I wish websites (like #NYTimes) would stop doing this sort of hijacking-style of ad targeting iThingy users.

I wish websites (like #NYTimes) would stop doing this sort of hijacking-style of ad targeting iThingy users., a photo by thepetecom on Flickr.

I know this is seriously a #firstworldproblem, but this is a serious time-waster and makes me not want to click on NYTimes links. This tactic harms you more than helps you, guys. Seriously.

Is Netflix's plan to divide their service/brand in two just a clever way to discourage DVD use?

From thepete.tumblr.com:

"Netflix doesn’t want you to remember “Qwikster”, it wants you to forget DVDs."

-theMattSmith

You could be on to something. However, I don’t think Netflix is as clever as you seem to think they are. It’s muuuuch cheaper to just start ignoring their DVD service and focus on their streaming.  Trademarking a new brand, separating out their DVD service/website from their current website/service and confusing the crap out of their customers and potential customers is not cost-effective at all and is also a huge risk.  If this theory is correct, and they are trying to get us to forget about DVDs, I think Netflix is still damned because they are spending way too much money on this whole thing and pissing a lot of people off in the process.

If it were me, I’d just:

1) rename the two services to “Netflix DVD” and “Netflix Now” and give them both their own department.

2) slowly drop resources/staff/titles from the Netflix DVD service and increase resources/staff/titles to the Netflix Now service.  This would happen over the span of years.  This would minimize the “drama” aspect of these changes (along with any negative interpretation to these choices) and ease customers and potential customers into the idea of only streaming.

3) keep prices as stable as possible. In today’s economy changing costs (whether up or down) can be confusing and difficult for a growing number of people who are being forced to consider where they spend every penny.

These days it’s hard for me to accept that stupid-looking choices are anything but stupid choices.  There’s a distinct lack of creative, imaginative and legitimately clever thinking in the world today and I just can’t give people who make these stupid-looking choices the benefit of the doubt since there is no evidence of these choices being anything but stupid.

Just my ¥2, but I just don’t have much faith in these guys or corporate types in general.

The real mistake Netflix is making here is that they look like idiots.  If there was a reasonably priced, reasonably stocked alternative to Netflix I would switch to them right now, rather than waste my time with a company that doesn't seem to know what it's doing.  So, even if there is some sort of cleverness behind their apparent lunacy, along the way, they may hemorrhage so many customers and investors as to damage their business beyond repair.  Why stand by a company that is behaving in this way?

Again, just my ¥2, but I think messing with how the public perceives you as a company is a huge mistake.

Google to Retire Blogger/Picasa Brands in Google+ Push -- Ben Parr

Link: EXCLUSIVE: Google to Retire Blogger/Picasa Brands in Google+ Push -- Ben Parr

From stoweboyd:

Ben Parr reports — exclusively — that Picasa and Blogger will become cogs in the Google+ refactoring of Google’s social tools.

As I recently wrote, ” Google+ is currently a browser based system, but it is relatively easy to imagine the core functionality implemented in a next generation Android, and all the tools — like Circles and Hangouts — accessed as complementary apps, along with dozens or hundreds of others built by Google or a growing ecology of developers.”

And it seems that Google is moving to quickly ‘plusify’ systems that were standalone apps until the present day.

Hmmm, wish they would absorb YouTube and ditch that stupid name while they’re at it (“YouTube”—REALLY?).  Of course, sucking Blogger into g+ seems to be making it a serious competitor with… Tumblr.

Ruh-roh!

;)

A good reason to stop using Facebook

From whitneymcn:

“Jason Calcanis sent an email to Facebook early this morning, because just after the new Facebook Groups feature went live, someone added both him and Michael Arrington to the newly-formed NAMBLA group. (NAMBLA, for those of you who don’t watch enough South Park, is the ” North American Man/Boy Love Association”.) So not only were they both enrolled by someone else into a group they don’t want to be a member of (we assume) but now they’re receiving email notifications for everything that happens in that group. Thankfully, your group memberships are not shown on your profile page, so it’s not as if they are suddenly publicly broadcast as NAMBLA members to anyone else…outside of existing NAMBLA members.”

