Farewell to history

A.I. generated imagery crossed the threshold of "dangerous" long ago. Now it's almost impossible to tell what's real.

A few weeks ago I saw video of Donald Trump's name being removed from the Kennedy Center. That never happened, at least not then, and not in a public way. The name was allegedly removed this past week, but under concealing tarps hanging from scaffolding in such a way that it could not be seen by the public.
Then yesterday I saw an image of the building restored, with the scaffolding down and the Trump name removed. Not a mark to indicate what had been done. It looked great. Only...in reality, the scaffolding is still up, the tarps are still covering the name. No one has seen it yet.

The world's largest steam locomotive just made its way through Northeastern PA yesterday. Dozens of people took photos and recorded videos. Today I saw some photos that looked...Weirdly composed. TOO perfect. Were they A.I. generated, or A.I. enhanced?

What's that guy pointing at? Why is the guy in the green shirt taking a photo of empty tracks instead of the historical train right behind him?

A.I.-enhanced? Or just tweaking colors until the picture looks completely unnatural?

This morning I saw photos from a historical event: the funeral procession of Ronald Reagan. Nancy Reagan expressing grief.

But something feels off about the composition of the photos, of the images of Nancy Reagan. Something makes me think these shots of cars and people are A.I. simulations of the actual events. Nancy Reagan's grief looks like a computer trying to express emotions.

These A.I.-generated images of Paul McCartney, Phil Collins. and Elton John immediately came to mind.

The list goes on and on. I recently heard about someone who had their photo taken on a trip and posted to social media. The photo gave them a pocket square they never wore, a fancy gold watch they never owned. They didn't ask for these "enhancements." Their cell phone's built-in A.I. assistant added them on its own.

Where are we going with this? Nowhere good. Elections this past month have freely made use of A.I.-generated fake photos and video. By the time the next elections come around, these fakes will be much better. Already we need to doubt the "evidence" presented of past and current events. Soon it may be completely impossible to be certain of anything. 

New Chromebook, August 27, 2023

I never made a record of when I got my first Chromebook. It was sometime in 2012 or 2013, I believe. It served me well for several years, but then began to experience multiple breakdowns, and I eventually bit the bullet and bought another one. The new one was also an entry-level device, also with a 10.5 inch screen, also priced under $120. It also lasted only a few years before it, too, broke down. (I believe, more specifically, it shorted out; perhaps the cool patterned-aluminum case was not the best idea.) It was followed by a third, and a fourth, with each gradually breaking down before a complete failure, giving me an opportunity to back up many of the photos and files stored locally. 

The most recent failure signaled its arrival for several months, first as a physical failure (the hinges crumbled and broke, first the left, then the right), then as a failure of the right-hand charging port and the charger itself (a replacement charger also failed after a while) and then increasing difficulty convincing the Chromebook to turn on. Finally yesterday, it shut itself off at one point and refused to turn back on, regardless of how much coaxing I did. I tried recharging it through its working charge port, and it took a charge but still refused to turn on.

I could probably get this most recent Chromebook repaired, but at what cost? Is it worth it for the handful of unbacked-up photos, files, and scans, most of which came from other devices or were subsequently preserved in emails? Last night I decided it would be better to buy a new Chromebook. None were available for the prices I had paid before (my last one was purchased new on sale for the deeply discounted price of $70), but I found a model that represented a significant upgrade - and could be delivered the next day. I ordered it, it arrived, I fired it up and here we are.

This time, though, I splurged on the two year extended warranty.

Going offline for a bit

I've been hit with another virus. It's a Google redirect, but this time it appears to have compromised my Windows firewall and updater. Webroot Personal Security didn't protect me from this virus, nor did it detect it once it was present, so I'm a little peeved. I'll be offline until the Geek Squad at the Wilkes-Barre Best Buy figures out how to fix it. I spent all day with an online agent working on it, and in the end he thought it was fixed, but the redirect is still there. We'll also have to see just what is covered under the warranty.

Be back ASAP.

Back from the (almost) dead

Friday night I went out to see a friend's band in Scranton. To hear them, too, though I wish I had followed my own advice and taken earplugs with me - they were good, but loud, and standing directly in front of one of the speakers didn't help.

Within an hour of getting home from the event I managed to unleash a virus onto my computer.

In retrospect I think I know what happened. A pop-up window appeared while I was bumbling around the internet and asked me if I wanted to install a certain program. I was given options of "Install" and "Cancel" - and like an idiot, I clicked on the one marked "Cancel", instead of x-ing or Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the browser out of existence. As I have just learned, when these pop-ups pop up, often the entire thing is one big button, and clicking anywhere in it will install the program.

The first sign something was wrong was when I was attempting to open some trusted sites in Chrome and was informed that the sites - like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and even Google - had suspicious-looking authentication certificates. I decided something was wrong with Chrome, and had to open IE to get to Google so I could research the problem. The official Chrome support sites were less than helpful, consisting mostly of people posting precisely the same problem I was having, followed by requests for more details from the Google techs. It took a lot of digging and a lot of false leads, but I finally came across one explanation that should have occurred to me from the start: malware.

Not to worry. I had Malwarebytes, and I had (had being the functional word; I don't see either of these now!) Spybot Search and Destroy (I think that's what it was called), and I had a top-notch antivirus program...which should have protected me in the first place.  Malwarebytes revealed a collection of suspicious-looking things that I removed. Spybot spotted a few others. My AV was able to target one program as the source of the problem, but couldn't remove it.

Fine. Screw it. I had a virus problem almost exactly a year ago, and took my computer to one of those big box electronics stores to have it deloused, and while I was electronically pouring money into their pockets,  I decided to spend a little more for the extended protection program. So I knew I was covered. Unfortunately, I didn't haul my computer up there until Sunday afternoon, and they told me that turnaround time would be about 48 hours, as I expected. But they didn't actually get things wrapped up until late Tuesday night, so Wednesday was the earliest I could pick it up.

In the meantime I had online obligations I was shirking. I should have written up the NEPA Blogs Blog of the Week for Tuesday, but I didn't, and dumped it in Michelle's lap. I also should have changed the NEPA Blogs header image on Wednesday, but I had had the foresight to send a bunch of header images to Michelle a few weeks ago, so she was also able to take care of that - and get the story behind the image from the person who submitted it.

