A white flag in ones and zeros

Alright, I give. I'm not going to write on the tech blog anymore. The reasons for that are numbered below, like terms of surrender:

1. My life was too fragmented. I was tired of thinking what to write where, instead of just plugging it all into the same place.
2. It wasn't fun to write. I like the voice I write with here; the snarky, obnoxious, vaguely-insulting voice. I was basically writing documentation over there, and I do enough of that at work.
3. It wasn't reaching its intended audience. I wanted to make it a place where I could convince people who were a'feared of computer to pet their computers and finally be friendly with them. For the kid's sake.

Then there's the bad news, much like the news of surrender is followed by the listing of the dead. The first bit of bad news is that whatever tech I want to write about is going to be written about here, and there's going to be a lot of it. It's a force-feeding. Sorry.

The second bit is that this site might go a little squirrely at some point if I switch blogging platforms. You won't need to change your feeds or bookmarks unless they include the word "blogspot" in the URL, but there may be moments where the site won't come up. It'll be back up eventually, so don't run out into the street in a blind panic, throwing bricks through the first windows you see. Again.

Quieting down

As you may or may not have noticed, I haven't been posting so much here lately. That's partly due to the fact that the mix took me an incredibly long time to put together, which was (as it always is) very rewarding, but a little frustrating as well.

There's a couple other reasons (which I'll get to), but this is probably the standard here for a while. I'm not quitting this blog at all, and probably never will. I write mostly for myself and my mental exercise, and because it keeps me somewhat in touch with people I wouldn't otherwise. I'll still post here, but it'll be less scheduled and more prompted by having both the time and topics and not anymore by staying regular, which I hope I don't have to say has nothing to do with my digestive system.

The first (and lesser) reason that I'm cooling down on this page is this: as most of you know, part of how I make my living is analyzing web statistics. I pull together a bunch of numbers and then interpret it for the folks in my organization. And if I had to sit down the CEO of the vast Are Seven media empire to go over the statistics, it would go something like this:

Frankly, sir, I think everyone's bored. People are still coming to the site, but it's a little bit hard to see why exactly. We get good feedback from our users, but the comments have been declining, fewer people are clicking through the feed and after four years, I think everyone's gotten a little tired. It's time to hit refresh on the whole blogging thing.

Refreshing it means doing what I've thought about for a long time: starting another blog. So I did it:

Tech for the Technophobic

Lord knows I need a better name, and it'll probably change a lot, but I wanted a place where I could:

1. Recommend software and steps for the people that I often find myself talking to about why they should use RSS readers, why they should blog, and basically why they should stop thinking of computers and technology as a separate world that only "tech" people can understand. I hope to make it something that people who don't subscribe to a bunch of tech-minded blogs can learn a lot from, though I'll be talking about analytics and such as well. The suggestion box is open.
   
2. Where I can talk about the computer-type stuff that interests me to an audience who knows that that's where they're getting, hopefully eventually building up a community that I can help and that can help me in return.
3. Have a single-topic (basically) blog that I can practice promotion and marketing on, and potentially even make some money.

I'm realistic enough to know that I can't keep that blog going and regularly update this one. So the tech blog experiment is going to become my priority, but I'll still write about music, sports and stupid shit and stories around here. In fact, it'll probably take a much more informal, dashed-off tone. I'm not really sure what'll happen here. We'll see.

Anyway, your mother and I felt you should know. Sleep well.

Share, dammit.

While the world of sharing and the increase of software that will allow everyone to see what you're doing all the time is a little creepy in some sense, it has some great advantages. I often feel much closer to the people who use the social tools. In personal conversations and emails, you often mostly get the big updates and the larger conversations. But it's in the Facebook updates or the del.icio.us feed or the occasional blog posts that you get to see the small parts of a friend's life: what they're enjoying or thinking about beyond just the big events.

One of my favorites of this software is the shared items in Google Reader. With a single click (or Shift-S), you mark a story as Shared and then people who subscribe to it can see what you're into. In the year or so that I've been using Reader, some of the most fascinating articles I've read have been through other people's shared feeds.