—

Hey Facebook, Please Make Group Email Notifications Opt-In (RWW)

Gee, who could have imagined that allowing your friends to make this kind of statement about you this might create problems? 

I need to write a longer post on this, there are some really interesting social dynamics in play here.

Another wonderful example of how Facebook is lame. How many more screw-ups like this will people put up with before we get a fricken clue and stop using that site?  I’ve already limited my activity over there—I think I’m going to have to do more limiting. Like deleting my content entirely and blocking as many apps/ads/etc as I can.  I just don’t like a site that keeps effing up like this.  These are obvious problems that should have been worked out before going live with them and it’s not like any regular users of FB are freaking out about these features—no one was screaming “OMG I NEED GROUPZ!”

I’m so sick of this constant drive in the tech sector to improveimproveimproveimprove.  It’s like TV commercials for McDonald’s.  Really? Not enough people eat your food?  Likewise with Facebook: really? A larger number of registered members than the population of many countries not enough for you?

This level of excess is just absurd.

Facebook ?????Holy DNS Failure! Does this mean they're getting nailed by a DDOS attack?

If Facebook can get taken down… NObody is safe!! O_O

There are "Microblogging Wars" now? Aren't we being a *little* overdramatic? Also: here's how Tumblr sucks.

“Microblogging wars?” Really?

From the usually well-balanced underpaidgenius:

Microblogging Wars Escalate: Posterous Claims Tumblr Blocks Its Autopost Feature

soupsoup:

I think this is a smart move by Tumblr.

Not as a strategic way to make Posterous less useful, but because I don’t want content auto-posted from one social network to another anywhere, be it Posterous, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Auto-posting, link dumping, are the worst things to ever happen to social media besides social media “experts”

Since Stowe hasn’t added any commentary here, I assume he agrees with the soupsoup post.  This doesn’t make him unbalanced, but usually he throws a little something in to let UnderpaidGenius readers know what he thinks.  Since he didn’t assume is all we can do. In that case, then I disagree with both of them. The worse thing to happen to social media is the idea that people can decide what’s right for everyone—even *saying* that a particular use of a particular site or function should not be allowed is a downright douchey thing to do. Who are you to decide what things are used for? Who cares? Don’t like how someone uses something? Don’t follow them or don’t use the site.  One site being deliberately jerky to another, regardless of the reason, has one effect that matters—the users being inconvenienced.

But no, no, it’s much more important that these “Microblogging wars” continue, for they are just wars!  WAIT—no they’re not.  Posterous and Tumblr are both pretty good at being douchey.

In fact, from my first experience with Tumblr I felt that Tumblr cornered the market on uber-controlling, doucheyness in that it has a few odd limitations that almost turned me off the site, entirely.  For starters, Tumblr tells you exactly how to post what you post.  Want to post a picture?  No title allowed. The same goes for video and audio posts, too—Sure, you can add a title to a text post, but it is “optional,” which always feels like discouragement, to me.  When I email a picture directly to Tumblr, it only accepts the email’s subject as the caption (rather than the title, unlike Posterous, which logically does this) and Tumblr ignores any *actual* caption you include in the body of the email (also, *unlike* Posterous).

Then, when you do post a pic, depending on how you do it, it may show up in full-size *only* on your blog and as a thumbnail to any Tumblr users who follow you or possibly, to them, not at all.  See, if you only visit a Tumblr-user’s main page, you see everything they want you to see—which is fine. But if you take advantage of Tumblr’s largely AWESOME Twitter-style dashboard (which displays your stream of Tumblr blogs you’re following), all bets are off.  Tumblr will either display a seriously tiny thumbnail of your image or not at all, putting a tiny rectangle icon in its place. I don’t care why Tumblr does this—it is intensely frustrating.

