How to Know if You're an Asshole

(I began this article in 2008 and it's been sitting in Draft mode ever since. Why not release it to the wild? Here it is.)

While I was speaking privately yesterday with a business partner who has resigned from the position she has held in our company for 9 years, I was wondering to myself what she thought of me. I know one of my natural weak points is being insensitive to the people around me, so I've typically leaned on others when I needed professional advice on human factors. She is a great person, savagely loyal, and highly competent in high pressure situations. I'm not sure she would tell me if I was being an asshole though.

No one thinks they are an asshole. At least, probably not. Maybe a drill sergeant or a cop wakes up in the morning and self-identifies as an asshole, and is happy about it. I don't know any of them. But everyone knows an asshole or two. Why this disconnect? Do those guys know they are assholes? I don't think so. I frequently encounter assholes when I drive. Sometimes they know they've been an asshole, and I make it a point to let them know my point of view on the matter, but that's different than being an asshole when you exit your vehicle and interact with people at work, in public, or even among friends and family. Assholes must have friends.

So I was thinking about this, and trying to figure out a way out of this point-of-view problem: assholes don't think they are assholes. So how do you know if you are an asshole? I developed the beginnings of a strategy to determine this, because the world needs a logic based approach to this problem.

Step 1: Identify a person who is not an asshole
Most people are not assholes. But you need to find some who is universally considered a non-asshole. If this person has coworkers who thinks that he/she is an asshole, but you think the person is actually normal, this person is still disqualified from the role of being your "Am I an asshole?" litmus test.

This person should not be family. Family members might love you even if you are an asshole, but are otherwise too close.

Step 2: Ask them if you are an asshole
You might need to phrase this question softly. Because the person you are talking to is not an asshole (see Step 1), if you just ask them "Hey, do you think I am an asshole?" they are likely to respond with a quick "What? Of course not!" Ignore this part of their response. Listen to the next part: "I mean, you can be a tad grumpy when you haven't had your coffee yet..." Any negative criticism they say *after* denying you are an asshole, amplify that by 10x and now you are getting their real thoughts on the matter. It is hard to give criticism to someone face to face. And you selected them because you trusted their opinion, so no rationalizations or justifications here -- that would be being an asshole. Listen to this person. Do not interrupt them. Let them keep talking until they peter out, or ask you a question. Then, thank them for there honestly and tell them you value their opinion greatly.

Step 3: Stop being an asshole
Be extra kind to the person who gave you feedback, regardless of whether it was positive or negative. Prove to them you care about what others think of you. If you had any doubt that you were/are an asshole, in fact, be extra kind to everyone.

Quicken 2010: Intuit still making buggy software

Quicken sent a promo today to current owners of Quicken Rental Property Manager 2010 (which is essentially the same as normal Quicken with a few added features). I have a need/hate relationship with Quicken -- there is no love involved -- that I've blogged about in the past.

Since I've griped about problems with their software, I wanted to give their latest software a fair shake, and of course I had to pay $129 for the privilege. But the installation failed citing an Exit Code 1721. There is a button on the Install Wizard failure notification for "Online Help" but it only opens a browser to the Quicken homepage. Searching the Quicken website for exit code 1721 leaves no results.

Apparently Quicken doesn't play nice with Vista User Access Control. Even as an Administrator I can't uninstall the old version, or now, the new one. Quicken does provide a utility that cleans up the registry, but it doesn't delete the install directory. And, again even with Admin rights, neither can I.

So now can I not install the new version, I can't reinstall the old version, and I'm out $129 bucks.

Intuit doesn't offer live chat support for this product, so I've open up a ticket via email. They promise a response within one business day. Quicken, why do you suck so bad?

Hopefully Intuit Won't Shelve Mint.com

Intuit, the makers of Quicken, announced they are buying web 2.0 darling Mint.com. I wrote about my concerns for Mint.com last year, and apparently Mint.com did a good job answering those. Congrats to Mint!

My concern now is that Intuit bought them just to shelve the Mint technology and eliminate a promising competitor. I use Quicken for all my finances, and love it for what it does: give me immediate insight into total net worth, track spending by category, and manage my rental properties. Nothing else out there can do that.

