karlo.org

I've finally gotten around to the long-overdue task of properly linking to the sprawling reaches of my little Web 2.0 empire from the main page on Karlo.Org. From now on, if you're looking for my Flickr page, or my Facebook profile, or whatever, you can find it in the link of lists on the Karlo.Org home page. If you run into any problem using the new links, let me know -- they seem to work for me, but some services can be a little funny about profile links (I'm looking at you, Facebook.)

As someone who loves to drive (and travel) but doesn't own a car, I rent a lot of cars -- I've probably rented for between 25 to 30 days from Avis this year so far. I do like them as a company in terms of their service execution -- the cars are ready for me when I arrive, I don't have to wait for them, and the prices are usually reasonable, if not rock bottom. But their web site drives me absolutely bonkers, it's so badly designed.

First of all, to login, you have to use your "AVIS Wizard Number" -- a randomly assigned alphanumeric mishmash with absolutely no relation to anything else. Mine is something like 1MQD32Z. All of the airlines and credit card companies have discovered the concept of a "user name" some time ago. Not AVIS. They've got their wizard numbers, and well, fuck you if you don't like it.
 
Worse, rather than using some kind of rational system for locations, AVIS uses whatever their internal coding is for locations. So midtown Manhattan? That's "M1H", you silly bastard. Why don't you know that? If you do manage to login and enter a date and a time for a rental, then search for a location, the system isn't smart enough to say, not show locations that _aren't open_ on the days you want to rent a car. (See the above graphic, which came about three screens after I had entered my target date and chosen a location.) Nor will it always tell you what times that location is actually open, so you might adjust your reservation. I guess that's a company secret or something.

Finally, to add insult to injury, if you do follow the directions in the error message and click on the "Modify >>" hyperlink to change your reservation, you'll probably end up right back at this page. That's because the new search form will have that "M1H" location filled in, so even if you enter your city and state again, it will ignore that and put you right back to the same location on the next try.

Now, if you don't mind. I'm going to have a stiff drink and try reserving a car again, for the tenth time.

I'm loving this ongoing story about the decision by Chinese officials to have one 9-year-old girl lip sync a patriotic ballad at the opening ceremonies for the Michael Phelps Show, because the actual singer (who is 7) basically wasn't cute enough.

Not only did they fake the singing, apparently they faked the fireworks as well (a bit.)

From the NYT: "But to achieve the spectacular, not only did organizers fake the song, but they also have acknowledged that one early sequence of the stunning fireworks shown to television viewers actually included digitally enhanced computer graphics used for 'theatrical effect.'"

There's an intriguing cultural gap here; Westerners are all excited that part of the show was "faked" whereas it seems the Chinese don't really even know why this is an issue. There's definitely a reasonable argument that in a show like this everything is "faked", but for some folks there's still an expectation of some kind of underlying genuine basis for the spectacle.

When we were in Vietnam, the guide used the term "original copy" to describe the low-priced, counterfeited copies of international brand products that flood the Asian markets and come primarily from mainland China. So it seems to me that China has managed to create an "original copy opening ceremony." (And, appropriately, "Original Copy Beijing" and "Original Copy Political Consensus" to boot.)

I have to wonder how this connects with the larger "counterfeiting culture" seen coming out of China, one where there doesn't seem to be a lot of respect for other brands and intellectual property. I've always assigned it more to being a result of aggressive commercialism - do whatever you can get away with and make money on - but I'm guessing it may also be a larger cultural disconnect, where there isn't quite the same value placed on the concept of "genuine" so long as the copy is good enough.

One of a small set of photos I uploaded to Flickr from Tony and Lisa's wedding in Madison, Wisconsin. They had a theme wedding and everyone had a lot of fun with it; it also made for some interesting snapshots.

I was experimenting with using an SC-28 cord to move the flash away from the camera, plus a handheld Lumiquest softbox on the flash to soften the light a little. It made for some interesting shots, although it's definitely more awkward than using an attached flash.