Tumblr does a few things really well, however.  The previously-mentioned Twitter-style dashboard is completely addictive.  I *love* it and it’s really why I continue to use Tumblr.  It’s the single easiest way to keep up with blogs you care about.  I wish every other blog service would rip it off because every time I come across a blog I love that isn’t on Tumblr I get frustrated because nobody makes it easier to follow you than Tumblr.  In fact, I just walk away from blogs on other services for that reason :(

Tumblr also makes it SUPER easy to run multiple blogs.  I run over a dozen of them.  Their theme system is straightforward and incredibly simple to use or customize.  Their tags work incredibly well (even as categories) and you can provide RSS feeds for each tag if you want to.  I love that Tumblr will allow you to import feeds. However, like regular posting, there are rigid guidelines the imports must fit into—which I don’t like.

One other thing I like about Tumblr is that they let you include Google Adsense in your theme.  Letting you make a few pennies off of your own content—imagine that!  This was my main motivation for moving all of my online blogging to Tumblr and to put up with their other limitations, in the process.  It’s been worth it, but I wish they’d improve—loosen up their absurd posting rules—I was using Posterous to crosspost to Tumblr just because it was more flexible than directly posting to Tumblr—but since Tumblr doesn’t allow for crossposted images to display to Tumbr-users in their streams, I’ve stopped doing this.  So if Tumblr could allow for images to be displayed, that’d be great, too.

See, I love Posterous for it’s flexibility of posting but hate it for everything else.  It’s themes are hard to use, it’s interface is cumbersome and clunky, and their recent “Tumblr is for high school kids” post made them look like a bunch of dickweeds and inspired me to block anyone from seeing my content on their site.  In fact, it looks like they’ve just been targeting every blog site known to man and talking about how Posterous is better—it’s like they’re really desperate or something.

But of all the blogging services I’ve tried out, Posterous does have the most potential.  It is truly mobile and is as easy to post to as sending an email.  Of course, anything beyond that and it’s a horrible pain in the ass.

Imagine combining the best of both worlds from Tumblr and from Posterous! It would be the perfect blog host!!  Uber-flexible posting and incredible back-end and following ability!  It would be heaven!

"Google Instant" huh? I tried it, doesn't seem too impressive to me...

What? Nuns are hot.

That aside, there’s nothing wrong with my connection speed for everything else I do on the ‘net (and I do a lot).

Honestly, though, I’ve never understood the whole “search instantly” thing.  Macs have done it for years and I’ve always found it annoying.  When I start typing, I’m still deciding on the best words to use for my search. And what if a typo results in something offensive instantly showing up in the search results?

Sometimes the word “advances” really needs the quotes around it.

Come on, Google—just get us to Mars and stop wasting our time with this crap.

Can we please BAN the use of relative dates? They seem entirely use-free to me.

You know what I mean, right?  It’s when, instead of a date/time-stamp on a blog post or article it says “3 hours ago” or worse “3 months ago”.  It’s useless in so many ways and I’ve never heard an argument for the use of relative dates.

“They’re perfect for people who don’t really care when something was posted!”

“Relative dating, for when specificity doesn’t matter!”

“Who wants a cold, in humanly precise date and time on an Internet post? Give me warm, human vagueness any day!”

I’ve tried really hard to come up with a good reason for relative dating to be better than absolute dating.

Isn’t it ridiculous that we even have a phrase for that?  “Absolute dating.”  Funny how that just refers to “putting the actual date down.”

Imagine if we tried to use relative dating on formal documents.  You sign your tax return “4 months ago.”

I guess you can avoid being late that way.

The conscience of Google & how to opt out of Stalkery Ads

Link: The conscience of Google & how to opt out of Stalkery Ads

Apparently Sergey Brin had some issues with Googles move towards ad-targeting that relies on “stalkery” to the point where there was a shouting match in front of subordinates. Also: find out how you…

The End of Google Wave, I totally called it...

So, on August 3, 2010, I tweeted the following:



“Does anybody remember this thing called “Google Wave” or how we were so excited about it?” 1:25 PM Aug 3rd


The next day, on August 4, 2010, the Google Blog announced:

…Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product…

I know, I know, it was a little obvious that Wave was failing, I just thought it was cool that I happened to mention it the day before it was officially discontinued.