But there are some things about Quicken that just plain suck. They are infamous for regularly launching buggy software. For example, I'm running the latest release of Quicken Rental Property Manager on 64 bit Vista Home Premium, and the software never remembers my preferences. And it says I have 3 reminders, with a "View Reminders" button that, when clicked, brings me to a calendar view with no reminders on it.

I just tried to use Intuit's live chat for tech support for assistance with the above, and after forcing me to pick a support category even though my problem didn't fit any of them, it launched an IE window (even though Firefox is my default browser) that did not connect to anything. Support for Quicken is typically done through its user forums, which can be hit or miss.

So although it is the best thing out there for my specific needs, it is still an unsatisfying user experience, and I'd love for something better to come along. Apparently that won't be Mint.com. Hopefully Intuit will incorporate the best of Mint's quality technology into their own, instead of smugly shelving it.

Dell still doesn't grok Ubuntu

I'm selecting a laptop for my kids. Mostly because they keep pestering my wife for her laptop. I'd love to get them Ubuntu because I'd love to teach them computer programming, and I like Ubuntu as an environment for that. I also like if for kids as it is less succeptible to spyware, viruses, and malware in general. My kids play Wizard 101 online, and according to one user, that works well under Wine.

So I'm configuring a laptop on Dell, going through their twenty page configuration process. On page one I specify Ubuntu. Eight or so pages later, Dell is asking me if I want Norton Internet Security 2009, Computer Associates Internet Security Plus 2009, and QuickBooks Pro 2009. Hello, none of them run on Ubuntu as installed. I'd love it if Intuit offered Linux software, especially Quicken which I use religously. So unless Dell is going to be including Wine configurations for each of these Windows applications they are selling with Ubuntu, they really are doing a disservice to their customer. An uniformed purchaser is going to assume the apps run on the computer they are purchasing, right out of the box. After purchase, do you think Dell is going to let the customer "return" this software?

Audible.com Web Site is Lousy (To Be Polite)

My wife was surprised this week when I told her Audible.com has been charging her $14.95 every month for almost a year. She checked into it and realized she had signed up for a monthly subscription without even know it. That's a problem right there. Before closing the account, she wanted to redeem six book credits her account had accumulated. We decided to divide them evenly.

When it was my turn to select books, I was expecting an experience similar to Amazon.com. First of all, the Audible.com web site is very slow. Not snappy like Amazon.com, or any other website I use by choice for that matter. Seconds lagged each time I clicked a link.

Secondly, the category navigation is not very intuitive.

Thirdly, it looks like the site is quite different depending on if you are signed in or not. The site is more appealing when they are trying to lure you into registration, and frankly it's faster too. Tolerably fast. Audible.com offers fewer categories, perhaps to remove clutter and reduce load times.

Once you log in, its the slow site. Clicking on "Science Fiction & Fantasy" now and you can feel the delay before the page loads. You get to a page that displays, among other sub-categories for fantasy etc:

# Sci-Fi: Classic (217)
# Sci-Fi: Contemporary (555)

That is not a great number of titles. It gets more frustrating after clicking around twenty pages or so, the amount it took me to figure out "Contemporary" means anything since 1980. There is no way to browse with multiple filters, for example all "contemporary" sci-fi that was also on the New York Times best sellers list. The closest thing Audible.com offers is all 555 titles, sorted by how often they are sold on Audible.com.

I clicked on that link, got frustrated at how long the page was taking to load and was able to type "I'm composing this" before the page loaded.

Suffice it to say, Audible.com: now that Amazon.com has entered the audio book market place, you web site needs a huge overhaul to be competitive:

1) Speed. The competition is a click away.
2) Breadth of content: I understand sci-fi may be your weak area, but if you don't have what I want for all my audio book needs, I'll go elsewhere.
3) Navigation. Browsing a book store is easy and pleasurable. You're website needs to be even easier. Let me go to sci-fi, and then narrow down to New York Times best sellers. Then let me sort by newest first. By letting me narrow in, and showing me what path I am on, you would let me feel like I am getting closer to the perfect purchase. Otherwise I'm lost in the woods, and leave.