Meanwhile, the weather conspired against me. We have had copious rain the past few days, but Wednesday started off sunny and clear - perfect grass-growing weather. I was in work during the day and couldn't do anything about it, and the forecast had suggested that rain would be coming later in the day. But it stayed dry into the afternoon, and conditions were perfect after work for mowing the lawn. So I did. By the time I was done, I really didn't feel much like taking a trip to pick up my computer. So I let it go until today.

Now here I am. Hundreds of emails behind, dozens of Facebook updates and tweets and blog post updates to catch up with. Several deaths have passed without my comment - George "Goober" Lindsey (whose hat on Hee Haw was a prime example of the lost art of repurposing a used-up fedora - and a real-world version of the "crown" worn by Archie's friend Jughead), Maurice Sendak (who was haunted all his life by the fact that he accidentally brought about the death of one of his friends as a child during a simple game of catch, when the friend ran into the street to retrieve a ball Sendak had thrown too far - and was hit by a car), and Vidal Sassoon (who had the most amazingly kickass biography you could imagine - how many people were both anti-Nazi street fighters and revolutionized women's hair fashion?) I also failed to commemorate the anniversary of the passing of Franco Kossa, the founder of the Sideshow Gathering. My own blogiversary is in here somewhere - either I have just missed it, or it's just about to happen.

So now I'm back. It will take some time for me to catch up. I've just re-installed Malwarebytes on my system, and a scan came up clean. Spybot Search & Destroy is installing as I type these words. This post is (almost) my first signal to the world that I'm back online. We'll see what I missed in the past few days!

SiteMeter issues

A few days ago I started having problems with Internet Explorer 8.*  Big problems.  It would lock up at various times in a non-repeatable manner.  Sometimes it would lock up when I opened too many tabs.  Sometimes it would lock up when I tried to close a tab.  Sometimes it would lock up if I was typing a comment in Facebook and made a mistake or wanted to make a change and used the left-arrow key. Sometimes, but not always.

I tried everything.  I remember once I started having random problems that seemed to be related to my mouse - more specifically, my mouse cord - and finally tracked the source to my drawing pad pen, velcroed to the side of my tower. Once I removed that, the problems went away. (Spurious signals being induced in the mouse wire by the magnet present in the tip of the pen? I have no idea.) I looked for something similar. I have a pair of headphones hanging from a stick-on hook on my tower. Could the magnets in the earpieces be causing a problem? I took them down. I had pulled my now-expired passport out of my passport pouch and propped it against the side of the computer. Could there be a magnetic strip embedded in the cover? I moved that. The problems persisted. I finally tried running an anti-virus scan and I found - something. Mal/GlFlframe-A. Not a virus, but an object that exhibits virus-like properties. Something that hadn't been there on the previous day's sweep. I removed it.

The problems persisted.

This had graduated from being annoying to something much worse.  It wasn't something physical, it wasn't something extrinsic like a virus.  Was it something intrinsic to one of the sites I had open?  My habit is to open my Hotmail, then Facebook, then SiteMeter, then Blogger. From Hotmail I may open links in new tabs.  Ditto for Facebook.  From SiteMeter I may open detailed information about individual visits in new tabs, and sometimes use those as jumping-off points to sites that directed traffic to my blog. From Blogger I will open my blog, and check for updates on friends' blogs.  Within a minute of going online I may have a dozen or more new tabs open.  Could one of them be causing the problem?

I tried opening each of my first four sites in separate windows.  I thought maybe these would each invoke individual sessions of IE8, and a crash on one would not cause a crash in the others.  In a few minutes I found I was wrong.

OK.  Four sites.  Open them three at a time.  There are four ways of doing this, assuming the order in which I open them is irrelevant.  (If it is relevant, there are 4x3x2 ways of choosing three items from a group of four, so I would have to run twenty-four tests.)  On a hunch I decided to eliminate the third site first: SiteMeter.

This wasn't just a random choice.  SiteMeter, once opened, is a static site - it won't update unless I refresh it.  All it does is show me reports. But the SiteMeter homepage was once apparently infected with a virus.  This came in the immediate aftermath of the August 2008 incident in which SiteMeter managed to crash most of the Internet for the better part of a weekend, apparently because someone decided that a Friday night would be the best time to implement some changes that had not yet been tested. (Perhaps the virus was a parting gift from the employee who was blamed for the problem?)

(This was not the only disaster of 2008 for SiteMeter.  They rolled out the new, exciting, revised SiteMeter in mid-September, to universal condemnation - and rolled it back, to their credit, the same day.  I don't know how much these two fiascoes hurt the company, but I'm guessing "a lot."  Since that time they have made occasional posts to their news and announcements blog, but most of them have been removed.  The last post there is from February 19, 2009 - more than two years ago at the time of this writing.)

So I opened Hotmail, then Facebook, then Blogger.  It took an enormous effort not to open SiteMeter.  And then I surfed and clicked and commented away to my heart's content without so much as a hiccup.  I soon forgot I was running a test.  Eventually I remembered.  I finished off any business I had, closed any extraneous tabs, and opened SiteMeter.

Within a minute Internet Explorer locked up.

I shut down IE and re-ran my virus scan.  It came up clean.

I re-opened SiteMeter by itself.  Within a minute it locked up again.

OK, test over.  SiteMeter was to blame.  Not very scientific, but so far this conclusion is holding.

So what's wrong?

I have no idea.  I'm not seeing much scuttlebutt about SiteMeter online, other than  some speculation that the precipitous drop in Gawker Media readership after a site redesign might actually be a problem with how their SteMeter thingie is reporting visitor statistics.  But I don't see any other recent praise or criticism of SiteMeter.  And the SiteMeter site itself is remarkably comatose. It's possibly little more than a zombie at this point, a zombie that happens to be generating enough revenue to keep it running.

I still check SiteMeter, sometimes.  Usually at the end of a session, when I'm done with everything else, when I don't care if IE crashes or not.  But it does.  Every damned time.



*Yes, I know.  Well, there's your problem right there.  Blah blah blah.  Shut up.  Has anyone resolved the Firefox js3250.dll issue yet?  I still get lots of hits about that every day.  SiteMeter tells me that.

Dappled Sunlight, 6/28/2007

The story:

It was four months into my layoff and I was getting desperate. Precious few jobs were to be found anywhere in Northeastern Pennsylvania. To make matters worse, the weather was swelteringly hot. The weather had played hell with my ancient (seven year old) PC and combined with numerous other factors - including, most likely, a vast array of viruses that had made it though my nearly-as-ancient (but dutifully updated) antivirus software - to fatally crash the system one time too many. A friend offered to assemble a new system for me, cobbled together out of parts he had acquired here and there. We transferred the data from my old hard drive to the new one, gave it a few test-boots, and I was back in business.