I GOT MY FINGER ON THE PULSE OF THE INTERNETS!!  … or something like that…

What’s funny is that I now find myself thinking of gMail more like I thought of Wave, the few times I used it, anyway.  I make sure the subject is relevant to what I’m emailing about and I find myself sticking to one topic in the email to make the entire “gMail conversation” a single unit.

…Interesting…

OH yeah—anybody wanna take bets on when we’ll see Buzz buzz-off?

Stowe Boyd predicts the future: Social iTunes in the Cloud

Link: Stowe Boyd predicts the future: Social iTunes in the Cloud

Stowe Boyd suggests a possible reason for why Apple hasn’t done anything with LaLa yet: a whole new social network needs to be built in the cloud for media sharing—he calls it The Orchard. I think…

100 Million Facebook Users Data Collated into One Giant-Ass File

The harvest has begun.. Ron Bowes is from Canada, and he is a security consultant. Just this week, Mr. Bowes changed the world as we know it, perhaps ever damning the word “privacy” into the trash heap of history. And how did he do it? Using the very data that people knowingly and happily gave up themselves on Facebook..

Bowes collated 100 million Facebook users’ names, addresses, and unique ID numberson a single 2.8 gig file and posted it online..Facebook also enabled this grand release of private data.

via coalspeaker.com

I would quit Facebook in a New York second if only I could convince my family and friends who treat the site like a religion to quit, too.

Maybe I should bite the bullet and set the good example.  The problem with that is simple: FB as lame as it is, is great for networking.  Plus, it saves me money on business cards—I barely give them out. I just tell them the socnets I’m on and they find me if they want to.

I just wish Zuckerberg wasn’t such a douche with our stuff.

Does the Internet rob us of the "joy of the unexpected" or does it provide it?

website666:

whitneymcn:

“There is another point to be made about the broad effects of iPads and Kindles on our culture. The clues people give about themselves used to be displayed proudly, or not, on the shelves of their homes and apartments. At dinner or a cocktail party, just a few moments in front of a bookshelf or record or CD rack could provide the kind of insight about your host it might otherwise take years to develop. In a future world without bookshelves, we will have many of these clues all neatly contained in files in your pocket or backpack. But, a phone or kindle is private, and access to it is more intimate than a moment in front of a rack of CDs.”

—

Marc Ruxin: The Death of Touch and the Lost Joy of the Unexpected

While I, too, have some concerns about trading physical artifacts for digital, I totally agree with the comment below…but man, I think there’s a full blog post in response to this. Assuming there’s time today…

(via tedr)(via newspeedwayboogie)(via mikehudack)

This assumes that we still meet people by going to their apts. I’ve met several hundred fine folks right here online, and know their pets’ names, what kind of music/books/art/pop culture/food they like, who many of their friends are, and often even more intimate and revealing details of their lives that you would never stumble across staring at someone’s bookshelf. And if they’re local and want to grab some food or a cocktail, I feel as if I already know enough to carry on a decent conversation with them in a noisy restaurant.

The phrase “the broad effects of ______” is always a red flag for me. I would argue the opposite, honestly. Tumblr has brought the “joy of the unexpected” back into my life.

(via aatombomb)

(via mikehudack)

I agree with aatombomb when he mentions what is a red flag to him.  Trying to define what the Internet (or any component part of it) is or does for everyone is absurd.  You might as well try to define how everyone uses a hammer.  Sure, the obvious use is for nails, but you can also pull nails out, then there are other types of hammering that can be done with it—from railroad spikes to tent stakes, to even, in a pinch, a home invader’s head.  The point is, Kindles and iPads are just doing what was already being done by the computer—removing stuff from our shelves.  However, blogs (not just Tumblr blogs), Twitter and other socnets replace our shelves.  Nowadays, if you read a book that you are proud to have read, you do something far more effective than displaying it on your shelf for your apartment-visitors to see—you blog/tweet/facebook it on the web for everyone to see it.  People will Google the book and stumble across your content. I know because I made a friend who found me after he Googled for an anime series I reviewed on my blog—we’ve been friends ever since.

