Monthly Archives: January 2008

The marketing lesson from Dreamhost’s billing meltdown

January 24, 2008 • Post a comment

Yesterday I talked about the important personal finance lesson derived from Dreamhost’s accidental over billing of their customers. Today let’s look at the PR lesson.
Dreamhost addressed their colossal blunder with their usual tongue in cheek style, even though many of their customers were seriously hurt by the error. This wasn’t some simple downtime, large sums [...]

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Posted in: Business • Reviews

The one crucial lesson you can learn from Dreamhost’s billing meltdown

January 23, 2008 • Post a comment

Dreamhost, my web host incidentally, mistakenly billed their customers for a whole year of service in advance. Fortunately my credit card on file was expired so I was spared, but others were not so lucky. Some customers were billed thousands of dollars against their checking accounts which caused everything from overdraft fees to missed mortgage [...]

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Posted in: Business • Reviews

Wired magazine’s annoying subscription cards: now with 32% more irony!

January 23, 2008 • Post a comment

In the latest Wired (Feb. 2008) they talk about things that suck.
The page where they talk about annoying magazine subscription cards is where they jammed the bulk of their own subscription cards.

Har Har. You know what is also funny? Putting those blank subscription cards in the mail so Wired has to pay postage.
To be [...]

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Posted in: Business

Are you a fundamentalist?

January 21, 2008 • Post a comment

Seth Godin posted a great 5 minute interview video today that starts with this:
A fundamentalist is someone who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it… A curious person explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.
One point he makes is that fundamentalism is [...]

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Posted in: Environment • Personal notes • Science

The Arclight + Cloverfield = Awesome

January 20, 2008 • Comments (1)

Cloverfield is really good. It delivers the sort of sustained tension I love in a thriller.
Spoiler alert: I managed to snap a phonecam pic of the mind blowing super secret monster.
I love seeing movies at the Arclight. Every time I go to normal theaters the experience is ruined by:

The stress of waiting in line and [...]

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Posted in: Business • Reviews

$5 fun: MySpace at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade

January 19, 2008 • Post a comment

Last Wednesday I went to MySpace at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade. Here’s the format: MySpace.com is projected on a screen in front of the audience. An audience member comes up and explores their profile with Chad Carter. This part is pretty funny especially when the subject is a guy with more than one picture [...]

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Posted in: Events

Taxing ISPs to pay record companies

January 17, 2008 • Post a comment

Jon Taplin posted about the music industry and he likes the idea of “taxing” ISPs, which of course really means taxing the ISPs’ users, and giving the money to the RIAA (it would have to be the RIAA, how would such a tax be evenly distributed to artists? How would you really know that a [...]

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Posted in: Business • Technology