For a little while.

I don't know if it was the heat, or a Firefox bug, or just me, but I managed to break the new set-up very quickly.

So back I went on the nearly seventy mile journey to my friend's house. It was eventful, to say the least: a titanic electrical storm swept through the region that afternoon, knocking out power to the house, and for a while it looked like I would be going home empty-handed. The first re-install failed in exactly the same way as the initial install. I think we tried it a second time and were able to make it fail again. The third time we made some modifications, stripped out a few things, and it came up and stayed up.*

By then it was about 3:00 in the morning. I didn't have anywhere special to be the next day, but my friend needed to get up for work in just a few hours. I spent the rest of the night at their house and got up after my friend had left. I packed my newly-repaired computer into my car and left the house as my friend's wife and their child were heading out for the day.

We stepped outside to cool, moist air, a far cry from the hot and humid air before the previous evening's thunderstorms. The rain had soaked the ground, and dew had formed on every needle of every branch of the hemlock forest that surrounds their house. A mist hung in the air, and the risen sun broke up in the branches and fell as visible beams onto the forest floor. I raised my ever-present camera and took three pictures.

Thanking my friend's wife for their aid and hospitality, I saddled up my car for the journey home.



*For a while. I managed to crash it again several months later. But by then I had a job, and decided not to bother my friend again, feeling too much like Odysseus returning to Aeolus to ask for the same favor one time too many. I bit the bullet and paid to have the contents of the hard drive salvaged and the necessary programs re-installed, including a souped-up anti-virus program. Aside from a power supply failure a year or so later, it's been pretty stable since then.

Illustrations for Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant"

UPDATE: You can just skip over these first three paragraphs if you like. And the fourth one as well.

Yes, that's what you would be seeing here...if I hadn't created the paintings using the Painter Classic program that came bundled with my cheapie Wacom tablet ten years ago, saved them in the proprietary .RIF format, and then had the 1999-vintage computer (running Windows 95) crash, taking the program with it.

So. The files are on my computer, recovered with great effort and some expense, first by my friend who built me this computer and transferred all my files from the old one, and then by the folks at Best Buy who had to recover this computer when I stumbled into a nest of vipers one day and had my new computer hit - hard - by several viruses at once. But they are inaccessible, as inaccessible as all the old homemade cards that were made in another proprietary format on another now-lost program. (Literally; I don't know where that disc is.)

Maybe I can locate the old tablet installation disc, and maybe I can convince Windows XP to allow me to install both the tablet and the Painter program. If that happens, I'll grab all those old RIF files and save them as BMPs or JPGs or whatever.


UPDATE: It took less than half an hour to locate and run the two discs that contained the installation programs for the Wacom tablet and the add-ons, including Corel Painter Classic. It then took another hour to figure out why Painter Classic kept telling me "Not enough memory to run Painter." (Turns out that too much virtual memory is as bad as too little, as far as this program is concerned; I temporarily cut my virtual memory in half and it works just fine.)

Perhaps the game was not worth the candle, though. These paintings...well, I was in my earliest days of playing around with this program, and I was aiming for something cartoonish, maybe even Muppet-ish, and I was mixing media - crayon, pastels, oils, watercolors - in a way that would be almost unthinkable (and probably unworkable) in the bricks-and-mortar world. Worse, the paintings were not really based on any textual passages (but see below), but more on my memory of the story, which I first experienced as a cartoon as a young child (see below) and later as an illustrated book at the office of Dr. Abbot, my Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor (that used to be a specialty, you know) who served mainly as my eye doctor, prescribing and dispensing my glasses and, later, contact lenses from third grade all the way through the end of High School. (He retired after that.)

Another note: The dates on these paintings indicated that they were created in late September, 2001 - in the weeks that came after the world changed forever, at least the world that some of us knew. My thoughts were turned towards family, and my young and as-yet-unborn nephews, and I was immersing myself in things that seemed important and worthwhile, all while swimming in an environment of shock and horror and grief and rage. I don't know how much that informed what I was doing, but I think it's in there somewhere.


This one is called "The Selfish Giant Alone." It doesn't really have a place in the story. I think it comes after this passage:

He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle.

(That sword looks bent, dammit.)

The problem is, the next picture - "The Selfish Giant Returns" - is an illustration for the sentence that immediately precedes that one:

One day the Giant came back.

It's meant to look imposing, frightening, an angry giant seen from a trespassing child's perspective, cast in silhouette by the sun. But at the same time it looks silly: a big angry giant with a sword* strapped to his back, wearing a short skirt.

And now "The Selfish Giant Revealed" - which would be an illustration for the very next paragraph. Two paragraphs, five sentences, three illustrations. Here we see the giant as more Muppet-like than the previous illustrations suggested, with ping-pong ball eyes and a wide gash of a mouth, big ears, a bushy mop of hair, sideburns, and knee breeches. Notice that the grass has grown midway to his knees in the seven years he's been away.

But that was it. I never did any additional illustrations for this story.

For those unfamiliar with this story, here's a link to Project Gutenberg's version of The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde. Read them all. He was an amazing guy who wrote amazing stories.

BONUS: YouTube user TheLittleDevil has posted the old cartoon online in three parts.
The Selfish Giant - Part 1
The Selfish Giant - Part 2 (The personifications of Frost, Snow, The North Wind, Hail, and Autumn have stuck with me for my entire life.)
The Selfish Giant - Part 3 (It's missing the very last sentence at the end of the story, which is a real gutpunch. Read the story and see for yourself!)


*The sword, at least, is canon. From near the end of the story:

"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant; "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him."

Facebook Revises Format; World Thrown Into Chaos

Well, maybe not. Not quite. Not yet.

I haven't been hit with the February 2010 revision yet, but I know it's coming. And lots of people I'm friends with have gotten it already. And none of them are singing its praises. Many of them are actively cursing it out.

I don't know why Facebook revises its format every few months. It's a business decision, of course; and for a business that gives its services to users for free, such decisions must lean towards pragmatic considerations of increasing revenue while at least maintaining market share by not alienating users to the point that they begin looking around for some other forum that provides the same or similar services without subjecting users to things they find objectionable.

