a letter from him in Germany and he
seemed like a nice man and I decided I would meet him. He was a nice
man and we talked, then we both sat in silence, staring out at the
landscape. Both of us remembering the stench, the noise, the gas, the
mud crusted with blood, the cries of the fallen comrades. We had both
fought because we were told to. Sadly, he died a year after I met him.Why
should the British government call me up and take me out to a
battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t
speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table.Now
what is the sense in that? It’s just an argument between two
governments. Neither Charles nor I ever want any other young man ever
to go through what we did again, but still we send our lads to war. In
Iraq, our young men are being killed and told to kill.I
don’t think it is possible to truly explain the bond that is forged
between a soldier in the trenches and his fellow soldiers. There you
all are, no matter what your life in civvy street, covered in lice,
desperately hungry, eking out the small treats – the ounce of tobacco,
the biscuit. You relied on him and he on you, never really thinking
that it was just the same for the enemy. But it was. It was every bit
as bad.
There’s an item on PressThink written by the woman who writes/runs H20town, a blog for and about Watertown, MA. It’s an interesting look at the motivations and rewards for someone who’s not a professional journalist but provides hyperlocal coverage of her town’s business anyway. She brings up some great points about how people like herself aren’t necessarily motivated in the same way that industry "pros" are, and she also asks some good questions about the future of the news business.
The "Alcatraz" of this post’s title is my beautiful home in which my wife and I are imprisoned with our children. The "Turd Man" is yours truly. Why, you may ask, am I the "Turd Man?" I am the "Turd Man" because I have this amazing propensity for being the one person in the house who finds stopped up toilets. Yesterday alone I discovered two.
Is there anything grosser than walking into the bathroom to relieve yourself only to flip up the toilet lid and find a coagulated glop of turd and TP stuck at the bottom of a bowl of tea-colored water? It’s doubly horrific if you’re unprepared. You’re assaulted at a moment of vulnerability (i.e. you’re about to pee your pants) and now you have to hunt down the plunger which is never in the same bathroom with the turd-wadded toilet. Then you have to plunge it vigorously enough that you make a bit of a mess and then you have to clean up. Only then can you find personal relief. (I forgot to mention that in my house you are destined to find the blocked toilet at exactly the same time that all the other restrooms are being used by the houses other occupants, one of whom has created the turd bomb with which you are dealing).
This phenomenon has increased in frequency due to two recent developments in our home. First, my children have reached the age where they actually find the idea of touching a turd, even their own, quite gross. So they wad up half a roll of toilet paper in their hand each time they take a swipe at their offending bottom. Thus you have the prime ingredient for a turd-ball: a full roll of paper entwined with what can only be described as a cannonball of personal ballast. Second you have the recent installation of the new, government-mandated, eco-friendly toilets. You have to flush these things 26 times after you pee, so it’s no wonder that my kids are so adept at flooding them.
Still, how hard is it to check to make sure that your flush has succeeded? Apparently it’s too much for the other inmates of the Lowder asylum, so upon discovery of the second turd-ball I let loose with a stream of expletives that would have made the inmates at the original Alcatraz proud. My children, drawn to the disturbance like moths to a flame, came to the bathroom door to see if their father’s head would explode this time around. Upon seeing them I said something like "When you guys take a poop why can’t you make sure it actually goes down? I mean look at the size of this turd? Who’s turd is this?"
At this point they were trying desperately not to laugh. Their not-so-cherubic-anymore faces turned bright red and their turd-laying bodies shook as they tried to hold in the giggles, but when I let loose with the first emphasized "turd" they started losing it and when I asked who’s turd it was they just started laughing hysterically. Well, damnit, I couldn’t hold my anger and I started cracking up too. I guess a word like "turd" has that effect on people.
Anyway, as a result I’m implementing a new household fine for anyone who leaves a floater for Dad to discover. I figure if I have to be the "Turd Man" I may as well get paid for the anguish.
There’s a new Google Maps mashup called Gmaps Pedometer that allows you to draw the coordinates of your running route and then calculates the mileage. I did it for the run I do most often in my neighborhood and you can view it here.
As you can see it doesn’t take into account the curves in the road so it basically draws a straight line from one coordinate to another. I tried to make as many coordinate points as possible to compensate but it still comes up short of the true mileage (I know, because I’ve clocked it a couple of times in different cars). What should be a little over four miles shows up as 3.6 miles.
Of course you could say that I’ve been giving myself more credit than I’m due, but I refuse to believe that I’m in such bad shape that my average time is so bad that it takes me as long as it does to just go 3.6 miles…and no I’m not going to reveal my average time. Let’s just say slower than the hare and faster than the tortoise.
This nifty little tool is available from Herrington Catalog for a cool $14.95. It’s essentially a palm-sized adjustable wrench with no moving parts. In a true sign that I’m not the man that I once was I actually would consider this a great gift at Christmas. What happened to the old me who couldn’t drive a nail or care to learn how?
Thanks to bookofjoe for the tip.
TThis blog is created on and hosted by a service called Typepad, which is provided by a company called Six Apart. Over the past month or so the service has had some serious problems, particularly for some of the more popular bloggers that use it like MicroPersuasion. It hasn’t been as much of a problem for me because, well, about four people read this thing.