Google, why do you hate SEO so much?

See the post on GetClicky blog re:Google's new Ajax-powered search results breaks search keyword tracking for everyone.

In a nutshell, the referrers you get from Google SERPs may no longer have the keyword phrase on the query string. So good luck trying to figure out how your customers are finding you!

Journalspace.com dies instantly, for lack of a smart CTO

Hearts out to anyone who blogged on Journalspace.com. The service is dead now, in a heartbeat, because they did not back up their data. Ever, apparently.

Hard to believe a website can remain popular for six years, whilst its IT team merrily whistle through their work day without once stopping to think about data backup.

Maybe I'm myopic, but I've seen this happen with companies started by business and marketing people without a technical stakeholder, albeit no implosion has been so instantaneous. Not everyone can be technically minded, but if you aren't, and you are starting a dot com, better hire someone who is, give them a stake in the company, and listen to them about things like contingency planning.

So, what would you do if your data was lost? This question applies to home users and business people alike. As a CTO, this question should keep you up at night, in many different manifestations:

- What if a HD in the database server goes?
- What if the whole database server blows up?
- What if your web server blows up?
- What if your data center goes off line?
- What if the CEO looses his laptop?
- What if someone hacks into the development environment?

There are hundreds of variations on this theme. Good sleep is for the naive, and the retired, and those that have worked very hard for high availability, disaster recovery, and security.

Ask.com Top 10 Search Terms for 2008

Ask.com announced their top 10 search terms for 2008, and Tech crunch covered it succinctly.

Its not surprising to anyone who has examined user behavior that it is common to use search navigationally. That is, they type in Google the search box of Yahoo and,apparently, Ask.com, to get to google. Ask.com top term "dictionary" should be seen as a navigational search; Ask.com owns dictionary.com.

TechCrunch lauds Ask for being more honest than the other search engines who scrub their lists so much the results are meaningless.

In my opinion, Ask.com and others should cite their methodology. Do they remove terms that are navigational to their competitors? Do they remove porn terms? Its fine and expected that they do, but they should say that.

Raw data is one outcome I hope to see in the future, and why I laud projects like solr that help make open search a reality.

Primerica Sucks

In 2000 I setup IRAs for the two children that I had at the time (I still have those two, and an additional three lol). I put token amounts in for them, the minimum possible to open an account. I use a Primerica agent, and never setup regular contributions.

My financial situation has changed a lot since then, and I'm trying to get everything accounted for in Quicken. With the financial upheaval, I'm making sure I have my ducks all in a row.

So today I go to the http://www.shareholder.primerica.com website to manage the account. But it's been eight years, so I need to call their customer service to establish login credentials. 1-800-544-5445. They pick up the phone fast enough; so far so good.

But the CSR quickly determines that she cannot help me, as my name is not on the account. Huh? The account is in the name of my eleven year old. Nice. He's off school today, so I interrupt his Mario Karts and get him on the phone. He correctly identifies himself. He states his date of birth. He gives our previous address, which is the one Primerica still has on record. He correctly gives our old phone number, and gives the phone back to me.

So I ask the CRS "can you help me now? Am I authorized to manage the account?" She explains no, since he is not the only name on the account. "So you want me to get my nine year old daughter and have her go through the same process?" The CSR says as long as she can get through the whole identification process without being prompted by me. Because she could hear me in the background helping my son. She wants me to call the agent who I setup the account with eight years ago. Whom I haven't spoken to since.

There has got to be a better way.

Gizmodo site down

wtf? Gizmodo site is down? How am I to goof off now?

My sister got hosed by MS Antivirus

[Wow, I haven't blogged for awhile. Been enjoying retirement, I guess. This pic is now way out of date. My hair got much longer and is now way shorter than my blogger headshot :P.]

First, kind reader, be fully confident: Microsoft does *not* make an antivirus product. There is a malware program going around that calls itself MS Antivirus. I know, because I just installed it for my sister.

