Knaddison.com - Opinions

Donate a Bike in Denver - Help Working Poor Without Feeding the Petro-Economy

greggles — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:54:21 +0000

Let’s say that you live in Denver and you have an old bike that you’re getting rid of. Or, let’s say that you don’t really like our petroleum-economy. Or, both! The solution is, frankly, quite simple: Derailer Bicycle Collective.

As you can read from their own website, the organization is based on the idea that

because bicycles are the most affordable, sustainable, efficient, healthy, environmentally friendly, FUN, and liberating form of transportation and recreation, the Derailer Bicycle Collective aims to teach and share knowledge about bikes and bike maintenance to anyone and everyone

Good enough for me!

What I couldn’t believe was the feeling at the place. It felt like I was in the middle of the revolution. Working poor who need bikes to live their lives, bicycle aficionados, and a handful of folks in between all getting together to build a better world one spoke at a time. Literally. Before the doors even opened there were at least 30 people chatting about what they were going to do that day to get themselves rolling on a bike or help someone else build a life rolling on a bike.

Why I hate PayPal (why PayPal Sucks)

greggles — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:55:08 +0000

I’ve disliked PayPal for quite some time now, but today they really bit it. Extra hard.

Withdraw Money from PayPal - Don’t Mess Up!

The other day I closed an account of mine that was the default account in PayPal. Then I went to withdraw some money. It, of course, went to my default account which doesn’t exist anymore. I sent in a support request about trying to cancel the transfer which got the great response “withdrawals cannot be canceled”. So, now what? Does my money just disappear? No response from PayPal.

Send money with PayPal - Just Kidding!

My wife needed to send some money. So she signed up for PayPal and added a credit card. She then went through the process to send the money and right as the last step in the process was submitted the site said “sorry, you need to be verified before we can process this”. If it were going to block the transfer why not block it at the beginning? So now it wants her to do a “credit card” verification process before she can use it which will take about a month for our credit card statement to actually arrive. So, if you want to send money, be sure to sign up months before you actually need to do it.

Fortunately, I’ve had my paypal accounts for a long time and have been verified in various ways over the years. Mailing things to my house, small deposits to bank accounts or credit charges, etc. PayPal had me verified to a level of “three” (whatever that means). This should mean that when I go to use PayPal to, you know, send money, I should be able to do it. Of course, I forgot my password so I had to go through the password re-request process. After requesting the password I was finally able to send the money for an apartment here in Buenos Aires which is what we really needed to do. A little while later I got an email saying my account had been suspended. That then marked all of my transactions as suspect, reversed the withdrawal to the bank account that had been closed (blessing in disguise, that was), and now my landlord hates me.

PayPal Suckage Overview

The trick of course is that while PayPal sucks, it’s the best thing out there. To recap the suckiness in short form:

If they are going to block payments the UI should stop you from payments before you complete the form
The time you most need a password change is when you need to use your account. So the “security question” process needs to be robust enough that they can trust it immediately rather than sending accounts with recent password changes to the “suspect” bin

And of course I’m not the only one that feels this way. My favorite example is stan the paypal hater. I never understood your hatred before, Stan, but I sooo do now.

Don’t Dump on your Partners and then Expect them To Help

And finally from the corporate strategy that made Microsoft and RIAA loved by so many I just got an email from PayPal requesting that I help them by updating any of their logos that I may use on my sites to the new PayPal logo. Yeah, I’ll be sure to cooperate on that right away. Except that PayPal’s status as a partner of mine just got placed in a “Limited” status.

Angies List Complaint - Yet Another Bit of Feedback

greggles — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 22:22:36 +0000

I got this email the other day and wanted to share it with y’all. The original author informed me that she was asking for a refund and was planning to cancel payment via her credit card company if Angies List didn’t give her a refund.

Edit for clarity:They sent this to Angie’s List customer support first and then sent a copy to me

Dear Angie,

We are in the midst of remodeling several portions of our home and were quite excited to discover your service. Last Thursday I signed up for a one year membership and contacted a contractor from your list. I was very excited because this company had awards and eight times more reviews than the other contractors in the category. The prices quoted on all of their jobs in the reviews were low. The quality of the work in the picture appeared impressive.
I scheduled an appointment for Saturday afternoon. The company was very pleasant on the phone and the representative who came to our home was also nice.

Angie’s List is a great concept, but it’s not turning out to be as easy or helpful as I at first believed it would be.
Reason? It seems more of a starting point, with lots of investigative work still to be done. Good contractors may not be on the list and bad ones may be.
The caveat is that I’m still new to this and have only contacted one business.
I will not, however, even consider using the business I contacted.