So on the one hand, you want to make more money from advertisers and applications developers. On the other hand, you don't want to piss people off too much.

But on the gripping hand, people don't like change.

Since I joined Facebook about a year and a half ago I have seen several changes to the interface format. Based on the earliest comments I saw from my friends, one had just happened a short while before I came on board. As for the others, it seems like they've kicked in just as soon as everyone got used to the previous changes.

Is this perhaps an intentional effort by Facebook to keep things fresh by never allowing users to get too set in the ways of a given revision? Is it part of a master plan to nudge Facebook toward something else? Or is it just a series of really bad decisions?

I hope Facebook knows the cautionary tale of SiteMeter.

SiteMeter was - is - one of the most popular visitor tracking applications out there. How popular, most people didn't realize until one fateful weekend starting on the very last day of July, 2008, when something happened that allowed an untested modification to the program to be unleashed on users - an untested modification that shut down a significant portion of the Internet.

Another Monkey: SiteMeter causing site errors in Internet Explorer

It took the better part of the weekend for SiteMeter to resolve this issue, a late summer weekend when the people doing the resolving had probably already made plans to do other things. It left the company with a black eye and a lot of angry users, particularly the paying users who found their sites inaccessible to customers for much of the weekend.

But that was just the dress rehearsal for what was to come. SiteMeter had been investing considerable time that year into a revision to their program, something that would be a dramatic change for the better. But what was released in the middle of September 2008...wasn't.

Another Monkey: The NEW & IMPROVED SiteMeter: ummmm.....

The reaction was overwhelming. SiteMeter heard and responded. They rolled back the revised program to the previous version. And that is the same version that is still being used a year and a half later.

SiteMeter hasn't had much to say since then. At all. Their blog, if you can find it,* is pretty sparse, and the posts referring to the two fiascoes of 2008 are gone. I get an impression that as a company, they never recovered from the massive loss of user confidence spawned by these debacles.

Facebook has never suffered such a loss, and has never rolled back a revision. Perhaps this is because, from a social networking point of view, they are the biggest gorilla in the room. Where are angry Facebook users going to go? MySpace? LinkedIn? Classmates.com?

Maybe Facebook doesn't care. Users will keep on using Facebook, and will get used to any changes, and will keep attracting advertisers and application designers and their money.

Or maybe Facebook really and truly doesn't know. Maybe they think everything is fine.

There exists an official Facebook blog. On it members of the Facebook staff have been posting about the ongoing changes. This entry, for example, details the changes to the interface, while this one deals with changes to the way photos are uploaded. These posts serve as a critical source of information, but also provide an opportunity, through the comments, for users to provide feedback to Facebook itself.

Are the changes really all that bad? Honestly, I have no idea. I haven't experienced them myself. I expect that there will be some things I will like, and some things that make no sense whatsoever.

But no matter how bad these changes are, one thing is certain with Facebook: more revisions are just down the road!



*If you follow the link to the SiteMeter Knowledge Center and then click on the New/Announcements button, you go to a dead page. It took some doing to find the actual blog. And the blog itself has not been without its problems.

Just when you thought it was safe to start using Firefox again...

I haven't used Firefox in over two years. I got tired of the crashes and failures, the uninstalls and reinstalls, all apparently related to a file called js3250.dll.

I don't miss it that much. Microsoft learned a lot from its upstart competitor and emulated some of its major features, like tabbed browsing. Through Google Reader and "following" on Blogger I've been able to get the same results as Firefox's "live bookmarks."

Still, every once in a while I will come across a site that sings the praises of Firefox, and tells you that it has been optimized for Firefox. And I wonder what I am missing.

My posts about the js3250.dll bug have been some of my most consistent hit generators since I first put them up. But lately - say, in the last few months - the number of hits from people searching specifically for js3250.dll has died off. Has the problem gone away?

Apparently not. Almost all of the increase in traffic in the last week of October can be traced to a single link on the Tech Support Guy forums - a link that was first posted on April 14, 2007.

So what's going on here? I wish I knew. Did Firefox make this problem go away for a while, only to have it come back with a vengeance? Who can say?

All I know for sure is, I won't be reinstalling Firefox anytime soon.

Lost Luggage

I have never personally had a problem with my luggage getting lost by an airline. Once, when I flew out to Los Angeles on business in 1994 or so, it nearly did. My traveling companion and I waited at the baggage conveyor and retrieved our luggage as it went around, and around, and around. In the end we had everything - except my main piece of luggage. We decided to look for help, and walked through baggage claim past several other stopped conveyors for other flights. About five conveyors down there was a single bag sitting unattended. Mine. We retrieved it and got out of there.

It used to happen all the time. One of my father's bags was lost when he was coming back from visiting his mother in California about thirty years ago. It was the bag containing, among other things, our ancient Brownie camera which he had used to take photos on his visit. All gone.

The past few times I have travelled I have made my own ID tags for my luggage, including my carry-on, with my face, name, address, and phone number. At Shannon airport in Ireland one of the staff asked me if I was a member of a crew - they have similar tags for their luggage. At Logan airport a security guard looked at my carry-on after it went though the scanner and asked who it belonged to. I guess the huge freaking tag wasn't explicit enough. (They needed to examine it because the scanner picked up "a large glass object" inside. I informed him that it wasn't glass, it was Waterford Crystal. Duty-free Waterford Crystal.)

On trips the past ten years or so I have been astonished by the complexity of luggage identification added to all checked bags, with numerous letter codes and barcodes. I don't know much about baggage handling systems, but I have heard that the mad mass of conveyor belts seen at the end of Toy Story 2 is a pretty accurate representation.

With the complexity and redundancy of these systems and the now-ubiquitous use of optical systems and computers to scan and track all bags, it seems absurd - even impossible - that a piece of luggage can get lost. Misdirected, yes. Stolen, yes. Had the tag fall off and dropped out of the system, yes.* But lost? Lost? Just follow the trail of scans and see where the last scan took place. Then work from there.

But a friend's son's luggage has gotten lost on an international flight.

Read This Because I Probably Won't Call: Continental Airlines will Steal Your Luggage and Ruin Your Career

This is Day 3 of Dean stuck in Amsterdam with no luggage, no bike (for which he paid a surprise $150 fee when bikes are supposed to ship free on international flights unless they don't like the way you look), and no way to compete in the 6-day racing event in which he was contracted to appear.