Her laptop was hosed, she told me. I thought she meant that the hard drive was shot, but then she continued and described all the problems her computer was having, and it was obviously infected with spyware.

So I took her laptop home, did a low level reformat, and installed Windows XP. Got all the patches loaded on, and of course gave her Firefox.

She sent me info on some antivirus software she had just purchased, including the activation code, and wanted me to make sure I loaded that on since it was bought and paid for. I'm a good brother, so I did.

D'Oh!

Spybot Search and Destroy cleaned the resulting mess up, except for MS Antivirus itself. To kill that, I Ctrl+Alt+Deleted and killed the program, then deleted the install directory.

So, a couple tips:
- Whenever I want to fix someones computer, I always download the utilities I need from download.com. Don't do a Google Search for the stuff you need, since any ads may be compromised. I don't know who the hell makes Spybot Search and Destroy but for years I've gone to download.com to get it; it's always one of the most popular downloads.
- An the new corollary I will pass on to my sister: If you suspect your computer is infected with spyware, don't click on any of the pop-ups said spyware produces looking for a cure.

Props to PC Mag for info on MS Antivirus.

And finally, here are the emails my sister got, in an effort to let any other victims know that they've been had.

From: eSafeBill Transaction 
Date: Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 5:29 PM
Subject: Your MS Antivirus License purchase
To: my sister


Thank you for making a purchase with eSafeBill!

Transaction information:
Amount: 77.9 USD Including SCHD Bundle chosen
Activation Code: 873465112334272
Transaction ID: 
Order Number: 
Item: MS Antivirus License + System Cleaner and Hardware Doctor Bundle
You have chosen to purchase your software along with System Cleaner and Hardware Doctor bundle offer. Please download the installer for the additional software: http://222.73.37.203/i.php?tks=1
Quantity: 1
Date: 08/27/2008 12:21:40
Download source: http://222.73.37.203/i.php?l=msantivirusxp&c=c

This purchase will appear in your credit card statement as "Spyware-shop4..com".
Total amount of 77.9 USD will be charged to your credit card.
If you are not completely satisfied with this purchase, please do not hesitate
to contact us using SUPPORT REQUEST APPLICATION at http://222.73.37.203/i.php?l=secure.esafebill&c=c
Please do not dispute this charge as doing so may affect your credit rating.

===
ACTIVATION

Please download the software from the following link if you
do not have it already installed.
Download source: http://222.73.37.203/i.php?l=msantivirusxp&c=c

Please activate the program by entering the following
code when prompted.

Make sure you enter your activation code correctly.
Just copy it and paste into the activation code box with no changes.
The code consists of 15 characters.
Your code is: 873465112334272

The product is activated now.
In case of any difficulties,
please do not hesitate to contact us.

===
REFUND POLICY

If you are not completely satisfied with this purchase, please do not hesitate


to contact us using SUPPORT REQUEST APPLICATION at http://222.73.37.203/i.php?l=secure.esafebill&c=c
Please do not dispute this charge as doing so may affect your credit rating.

===
THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE. PLEASE DO NOT REPLY.

Ok, lets note that dead giveaway too: if it says "Don't contact your credit card company to dispute the charge, it will affect your credit rating" then please call Visa or Mastercard right now and do just that. Their operators are standing by. :)

LinkedIn valuation leads to site downtime?

LinkedIn is really lagging this morning. I've never experienced lag on LinkedIn before, so maybe its the news of their 1 billion valuation. Maybe LinkedIn will now be hip and trendy, and downish, just like Twitter!

Downtime killed Friendster when it's valuation was through the roof.

So LinkedIn, take some of that new money and go shopping.

Wikia Search dead?

search.wikia.com was released January 7, 2008 as an open source search engine enhanced by user submitted content. But looking at http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia, the wiki about the project, there has been no news in over a month. And the forums look dead too. This could be a really interesting project, but seems like the open source community hasn't embraced it yet. Maybe we're tired of Jimmy? Maybe he's tainted?

