Well, thanks but no thanks. Call me when you stop treating your customers and fans like thieves.

Oh well. Hopefully Yahoo! (who apparently just bought del.icio.us for an undisclosed-but-rumoured-to-be-healthy amount of money) will be able to throw enough money at the problem that del.icio.us will become a reliable service again sometime. Right now I’m just moderately irked because I’ve gone to tag a half-dozen sites in the past couple of hours and keep running into the “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible” error message. Grf.

Go check Joe’s post for a great clip of David Cross ranting about this very thing.

*sigh*

This trip did nothing to change my opinion that airports suck. I’m sure there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make them suck less, but as yet they’ve just totally failed. They’re grimy, horribly laid-out, confusing, uncomfortable, difficult to get around, and generally just annoying on all possible levels.

The driverless “air trains” at SFO are pretty cool, but getting from the car rental drop off to Gate 23 at Terminal 1 involved something along the lines of: drop off car, walk to elevator, elevator up, walk to escalator, escalator up, walk to air train, wait; get on air train, stop at two stops, get off air train at third stop, walk to escalator, down escalator, walk to tunnel, walk into tunnel, get on moving sidewalk, walk, get off moving sidewalk, walk to escalator, up escalator, walk around a bit, get in line for check in, check in (finally getting rid of half my luggage); walk from check in toward gates, go through initial security screen, go through secondary screen (removing shoes), get laptop bag x-rayed three times (put on shoes, have lighter taken away), put laptop bag back together, walk to gate. I can’t imagine what it was like before the air trains were put in.

Once I was at the gate I had an hour to wait, so ended up going on two peripheral trips to 1) find and use the most disgusting bathroom I’ve seen in years, and 2) buy a $14 USD turkey sandwich since airlines don’t feed people on flights any more. Of course, the best part about airports is that no one wants to be there, so everyone — passengers, security guys, airport staff, airline staff — is cranky and bored. It really just makes for a fantastic experience from start to merciful finish. Ugh. At least the customs guy in Calgary was nice.

For what it’s worth, I doubt I’ll ever stop griping about airports. I used to think that I hated travelling or airplanes, but that’s not true — I don’t mind flying, and I don’t mind being other places. I just really hate airports. If it were practical, I’d travel exclusively on trains. Trains are cool.

My future camera will be a Nikon D70 or D70s or whatever the next proper Nikon DSLR turns out to be. I really, really want a proper DSLR. The time will come eventually.

Amsterdam. Tons of fun, met lots of great people, had a ton of good food, walked more in a week than I probably have in the past two months combined. Gorgeous weather, great hotel (facilities, at least…the staff was a bit off, but more on that in a moment), utterly phenomenal coffee.

Europeans seriously know how to make good coffee.

On service: I’m not sure whether it was just a bad week or something, but the staff at hotels and restaurants we frequented during our stay in Amsterdam was pretty universally sub-par. I’m not sure why this is, but we just got generally lousy service every where we went. Some folks were ok, and everyone was generally friendly, but, really, servers at decent-or-better restaurants in Canada are, on average, just much better at what they do. In one Amsterdamian restaurant our waiter was so in-your-face that I found it distinctly uncomfortable.

Whatever happened to Zen Waiters? The basic premise I work under is this: the less I notice the service I’m receiving, the happier I am. If a waiter spills wine on me (yes, this happened), or if I have to flag a waiter down for a second round of drinks (this also happened, multiple times), or if I have to physically back away from a waiter because he’s a total close-talker (also happened), or if I wait for my food long enough that I check my watch (happened), or if I have to physically walk around looking for someone to give me my bill (slight exaggeration, but close to truth)…guess what? The waiter sucks.

The best waiter I’ve ever had was at Acton’s Cafe in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Quiet, efficient, unassuming, brilliantly experienced, and extraordinarily talented waiter. We sat and ate several courses happily, never once having to ask for anything (water, wine, food, dessert, coffee, bill, whatever). My soup, as I recall, simply showed up like it fell through a tiny hole in space-time. I never once noticed the waiter until we were finished and I realized, all at once, that I never once noticed the waiter. I love service like that. I also, I’ll have you know, tip extraordinarily well for service like that.

If I ever end up walking away from this whole interweb thing and go back into food service, I think I’ll make it my life’s work to be that good a waiter. Really talented waiters who take their vocation seriously can make extremely good money. The problem, I think, is that most waiters think that they’re too good for what they’re doing — most high end waiters probably fancy themselves as a maitre d’, or perhaps as an underemployed sommelier. My god, the in-your-face guy was just unreal. He put me off so badly in the first five minutes we were sitting at the table that I simply didn’t want to talk to him again, and avoided it as best I could. What a piece of work.