Continental doesn't even know where his luggage is. "Luggage" meaning a custom-built track bike, uniforms, bike shoes, and peripherals valued at - I don't know - lots.

If Continental is not providing tracking information on this, then it's probably safe to assume it's been stolen while in their possession. Which means it's a security matter. Which means it's also a matter for HOMELAND Security - if some employee of the carrier is tampering with cargo, then it wouldn't take a Libyan "businessman" to get something onto one of their flights.

Has anyone else had an experience in the past fifteen or so years with luggage that was lost, stolen, or misdirected and never recovered? Did the airline ever explain how and where the scan trail went cold?

UPDATE, 2:28 PM 10/18/09: The missing bag has been recovered. But the mystery remains: Where has it been? I doubt Continental will ever provide a straight answer to that.

Read This Because I Probably Won't Call: Continental Sucks, but Dean Survives


*I had this happen with a FedEx package at work a few years ago. After realizing that a missing asset had actually been shipped more than a week before, I used FedEx's tracking system to follow the package to, I think, a FedEx facility in Tennessee. We contacted that facility, and they were able to locate a package whose shipping label had fallen off - the missing package.

Firewall issues

I haven't been able to access AOL for the past two days. The site itself, or my AOL mail, or (most importantly) my AOL Instant Messenger.

I think it's a Firewall thing. It may also be related to this change made by Verizon, though I don't think so.

Today when I opened a new tab in IE8 I was greeted by a Google page. But that wasn't the page I was expecting. A few minutes of checking reveled that my Google toolbar now had a feature turned on that I had never turned on.

I need to look into these issues, especially the AIM one. But this is a work day. I'm scheduled to work through Monday night, and will probably have overtime on Tuesday night. After that I'll try to sit down and figure out what's going on.


UPDATE: Never mind. Choosing "Auto configure" on the AIM error screen for the umpteenth time finally fixed it.

Is Google under attack now?

Tried to view my blog through a comment notification, and I got this error message:

Google Sorry...

We're sorry...
... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

See Google Help for more information.

So is Google having a DDOS attack today? Or is this just me? I've never seen this message before.

Update, 5:56 PM: Yep, it's not just me.

Anybody else having problems with Facebook this morning?

If I try to update my status, I get this:

Transport error (#12031) while retrieving data from endpoint `/ajax/updatestatus.php': Unknown HTTP error #12031

Hmmmm...some of the stuff I'm seeing suggests this is a Firewall / Windows XP problem.

Update, 11:23 AM: Ummmm, can these stories be related?:

http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/08/facebook-downtime-issues/
Facebook Experiencing Serious Downtime Issues
Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 6th, 2009 10:18 AM

Want to browse Facebook to see what your friends are doing or to catch up on to harvest your farms on FarmVille? Good luck! Over the past 24 hours I’ve been receiving numerous emails from users reporting that many features on Facebook have been unavailable. I’ve also been experiencing problems. This morning I tried to load my friend requests page and it just failed. On the AllFacebook page I tried viewing comments and likes of one of the posts and an AJAX error popped up.

Facebook doesn’t appear to be the only site having issues however. Twitter has been down for the past 15 minutes and users are going crazy! One anonymous blogger told us “I can’t retweet my own articles so how the hell am I going to get readers to my site?” Woe is me my dear friend! Talk about problems going on in the world: Facebook can’t be accessed by a large portion of its users. The site is known for having great uptime but more recently as the site has surged past 250 million users, the company is facing new issues.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351283,00.asp
Twitter's Site Goes Down
08.06.09
by Mark Hachman and Brian Heater
The popular microblogging site Twitter went down early Thursday morning, with the site's operators confirming the outage on a status blog.

Twitter offered no explanation for the outage, adding a characteristically pithy post on its Status blog titled, simply, "Site is Down". "We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly," the post read.

PCMag.com staffers also noted problems with Facebook at about the same time, with the site failing to load briefly. The status site "downforeveryoneorjustme.com" also reported both Twitter and Facebook being down at about 9:45 AM Eastern time. Facebook was accessible shortly thereafter, although PCMag.com staffers reported a few glitches, such as problems with posting status updates and internal links.

http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2009/08/05/DOD-ban-social-media.aspx
Does a DOD ban on social media makes sense?
By John S. Monroe
Aug 05, 2009FCW readers are evenly split — and passionately so — about the prospects of a Defense Department ban on social media.

To some readers, it’s a “no duh” decision. DOD, an anonymous reader writes, “is not a social experiment.”

Other readers acknowledge the security risks associated with social media, but say such risks can and should be addressed.

Further, a ban comes with risks of its own.

“If [the social-media applications] are blocked, we potentially face losing good employees and soldiers/marines/airmen/sailors, but will be completely unprepared for future technology,” writes Phil.

For more background, check out the following stories:
DOD may ban Twitter, Facebook, other social media
Marines: Facebook is not for the few good men

Update, 2:18 PM, courtesy of Michelle: Facebook and Twitter are under attack.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_facebook_and_livejournal_down_at_the_same.php

Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal Down at the Same Time!(Update)
Written by Sarah Perez / August 6, 2009 7:32 AM/

For those of you addicted to social networking, Thursday morning is starting out pretty rough. The two biggest sites for updating your status - Twitter and Facebook - are both experiencing issues this morning. Twitter's outage started around 9 AM EST today and while Facebook is up (somewhat), posting updates and wall comments is currently very flaky. And you can't even go vent about how this makes you feel over on your LiveJournal blog because - guess what? - it's down too.

Update: Twitter says they're fighting off a DDOS attack right now but the site is back up. LJ also says they're experiencing a DDOS attack.

According to the Twitter status blog, a posting around 10 AM EST simply reads: "Site is down. We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly." However, Twitter Search appears to be functional and is somehow pulling in recent tweets, so obviously Twitter has not completely "failwhaled" for everyone.

To make matters worse, Facebook is also experiencing issues this morning as many rebuffed Twitter users are now finding out when they go to post their status on the social networking site instead. The Facebook outage appears to be intermittent, though, and isn't affecting everyone. If you notice anything at all, it may be only that posting status updates and comments display an error message. But simply clicking the post button again may be able to force them through (at least that was my experience.) The site also loads slowly at times and is displaying occasional "transport" errors.

So, who to suspect in this Distributed Denial of Service attack on social media?

