and now it’s unpaid endorsement time

i don’t normally do this kind of thing, but i’m
going to wax enthusiastic about my hosting provider,
cornerhost

, which touts itself as
hosting with a human touch

. this is no mere marketing euphemism – devoid of any spirit – for it
doesn’t take long for a new
cornerhost

customer to see the immovable force behind the company,
michal wallace

, performing his characteristic brand of understated, yet
unparalled, customer support.

a case in point. recently, a peculiar and difficult to track down behavior began
to appear in
ids

, the image management script that i use to power my
photo gallery

. i spent a little bit of time trying to track down the cause of
the problem but didn’t have time to really dig into the root cause,
so i decided to lob a barely coherent email to the private email
discussion group for
cornerhost

customers.

24 hours

later, michal had not only tracked down the bug, but had proposed
several alternative solutions
and

actually modified my script to get it running correctly again! i want you to pause for a moment and think of what would happen in you asked your hosting provider for help with a script that they didn’t officially support.

michal

obviously has a deep understanding of how to run what would
typically be viewed as a commodity business. now, i can hear all
you freshly minted mbas screaming that “high touch” customer
support isn’t
scaleable

and you’re right, to a certain extent, it’s not. but it has been my
experience that
cornerhost

cultivates a relationship with its customers that discourages
abusing the system and the support takes place in a semi-public
forum where any number of smart people can jump in if michal is to
busy to respond within 24 hours. and, of course, he’s probably not
unaware that after one of these superhuman feats of support, a percentage of his customers
with a little google juice are probably going to be more than happy to step
up to the plate and give him a good-old-fashioned unqualified
endorsement.

so, if you’re in the market for affordable hosting with a human
touch, look no further than
cornerhost

.

so, what exactly does pat metheny think of kenny g?

now, i don’t know pat metheny that well. o.k. i don’t know him at all. and it’s not like i’m a big fan of kenny g, but i’m still surprised to see pat crack open such a mean can of whoopass on kenny:

“But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture – something that we all should be totally embarrassed about – and afraid of. We ignore this, “let it slide”, at our own peril.”

[ via anil ]

what gender is your prose?

well, i guess i’ll have to add Lingua::EN::Gender to my rather long list of things to check out:

“I discovered The Gender Genie from LaughingMeme, which led me to Moshe Koppel and Shlomo Argamon’s algorithm, described in Nature and the New York Times Magazine. The Koppel-Argamon algorithm analyzes the text and guesses the author’s gender.

The algorithm was very simple, so I implemented it as a Perl module — Lingua::EN::Gender.”

i could imagine a few amusing and pointless applications that could benefit from guessing an author’s gender. [ via laughingmeme ]

scientist rediscover portion distortion

from the discovering-the-obvious department. scientist confirm what is obvious to anyone who’s been out to eat in the last decade – americans are fatter that their french counterparts because their portions are obnoxious:

“The answer, after methodical study of brasseries, eateries, pizza parlours, Chinese restaurants and Hard Rock cafes in both countries, is simple: the French eat less of everything. And they eat less because they are served smaller portions.”

i’m shocked, shocked. did you know that 20 years ago the average bagel was 3 inches in diameter and now it’s around 6. the average french fry serving has gone from 2 ounces to 5. of course, soft drink manufacturers are the big winners, with the “typical” soda [ giving away my east coast heritage ] serving ballooning from 6 ounces to 20 ounces.

olivier hits things squarely on the head – it’s all about elastic demand and “share of stomach”.

anal gland impaction and emotive malamutes


i’ve written previously on mauja, our emotive malamute and his sometimes amusing, occasionally infuriating, tendency to walk around “talking” to you; of course since he talks, he’s more than capable of talking back, or – more correctly – getting sassy:

“One of the most endearing (and sometimes exasperating) characteristics of the Alaskan Malamute is the fact that they talk. Their “Mala-talk” is usually sounds such as “oowoo”, “roowuf”, etc. Be warned, if they talk… they will also “talk back” to you just as a arguing child would. Owners have often found themselves in full conversation with their mals and both parties understanding what is being said.”

under normal circumstances mauja’s full of mostly good-natured, if not slightly grumpy sass, but give him a good case of impacted anal glands [ i’m not going to go into the ugly details of impacted anal glands, follow the link or use your imagination. ] and the sass turns into the rough equivalent of what you get when a toddler decides that she doesn’t want to be in the car anymore 20 minutes into a 5 hour trip.

to “unimpact” anal sacs, one need to “express” them, which pretty much means you need to pinch and squeeze them to get out the infected material. it’s kind of like when you were 13 and had pimples, only different in vitally important and repugnant ways. technically, a dog owner can perform this function, but i’ve never had the necessary fortitude, so off to the vet mauja goes, with bulging anal sacs and a mouth full of sass.

i arrive at the vet and realize that i’m getting a “newbie”. maybe she’s heard of mauja, but she hasn’t really experienced his sass in the first person. i don’t even bother to warn her. she takes mauja’s leash and i take a seat, casually flipping through “dog fancy”, while counting down in my head.

“5…4….3…2….1…”

“RAAAAAAARRRRRGH….ARRRR…….RAAAARRRRRGH!”

and so it goes on for two or three minutes. the newbie has gusto, i think to myself. people in the lobby cast worried glances, obviously wondering what sort of torture is being performed on mauja. of course, i know that not one person has laid a single finger on him. he’s merely telling them in no uncertain terms that he’s not really happy about the whole situation.

the newbie comes into the lobby, red-faced, likely embarrased by the calamity and probably wondering if i’m thinking that she’s injuring mauja.

“ummm. i think it might be infected. but i’m not really sure, because mauja won’t let me look. you know, he’s really not very happy.”

“i think i’ll have to get his regular vet so there’s somebody in the room he knows. it might be a few minutes since she’s seeing another animal right now”

“that’s fine. i understand.”

about 5 minutes pass and mauja starts into making his case again. only this time, it’s slightly different. i am not making this up. you can tell when he’s talking to somebody he knows. although he’s still loud enough so that you can hear him through the entire building, he’s a little less over-the-top in his vocalizations. it’s as if he’s switched from north korean style brinksmanship to a more diplomatic tone. it gets quieter over time and can tell the vet is slowly sweet talking him into letting her do what needs to be done. it’s only when i don’t hear a sound that i know he’s been pursuaded.

a few minutes later the vet comes into the waiting room. “ok. all set.”

“mauja’s such a big talker.” she says. “and a big baby. you know the whole time he was making all that noise we were standing around trying to talk to him. he always settles down eventually. ”

“yeah. i know.”

openoffice on osx. it’s worse than it appears.

i knew things weren’t looking so good when weeks started to pass and you still couldn’t get the x11 version of openoffice for os x [ update: oh, c’mon, of course i meant you can’t get the new 1.1 version. i’m perfectly aware that if you follow the link you can download the older 1.0 version ]. but apparently it gets worse, for the openoffice team has delayed a aqua-native version until early 2006:

“According to the update, the OS X translation has proven more complex and developer resources more limited than expected. As a result, project leaders have halted work on the OS X edition until version 2.0 of the main Windows/Linux version of OpenOffice is ready. ”

i guess i can live with this as long as it doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more updates of the x11 version for the mac. i’m not a power user of office suites of any sort and openoffice is the perfect solution; it allows me to avoid the microsoft tax while giving me the ability to open the occasional powerpoint or word file the someone sends me.

{ intertwingled since 2000 }