• Update:

    I am in the process of migrating, redesigning and relaunching the site. Please enjoy what is here and excuse any changes or disruptions. They should be painless.

MyHeritage.com Hates Spam

By Kit | Published: April 12, 2007

So blah bitty blah blah, I wanted to see what celebrities I look like and MyHeritage has a nifty little tool for this. In a move about which I am none to pleased, the require you to register in order to see your look alikes. As I mentioned previously, I have an email address explicitly for this purpose. Unfortunately, MyHeritage outsmarted me and ruled my email address to be unacceptable apparently because it contains the word “spam”. Since email addresses are about as easy to obtain as getting a monkey to fling waste, their security policy simply encouraged me to employ an email address that lives in the Internet ether. Again, it is ironic that I receive no spam at my spam address and I know numerous people who throw the word “spam” into their most valuable address just to tap into this mojo.

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Flock on Linux

By Kit | Published: April 4, 2007

I recently installed Flock on my Ubuntu box and have run into more problems than I would care to. First and foremost, it is a pain to install, requiring you to work from the command line. N ow I am no stranger to bash, but I generally do not use it in Ubuntu (there is something ironic there I am sure). Whatever it is, it just didn’t want to work for me. Once I had it installed, Ubuntu did not want to accept it into program files so I had to do a little back end lo-fi wizardry to get it to behave as one. Once I was up and running everything seemed to be humming along fine until I got to what is at the core of Flock: bookmarks. For some reason Flock will just not hold onto my bookmarks in the favorites bar. It posts them to del.icio.us just fine (which becomes an annoyance as I post over and over again trying to fix the problem. I will keep working on this for a bit, but in the meantime it seems that Firefox reigns supreme on Linux.

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Social Networking in Firefox

By Kit | Published: April 4, 2007

Michael Arrington has a post today at TechCrunch on how Mozilla is integrating social networking into Firefox and how it is bad news for Flock. Being a die hard fan of Flock, this raised some concerns for me. However, looking at the new Coop product, I think that it misses the mark for the average Flock user. The Coop creates a sidebar of your friends and shows any new content that they have posted or even pushed to you. This is perfect for people who use social networks but cannot be bothered with visiting all of their pages to check on a few friends. This keeps front and center so you are always up-to-date. Flock on the other hand offers features for what are essentially power usersw of the internet. To be honest, I never understood why they positioned themselves as a social browser as no one I know who uses it plays in social networks all that much. If it was their goal to create a social browser and they had not yet included a feature like the Coop then they have sorely missed their mark. What the have done is create a great meta tool for the internet. The killer features are the bookmark storage on del.icio.us, Flickr and Photobucket integration, and quick commands for uploading images and creating a blog post (I still cannot bring myself to use a browser based RSS reader and the Flock version pales next to Safari’s). None of these seem to be tied into the Coop and I would be curious to see how they work outside of there. All told, I don’t know that the Coop will be all that much of a threat to Flock, but a nice fork for those who really can’t get enough social networking in their lives. It will be interesting to see who the first will be to integrate Twitter in, as this seems to have a place in both.

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Ironic Spam Control

By Kit | Published: March 29, 2007

I discovered a bit spare irony in my life today. I maintain a number of email addresses that I use fairly arbitrarily. I do however have one that is a spam address that I use when signing up for things online and I am not entirely certain that the purveyor will not be flooding me with unwanted mail. The irony is of course that those email addresses that I distribute to people and organizations that I trust are inevitably flooded with copious amounts of spam and on checking my rarely checked “spam” address today, I discovered that it is 100% spam free. Looks like I need to rethink my policies…



