Tech Status Quo

One or two incredibly interesting stories strike me on a daily basis, the first being this gem out of England.  A theme park there is actually banning the use of PDAs in the park.  Excerpt below.

“Alton Towers Resort will be piloting a “PDA Free Zone” during May Half Term (May 25th - June 1st inclusive), to encourage parents to disconnect from the office and reconnect fully with their families. PDA police will be onsite to enforce the ban and any adult caught using a PDA whilst at the Resort will be asked to report to one of five “PDA Drop Off Zones” where they can safely leave their PDA’s for the day. If the scheme is successful, it will be introduced full time.

Russell Barnes, Divisional Director for the Alton Towers Resort explains; “What we have here is the ultimate short break location where every member of the family can unwind and have fun. We feel it’s so important for parents and kids to focus on nothing more than having the best possible time, we are prepared to take drastic action to ensure that parents really leave their work behind!”

How arbitrary.  Rather than lowering prices, building more rides, or lengthening park hours, the security is actually stopping patrons from using their PDAs.  What a business strategy.

The biggest problem with this ‘ban’ on adults having PDAs is quite comical:

“So the policy allows kids phones for safety purposes.
Who are they going to call? The parents without the cell phones?”

Tag this at Technorati: alton parks, bad ban, dumb adults, family fun, pda, waste-of-money

Thats right folks, Google is going to update their page rank within the next 12 days. That would bring the time lapse between two PR updates to 100 days, leading to the belief that it is time to update the PRs. Below are the last 10 PR updates by date and days between.

Date Updated	Update Type	Days Lapsed
4/26/2006	TBPR Export	45
7/13/2006	TBPR & BL Export	100
9/28/2006	TBPR & BL Export	76
1/10/2007	TBPR & BL Export	101
1/25/2007	TBPR & BL Export	18
4/30/2007	TBPR & BL Export	98
10/28/2007	TBPR & BL Export	181
1/10/2008	TBPR & BL Export	74
2/26/2008	TBPR & BL Export	47
6/06/2008	TBPR & BL Export	100

Many people have been spreading the rumor that the PR update happened on April 30th. I personally checked the blogs of those claiming that their blog PR was updated, and none had been (most were still at N/A).

“Many of you has already noticed their new PR, and the rest will be noticing it in the next moments or days, so keep checking your Google Toolbar or use any of the Backlinks and Page Rank Checkers. for me and my 3 months site I have noticed my first new PR at the first moments of this day - the first of May (the labor day! and the month that holds my birthdate (May 7th) in its days! what a coincidence lol) - I was so excited for this Update as it’s my first update to know how good did I work and how much do I understand Google PR and the Search Engine Optimization concepts, so what was the result??”

The PR update has not yet happened, but it is coming in the near future. Get your final links in now before the update, the next one won’t be for another 100 days or so.

Tag this at Technorati: blogs, Google, google update, page rank, reach, search engine optimization, SEO, traffic

If you have (or had) Comcast as a service provider, we want to hear your experiences with them, preferably bad experiences to keep things interesting.

To participate in this contest either post your Comcast related story here or write a review of the wehatecomcast.com blog on your own blog.  If you choose the latter, make sure you leave a comment with a link to your blog.

The best post wins.  Creativity and exaggeration are key to this contest; the stories should be true, but a bit of flair never hurt anyone.

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought my experiences with Comcast were bad: frequent outages, technicians who didn’t know how to connect the line to my house, and shotty billing techniques; the following is the worst Comcast story I have hard in a while:

In the spring of 2005, Comcast had a national DNS problem that lasted for a couple of days.

A couple of weeks after that , my own Comcast started disconnecting and reconnecting all by itself. I’d be on one minute and off the next. Sure it would work 90% of the time, but only about 9 out of every 10 minutes.

The outages would be 3 or 4 seconds, or up to a minute or more. working remotely or working on a server became impossible. A constant internet connection for me is just as important as speed. Here’s a sustained ping to Comcast…

Read the rest of this ordeal…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tag this at Technorati: comcast, internet, shotty service

According to Steve Ballmer, Vista is selling “incredibly well”.

“”Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,” the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on, “45 percent of all of new business PCs”. Which is enlightening, since business users are about the ony buyers of new PCs that get a choice.”

After reading that nobody likes Microsoft’s most recent OS, Vista, this news is quite surprising. Personally, I have used Vista for over a year and have never had a problem with it. Not one crash. No hardware compatibility issues. No problems whatsoever.

XP was and still is a beautiful operating system. XP lacked one aspect thought, aesthetic value. Vista is an amazing piece of eye candy with awe-inspiring graphics.

The biggest complaint I hear about Vista is that it “hogs so much RAM”. This is because the graphics functions are stored in the kernel rather than in virtual memory, which eats up more RAM. Big deal, it looks pretty enough to part with an extra gig of RAM.

Tag this at Technorati: microsoft, RAM hog, vista