Um…anyhow, that rant aside. I had a great time in Amsterdam, waiters bedamned. Oh, and the bartender at the hotel. I mean, seriously dude, if someone asks you “what scotches do you have?”, it’s not an invitation to play 20 questions. WTF?

Unrelated, here are some more photos, but not of Amsterdam.

Now, about these widgets. Let’s say I decided I wanted a Google search widget. To get it widget, I have to find it (not hard), trust it to be non-malicious (I’m paranoid, so this is a bit edgy), download it, install it (it doesn’t do that automatically), then start it. Assuming it starts and does what it’s supposed to do, it then sits on the Dashboard and quietly sucks up system resources waiting for me to give it something to do. When I do decide I want to use the widget, I have to hit F12, click on the widget to focus, usually click on it again to get my cursor into whatever text box it’s supposed to be in, then type something, then click on the widget again to make it go (or hit enter), then either hit F12 or on an empty spot in the Dashboard to get back to my desktop.

Alternately, I could just click the Google button on my Firefox quickbar, type something in the webform (which happily autofocuses my cursor in the right place), then hit enter.

Maybe you’re seeing my confusion here. There are eleventy billion widgets out there that do things people can already do very easily in their web browser. Google searches, Ebay searches, Amazon searches, LiveJournal updates, etc etc. Widgets do not make these things easier or more convenient, so…I say to you, “Wtf?”

1) Napster is a digital music delivery service. iPods are hardware. Please, for crap’s sake, at least compare it to the iTunes Music Store. In order to “challenge” the iPod, Napster would have to include the player, the player-machine synch software, and the store all in one (beautifully designed) package of “it just works” interoperability. Oh yeah, it would have to include a fast and high-quality ripping system, and some brilliant cataloguing/playlist-creating/rating software.

2) iTunes lets you purchase and download music in a single transaction with no followup or communication between you and the store regarding that purchase ever again. When you purchase a song through the iTunes Music Store, here’s what you get, from the Apple website: “You can burn individual songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for your personal use, listen to songs on an unlimited number of iPods and play songs on up to five Macintosh computers or Windows PCs.”

Now, the only sticky bit there for me is the “up to five” thing at the end. That’s a limitation I don’t understand, but it also doesn’t really matter. The “unlimited” cds and iPods is what counts for me.

Napster works very, very differently. When you subscribe to Napster (for $15 USD/mo or whatever) you gain access to an unlimited quantity of music from their library. Until you stop subscribing. When you stop subscribing, the Microsoft-designed DRM system that’s tagged your music kicks in and those music files “expire”. They stop working. So, for $15/mo you rent music, and if you stop giving them money, your music gets repo’d and you’re SOL. You paid for a service, period. There is no “product” involved in this exchange.

Yes, iTunes does only work with iPods. People get pissed off about this, but I look at it the same way as I look at my Mac: OSX only runs on the Mac, and the Mac only runs OSX (well, technically I could put Linux on there I think, but that’d be silly). When I bought my Mac, I bought the whole package — hardware, operating system, software, AppleCare warranty, the whole shebang. When I bought my iPod it never once crossed my mind that I couldn’t use other software to load it up. I don’t care. I guess other people do. I suppose that’s where Napster comes in, sort of, kinda. Or something.

3) iTunes is much more than just a store. I use iTunes to rip my own CDs. This process works as follows: I put the CD in the drive. I click the “Import” button. The End. iTunes takes care of ripping, cataloguing, and synching that music to my iPod. It is, literally, a one-click process. And I love it. In fact, that one-click process is what inspired me to buy an iPod, which in turn inspired me to buy a Mac. I am an unparalleled example of the Halo Effect in action.

Napster is a music rental service, period. I don’t know how it stands up, design-wise, and I honestly don’t care. I’m not going to rent my music. It doesn’t help me with my existing music collection. It …bah, it’s just a half-assed service that promotes quantity over quality and leaves you with nothing in the end.

There are a lot of articles that cover this whole Napster thing, and many of them seem to be as disdainful of the whole thing as I am. The Register covers why Napster sucks, without comparing it to the iPod/iTunes combo at all.

Silly people. This isn’t a challenge, this is just sad.

[W]hen told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

Doomed.