So I was thrilled to see Google's new feature where they've integrated your friends from the Gmail chat into your reader. So no more having to ask people what their shared page is before you can see what you're sharing. If they're in your address book and they use Google Reader, you can see their shared items.

If you're using Google Reader, get to sharing. Anything that you think is interesting, hit the button. I certainly want to know what's striking your interest.

But I still want to say this means I'm not still mad at Google for the ridiculous non-update of Analytics last week, where they left in everything that was flawed about the tool, but changed the code that makes it suck. I've taken off the "I ♥ Google" bumper sticker on my car.

Tech Talk

Hello, and welcome back to Tech Talk! I say "welcome back" even though this is the first and likely last installment of Tech Talk, but our marketing department (who will soon be laid off, owing to the show's imminent cancellation) advises a forced-friendly approach to mask our lack of savvy. Our marketing department also works for Hillary Clinton. <rimshot>

This last week was a week of fun technology as tech companies ramp up their services in time for the holiday shopping season, which, of course, has nothing to do with it. Let's walk you through them, huh?

First of all, gmail starting rolling out IMAP for all of it's accounts. Now, let me just take a moment to get my judgment finger (you might know yours as your "index finger") out of it's plush, velvet-lined carrying case and wag it in your face while I wonder why in the hell you haven't switched to a gmail address yet. To make a long harangue short: there's no reason not to.

This IMAP development makes it so that it's almost completely unnecessary for me to ever go to the gmail website. But it's brought a big question with it: which email client do I go with? I'll ask you what client you prefer, pretending that you've actually read this far.

What I've found is that email softwares are like banks or cable companies: they all mostly suck with a handful of unique positives. Outlook Express is clunky and awkward, but it has a nice "hide folder" feature. Mac Mail works well and looks nice and has the great feature of having the inbox separately at the top, but remains the shining example of the frustrations that Apple's emphasis on simplicity can bring. Really? Still no previous message or next message buttons? Unbelievable.

It's Thunderbird that's really drawn my ire. After buying into Lifehacker's hype, I gave it a try. Let's just leave it at this: extensions, etcetera aside, I don't see much difference between Thunderbird and the Netscape email I used in 1998. And I've gotten really tired of people like Lifehacker automatically assuming that anything open source is superior. It goes to show that independent coders can be as—if not more—clueless as the programmers being paid to overlook the obvious.

Besides the IMAP thing, I was excited to see that Google Analytics has added in an internal site search component to their Analytics. Besides that fact that it adds to the feeling that Google never stops improving—a feeling that helps me sleep soundly—it's a great improvement for me, mostly professionally. Having the analytics that let you see not only what people are searching for, but how many pages they look at afterwards and how many times they search after getting their initial searches is a site manager's dream.

Because areseven.com is increasingly becoming a playground for the tools I use professionally even if they're of little-to-no use on this page, I put an internal site search on this page. I've nestled it over there in the right nav. It's placed for maximum ignorability, but if you want to go looking for "muppet fucking" or "portal to hell" or "dead bear", it's there for you (once the site gets indexed, that is).

In non-web software news, I upgraded my Mac to the new OS, Leopard. In a word: disappointment. Not only are the cosmetic changes superfluous and ugly, but my computer's suddenly having network connection issues and has made configuration changes where it shouldn't have. Looks like Apple's been hiring away people from Microsoft.

Finally (finally!), you probably didn't even notice when you came here, but I changed the location of this page to blog.areseven.com. And though I've already humped Google's leg enough in this post, you should get your own domain and use Google Apps For Your Domain for all your email needs. They make it so easy.

The humans are dead

Just a few quick words about me and the wide world of computers, who, I probably don't need to remind you, will soon rise up and destroy us all. Put it on your calendars!