If anyone is interested in working on the concept of open search, I recommend Lucene which is the engine Wikia Search is based on, or solr which is an enhacement of lucene. I've done a solr proof of concept in the past several months, and I love what solr can do. I think I'll be spending time their. Google can't be the final solution to search.

chili's hates vegatarians

My wife and I ate at the new chili's here in town. You expect the service to suck at a new restaurant, but they canned our waitress mid-meal and her replacement was great. No worries there.

But I could not find a single vegetarian entree on the menu. I'm not a vegetarian, but I like to eat healthy, and try to be environmentally friendly. I've learned you can conserve more water than forgoing 1 lb of beef than if you forgo showering for an entire year. And I'm trying to loose weight as my New Years resolution. Plus I love veggies, and that's what I was craving tonight.

The sucky waitress didn't know what they offered for vegetarian choices, but after discussing with the manager said there were some things they did. So I asked for the manager and confirmed that, in fact, there were no vegetarian entrees on the menu. But she was a vegetarian herself and suggested a couple of things she liked. So I took her recommendation and got a fajita with lots of veggies and a bean pattie. It was fine, and I enjoyed it. The manager was awesome, and I made it a point to tell her our new waitress was great, the other one was lousy, and thats when she told us that the other one was "no mas."

We won't go back there though. My wifes peach margarita was way too sweet she said, and the menu choices were just not good. There was nothing healthy.

So chili's.... why not a single vegetarian entree on the whole menu?

Compete Aquired

Mashable reports Compete Acquired by TNS for $75 Million. Compete offers free public web metrics, like Quantcast. Unlike Alexa, in that it doesn't suck.

I predict that in five years either Compete and Quantcast will be purchased by Google, and the new company will *replace* Nielsen/Net Ratings and comScore. Information wants to be free, and the industry desperately needs a trusted third party to step in so we can all start comparing traffic using the same measuring stick. Mergers and acquisitions rely on this data, and beyond the top 10 sites, Nielsen and comScore methodologies can't see through the data storm.

The survivor will combine data that works by getting anonymized data from a significant portion of ISPs, like HitWise does, and data gathered from javascript that can be copied and pasted onto your website -- does this part sound like Google Analytics to anyone? Google also has the peering relationship with ISPs to get the first part done. And they have the "preventing fraud" chops to get it done right.

Nielsen will not be trusted any more then it currently is (not a lot) and it's Golden Age has past. comScore hasn't shown it can do a better job. Long live {insert successor here}!

iTunes: why my wife must get Vista instead of Ubuntu on her new laptop

Being a geek, I buy gadgets. For Valentine's day, I bought my wife an iPod. Yeah, yeah, dinner too etc.

For our imminent anniversary, I'll be getting her a laptop. She wants mobility just around the house, and her desktop will be taken over by the kids.

I've been eyeing OLPC's offering, thinking that's what I could get for our 10 year old too and benefit from the networking things that device does so nicely. But since they are not offering the "Buy One, Give One" anymore, that options is gone.

I was thinking about the ASUS EEE PC too, since it's received good reviews and its ultra small. Her fingers are smaller than mine.

But the deal breaker is iTunes. She *must* have iTunes -- it's the thing she's really wanted. Not because it's the best, or cheapest. But it's what she knows, what her friends use, it's easy. Any laptop that doesn't support iTunes will disappoint her. And, fact is, she doesn't need a laptop, the pleasure she will get from having one and using it with her new iPod is the whole point. Everything. Not a "kinda cool, with concessions cause my husband is a geek, and thats really cool, but it comes with caveats*" outcome, I'm looking for here.

Yeah, I know, geek-readers, yo've been using your iPod on Debian or whatever for 2 years without a hitch, or your alternate-MP3-player-that-stores-2x-more-and-cost-.5-less on CentOS, but please see above. It's my wife, dude.

So, unless Apple comes out with an iTunes client for Ubuntu in the next couple days, I'll be paying Microsoft for an OS I'd rather do without. Yuck.