1. "White-hat" hackers making the DoD's point for them.
2. Wingnuts upset that people are expressing gratitude that Bill Clinton and/or the Obama Administration were able to get Laura Ling and Euna Lee freed from North Korea.
3. The same people behind the Astroturfing Teabaggers who are trying to Swift Boat health care reform. (And are there no cops armed with Tasers at these meetings?)
4. North Koreans upset that Americans are not bowing down in gratitude to the Great Leader for his mangnanimity.
5. The Iranian government because...just because.

This is happening just a little more than a year after SiteMeter crashed the Internet.


Update, 7:38 PM: Michelle has pointed out that there is a major hackers' conference going on, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to suspect some connection.

But this from a friend on Facebook: "Andy Borowitz just announced 'One Billionth Click on Nude Vanessa Hudgens Link Causes Twitter Outage.'"

Internet Explorer script error: Line 53, Character 3

Anybody know what the heck this is? I've been seeing it over and over again on websites of all sorts. It appears whenever I try to close the page I'm on. The above example is from Gort's Gort42, which is a Blogspot blog. I'm also seeing it on Gareth's Another Chance to See, which is also a Blogspot blog, as well as Isis the Scientist's On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess (NEW ScienceBlogs version) - which is not a Blogspot blog. On many other sites I'm not seeing the problem at all.

The remedy that I have found is to click the "Yes" button, or sometimes the "No" button, or sometimes both, about a gazillion times. The fun part comes on the gazillion-and-first click, after the message has closed and you've just randomly clicked on whatever happened to be under it.

I know, I know: Who uses Internet Explorer anymore? Use a real browser, like Firefox! Well, I use Internet Explorer, and so do a heck of a lot of other people. And as far as I know, Firefox hasn't resolved this problem, though their open-source philosophy suggests that I should say that Firefox users haven't resolved that problem.

I tried looking information up on this problem the other day but could only find scattered bits and pieces. I'm guessing that this is another one of those little bugs inadvertently written into Internet Explorer that requires an elaborate and precise workaround and creates an incompatibility with stuff that works perfectly well in other browsers that hasn't had the workaround applied. But that's just a guess. Maybe on my days off I'll look into this more closely.

Off-kilter

I slept from shortly after I got home on Thursday morning at 7:00 to around 2:00 Thursday afternoon. Worked from 6:00 PM Thursday to 6:00 AM Friday. Got home a little after 7:00 Friday morning, made some coffee, had some pie, screwed around online, stayed up until 11:00 AM. Went to bed. Woke up at 12:30 PM, did some stuff, slept until 2:00 in the afternoon, did s0me more stuff, went back to bed. Woke up around 5:00, called some friends, talked on the phone for a while, rubbed my feet and legs with Kmart's version of Icy Hot, got out of bed, had something to eat. Have been screwing around online since, with the exception of a break to watch the last twenty minutes of the last Battlestar Galactica. (I can't believe it was all the dream of an autistic kid. And when Adama woke up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette...)

It's now 2:51 Saturday morning.

I should get to bed soon. In the morning (later in the morning, I should say) I will haul away my old 19" CRT monitor to be recycled at Best Buy. They'll charge me $10, but will give me a $10 gift card. Maybe I'll buy something.

I'll also have to do something with my old speakers. Like the monitor, these are also quite old, and the left speaker has something disconnected internally. If I can figure out a way to get into the welded-plastic shell I might be able to fix it. Then I'll have a backup set of speakers (with a very good subwoofer) with only a small chance that they will burst into flames. If anyone feels technically competent in these matters, these Altec-Lansing stereo speakers (with subwoofer!) are free to a good home!

Good news, bad news, good news...

GOOD NEWS: Nicky now has Dolly back.


After church yesterday my mom and I went out to do a little shopping. I had a 15% off coupon at a store, and the coupon was expiring yesterday, and I knew I could get dimmable fluorescent light bulbs there - it's the only place I know of where you can get these things. So after Mass ended at about 12:45 we headed up to the store. By the time we got done there it was just after 2:00.

My mom then asked if we could stop at a bank that stays open until 3:00 on Sundays so she could deposit a refund check she received for overpayment to a doctor. (It's unusual for there to be any banks open on a Sunday.) We went there, and then I decided to stop at a pet supplies store to get a toy for Nicky that would keep him amused until we located Dolly. On the way there, my mom asked if we could stop at a local chocolate shop and see if they had any discounted Valentine's candy - specifically chocolate-covered soft caramels. (They didn't have any Valentine's candy, so I got her Easter candy instead. Paid through the eye for it, but, hey, it's what she wanted.)

The upshot of this is, after we ran all these errands and got home, it was already after 4:00.

We got home and I presented Nicky with the interim Dolly - a small blue furry puppy with floppy ears. He wasn't very interested. I ate quickly, went online, read my mail, checked my junk mail on a whim, and wound up banging out yesterday's post. I then meandered around the Internet a while, checking Facebook and my friends' sites.

After a while I started to feel guilty. I had promised Nicky I would look for Dolly, and I had a pretty good idea where to look, and here I was screwing around on the Internet. I didn't want to log off, but I didn't want my monitor to burst into flames while I was away. So I switched off the monitor and went off to search for Dolly.

I looked in the most likely spot - some boxes near the bottom of the steps to our basement. Nicky often plays with Dolly on these steps, and I toss my coat on top of the boxes when I come home. Maybe Dolly had fallen between or behind the boxes? I moved them around and searched a bit and came up empty.

I then moved to other spots I hadn't had time to search earlier in the week while I was at work. I looked around my bed, and behind it, and under it. Nothing. Then I began to pull the blankets off, layer after layer. And there, tangled in the blankets, was Dolly! I had found her!

Nicky was happy. He had been showing an increasingly disturbing lassitude the past few days, which I attributed to pining for the loss of his favorite toy, and his sudden improvement in spirits seemed to confirm what I had believed. He carried Dolly around, and yelled at her, and yelled at me when I tried to move her into a better position for photos. But something still seemed wrong.

Whatever. I had been away from the computer too long. I switched on the monitor, got ready to report the good news, and...

...nothing.

BAD NEWS: My monitor finally died.

Well, it was hardly a surprise, but it was upsetting. No image, no nothing - I did manage to get a white spot in the middle of the screen at one point, but that didn't last. My monitor was dead, and there was nothing to do but replace it.

GOOD NEWS: I got an new monitor, and it didn't cost me an arm and a leg.