Bloggers being bloggers the Typepad customers have not suffered in silence. They’ve posted quite a bit about their problems with the service and Six Apart has done a good job of responding to their complaints. I figured Six Apart would work out their problems (mostly upgrading their hardware and software) and then the service would improve and that would be that.
That was until I received this email today from the CEO of Six Apart:
Dear Jon,
Two weeks ago I wrote you to explain the problems that some of our users experienced last month and what we were doing
to fix them. Today I want to tell you about the work we’ve done and our plans to compensate you for the inconvenience
and frustration we may have caused you.<!–
D(["mb","\r\n\r\n
The progress we\’ve made
\r\n\r\n
\r\nOver the last two weeks we have made great strides. As we recently posted on Mena\’s Corner, we have made a number of significant technical changes. \r\n\r\nWe have upgraded hardware throughout the service, we are about to finish installation of a new enterprise-grade data \r\n\r\nstorage device and the move to our new data center is nearly complete. All of this has led to improved performance.
\r\n\r\n
\r\nWe are not yet perfect. One incident on Tuesday November 8th between approximately 9:00 am and noon Pacific Time caused \r\n\r\nlimited access to the TypePad application. Even with that problem the performance of TypePad, as reported by our \r\n\r\ncustomers, our internal systems and the independent Keynote monitoring service, has improved greatly over the last 12 \r\n\r\ndays.
\r\n\r\n
\r\nWhile we are not done with our work, and there is always the chance of outages on any web service, we believe that the \r\n\r\nworst performance is behind us, and it is now time to focus on how we can make these problems up to you.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Compensation for this less than stellar performance
\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nWe are all aware that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times \r\n\r\nlast month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.
\r\n\r\n
\r\nWe also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. If you often use the service on weekdays \r\n\r\nbetween 7:00 am and 1:00 pm Pacific Time you may have experienced one or even many periods when you had problems with \r\n\r\nTypePad\’s speed and responsiveness. If you use the service at other times, you may not have experienced any problems at \r\n\r\nall. After wrestling with these facts and wanting to be fair to all our users we have decided that the only option is \r\n\r\nto “,1]
);
//–>The progress we’ve made
Over the last two weeks we have made great strides. As we recently posted on Mena’s Corner, we have made a number of significant technical changes.
We have upgraded hardware throughout the service, we are about to finish installation of a new enterprise-grade data
storage device and the move to our new data center is nearly complete. All of this has led to improved performance.We are not yet perfect. One incident on Tuesday November 8th between approximately 9:00 am and noon Pacific Time caused
limited access to the TypePad application. Even with that problem the performance of TypePad, as reported by our
customers, our internal systems and the independent Keynote monitoring service, has improved greatly over the last 12
days.While we are not done with our work, and there is always the chance of outages on any web service, we believe that the
worst performance is behind us, and it is now time to focus on how we can make these problems up to you.Compensation for this less than stellar performance
We are all aware that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times
last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.We also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. If you often use the service on weekdays
between 7:00 am and 1:00 pm Pacific Time you may have experienced one or even many periods when you had problems with
TypePad’s speed and responsiveness. If you use the service at other times, you may not have experienced any problems at
all. After wrestling with these facts and wanting to be fair to all our users we have decided that the only option is
to <!–
D(["mb","allow you to choose how Six Apart should compensate you.\r\n\r\n
\r\nBy default, you will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don\’t have to \r\n\r\ndo anything; we will just credit your account.
\r\n\r\n
\r\nThat said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the \r\n\r\nopportunity to choose more, or even less compensation. If you click the link below, you\’ll get a screen that offers you \r\n\r\nthe following choices:
\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n
\r\nWhile the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
\r\nGive me 15 free days of TypePad. \r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nThe performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
\r\nGive me 30 free days of TypePad.\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nThe performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
\r\nGive me 45 free days of TypePad.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nI really wasn\’t affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
\r\nThank you for the offer, but please don\’t credit my account.\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\n
Make your choice now.
\r\n
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nIf you want to elect for more or less compensation you have until Sunday, November 27th to go to the web address \r\n\r\nabove. By Monday December 5th we will apply either 15 free days or your stated compensation preference to your \r\n\r\naccount. If you are billed monthly, you will notice a gap in charges to your credit card for the number of days you \r\n\r\nselect. If you are billed annually, we will extend your billing cycle by the number of days you select.
\r\n\r\n\r\n
The future
\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nI must say that one of the most rewarding aspects of these last three frustrating weeks have been the emails I have \r\n\r\nreceived from many of you. A large number of the messages I received were very kind and supportive, and some of you \r\n\r\nwere understandably angry, but you all expressed that you just wanted the service you loved back. Rest assured that we \r\n\r\nare working night and day to do just that and more. “,1]
);
//–>allow you to choose how Six Apart should compensate you.By default, you will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don’t have to
do anything; we will just credit your account.That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the
opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation. If you click the link below, you’ll get a screen that offers you
the following choices:
While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
Give me 15 free days of TypePad.
The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
Give me 30 free days of TypePad.
