I've said it once and I'll say it again… many aspects of Japanese culture are verrrrrry… kookie.
For example, this new trend for lengthy videos of pretty girls staring at the camera.
Apparently the idea is to help socially anxious guys get used to making eye contact with pretty girls. Personally, I'm not so sure that the best treatment for this affliction is more staring at the computer screen, but who am I to say? I'm not an expert in prettygirlnoneyecontactitis. Though I am pretty sure I've had conjunctivitis at least once in my life.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES! Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has it SO right in his article, Think Before you Voicemail. I could not agree more! Voicemail is a horrible relic of the 90s from an era before everyone had email at their fingertips, and it must DIE!
My particular tactic at work is to have a 90 second voice greeting that really, really, slowly and laboriously tells people that I really prefer email to voicemail, and repeats my email address numerous times, including spelling it out in full. And if people suffer through that all the way, I say: "I am often away from my desk or travelling and may not get your voicemail for days or weeks … however I have a mobile phone with email, so that is always the best way to reach me … but leave your message, if you want."
Comically, the only people who ever leave me messages are bubbly junior PR people who are ringing to follow up to check that I got such and such a press release. Clearly, they don't care whether I got the message or not, as long as they can tick the box on their client billing form that says they followed up with me.
Another good thing I discovered for avoiding voicemail in my life: on my particular mobile phone plan (Optus Blackberry $79 cap plan), the Optus SurePage service can be billed into the cap. So, even though each operator-answered message that is taken down and SMSed to me costs $0.85, that can be billed as part of my $300 per month cap value. And since I never spend anywhere near $300 on my voice calls, those $0.85 pager-style text messages don't cost me any real money.
I'm sure it's not the same on all plans, and since it's a premium Optus service, I almost wonder if it's an oversight by Optus, but I'm glad it's that way, because now I never have to listen to voicemail on my mobile any more either — I just get an SMS with the message and a number I can click on to call back if necessary.
In short, I HATE VOICEMAIL, and even if it was massively overhauled and sent to my email and stuff, I'd still hate it, because listening to the messages and transcribing people's numbers, etc, takes up valuable time, and I wish they'd just email me instead.
It's nice for Michael Arrington — who is hugely influential in tech — to have come out and declared voicemail dead.
This is why I love BRAN, the tech podcast by Aussie journos Angus Kidman, Nathan Taylor and Roulla Yiaccoumi: a quote from the latest episode (90): "Every site Sensis has rolled out is … let's not mince words… TOTAL SHIT…"
I couldn't agree more. I was amazed at what abject shit the new version of Whereis is compared to Google Maps. Yellow Pages is equally useless… I hate the way when you're trying to find a plumber in your area, the first 50 results are always massive contractor companies with a 1800 number that cover the entire state. The sooner Google's business directories supplant telco directories, the better. Google gets search, and that's what directories are all about from the end user's perspective.
Speaking of search, Sensis' shit search engine… why do they even bother? Microsoft can't make the smallest dent in people's loyalty to Google, and that's with them having full control of Windows so they can sucker in people who use the default settings in Internet Explorer.
Why doesn't Sensis just shrivel up and die, in the face of the superior competition?
I love the ABC's new Q&A program. The public Q&A with Kevin Rudd was one hour of thoroughly interesting watching (and it also made obvious how good an orator Kevin Rudd is, but how that is also married with intellect and logic… and the fact that he has the guts to get in front of an audience, take unscreened questions, unlike John "no worm" Howard.)
But the funniest part was the closing credits 'mashup'…
Walt Mossberg interviewed Rupert Murdoch at The Wall Street Journal's D6: All Things Digital conference today. Some very interesting quotes in there from Murdoch:
- he says newspapers around the world are down 10 - 30% in ad revenue, which eats into profit margins. "They've made every economy they can in production, with computers and so on," says Murdoch. "Now they're going to have to reduce costs in journalism and things are going to deteriorate tremendously."
- "A news story published in a newspaper is, on average, touched or edited by 8.3 people. That is ridiculous."
One of the things that really annoys me about Apple Safari is that it doesn't use the CTRL+K / CMD+K keyboard shortcut for activating the Google Search dialogue box, which is standard across most browsers — particularly Safari.
Instead, Safari makes you use CMD+Shift+L which is a "twister" of a keyboard shortcut — not very ergonomic.
Amusingly, in their efforts to make Firefox 3 more Mac-like, the Firefox team has implemented the CMD+Shift+L keyboard shortcut as an alternative to CMD+K in Firefox 3. However, I still much prefer CMD+K.
I found this great post over at 5thirtyone about how to make Safari recognise CMD+K as a keyboard shortcut for activating the Google Search box. It works a treat! Hurrah!
Ever wanted to change the desktop picture in Mac OS X by selecting the file in the Finder, right clicking and selecting "set as Desktop Picture" from a context menu?Or perhaps select some files, then "move files to a new folder", "create folder enclosing these files" or "make new folder for files"? (It's about time Apple built a "move files" option into OS X rather than just having copy available via the GUI.)
The answers to these needs are at a great page listing various context menu plugins for Mac OS X. Check it out. The two mentioned above are DeskPicChangeCM and MoveItemsX.
I also discovered a wonderful program that sits in your menu bar and lets you change your desktop picture. It can change desktop pictures on a schedule, too (with very nice transitions). It's called PictureSwitcher (pictured below). It's $US30 shareware, which I will happily pay once I've got some damn money in the bank again ;-)
And then there's this handy Utility… Desktop 2 Login, which replaces the utterly hideous, gaudy, un-Apple-like purple starscape that sits behind the OS X login screen. It simply copies your current desktop picture to be displayed instead. Why couldn't Apple have provided that as an option!! Grumble grizzle!