First is that I wandered over to the new mp3 store at Amazon to buy that Pink Floyd song I blessed you with yesterday. It's a nice place, that new store. I may ultimately, though heavy-heartedly, cancel my subscription to emusic. They're just not upgrading their store enough, and the subscription model is a bit of a pain. It makes me wonder if small businesses will ever really be able to keep up anymore. Anyway, if you're into purchasing music legally, the Amazon store is reluctantly though highly recommended.

You may have noticed that I put a few new links at the bottom of the posts. They're really only there because I've become kind of obsessed with FeedBurner and all the things they do (I can't recommend FB enough, especially if you have a blogspot blog), so I figured I'd add it on. Don't worry about using them, though. I've never been one for much self-promotion of this page, and still am not, so don't go thinking that I'm trying to go all big time and that I'll get huge and famous and forget my friends. I mean, if I do ever get famous, I couldn't forget you fast enough, but it's pretty unlikely that I'll get famous so...you mean so much to me.

Would you like some product?

As I was hacking my way through the impenetrable (and dry-heave ugly) jungle of MySpace last night, it occurred to me that there are two ways to be successful that can be summed up by the MySpace way of doing things and the Google way of doing things.

Far too many people do things the way MySpace has done it. They've gotten incredibly successful with a highly useful but flawed product. This is fine to some extent. They can pat themselves on the back for creating a successful and desirable product. And through both habit and necessity (in a manner of speaking) they'll continue to be successful even if they just sit in their Herman Miller chairs with cigar in their mouths and their feet on their desks.

But eventually, the sheer suck of the product is going to do them in. And instead of correcting the problems, they become inwardly focused and put emphasis on new campaigns and new features, while their customers are getting increasingly frustrated with the product as a whole.

Eventually, businesses in the MySpace model will collapse. A competitor who does it better will come along, both fixing and improving upon the first big success story.

I'm afraid this is what's in store for emusic, and they haven't even gotten to be hugely successful. I'm getting more frustrated with the fact that new releases still don't show up very quickly, their search stinks and there seems to be no institutional concern with making the product better.

This is why, as my good friend Lindsay always says, I welcome our future Google overlords. It's amazing to me that so few people have figured out what makes Google so great: they fix their flaws. And what's better, they don't make the mistake of bundling these fixes in major product releases, which only inevitably disappoint the customers waiting for it. They improve every product they buy.

It's so simple: build a quality product. It seems so obvious, but people forget it in their insularity. Marketing campaigns are important, but only when you have a quality product. And you can thrive and succeed wildly on a crap product, but only temporarily.

I could make another parallel here, but I won't.

iPiling on the chatter

A disclaimer that I've given before, but will do again: when it comes to computer systems, I go both ways. I have a Mac at home and I love it, but I'm not at all a switcher. Mac has its problems, technically as well as in a business sense. I have a slight preference to my Mac, but I'm as bugged by the ridiculous cultism as other folks.

That said, I'm feeling a little hyperbolic about the first day of sale of the iPhone. This is one of the few times in technology that a product has so clearly been a huge single step forward. From the buying experience to the interface to the logical improvements on already-common PDA features like internet or audio player, it feels like this is the beginning. We know that we'll look back at it in five years and that same device that looks so flashy now will look as ancient as a typewriter, but right now...it feels like a definite moment.

And before you ask: I will not be buying one just yet.

How to be a playa (note to Spanish speakers: not "beach")

We're gonna talk music, but before we do that, I have to do a poll of Are Seven readers (that's you). You may have noticed the little jukebox that I have. It's a simple Flash app, and it works pretty well, but it's probably a little bit of a pain to switch over to another page to hear the sweet, sweet tunes that I lay on you jazz cats. So I found the code to that excellent single-song player that you may have seen on some other sites and I thought I'd give this a try.

So the question before the listen: which do you prefer? Do you ever listen to all of the songs in a row on the jukebox page, or would you rather just stay on this page to cross "Listen to R7 jammies" off your to-do list? Or do you never really ever listen, you ingrate?

On with the tunes...