Here is my problem.
I understood that the contractors on your list could only be there if one of their clients (nominated them) wrote a review and put them there. “They cannot buy their way onto the list.”
Is this correct?
In a general conversation with this contractor, I was told that you solicited him. “Angie’s List was mostly on the East Coast. A couple of years ago when they expanded West they (needed a list and) called us and asked if they could list us. At first I was skeptical, but I finally told them that as long as it was free they could list us. Our business took off from there.”

Do you solicit businesses?

The story has a ring of truth to it. If the story is true, it bothers me immensely.
At least in the beginning, it doesn’t appear that this company came to your list from a client.
Of course. You need a list to start building a list. You have to start somewhere to get members so that they can submit reviews.
Angie’s List is a business.
However…
It seems that building a list in this way compromises the list’s integrity.
This is not the online Yellow Pages advertising and supporting businesses, but rather a service to help consumers choose a business they can trust. Right?
How can you build trust on a foundation of deception?

Actually, to take this a step further, what is to prevent someone from getting on the list by writing a review of their business while posing as a client?
What’s to prevent someone from padding their reviews by writing several himself or by soliciting friends or family to do so?
Checks and balances. Consumers can post unfavorable reviews…
but perhaps there is also an easy way around that…
My husband found one company with an unfavorable review and felt strongly that the contractor padded his account with positive letters - I think he said five - to raise his average and counteract the negative report. My husband felt all five letters were written by the same person because all were typed in caps and the language structure was the same. Is this a possibility?
Could a person join for one month just to submit a review?
Paying someone $20 (buying them a membership) to submit a favorable review of your company could be very inexpensive advertising. Even paying lots of people to do that would be cost effective and give a business a huge boost.
This could be especially true if the business stood out incredibly far ahead of the pack - as the one I chose did. Subliminal marketing…
I wonder now if the contractors with less reviews might actually be more real.

I pose these questions because of the quality of work the contractor I contacted showed me. Although the homeowner was very happy, I still wonder if this company may have padded their listing. Perhaps they really do have a huge business going — and maybe I don’t know what a professional remodel should look like.
Okay.
I’ve got it.
My criteria: There should be no obvious defects in workmanship and the job should blend well with the house. It should not stand out as a remodel.

The contractor took us to see a “high-end” ($80,000) kitchen remodel that he had just completed. He was very proud of the workmanship and the homeowner was also very happy. I believe she found him on Angie’s List and that they did not know each other prior to the project. He said that she did not submit a review but I’m quite sure it would be favorable if she were to submit one.
The cost of this remodel was far higher than the (advertised) prices in the reviews that get a subscriber’s attention to call the company. Marketing. I’m just making a point. This is not a money issue for me.

I’m not an expert, so some of the things that I didn’t care for may not really be a problem. Maybe just personal taste…

However, there were two things I noticed that I really believe were wrong…

After we returned home, I asked the contractor about the location of the seams in the granite counter top. I told him that I would prefer the seams in my counter to be located near the corner of the L.
He was quite adamant that these things were done properly and skillfully and that my opinion was wrong.

This contractor made the granite seam straight through the center of the sink!

Not only was that the focal point of the kitchen, but it was also the narrowest and weakest part of the entire slab. The seam was wider than usual and the filler color made the joint obvious. I could also see the joint seam along the front edge of the bull nose from several feet away. The contractor told me that the bull nose seam is always visible regardless of who does the work. That is not true. This homeowner got shoddy workmanship on a very expensive part of her kitchen.

The cabinets were “custom”, but the upper cabinets on the sink side looked more like random pieces that would work. They were probably made for that kitchen and maybe the designer just wanted a lot of space around them. The staining on the cabinets didn’t look professional to me; I also had some issues with the tile work and edge pieces on the back splashes. The kitchen was not large and it did not have a huge number of cabinets. I think they overpaid for what they received, but I really don’t know.

So…what do I want?
Answers — and some reassurance that the list is valid and my experiences should improve.
Maybe, since Angie’s List depends on feedback, you might find my experience yesterday helpful. I did not (and will not) use this contractor, but I don’t care to leave negative feedback about work that someone is proud of and the homeowner is happy with. I wonder how many others out there might feel the same way?