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Introducing Tumblekit

By Kit | Published: February 28, 2007

I had a scary realization recently: I stink as a blogger. I reek at it to be frank. I don’t do it as often as I should and the content has turned to fluff. Just look at this main page. Not much substance. It is not a lack on inspiration or ideas. It is a lack of effort. I promise to start honing and will send some of this fluff elsewhere. Fortunately, that elsewhere has arrived. I have been using vox a bit, and I plan on keepiong that site running for lists and whatnot. But, I have also added another site to thye mix. I recently learned via MacBreak Weekly(the best podcast around for the money in my opinion. Even if you are not a Mac fan) of Tumblr and the concept of the Tumblelog which is what 90% of bloggers do and is what I am guilty of recently; using one’s weblog for link and media posting. Tumblr is full of Rails goodness and I figured at least worth a shot. It can be found at Tumblekit.com or at least will be once GoDaddy points everything in the right direction (in the meantime, you can find it at kit.tumbler.com. The permnent link can also be found in the header above.

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More on Treating Your Customers like Criminals

By Kit | Published: November 29, 2006

There is a great article at Black and White, Birmingham’s City Paper about the practice of stores stopping you when a security device is triggered upon your departure from the store or they ask to review your receipt prior to your departure. Essentially what it boils down to is the fact that assuming you have paid for all of your purchases you are doing them a service by stopping and that you are under no obligation to stop. And, in keeping with the theme of a number of previous posts here, I feel that it is your duty to depart the store. Otherwise, you are endorsing their policy of treating customers like thieves and potentially hinting that you yourself may be guilty of some crime.

Let’s take the instance whereby an alarm is triggered as you depart the store. Assuming that you have paid for everything that you intended to purchase, the triggering of the alarm must be due either to the failure on the part of the person that checked you out to deactivate the device or the malfunction of the sensor. In either case it is not your fault. It is an inconvenience to you to have to stop and their expectation that you stop indicates that they think their customers are criminals. Under no circumstances do they have the right to detain you. As the article indicates, you should proceed on your way. In the event that they have failed to remove a tag that triggers the sensors, I suppose it may be convenient to have that removed, but the bolder amongst you may take a stab at Urban Sprinting. (Via Link)

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The Bad: Treating your Students Like Criminals

By Kit | Published: November 16, 2006

One day when returning from class on my bicycle at Indiana University I got flagged down by a campus police officer. Being in a pack of other bicycles, I figured that there was nothing wrong and that he just had a quick question. He then asked for my ID and indicated that I was going the wrong way on a one-way street (a street that went for a good 200 feet and was essentially dedicated to foot traffic). He then issued me a ticket for $35, which seemed especially high to me since I was a college student and it was the equivalent to charge to “parking on landscaping” so presumably I could have driven my car into the middle of campus left in the yard and been charged the same amount. To this day, I have always wondered what would have happened had I refused to show my ID, since you A) Do not need to be a student to be on campus and B) Do not need a license to ride a bike.

I don’t think I will stew over that anymore, as a 23 year-old student at UCLA, Mostafa Tabatabainejad was tasered as many as five times by the UCPD for failing to present his student ID. You can see the horrific video here. While it seems the student resists a bit and is pretty outspoken (invoking the patriot act, claiming a medical issue, and generally being a 23 year old college student), it is my understanding that tasers are to be used in place of deadly force, and not to coerce someone to follow orders such as “stand up!”. In fact, I am pretty certain that the at least three officers could have helped the already tasered student to his feet without much trouble. In fact, that large group of students looking on shows that he clearly is not much of a threat. Since he did turn out to be a student who had simply forgotten his ID, the police were completely unwarranted in their actions and it certainly did not merit this level of force.

Amnesty International has called for an inquiry into the use of tasers, because 61 people died due to their use in 2005 alone and over 150 since their widespread adoption by law enforcement in the U.S. and Canada.

Update: From the CBS news story: “If he was able to walk out of here, I think he was okay,” the sergeant said.

Clearly they don’t get it.