The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
Give me 45 free days of TypePad.
I really wasn’t affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
Thank you for the offer, but please don’t credit my account.
Make Your Choice Now.
If you want to elect for more or less compensation you have until Sunday, November 27th to go to the web address
above. By Monday December 5th we will apply either 15 free days or your stated compensation preference to your
account. If you are billed monthly, you will notice a gap in charges to your credit card for the number of days you
select. If you are billed annually, we will extend your billing cycle by the number of days you select.The future
I must say that one of the most rewarding aspects of these last three frustrating weeks have been the emails I have
received from many of you. A large number of the messages I received were very kind and supportive, and some of you
were understandably angry, but you all expressed that you just wanted the service you loved back. Rest assured that we
are working night and day to do just that and more. <!–
D(["mb","\r\n\r\n
\r\nWe are committed to making the service faster and more reliable than it has ever been. With our new data center we now \r\n\r\nhave room to add the capacity we will need to continue our growth while improving performance and adding often requested \r\n\r\nfeatures.
\r\n\r\n
\r\nWe will soon roll out a new release of TypePad that will include more controls for comment and TrackBack spam as well \r\n\r\nmore performance improvements. By year end we will do even more to improve TypePad and add the features you have asked \r\n\r\nfor. We are excited to get back to building a great product for you.
\r\n\r\n
\r\nThank you for your patience over the past several weeks and I hope you accept our sincere apologies for the \r\n\r\ninconvenience we may have caused you.
\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nSincerely,
\r\n\r\n
\r\nBarak Berkowitz
\r\nChairman and CEO
\r\nSix Apart, Ltd.
\r\nbarakb@sixapart.com\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\nThe makers of of TypePad, LiveJournal and Movable Type.
\r\n\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\n
\r\nPS: As always, we appreciate and value your feedback. Feel free to reply to this message, file a support ticket in TypePad, or email me at \r\n\r\nBarakB@sixapart.com. We will continue to update status.sixapart.com to keep \r\n\r\ninformed of the status of the service and to provide advance notice of scheduled maintenance.
\r\n\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
“,1]
);
//–>We are committed to making the service faster and more reliable than it has ever been. With our new data center we now
have room to add the capacity we will need to continue our growth while improving performance and adding often requested
features.We will soon roll out a new release of TypePad that will include more controls for comment and TrackBack spam as well
more performance improvements. By year end we will do even more to improve TypePad and add the features you have asked
for. We are excited to get back to building a great product for you.Thank you for your patience over the past several weeks and I hope you accept our sincere apologies for the
inconvenience we may have caused you.Sincerely,
Barak Berkowitz
Chairman and CEO
Six Apart, Ltd.
barakb@sixapart.com
I don’t know that I’ve ever received a customer service message quite like it. Basically they’re saying that they know their service has been sub-par, they regret it and they also understand that some people have been affected more than others. Then they put it in the customers’ hands to decide how much they’ve been impacted and how much compensation they will take. Essentially it’s customer service with an honor code.
Well my vote is that it’s genius. Not only is it a good faith gesture to their customers it’s also a weird kind of customer survey. They’ll be able to gauge their customers’ satisfaction by how they react to the offer. It really is smart and it also feels genuine.
I’m impressed.
A site called Innocent English has a list of top 10 Bushisms. The title of this post is number nine on the list and was uttered by President Bush on November 5 of this year when he was shown a map of Brazil by the Brazilian president.
A full list of Bushisms can be found here. As well as one of the best screenshot’s I’ve seen in a while:
There’s an interview with Karl "Mailman" Malone, ex-NBA great where he talks about his efforts to help with Hurricane Katrina cleanup in Pascagoula, Mississippi. You can hear it here. Highlights:
If what he says is true then I think we really need to look at how our country engages volunteers during responses to disasters. I know there are a lot of things that the authorities need to consider, and I’m sure words like "liability" and "responsibility" are invoked a lot during conversations about how to coordinate relief, but there has to be a way that they can utilize all of the volunteers that show up to help in these situations.
This isn’t the first story of volunteer help being turned away during the Katrina response. Back in September several stories came out about people showing up to help in various ways only to be turned away by officials on the ground. Some people were turned away because the authorities couldn’t guarantee their safety. Well, why not give the volunteers a waiver to sign saying they understand the risks and then let them do their thing? And in the future why not make plans for the likelihood that these volunteers will appear and figure out how to integrate them into the process?
Add this to the "truth is stranger than fiction" category: an 18 year old high school senior has been elected mayor of Hillsdale, MI. (Full story here and here). Hillsdale has about 9,000 residents and is home to a small college.
Not only was Michael Sessions elected, but he was elected as a write-in and he beat an incumbent. Since he still lives at home I wonder how things will work with his parents? Will they call him Mr. Mayor? Will they make him pay rent? And how about school? What will his teachers call him?
I’m trying to remember what I was doing my senior year of high school, and though I don’t remember much I can say with certainty that it wasn’t very productive. In fact if it didn’t involve sports or girls I don’t think I was interested.
Speaking of girls just think about what this is going to do for Mayor Sessions’ social situation. Poor kid.
Befuddled 