Classical Geek Joke

Following up on Dori's "Tiling Constant" post below, last night she came home and surveyed the progress of retiling our shower. Then we had this conversation:

Dori: "When will Zeno the Tile Guy be here in the morning?"

Tom: "9:30. If he can actually arrive."

Ain't I A Woman?

At Macworld Expo last week, multiple people asked me, "What's up with you and Blogher?" The first time, I said that I had no idea even what the question was, and found out that they'd contacted everyone on my almost-panel at SxSW except for me and asked them to please stay on.

Other times the question was asked, it was more in reference to why I wasn't speaking at BlogHer, and the answer was the same: no one asked.

[BTW, as with the post a couple of days ago, this isn't another "why wasn't I asked?" post. It's something else entirely, so don't waste your time saying, "You need to ask them." Although I did ask at least one site mentioned in this post, but never got a response.]

As I've said here before, I tend to use the line that I was brought up by wolves. I don't understand much about women in general, or how they think, or how they work together. And I think that that not only makes me uncomfortable with groups of women, but makes groups of women uncomfortable with me.

One of the reasons I helped found Wise-Women many years ago was so that there would be a women's group on the Web that was a friendly home for me. I knew I wanted that, and it's almost always a warm comfortable mailing list. But given the number of other women's groups online, and how they never include W-W in general or me in particular makes me wonder if I'm holding the other W-W back; that is, would it be a more noticed and useful group if I wasn't involved?

This isn't just Blogher, btw; it's also misbehaving.net and Blog Sisters and BlogSheroes and What She Said! and Women's Media Center and, well, basically, pretty much all the women's groups out there.

Maybe I'm not living in the right area, or maybe it's that I'm not on the right mailing lists, or maybe it's that I share this blog, or maybe I'm too geeky, or maybe it's just, as I said, that having been brought up by wolves I have no idea of how to do the whole interacting with other women thing.

I'm not really sure of where I'm going with this, except that with today's BlogHer announcement — One more SXSWi panel is under BlogHer's wing — that they've taken over my almost-panel at SxSW, it means that I'm going to get asked this even more often, and I figured that I'd just write it up once so I could point to it here rather than answer it again.

But the one thing that I did want to get across in this post is this: the door is always open on this side. If anyone wants to talk to me, my email address is over to the right. That same contact can also be used for Jabber, and the bit before the @ can also be used to contact me on Skype. My phone number is pretty darn easy to track down, too, as others have found. If anyone wants to talk, I want to listen.

Tiling Constant

If you were at Macworld Expo last week, you may have heard one or both of us mention that we're in the middle of remodeling our house. I've now come up with Dori's law of bathroom remodeling (aka "the tiling constant"): the tile guy will always be done tiling the bathroom in three days. Could be Tuesday last week, could be Thursday this week — it doesn't matter. It'll be done three days from now.

Or in other words: it's probably a good idea that I'm headed out of town, as I could really use a shower.

Search Champ

Just a heads up: I'll be in Seattle next week at Microsoft's Search Champs 4 group. My understanding is that the list of who's attending will be made public tomorrow, so I figured I'd let y'all know about it here as I'm not trying to hide anything.

Some answers to possibly asked questions:

Q: Does this mean that you're on MS's payroll?

A: No. They're paying for my airfare, hotel room, and a few meals; to the best of my knowledge, I'm on the hook for everything else. All in all, it's going to cost me a chunk of change (parking at SFO is expensive, not to mention that it's time spent that I'm not writing pay copy), but I've griped enough here and elsewhere about my opinion being ignored that, having been invited, I need to be there.

Q: Will you blog about the meeting?

A: Only those things where I can do it without breaking the NDA I signed. No, I don't have a problem with NDA's; signing them is a normal part of the tech biz, so don't give me flack about that.

Q: Who else is going?

A: I've seen the list, but I'm not going to mention names as, most likely, not everyone is comfortable with being known as attending. OTOH, it's an interesting group — as I told Tom, if you had lists of the people I most admire and most dislike on the 'net, and then randomly picked names from each, it's very close to what you'd get. I suspect it's going to be a good lesson for me in holding my tongue.

Q: I'm in Seattle, will you have time to see me?

A: I don't know. From the sound of things, it's going to be busy. I'm hoping to also get to talk to some people in other groups so long as I'm up there, which makes things even busier. But I'd still like to get together with people up there, so if you're interested, drop me a line and I'll see how my schedule works out.

Q: You're going to be a MS shill now, right?

A: Snicker. Hey, I know that Scoble was a part of this, and he knows that when I'm asked for my honest opinion, I give it. If I'm shown something that I think is cool, I'll say so. If it's less than wonderful and my opinion is asked, I'll give it. But I don't see me coming back as a Wintel gal — they'd have to show me some amazingly cool stuff in order for that to happen.

Windows on Intel Macs?

Has anyone who has one of those shiny new Intel iMacs tried OpenOSX™ WinTel 2.0 yet? If so, have you tried it with Win XP? Inquiring minds want to know, particularly about speed. If you have such a box but have yet to try the software, drop me a line, and thanks.

MacBook Pro/Con

If the MacBook Pro is the machine for professionals, does that mean that the consumer-level Mac laptop will be the MacBook Con?

The law versus RSS

There's a new site, Top 10 Sources, which uses RSS feeds to display what they consider the "Top 10" blogs in any given area.

[No, this isn't a rant about how we're not included; in order for us to be included, we'd have to be pigeonhole-able (is that a word? I guess it is now). This site has never been easily categorized. We write about whatever we feel like writing about, and that's wide-ranging. Deal with it.]