The New Pornographers, "My Rights vs Yours"

The first listen of the new New Pornographers record Challengers hasn't left a great impression on me. They're expanding their sound a little bit, but it seems like they've lost the energy of their previous albums when they found a new direction. Still, this song has that classic AC Newman melodic touch that will never get old. That verse melody could shine through a brick wall. Gorgeous.

Feed me

I know that there's a number of you who have decided to take a look at what the 21st century has to offer and have subscribed to this page with a feed reader. To those of you who have, I have a favor to ask:

I'm trying out the services of Feedburner, and I'm trying to get a feel for how accurate a service it is. So...those of you who have subscribed to this page, please change your feeds to point to feeds.feedburner.com/areseven. In something like Bloglines, you can just change where the feed is pointed, but in Google Reader, I haven't figured out any other way but to unsubscribe and then resubscribe.

If you do this, please let me know, either in the comments or by email (areseven(at)gmail.com), and I'll thank you in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. Well, actually, I guess it's pretty easy to imagine. I'll just say, "Thanks." Or, if you're lucky, "Thanks!"

To those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry. It's been a trying few weeks here at casa de Are Seven, so the content has been about as dry as...well, not outside because it's been really wet. But...well...dry! You get what you pay for, I suppose.

If you still haven't hopped on the bandwagon...

One day, when our beloved family dog Chelsea (RIP) was still a little puppy, we got her a new chew-toy. It was in the shape of a rolled-up newspaper, and when we first showed it to her, we got no reaction. She just stared as it as if to say, "Um, why should I care?" But then we squeezed it, and the little squeak inside went off and...I wish there were words to accurately describe her reaction, but she went freaking nuts. Her eyes widened impossibly, her head actually shook in a kind of cartoonish double-take, and she seemed to say, "OH! MY! GOD! IT! SQUEAKS!"

I think of this story whenever there's a small amount of time between the point when someone is first shown something which they can't really get too excited about and the full realization of all the wonders it holds. I've seen this twice in the past couple of weeks, both with the Google Reader. My sister and my coworker Vinnie both kind of shrugged when they first heard about it, saying (more or less), "That seems great, but it would take too long to set up and I'm not really sure how I'd use it." Then I squeaked it for them and their eyes widened impossibly and their heads shook in a kind of cartoonish double-take, and now they can't get enough, spending hours a day on it, but hours less than they would surfing around to all the sites they want to check.

So for the absolute very last time: get on a reader. And if you get on Google and decide to share your links (like I do over on the right and this subscribe-able page), please let me know your shared page, because I want to know. Because I care like that.

As an extra-added bonus for those of you who own a domain, you NEED Google Apps For Your Domain. It's an awkward name, but an awesome tool.

Maybe one day, when Google has taken over the earth and is ruling with an iron fist and not a helping hand, I'll regret this propaganda post. But until the whips and slavery, let's enjoy it all to the fullest, huh?

Keeping up with the robots next door

I do make effort to keep up with at least a few of the features made by the industry that pays me, and so I've made a change to this page. It just so happens that this change also has the convenient feature of me being able to share interesting things with you even if it doesn't come from my head, thus taking some of the pressure off me to keep you entertained at work.

So if passengers will please turn their eyes slightly to the right, they'll notice a list of items from my blogroll that I think they might find interesting. This has meant that I've had to start using the Google Reader (which is amazingly slow and much harder to use) instead of Bloglines, but as I've mentioned before, I suffer for your happiness. This sharing is a pretty great feature, and it means that I don't have to puke out a whole post on something that you may have already read.

Trust me on these. It's only the good stuff that's allowed in that box.

R7's possibly obvious, possibly revelatory tech guide

No matter how much of an expert someone is, no matter how long they've been immersed in a particular field or how knowledgeable they are about a single subject, they've probably missed some simple stuff along the way; things that a newbie with a dummies guide would learn in the first hour. Likewise, there's people who dabble in something and get overwhelmed by the amount of information, but can really be helped along with one or two helpful hints.