Mint.com resuccitates a failed concept

Mint has been getting a lot of good press, kudos to them for that. But the idea is not new. It was tried during Web 1.0 by OnMoney.com, a division of Ameritrade. I worked there for a couple months.

OnMoney tried to make a business as a website where you got manage all your financial data: banking, insurance, investments. Total net worth, with articles from experts advising of all of this.

After I left, I heard they got the results of an $80k usability study: "You've got some great tools that *no one* knows how to use."

OnMoney went on to blow a big wad on a Super Bowl commercial. Not too long after, they closed shop.

Hurdles Mint will need to overcome:

- consumers don't know they need these tools. They aren't fun and sexy. You going to give me a facebook app that lets my peeps know "Steve has maintained a positive balance for 6 weeks in a row!" People -- not the Ivy school grads that fund and launch startups like this, but real live real-world people -- don't talk about finances to their friends. So how go you get a community, how do you spread the word?

- all my financial data in one place? No way I'm going to trust anyone with that. Mint needs to prove to the world that they have a 100% bullet proof infrastructure that the NSA and hackers all over the world agree is insurmountably robust. New code just can't do that. So I'll wait 10 years and if they are still around, then I'll assume their code is good. Can they wait that long?

They could put all their code open-source to address the security concerns, but I'm not sure their business model can support that.

domainsystems.com site down?

What's up with domainsystems.com? Their site has been down all day. Not just me; even Netcraft can't reach them.

Update: Day 2, still down. Has this site been down for awhile? Not one that I've used before, but moniker.com is still pointing to it.

VoilaBot, behave!

My websites are in the local advertising space: employment, online dating, business listings. My audience is in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Because of that, I have no chance of making revenue from traffic from Europe, China, or Nigeria.

So when I see a spider called voilabot, for Voila.fr, pounding my server farm, that's a spider I'd like to disallow. No problem, just add them to robots.txt. Only thing needed is how the bot identifies itself when scanning that file.

Typically, a spider will identify it's useragent and, parenthetically, give a link to info regarding the bot. Voilabot does not, it just points to their homepage:


2008-01-09 05:00:12 GET /robots.txt - - 193.252.149.16 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+fr;+rv:1.8.1)+
VoilaBot+BETA+1.2+(http://www.voila.com/) - - 200 1100 358 546


which redirects to http://www.voila.fr/, which sucks for me since I don't know French. I am able to find a page on their site about robots.txt, and how to block *all* spiders from visiting my site -- no thanks! I heart Google -- but nothing that mentions what user-agent top specify to block Voilabot.

The Google index, interestingly, includes the robots.txt files they scan. Examining these, some people specify Voila and just as many specify Voilabot. Other Google results include rant like mine -- apparently this bot has been in Beta since 2001.

So Voila.fr Webmaster: please tell us how to block your bot. Thanks!

Update: 1/15/08
No response from Voiala.fr so I'm now denying them at the firewall. If you don't want this bot, I encourage you to do the same.

We've seen it from

81.52.143.15
81.52.143.16

193.252.149.15
193.252.149.16

Google Analytics can't track Javascript support

AJAX is almost a definitive component of Web 2.0. I tend to be an asshole about security so I like my sites to degrade nicely for those users who have Javascript disabled. I was wondering today if I am a relic.

Digg, my favorite web 2.0 site, is unusable without Javascript. You can login and click around your profile ok, but you can't digg any stories. I'd call that core functionality.

Google maps work ok. Maybe not mashups of Google maps, but the site itself will display in street view and text links for zooming and panning. Nice degradation.

But how many people actually surf around without Javascript enabled? I use Google Analytics to measure the meager traffic I get to this blog, so I checked there first. But since Google Analytics measures traffic solely by Javascript, by definition they can't tell how many people on your siet don't have Javascript enabled. Those users are invisible to Google Analytics.

Looks like Omniture has worked around this issue, I'm checking to see if WebTrends via log analysis provides the data too.

I can't complain about a missing feature in a free service, it's just uncommon for Google to miss a trick.

PS: Blogger requires Javascript, as I discover trying to click the "Publish Post" button and get nothing. Time to enable Javascript again.