What is happening is a discussion about whether or not using the RSS feeds of others in a public and commercial way is legal. For a couple of viewpoints, see John Palfrey on RSS and Copyright, circa 2006 and Shelley Powers on That old copyright song.

This is interesting to me because we've been doing just this since 2003 over at our Mac OS X Unwired book site. We aggregate a variety of news sites that cover Mac and wireless topics, and show them in a most-recent format. Of course, the site has links to both the particular posts and to the sites themselves. To date, I've never had any of the feeds we've been using ask to be removed or for me to change the feed being used. If asked, I'd do so in a second, of course, but either no one's cared or the site doesn't get enough hits to be noticeable.

So, have we been breaking the law all this time?

Please take my money!

Sandra -

You asked me to write up the problems I've had attempting to purchase from your Web site… Here you go:

1. Safari/Mac

   I go to your site, choose the free Microfiber Sleeve for 40 Gb iPod, choose a quantity of 1 for the Turbo Mouse Pro - USB trackball, and click submit. Result: the trackball shows up in my cart with a price of $82.49, but with no iPod sleeve.

   I figured that maybe it would just show up at checkout, so I go to find the very cool travel plug adapter displayed at the show as I also want to purchase that. I can't find it on your site under the "power it" category, nor can I find it by searching for the words "power" & "adapter", but I am able to finally find it by searching for just the word "adapter". I click on the item, click on the "Buy now" button — and my cart displays only the trackball, with no travel adapter added.

2. Firefox/Mac

   I go to your site, choose the free Microfiber Sleeve for 40 Gb iPod, choose a quantity of 1 for the Turbo Mouse Pro - USB trackball, and click submit. Result: the trackball shows up in my cart with a price of $82.49, but with no iPod sleeve.

   I look again for the travel adapter and find it by searching on the product number (as I now know it). I click on the item, click on the "Buy now" button, and it shows up in my cart, but at the full price, not the discounted price I was told about at the show. I then enter the promotional code, and I get a message that "A coupon in your basket is no longer valid."

   At this point, I decide to try calling customer service and see if I can make my purchase over the phone.

3. Firefox/Windows

   Customer service tells me that the only browser they officially support is IE/Windows. As I'd rather stick a red-hot poker in my eye than use IE for credit card transactions, I try Firefox/Windows, with the same result as Firefox/Mac.

4. IE/Windows

   I go to your site, choose the free Microfiber Sleeve for 40 Gb iPod, choose a quantity of 1 for the Turbo Mouse Pro - USB trackball, and click submit. Result: for the first time, both the trackball and the iPod sleeve show up in my cart, but with a price of $109.99 (versus the correct $82.49) and $19.99 (versus the correct $0) respectively.

   I enter the promotional code (thinking that maybe this will straighten out the pricing), and I again get the message that "A coupon in your basket is no longer valid."

Another call to customer service ensues, with a request that I document all these purchase attempts so that the web team can attempt to fix them today while the coupon code is still valid. And that's why I wrote this piece.

Things probably worth mentioning:

• I have used and loved Kensington products for years. At this very moment, I have two of your keyboards, one trackball, and one mouse sitting in front of me. But I've never had this much trouble before trying to give you my money.

• I am a judge for the Everyday Hogwash competition, which awards prizes for humorous rants about frustrating experiences with companies. I promised them a couple of weeks ago I'd write something but I wasn't sure what to write about. After today's experience trying to buy your products, my topic was obvious.

If there's any other information I can provide, please let me know — but mostly, I'd like to buy these products at the price I was promised.

Beadscape, RIP

Last week Tom and I talked in the User Group Lounge at Macworld, and one of the topics was about how the new Intel-based Macs won't run Classic. Someone asked the obvious, "Does anyone still care?" question, and my answer was yes — there's still one Classic-only app I run. I've mentioned Beadscape on this blog before (here and here, specifically), and noted that their site had, since 2004, said, "We are working on a new OS X native version that should be ready in the next few months."

Well, with the end of Classic in sight, the makers of Beadscape have announced their future plans:

Unfortunately, we have decided not to continue Beadscape development. We overcommitted our resources over the last few years to the point where we can't finish Beadscape.

Beadscape was something we did for fun and enjoyment. We met a lot of nice people and saw a lot of incredible bead projects that folks designed using Beadscape. We won't forget the good times we had.

We would like to thank all our customers for their patience and understanding.

Well, crap. So far as I can tell, my choices are to (1) keep an old Mac around to run it, (2) find a Classic emulator to run it on future Classic-less Macs, or (3) run a Windows emulator (e.g., Virtual PC) and buy a similar Windows app. I don't like any of these choices.

Any Cocoa programmers looking for a project? Beadscape 2.0 came out almost eight years ago, but it's still got a very active community of users. Come out with a OS X equivalent and you've got yourself a built-in market that wants to buy it.

Updates (based on feedback):

• I'm guessing that no, they're not interested in making this software open-source, given that they've already stated that they won't sell it. Yeah, it sucks, but it's their right to do that.

• Yes, I know about Stitch Painter. In order to limp along with SP, I'd have to buy the Gold version ($165) + the Beading Module ($30) + the Full Color Import Module ($49) + shipping + tax for $272.56 total. And that's without the database of beads which is a large feature of Beadscape. Given that it doesn't do much of what I want, and that I won't have a Classic-less Mac for a while yet, I'm in no hurry to buy it.