More like just an arm. Still, it's bigger than my old CRT that I bought back in 1999, which was a 19" diagonal as compared to this 21.5" wide widescreen monitor, and it cost less than half as much as that one did, and weighs about twenty-five pounds less. It took me a while to set up, and I didn't much like the "force-fitting" of the screen to the base - it took three calls to the Samsung help line before I got someone who told me just to push down as hard as I could. Note to the folks who design those helpful pictograms to show non-literate users how to assemble things without the use of, say, detailed directions using words: These things suck. Please use words.

BAD NEWS: Nicky still was not himself.

He's been displaying increasingly odd behavior. Saturday morning he wasn't himself. He usually nudges his face into mine when my alarm goes off, and then paws at me to pet him as I am getting ready for work in the morning. Saturday he did these things, but without much enthusiasm. Saturday evening my mom found him lurking under her bed, resting against the baseboard of radiation, trying to get warm. He usually doesn't do this. As I headed to bed that night he did the same thing against the kitchen baseboard.

Sunday morning he mostly ignored me.

Sunday evening he was already in my bed when I got there, and hissed at me and ran away as I went to bed.

This morning he was not in my bed. I found him crouched on a mat in front of the downstairs bathroom.

He's also not eating right. He normally is a little piggy, eating all of his food and then raiding the other cats' bowls and eating whatever they haven't. These past few days he has taken a few bites, swallowed with an exaggerated gulp, and then wandered off. Sometime he would retch afterwards, sometimes throw up a little mucus.

Today we decided to take him to the vet. My mom called first thing this morning and was able to get an afternoon appointment, which gave me a chance to go out, do some monitor shopping, try to set up the new monitor, and spend some time on the phone with customer service before it was time to pack Nicky into his crate and take him to the vet's.

GOOD NEWS: It's probably just a food allergy.

Nicky cried the whole way up, a pathetic, eerie yowl that I have only heard when we are taking him to the vet's - and once, in the middle of the night, when he had a nightmare. The vet was able to see him fairly quickly and ran a battery of tests and checks, none of which revealed anything suspicious. He then asked about changes to his diet, and we noted that, yes, we had just started him on some new cat food that we bought last Tuesday. He suggested that we eliminate this from his diet and switch him back to what he had been eating - perhaps he is allergic to some specific protein used in this new cat food. We had been thinking along these lines already, but we wanted to eliminate the possibility that it could be something else.

BAD NEWS: This visit DID cost an arm and a leg.

So that's a total of two arms and one leg for today - or, in other terms, nearly everything I earned in these past few days of work. But these were necessary expenses. Without a monitor I would be - was - blind online. And I would never skimp on something like today's trip to the vet.

That's OK. These expenses have been deferred through the magic of credit cards. I'm starting to look upon debt as a measurement of optimism, of hope for the future. I have faith that someday I will be able to pay back all these debts.

Here's hoping that the future holds more good news, and less bad.

Potential downtime ahead

If I stop posting for a while, it will be because my monitor exploded or died or caught fire or something. Just so you know. After nearly ten years of service, I guess that's to be expected. Hasn't happened yet, but I'm just letting you know ahead of time.

That, or the wind blew me away.

Buddy List disaster

There are a few reasons you shouldn't vacuum your keyboard while your computer is running. For one, you might send a static discharge through the keyboard that can fry things you'd rather not have fried. But for another, you might do something dumb, like accidentally delete your entire "Friends" Buddy List from your AIM window.

Like I did.

So if you were one of the people I used to chat with using AIM, contact me through the comments or send an e-mail to the address listed on my sidebar, and I'll re-add you right away! And I'll have to remember to never, never do something so dumb again!

A sign

I have a bunch of things I want to post about, but I'm tired and my computer is being very slow, though the antivirus/spyware scan I just ran came up clean.

I have a decent list for "How to Fight like Karl Rove, Part 2" (see here for the original.) I had a quote relevant to the ongoing worldwide financial collapse from V for Vendetta - the book, not the movie - but it would have to be taken completely out of context to make it work.* Which reminds me of a quote from another Alan Moore work that I really want to use as a post title sometime soon. And then there's that video about the other upcoming crisis, the one that will hit a few weeks after a new President is sworn in...

One thing I will post about. A few weeks ago I mentioned that the local bishop had renamed the "Bishop's Annual Appeal" to "Our Grateful Faith Annual Appeal," probably because the bishop has made many of the people of the Diocese of Scranton hate and resent him through his union-busting, school-closing, parish-closing, parishioner-ignoring, mafia-hugging, pedophile-shielding, and now vote-manipulating ways, so putting his name on the fund drive would not be a way to guarantee success.

"Our Grateful Faith" has been announced at all the Masses for a while now, and people know about it, that ever-dwindling fraction of Catholics who actually attend Mass on Sundays at least. For those who don't attend Mass - well, what are the odds they're going to donate, anyway?

So as I was driving to work the other day and approached the point where I-84/380/Rt. 6 splits from I-81, I got to wondering who the big expensive ad for "Our Grateful Faith" on the big giant electronic billboard over the highway was targeted towards? And how much it cost? And where that money was coming from? Because, obviously, the people most likely to donate had already been reached through the weekly Mass. I wonder if there is any way of measuring the return on investment for this ad?

Oh, well. At least the people who own the billboard got a nice big fat check, most likely made from the meager contributions of the people of the Diocese of Scranton to last year's Annual Appeal.



*Unless anyone believes that this crisis is actually the result of actions taken by a masked anarchist trying to save the world from itself.

The NEW & IMPROVED SiteMeter: ummmm.....

Well, I migrated my SiteMeter accounts first thing this morning. And was immediately told I couldn't access them anymore.

Let's see if we can find the flaw in this plan:

1 – Click on the “Login” tab at the top right of SiteMeter’s homepage (http://www.sitemeter.com/).
2 – Use the bottom half of the Login area to activate your account (Migrated Account Activation) –
A - Enter your Codename
B - Enter your password

3 – Press Submit

Your account is now active.

Note – our activation process will check to see if any additional accounts in our system use the same email address as your accounts. If others are found you can activate those by providing the correct codename. Successfully activated accounts will appear under the same Master Account.

4 - Your SiteMeter account(s) is now active on the new system. You should be able to go directly to your new Master Account area.

NOTE – The next time you want to access your SiteMeter account use the Standard Login in the upper half of the Login area by entering your email address and password.

Take a close look at the word in red: password. Notice the part where a new password is created that is now linked to your e-mail address instead of the individual SiteMeter accounts, each of which had its own password? (I have, I think, six accounts.) Oh, you don't see that part? Neither do I.

