From the category archives:

Rants

There are some people who really, really want my readers to know about various essay writing services that are available. I mean, they spam me with links constantly. So to save everyone time, I thought I’d just compile all their offers in one place. Back in November, someone by the name of “Essay Writers” posted to [...]

{ 7 comments }

I don’t know anyone who likes the Department Of Motor Vehicles in any state. The DMV seems to represent all we hate in bureaucracy. Surely there’s got to be a better way? Here’s a short tale of the absurdity of replacing my driver’s license. I’ve misplaced my wallet. Maybe I’ve actually lost it, but having looked [...]

{ 0 comments }

When I tuned into Twitter this morning, like many other people, I saw tweets about a bomb threat of some type in Times Square. How serious was this? So I went looking for news and found an erectile dysfunction ad along the way. Classy Fox News — and shame on you CNN and the New [...]

{ 8 comments }

I live in Newport Beach, California. It is 400 miles away from the city of San Jose. Nevertheless, for some strange reason, San Jose councilmember Pete Constant has been emailing me news about his “mobile city hall” application for smartphones. The app does sound smart. Too bad his email system is so dumb. The emails are [...]

{ 6 comments }

If you’re link spamming, you suck. If you know someone who is link spamming, they suck — and you should tell them so. If you don’t know why you suck, here’s a story about the human impact of what you do. About a year ago, my wife Lorna Harris launched a social news site [...]

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Joy. Citibank closed my credit card today, not because of anything I did but because of some unknown merchant problem. Aside from being an inconvenience to me, Citibank also apparently thought it was a good time to pitch me on credit monitoring. Bad idea. Apparently, some undisclosed merchant out there had a security problem that has [...]

{ 12 comments }

The public relations war of newspapers against both Google and blogs shows no signs of ebbing. Today, we get a proposal that newspapers deserve special laws to protect them. I’ll come back to that, but I wanted to float the idea that perhaps it’s time for an Associated Blogs to take on the Associated Press. The [...]

{ 35 comments }

Time Magazine’s out with a Top 25 Blogs list, I learned tonight on Techmeme. Curious, I went to look for it. As expected, finding an actual list of all the blogs was impossible. OK, not impossible — eventually @thedelicious twittered me the location. Thank goodness, because Time certainly didn’t make it obvious. I [...]

{ 1 comment }

From time to time over the years, I’ve had various investment analysts want to talk to me about my thoughts on how a particular search company might do. What cracks me up is that invariably, they think I should provide such advice for free. I have peers in the search space and [...]

{ 1 comment }

For all the concerns people have about internet search, privacy and “all that info Google knows about us,” I remain amazed at how much power credit reporting agencies have to really dick with our lives and publish incorrect information about us, with us seeming to have little ability to resolve things. And [...]

{ 3 comments }