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The Bad: Treating Your Customers Like Criminals Part 2 – Bank of America

By Kit | Published: November 15, 2006

Following UMGs example, Bank of America has decided that when in doubt you should treat your customers as criminals rather than acknowledging that the majority of people are not law breakers and that they should not be treated as such. Boing Boing has the full story, but here is the jist of it…

Guy sells bikes online for $600. Guy receives check from buyer for $2000 dollars. Buyer explains that extra money is for guy’s “trouble”. Dubious of the circumstances, guy asks Bank of America to confirm the availability of funds prior to depositing the check. Bank of America contacts buyer, buyer denies ever writing check. Bank of America calls cops, guy gets arrested. Guy has to pay $14,000 dollars to clear his name and is still out his $600. Bank of America says “screw you” when asked for compensation or apology.

In a reciprocal “screw you” and a bit of social justice, people have begun pulling their accounts from BOA to the tune of $50 million. I wish I could do the same, unfortunately I bank with Chase who is only marginally better.

Heck, people should have pulled their accounts simply for this.

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The Bad: UMG

By Kit | Published: November 13, 2006

In a tremendous showing of outreach the CEO and Chairman of Universal Music Group, Doug Morris said “”These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, So it’s time to get paid for it.” In reference to portable audio devices like the iPod and Microsoft Zune. Microsoft has folded and agreed to pay Universal money back on every Zune sold. I think it is pretty generous for Universal to call all of their customers thieves and for Microsoft to essentially confirm it. Since I own 4 iPods housing over 12,000 songs, I must be a really really big thief. That or a really good customer. Either way, it is clear that I like music. Which way do you think is a better way to get me, an existing or potential customer, to give you more of my money? Accuse me of theft and charge me against my will, or give me the benefit of the doubt and focus on providing better products and services. I now definitely will not be purchasing a Zune or any UMG music anytime soon.

Update: Om Malik is trying to rally folks to not buy Universal Music for a week in order to demonstrate that there are in fact paying customers out there. Please help out and if you have a blog, throw one of these badges on it for good measure.

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GTD and the Big Dumb Monkey

By Kit | Published: November 10, 2006

43Folders is featuring a series of conversations between Merlin Mann and Getting Things Done author David Allen. The first podcast in the series focuses on procrastination which is something that I struggle with quite a bit (who doesn’t). Allen suggests really working on the first action portion of GTD such that tasks become essentially a matter of cranking widgets; No thought, no big ideas, just plain mindless action. This is a concept that I stumbled on myself, or rather I am sure I was led to naturally via GTD and is what I call the “Big Dumb Monkey”. I have found that I get the most stuck on projects or most distracted when I start thinking of grand ideas and looking at projects as a whole instead of the little pieces. When that happens, I just tell myself “You are a big dumb monkey”, settle in and pick out the tasks that have the best delineated small steps (so much so that it often takes more time to check off the tasks then it does to complete them). Between the prerequisite scratching, picking, sniffing of big dumb monkey mode, I am always surprised at the amount of work that gets done. At the end of the day, it truly does wind down to just knowing the steps and executing them. If it is a particularly stressful time and I have a lot of bind freezing projects I have been known to have Amy send me off in the morning with a hearty “Big Dumb Monkey!” cheer just to make sure I don’t get too caught up in the fact that I am a sentient being.

For the editorial process on books, I have managed to distill the entire proposal and launch phase into a 29-step process with 5 mile markers (new titles meeting, proposal meeting, post proposal meeting, contract phase, and editorial launch) to keep things segmented. It all flows from one step to the next. Best of all, I have built it out as a template within Kinkless GTD so I can kick start just about anything with three mouse clicks. It has become a true procrastination stopper in that if I stall out on any given project I just grab an active book and move it along through the steps as far as I can or take a book idea that I have had kicking around and thrust it into the machine. From there it is a matter of cranking widgets.

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    This is the weblog of Kit Kemper. It is generally about marketing. Marketing in the sense that pretty much everything you do as a company and more often as a person these days devolves into marketing of some sort or another. It is also about tech in much the same way as it is about marketing, technology touches more of our lives every day and where people, marketing, and technology converge there are some pretty interesting things happening.