UPDATE: Because they had it hidden on another page, the "Help" page. Maybe it wasn't even there at the time I encountered the problem:

Note – The next time you want to access your SiteMeter account use the Standard Login in the upper half of the Login area by entering your email address and password. Passwords are now case sensitive. Please enter your current password in uppercase to log into your account.

(They made it red, but I made it bold.)

So I submitted a request to SiteMeter for a new password. Still waiting. I understand, they're probably getting bombarded with requests right now.

As for the new look for SiteMeter - feh. It looks like it was designed by a programmer, not an end user. Compare this snapshot of the information for my 100,000th visitor...

...to the new, exciting, control-room style of SiteMeter today:


Nothing simple, nothing elegant, nothing intuitive. But it sure is flashy and all technical looking! Tiny, dark, chunky fonts on a dark background? Brilliant! I can't even figure out how to get the basic information I used to use all the time.

Maybe, if they're smart, SiteMeter will have a tutorial tucked away somewhere that explains how to access things like referral stats and out-clicks and locations that used to give me a daily picture of what was bringing visitors here, and whether they were clicking on any of my links, and where they were coming from. Maybe those are all Premium services now. Maybe it's time I start looking at other statistics tracking packages.


Update: And what are other bloggers saying about the "new and improved" SiteMeter? Here is an unedited reproduction of the first page of Google Blog search results for "sitemeter":

SiteMeter gets a facelift - and a few other nips and tucks too
3 hours ago by Brad Linder Web analytics company SiteMeter has rolled out a major update to its free and premium web stats tracking service. The new version of SiteMeter is full of new charts and graphs that let you see how a web site is performing at a glance. ...Download Squad - http://www.downloadsquad.com - References[ More results from Download Squad ]

New SiteMeter is much less usable than the old one
6 hours ago by Lumo SiteMeter.com, a server responsible for the counter at the very bottom of this page, has switched to new servers with new software. The statistics suddenly is shown in Flash applets. Because of the following and other reasons, ...The Reference Frame - http://motls.blogspot.com/ - References

Bye-bye SiteMeter
4 hours ago My wife loves looking through the SiteMeter stats on her blog (Linda's Thoughts). Today she was frustrated to find she can no longer access those stats. SiteMeter redid their user interface for free accounts, so that it is very ...JackLewis.net - http://jacklewis.net/weblog/ - References

I Hate The New Sitemeter
4 hours ago by Shawn Powers I used to love the simple, useful, real-time information SiteMeter offered for web traffic. This weekend, they changed over to their new system, which resembles a much less friendly, and much less useful version of Google Analytics. ...The Brain of Shawn - http://www.brainofshawn.com - References

SiteMeter Stinks
3 hours ago by nospam@example.com (Brian C. Ledbetter) SiteMeter's service was atrocious enough to use before (it was slow, and barely worked via BlackBerry), but now they've gone and redesigned everything—and I don't know how they did it, but it's even more horrible than before. ...Snapped Shot - http://www.snappedshot.com/ - References

Sitemeter has changed
4 hours ago by Neil Aside from migrating successfully to their new servers over the weekend, Sitemeter have also rolled out their new look. Yes, I’m old, but I really was more comfortable with the old one! There’s one new bit thought, whatever it may mean. ...Floating Life - http://ninglundecember.wordpress.com - References

I hate hate hate hate the new SiteMeter.
4 hours ago by Ann Althouse What is the point of SiteMeter now? Everything I loved about SiteMeter -- and you can click on the SiteMeter tag to read how I've adored it -- is gone. Ugh! I'm throwing away my most-click-on bookmark. blog advertising blog advertising.Althouse - http://althouse.blogspot.com/ - References

They've ruined SiteMeter
7 hours ago by Robert Stacy McCain Just got my first look at the new format for SiteMeter statistics. It sucks, big-time. Like Windows Vista, is how bad it sucks. The old Site Meter was simple and elegant. The new Site Meter is clumsy and awkward. ...The Other McCain - http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/ - References

Sitemeter Strikes Again, and Other News
1 hour ago by Tenured Radical you sneer) I have spent a substantial amount of time migrating to the New Sitemeter. And after a prolonged effort, during which I considered options from sending out an SOS to my blogpal ahistoricality (who has occasionally offered ...Tenured Radical - http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/

new sitemeter sux
48 minutes ago by upyernoz the new sitemeter rolled out today and my first impression is: i hate it. the annoying thing is that the old sitemeter let you easily display a list of the recent referring sites, even with a free account. now referral info is buried, ...rubber hose - http://upyernoz.blogspot.com/


Update from Sitemeter:

SiteMeter Rollback

September 14, 2008 · Comments Off

Good Afternoon,

We have received and heard your feedback concerning the latest changes to the website. We will implementing a rollback to the website immediately. We will also be responding to each of your support requests as soon as possible. If you have any questions please let us know.

Sincerely,

SiteMeter Support Team

Later, revised, edited, redacted, expanded version of same:

Our Apologies -

September 14, 2008 · Comments Off

Dear Valued SiteMeter Customers,

As you’re no doubt aware by now, we’ve chosen to roll back our website to the previous “classic” version.

Based on some performance issues we were experiencing along with feedback from the community it appears we have pushed our new site live prematurely.

Our intention is and has always been to offer you, our customer’s better tools and more accurate data. Obviously we fell short of this. The first thing we need to do, moving forward, is to roll out new product releases in parallel to our current platform. This will give everyone a chance to try out, evaluate, and comment on our new concepts.

We would also like to take this opportunity to ask those of you who had issues or concerns with the new site to participate in future beta testing. We had originally asked for Beta Tester in two of our newsletters sent earlier this year so we’re eager to build our beta group even larger. If you’re interested in participating please send us an email using our support ticketing system with BETA TESTER in the subject line of your email.

In the near term we’ll be evaluating the performance issues and feedback from our community. If you have additional input that would help us build you a better product we’d like to hear from you.

We apologize for the botched rollout and will do our best to make sure the next time we do this it has your full support and blessing.

Sincerely,

The SiteMeter Team


It is sad that now, whenever anyone mentions the "SiteMeter Fiasco", you need to ask "Which one?"

I think the folks at SiteMeter who thought this new design was a good idea need to take the time to read Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." Oh, hell, everybody should read that book. It's fan-frickin'-tastic!