The Ultimate Beer Pong Champion

greggles — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:44:10 +0000

While he looks too young to drink, you must watch out for this man and never ever play beer pong against him:

The other interesting thing to note here (so this post isn’t completely devoid of pseudo-technical-intellectual content) is that a lot of folks are worried about censorship and how corporate ownership of the airwaves prevents publishing original/controversial content. The day that cameras become cheap enough, editing software easy enough, and movie distribution sites plentiful enough that this gets published I think it’s fair to say that corporate censorship is largely not a concern. Part of cable+satelite+IPTV+TV-Over-Internet (aka the future of video) is that with so many delivery options we’ll also get so many content choices. so, we can be sure that “watching the girl at hot-dog-on-a-stick-make-lemonade” will be possible even if the content companies want us to watch “Robin Williams cousin making bacon juice”.

www.angieslist.com - what's the motivation behind the site?

greggles — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 03:46:15 +0000

Well, I didn’t have any idea two months ago when I first wrote about www.angieslist.com that it would have quite such a strong reaction. There have been about 50 comments on the post and it has been growing daily. Yikes.

The real deal behind AngiesList.com

So, what is the story with Angies List. Is it good or bad? I said “sucks” but that’s an obvious overstatement that is a common online phrase. Sorry for the folks that pissed off. AngiesList.com provides a good service to people and people like it. So how can I also say that it’ bad? My points were mostly that they were being dishonest with customers and that their model was flawed and would eventually be “gamed” once the service got big enough. Spammers and shills would grow and ruin it, much like they’ve wreaked havoc on other big sites that started off great when they were small.

My alternative to www.AngiesList.com

So, what’s my alternative to Angies List? Well, in fact I have two alternatives:
You should see a little block on the right side of this page (and several others) that lists all the people whose services I’ve written about on my site. Obviously I like them. So, if that’s valuable to you then great.

Trust my lijit profile which has given ratings to all the sites I like (and I’ve got a few upstream folks trusted as well, so you’ll get their rankings). If you like that system sign up on Lijit and trust me. I’ll probably trust you back. Then we’ll get a big network of trusters going and we can rate everything. Awesome. That’s the real way to do a rating system. And guess what - no cost (at least none from your wallet to theirs).

Comments are for Authenticated users only - thanks anonymous Angies List Lovers!

Yeah, and PS: I really dislike arguing with people who are anonymous. I’ve got pretty much my whole life out in public. If you want to argue with me the least you can do is share a little information about yourself. To enforce that I’m limiting comments to authenticated users. If that’s frustrating, oh well. Consider it my set of costs to keep quality higher.

The Future of Video

greggles — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:34:12 +0000

So, what is the future of video?

I’ve discussed this a little bit before and more directly gave a practical example of how Google and YouTube etc. are going to p0wn cable networks and then today I found yet another example of the shift.

Cable is Dead

People said for a long time that Newspapers were dead and the truth is that some of them are still making money and are going to last a long time. That said, this is just another stop on the way towards the all-internet content delivery world.

The Democracy Player for Media Files

There is a piece of software called Democracy Player which does a really great job of taking RSS feeds of movies and presenting them in an easy to understand and use format. This is high quality web TV that my mom can use. And, the thing that sparked my motivation today was Pictures of Assholes a short movie by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. You see, I got this movie presented to me from one of the default RSS feeds in Democracy Player, the title caught my attention (knowing that the content as still PG rated) and knowing it was by Joseph Gordon-Levitt seemed extra interesting. So, I watched it. It played - nice, full screen. And it’s full of ironic bullshit “Ever Since La Dolce Vita…who directed that (answer Fellini) Who?” Sad.

It’s worth watching. And then keep exploring Democracy Player to see what Video might look like in 2-3 years.

Denver on the Cusp of Continued Growth and Livability Improvements

greggles — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:40:31 +0000

Denver is really a great place. Every time I say that I wish I didn’t say it because one of the things I like about Denver is that it’s a medium sized city. There will come a day in the future when we have suburbs and shopping malls from the New Mexico Border right up to Wyoming all along the front-rang/I-25 corridor. Until then, we can just be excited about infill, denser downtown Denver, and a lot of exciting mass-transit options. As the Denver Infill Blog put it:

This is such an exciting time to be in Denver! Imagine how many cities would love to be in our position: On the eve of the grand opening of a major new light rail corridor, we also have just taken a significant step forward in the process of implementing an approved and funded plan to build an additional 119 miles of rail-based transport, complete with a major Downtown transit facility at a classic historic train station. All this at a time when we have just launched a major convention center expansion and hotel, a new art museum building, and so many Downtown infill projects that we need a website just to keep track of them all.