A red flag for me is when people knee-jerk a negative reaction to some new thing that comes along.  Wasn’t it Jack Valenti that said the VCR was to Hollywood like the Boston Strangler was to a young woman?

We need to stop being so afraid of the future.

What bad could come from technology???

I mean, aside from fueling wars fought over resources to build the technology and the exploitation of cheap Asian labor, stupid long lines for new gadgets and lots of hair-pulling when the gadget doesn’t work the way Apple the company who made it says it would?

HTTPS Everywhere

Link: HTTPS Everywhere

thedaytheytriedtokillme:

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites.

I’m trying this add-on with Firefox on my Ubuntu netty. We’ll see how it goes!

"Zuckerberg needs your data..."

“Zuckerberg needs your data. His business is built upon it. The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook’s real customers are advertisers. You, as a Facebook member, are useful only because you can be packaged up and sold to advertisers. The more information Facebook can get from you, the more you are worth. In response, a FB spokesman told me: “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Lyons, on Facebook (via newsweek)

But isn’t this the same with any ad-supported service? MySpace? GMail? Etc?  Hell, even advertising on the old TV is built this way. It’s our behavior that is the product.

All that said, I wonder if most people understand this dynamic.  No one is getting “free hosting services” for their pics and status updates—they are getting hosting services in exchange for their pics and status updates.  Maybe not the literal content, but the behavior patterns behind the content is sold to advertisers.  How else are these sites supposed to remain “free”?

Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing

Link: Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing

newsweek:

soupsoup:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

Call it Zuckerberg’s Law.

We think sharing is great! Except maybe not so much when you’re being pushed to do it by large corporations whose business model depends on convincing you to not value that information you’re sharing as much as advertisers do.

Yeah, for me this has always been about control, not privacy.  I’ll share what *I* want and keep private what *I* choose.  Thanks.  Facebook has just proven that we need to question what we post to any network.  Like anyone else’s bottom line is different from Zuckerdouche’s?

More Facebook "Fun" making it tempting to Stop Facebooking... (not that I was that active, anyway)

Facebook Glitch Brings New Privacy Worries

By JENNA WORTHAM
Published: May 5, 2010

…

On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.

Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether.

Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.

“Facebook has become more scary than fun,” said Jeffrey P. Ament, 35, a government contractor who lives in Rockville, Md.

Mr. Ament said he was so fed up with Facebook that he deleted his account this week after three years of using the service. “Every week there seems to be a new privacy update or change, and I just can’t keep up with it.”

via NYTimes.com

This has been my attitude toward Facebook for, what feels like, years now. These latest problems, a Gizmodo rant I posted about the other day, and, quite honestly, the stories of others who share the same “can’t keep up” feelings as myself, are making me consider leaving Facebook. Or at the very least, emptying all of my content from them and no longer posting there. Thanks to Rohit Khare’s post over at TechCrunch today, I’ve learned that there are a few ways to leave Facebook.

I’m sick of this sheeple mentality from other folks who just roll with the tide and put up with anything just because something is convenient. Facebook is NOT convenient when every few months they move everything and change the ToS. Speaking of Facebook’s Terms of Service, did you know Facebook is trying to make violations of it’s ToS a crime??

I think I smell this week’s EFFYOU.

Online Artwork Takes on the Internet as an Accurate Information Aggregator

Click the pic to try it yourself!