With those two kinds of people in mind (because everyone knows there's only two kinds of people in the world: one kind and the other), here's a list of some of the blogs and web technologies that I've found to be entertaining and helpful in the last little bit. Because in spite of working in the web world for the last seven (!) years, I still learn new stuff all the time.

RSS Feed Readers
If you're not using a feed reader, I can only assume that you also go to the town square to read the news on a post. I use Bloglines, but that's as much out of habit as anything. The Google Reader has gotten a lot better, and my boss swears by Netvibes, which is like the My Yahoo or My Google pages, but with about 1000 times more features.

These things may seem like a pain to set up, but I swear that once you go to a feed reader, you'll start depending on it for pretty much everything.

Blogs
It's funny that there's still tons of people who think of blogs as simply personal journals of dating or parenthood or (*sigh*) "rantings and musings". But there's tons of blogs out there on just about every possible subject. The ones that I get hooked on change every now and then, but there's three that I can recommend highly:

• Life Hacker is a must. It's mostly a tech blog, and that may scare some people off, but the tips and tricks for improving your computer life both at home and at work are invaluable. There's plenty of stuff I discard, but if you spend your day on a computer (and if you're reading this, I'm guessing you do), you really need to get on this.
• TechCruch is definitely more technical, but if you're even remotely involved or interested in the Tech world, go there now. They profile the new web services popping up (and going under) all the time. I'm ashamed that I didn't know about this until about a month ago.
• Deadspin is the best sports blog EVER. I suppose you would have to be at least remotely interested in sports to want to read it, but it's about as funny as writing gets. And some of the YouTube video they post is worth it even if you're not into sports.

Applications
My site stats show that the vast majority of you are already using Firefox, but I know that there's a lot of people who assume that everyone uses Firefox and Macs only out of rebellion against all thing Microsoft. Not true. It's by far and away the better browser, if only because of the extensions. I've only used IE7 a little bit when it was still in beta, but it was annoying enough that I don't want to try again until at least January.

If you're using a Mac and you have an iPod and you like stealing music like the dirty little thief you are, you've got to get Senuti, a perfect little program that lets you take music off of your iPod. So grab your iPod, head over to a friend's house, and find yourself with about 20 new albums that it'll take you months to listen to even once. Beautiful.

I've been a little iffy on Pandora. I created a station based on LCD Soundsystem that pretty accurately gives me similar tunes, but the one that I created for Neko Case was full of Leanne Rimes and Shania Twain instead of Nina Nastastia and Jenny Lewis. But if you're getting a craving for something new, it's a good first stop.

Other music sites that I love and have had on the right nav for a while now are the Hype Machine, which just gives all of the mp3s posted on thousands of music blogs, and the 3voor12 Luisterpaal (which I believe is Dutch for "listening post"), which streams entire albums. It's a little frustrating that a loft of the albums aren't available in the States, but there's still lots to find for the tune-curious.

So here's the real reason for this: what are the things you've found invaluable to your web and computer life? What are those things you think that everyone already knows, but you still love? Applications? Blogs? Tweaks? Share it.

Shhh...the grownups are spending money now

Daddy got a raise and a bonus for getting the Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field of Excellence. So what is he spending it on? Let's just say that Daddy's going Pro:Do your magic, mail folk. And do it quick.

Did You Know? Of course you did

My job requires me to visit the Google Language translation page pretty often. It's a decent tool, but it only really works for getting the gist of something, and isn't very reliable for word-for-word translation. Actually, it's best use is for taking bits of text, translanting them into another language and then translating it back to English. Guaranteed hilarity.

But as many times as I went to the page, I only now noticed that, just below the translation tool, in the listings of interface languages that you can display the Google tools in are: Pig Latin, Klingon, Elmer Fudd, Esperonto, Hacker and a language called "Bork Bork Bork!", which appears to be the language of the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show. I'm not making this up.

The sound you're hearing right now is Hans changing his Google settings to "Klingon".