The Following is an Unbiased Paid Review

greggles — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 20:18:14 +0000

I previously wrote about this idea in Paid blogging - Review of ReviewMe, PayPerPost, Blogsvertise (not a sponsored post) and at that time I was NOT paid for the post. Well, the time has come and ReviewMe is now live and kicking. So, does my earlier review hold true? So far it seems to and that’s not terribly surprising based upon the initial work they’ve done on the site. Use of the site is logical and simple. There are plenty of usability enhancements I found that I want to integrate into my own sites.

ReviewMe has several requirements for their service. First, all blogs submitted must pass their quality test. It’s not terribly complicated how it works (nor how to game the system) but it does a decent job of keeping out the junk sites. Next, you must mention that it is a paid post which is certainly above the line in terms of the ethics and clarity of what’s going on. Third, write a balanced review - no need for it to be extremely positive OR negative. Fourth, make money. So far, that seems to be it!

What’s notably missing: onerous requirements such as required linking and/or link text that you MUST include in each post. Requirements to insert tracking bullets, requirements for a certain slant on the issue. Requirements about frequency of posts. It’s really about the best situation I know for publishers and that’s a great idea. If it works out right, they’ll get the best group of publishers which will in turn draw in advertisers to the group.

This is a system built by and for people who understand the cluetrain manifesto: open and honest conversations with your consumers and in front of your consumers can only help your business. If your business can’t stand up to that, time to change or close up shop.

I’m a little sad they don’t have an affiliate program.

The only other feature they’re missing is advice in terms of “here’s how to make more money with reviewme” and a section of testimonials. Perhaps those will come in time, though.

Search as economic predictor

greggles — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 14:06:38 +0000

What do you do before taking an important action?

You research. Since this is the internet age, how do you search? Google. Yahoo. MSN, AOL, Ask.com. At least that’s how the majority of internet users research. Maybe you use Wikipedia. If someone were sitting on your shoulder and watching all of your search terms they would know the future of your actions.

Search as a Predictor of Home Sales

Search term aggregator HitWise is pointing out the potential benefit of this system on their Analyst Blogs. They recently posted an article about the unexpected fall in home sales in August. They pointed out how they knew this was going to happen based upon the search data. And, in fact, looking at the two charts it’s pretty clear that the peak in searches for “homes for sale” at the beginning of July 2005 came just before the peak in actual sales. And the rest of the graph shows fairly neatly a rise/fall in the searches (red line) will be followed within a month by a rise/fall in actual sales activity (blue line).

Personally, predictive technologies are very neat to me. Whether it’s predictive markets or using search technology as a predictor for future behavior. It’s great stuff. There’s a little bit of a privacy concern, but as long as you are aggregating and anonymizing data I don’t have a problem with it.

Bias from Sources of Funding

greggles — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 13:10:37 +0000

Wired is running an article about funding and bias in global warming science this morning. Global warming is a topic that is pretty popular right now, but I believe they are only really telling half the story on the funding/bias issue.

The slant of the story is that Pat Michaels, a long time anti-human-induced/global-warming-is-exaggerated scientist is being biased in his research because he is accepting money from energy producers. Certainly, many research companies have gotten into scandals in recent years as they write passionate stories on a subject only to have it revealed that the study was funded by the organization that stands to benefit the most. This is especially sad when the actions of the research organization are in opposition to the findings in these studies.

So, if we accept the claim that research funding from “interested” parties biases the researchers then what can we say about the people who are crying foul in the case of Michaels?

A quick quote from the article:

“These people are just spitting into the wind,” said John Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The fact is that the drumbeat of science and people’s perspectives are in line that the climate is changing.”

Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, a Washington advocacy group, said: “This is a classic case of industry buying science to back up its anti-environmental agenda.”

So, who are the people funding these organizations. Neither of them readily discloses their sources of funding (at least not that I could find in a cursory view of their website). Clean Air Watch (CAW) does accept donations from private individuals - in which case you have to ask a question: “what motivates a private individual to give money to CAW?” The optimistic perspective is that people do it because CAW is doing something to help every person who breathes air. The pessimistic perspective is that if CAW produces enough “alarmist” reports that scare people into action then those people will be motivated to give more money to CAW. I think it’s only fair to say that both the optimistic and pessimistic perspective are valid in at least some of the cases which brings me to my point: CAW has a bias in it’s source of funding! So all of this “CAW is holier than though, Pat Michaels” stuff is poppycock.

At the end of the day, I don’t have a problem with research funding giving a bias to the research. I’m glad that there is funding at all for this kind of work. If people had to give funding in a truly unbiased way (double blind donations) can you imagine the unintended consequences and horrible research that would result? It’s the responsibility of the peer scientists, the academic journals, the conferences, AND the funders as a whole community to ensure that the research is valid. Any researcher who says that they come at a task without a bias is lying to themselves.