The BBC is reporting a study that found dogs will "catch" yawns from people, which may indicate that when you think your dog reads your thoughts, you may not be totally wrong.

"The copying activity suggests that canines are capable of empathising with people, say the researchers who recorded dogs' behaviour in lab tests.

Until now, only humans and their close primate relatives were thought to find yawning contagious."

Seems like Mochi is in for a little "animal testing" this evening. If I wait until I know he's already sleepy, does that skew the result?

Bonus: The BBC has an open call for video of anyone who can make their dog "catch" their yawns. How would you like to be on the receiving end of that spam-stream?

This is the current status of the help window for Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac this morning. Look, I know sometimes web servers go down, SQL databases hiccup, etc. But really, couldn't you have a more graceful failure mode than this? Say, maybe, rolling back to good-old "offline" help pages?

Not a good outcome. And not helping me with my financial modeling.

(I was able to switch it to offline help manually... but how is a user supposed to know that?)

The NYT has an article on the launch of Cuil.com, a search engine by some Google alums. It's interesting, but I'm getting a lot of weirdness in the results for searches. When I search for "Tom Karlo" (Doesn't everyone throw their own name into a new search engine during the first session?) I get some really odd responses, including Google.com and on occasion, either 600,000+ matches, or zero matches. And when it does come back with matches it often has the weird pairing of my home page, and an image I've never seen next to it as my "photo". It also spat out fails for "Britney Spears," "George Carlin" and didn't include itself in the front page results for "Cuil." I suspect they're having some first-day issues.

Walking down Prince Street this week I noticed that the Vesuvio Bakery, with its memorable green color scheme, has closed down... I don't know how long ago this happened but it's sad to see a small business like this disappear. Hopefully they won't be replaced by a Starbuck's, Pinkberry or some fashion boutique. This photo is from 2005.

Wordle.net is a fun little Java utility that turns any block of text (or, as in the case above, my RSS feed) into a beautifully rendered word cloud. Lots of fun to play with and coincidentally adjacent to some work I've been doing lately with my new project (more on that later.) Wordle gives the best result if you tell it to block out common words in the language you're submitting (for English, "if, and, but... etc.").

[via The Morning News]

If you have a Facebook account you can go here to see the new profile page design. I understand what they're trying to do with it - focus folks on user activity rather than static profile boxes - but I think they're going to take a lot of flack for it.

It's very much like FriendFeed or Tumblr - which is great for people who spend all day posting little tidbits for everyone, etc. But a lot of Facebook users are much more casual net users who are using it as a substitute homepage. By removing all of the application boxes that users had been employing to customize their profile, Facebook is disrupting one of the reasons why it's become so popular.

I've always thought of FB as "blog light" - the next step in the evolution from HTML to MoveableType/Wordpress to Typepad and finally to Tumblr/Twitter. Each has respectively reduced the barriers to entry for users. FB takes it even further by basically bringing your real world friends right to your "blog", which is what most private individuals want anyway (you're not posting photos of kids for random Internet readers, you're posting them for Aunt Ida.)

Application developers are going to feel particularly slighted as well... their profile boxes, which users used to be able to place wherever they wanted on their profile page, have now been relegated to the "boxes" tab, a virtual interface ghetto. Facebook says this is because they wanted to isolate the sometimes unruly interfaces of 3rd party apps, but that's kind of a weak excuse -- after all, it was users choosing to put these applications into their profiles and use them, so obviously the interface issues weren't causing that many problems.

(Part of the lesson here is how difficult it is to remodel a product once it's released to the public. The people who have adopted it were the ones that liked how it was laid out, even if it wasn't optimal. Going to a new, better layout isn't always going to get the response you might expect, although sometimes it does.)

Update: It seems like different people see slightly different layouts in the new system, but there are similar comments regardless... as seen on another blog talking about the new UI.