He's strong, really strong, man

Zeb:

I'm strong, really strong, man. You better not ask me to punch you as hard as I can. Please don't do that!

You got it Zeb.

Unless you're a bad guy!
And you better not ask me to charge you with my head first. Please don't! I'm very fast, man! You're gonna fall out of your chair and you might even wet your pants.

One long! Lace me! What have you got!

Ryan tells a great Clara story, and ends up visiting KEXP and showing up on their blog.

Dan's favorite Mac OS X apps & utilities

So I recently mentioned two great Mac OS X DVD ripping and encoding apps. I realize there are several other applications and utilities which I immediately install on any Mac I use. Some I've talked about before. Here's the whole list with sporadic commentary. I'll turn these into URLs when I'm not feeling so lazy but you can jfgi using their names and "Mac OS X" in the meantime.

Or use versiontracker. The comments are useful if you ignore the trolls and patheticly uninformed comments.

HandBrake and ffmpegX - see that previous post.

Dasher Daemon - menubar geek system monitor; network bandwidth usage monitor, cpu, disk activity, memory usage, etc.

NetNewsWire Pro. Awesome Mac RSS newsreader. It:

• has just about every feature I could want in a newsreader
• it's architecture is excellent in terms of allowing you to choose what other apps you want to have it call for performing related functions
• it integrates with NewsGator, so I can stay synchronized across:

1. my Macs
2. Windows machines at home and at work
3. my RAZR cell phone
4. whatever Microsoft SmartPhone I end up getting for work so I can start trying it out with our Exchange 2003 upgrade.
5. and whatever other machines I happen to use that aren't one of the above, as long as it has a web browser
   

Speaking of the web and cell phone - I use Opera Mini on my RAZR. Go get Opera Mini right now if you have a cell phone with web access. I guarantee Mini is better than the browser that came on your cell phone.

Bittorrent. Great for getting those iso's.

Firefox of course. Have I blogged about the Firefox extensions I use? These aren't necessarily the very best in the world, but they're the ones I use. Firefox extensions:

1. Sessionsaver
2. Del.icio.us
3. TabColor
4. Logmein.com

iLove iLife but iJust don't iUse iMovie or iDVD or iWeb or iGarageBand that much. iWish iHad more iTime to iDo iThat. Of course iDo iUse iPhoto and iTunes aTon.

Activity Monitor. It's in your Utilities folder and I run it as a startup (login) item.

Google Earth rocks. Everyone who has a computer and is interested in looking at the planet they live on should have it. Very happy there's finally a Mac version. Thanks!

Broken customer service / software systems

Joel on Software:

"One of the hallmarks of a broken system is when there's just no possible way that the programmer who is writing code that talks to customers can ever get feedback from those customers about bugs, because the call center is outsourced to a different company than the software development project is outsourced to. Everyone is trying their hardest to do their job but management has set it up so that it's impossible."

True dat, Joel!

Glad to see they finally fixed THAT in Vista...

Uh, maybe it's not fixed yet.

"We have armies of people whose only job is to handle exceptions..."

Collaboration Consultant [Mike Jones, London] writes:

"I remember a colleague in and consultancy group that I used to work for telling me some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!"

Ouch!

Of course this explains why the service desk is no good at providing useful data about the exceptions they encounter - if we were able to identify and fix the exceptions, they would not have anything to do, so we'd pay them less $$$. Yet another reason why outsourcing your support organization can be a non-optimized solution.

Forthcoming: more value creation exercises - (practical thingamy example #2)

Value here - just like the last example - should be an approximate combination of:
- Technology knowledge.
- Client knowledge.
- Constraints knowledge (culture, laws, regulations).
- Practical solutions knowledge.
- Easy matching of the above.
- Seamless execution."

Yeah.

My Guitar Hero 2 wishlist

So the first songs for Guitar Hero 2 are starting to be announced. Here's my wishlist for others:

Stone in Love - Journey
Always With Me, Always With You - Joe Satriani
Back in Black - AC/DC
Owner of a Lonely Heart - Yes
Play Guitar - John Mellencamp
Are You Gonna Go My Way - Lenny Kravitz
Every Day is a Winding Road - Sheryl Crow
Free Fallin' - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Healing Bones - Jules Shear
Walk on the Wild Side - Lou Reed (the bassline, of course)
Where the Streets Have No Name - U2
Gun - Uncle Tupelo

As a bonus, here's the lyrics to Play Guitar.

Z Rocket 4

The Z rocket 4 has twice as much power as the Z rocket 3, the Z rocket 2, and the the Z rocket 1 has. It can do all the things those Z rockets do but it is the fastest Z rocket ever designed by Zebediah Scott Becker aged four and a half.

Z Rocket 3

Another guest post dictated by Zeb:

It has 42 million thousand million bazillion trillion million billion trillion billion million trillian million trillian hundred I mean hundred hundred forty-two twenty and twenty-four more times than Z Rocket 2 does and Z Rocket 1 does (both together). And it has all the stuff that Z Rocket 1 and Z Rocket 2 does but it has more power than any of the rockets ever designed by Zebediah Scott Becker age four and a half.