The above image was created after entering my name into an online art piece called "Personas." After hitting "return" on my keyboard, a series of interesting things happen. It's hard to really express what happens--nothing mind blowing, but you watch as the above image is created based on data culled from the Internet. The piece was created by Aaron Zinman and the idea is to point out both how capable and how flawed the Internet is in determining who we are as people. Here's what I found on the official project page for Personas:

WHAT IS PERSONAS?
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

PHILOSOPHY
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Pretty neat idea considering just how much faith is put in this giant network we call the Web. Seems we humans are still necessary pieces of the information-gathering puzzle. Check it out for yourself and see what you learn about the Internet or about yourself (or folks with your name):

http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

My Experience with Blippr.com: BLEH

OK, my buddy @Krownz recommended this site Blippr.com after I Tweeted to @Netflix about wishing I could easily Tweet a link to a movie I saw through Netflix. In theory, Blippr.com is a site that allows you to share your opinions on various types of media easily. Well, "easy" is subjective, apparently. Either that, or "easy" is defined by the folks behind Blippr.com as "without any control by you."

But rather than get too detailed, I'll just paste the text I entered into the "other comments" field on Blippr.com's "delete your account" page. Check it out:

I'm VERY upset that by connecting this account to my Netflix account, your site assumes I want to import everything on my queue, both present and past, and (I assume) share it with everyone. NOT COOL. All I wanted was a service that would allow me to share my feelings on certain media with friends on Twitter. I don't need to alert the world that I'm watching porn or pilates or anything else UNLESS I WANT TO.

What's extra nice is that even after I disconnect Netflix from my Blippr account, the content that was imported DOESN'T GO AWAY, which means, I must delete my Blippr.com profile. Good one, guys!

Plus your interface is confusing--I couldn't work out where the hell my "blips" are listed and don't know how I came to see "blips" from some dude called "JC" who apparently really liked "Funny People" which happens to be a film I NEVER WANT TO SEE EVER.

My experience on Blippr has been overwhelmingly negative and I will be honest if anyone ever asks me about your site.

Also: When I "blip" something, I think of Blip.FM. You guys should really come up with another made-up verb to describe the act of posting something on this site.

All right... I'm done.

Gah. I don't blame @krownz for this, since he's perfectly happy with the site. I'm a Twitter addict, though. I like simple, basic, easy, low-maintenance. Ideally, I'd love to see Netflix add a simple "Tweet this" link or a "share this" button that allows users to post a link to a DVD on Netflix in their Twitterstream, or Facebook profile or where ever else. I don't need a whole third-party site for managing my media recommendations since I really don't recommend stuff that much and when I do, I post on my old fashioned blog.

Ah well.

Google Voice Transcription Service Cool, but not quite there yet.

So, I was a GrandCentral.com member since way back. In case you weren't aware, GrandCentral was a service that gave you a free phone number that aim at all of your phones--work, home, mobile, Skype, etc. So, all of your contacts call one number and voila, which ever phone you're at will ring. Bestest service EVER!

Shortly after I signed up with them, they were bought by Google. After years of no improvements whatsoever, GrandCentral was finally folded into Google and were then reborn as "Google Voice." Very exciting! They even had new features and services. My favorite is that I can tell calls from some people to go straight through to my phones without me having to answer my phone and then approving the call. YES. Simple = good!

One feature I didn't ask for, but do think is pretty cool none the less, is voicemail transcription.

The idea is this: you can miss a phone call that then gets sent to voicemail, but maybe you're busy in a meeting or (like me) on a subway and can't call to get your messages. So, Google Voice will transcribe them and then email them to you. Pretty neat, huh? The only catch is, their voice recognition software, as you might expect, isn't quite there yet.

This afternoon after leaving her temp job, my wife left me this message. Well, according to Google Voice, my wife left me this message:

hey it's mike i am just now getting out of the library and i'm slightly calling the right but i will jump on the a from with united soon i love you and i hope to be home around six forty five seven operator love you bye bye

Yeah, I didn't know my wife's name was "Mike" either. Not sure why she'd be "calling the right slightly" unless she's curious about converting from the Democrats. "The a" is a reference to the A-Train, so that makes sense, but why she'd do it "with united" is not a question I can answer. Nor can I tell you why the operator might love me.

So, sadly, Google Voice's transcriptions end up reading a bit like a poorly translated VCR manual.

Ah well, Google knows they own my soul, and I know all my base belongs to them.

Posted via email from thepete's posterous