501 Developer Manifesto: A clock puncher is a clock puncher. I’m not impressed. Come and go as you please, and don’t bother coming if you don’t bring any passion for what you do.

Inbound Writer: I love the idea of this. I’m starting to use it, time will quickly tell if it has real SEO value.

Windows 8 taking a run at iPad: I think Apple has been holding out on us and have some surprises in store that will again raise the bar on the industry and leave Dell, HP and Microsoft wondering what the hell just happened. Again.

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That is why Facebook bought Instagram.

Take out a middleman and flank a competitor – in one transaction.

That might be worth a billion dollars to someone who is really worried about Apple. Especially if that someone is still in their twenties, doesn’t have a sense of his own mortality and has built what could become the biggest thing the Internet has ever seen – before most of his peers graduated.

Apple still has a hard time with the Internet. Their DNA predates the modern networked era. Instagram could be a problem for Apple if Facebook plays their cards right.

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I’m not writing about this as a fan. I really enjoy Alice in Chains but this isn’t one of those “RIP Rock Star” posts. I’m noting it because of how tragic, lonely and dark the ending was for Layne Staley.

He was truly alone – he’d abandoned himself, forced his friends and family away and even his high had left him. And Staley wasn’t a tortured artist – at least not in the classic sense. He was an addict, bound by the pathetic demands of his disease, slowly circling the drain. There was nothing romantic about Layne’s existence, or his end.

(paraphrased from Wikipedia…)

On April 19, 2002, Layne Staley’s accountants contacted his mother, Nancy McCallum, and informed her that no money had been withdrawn from Layne’s bank account in two weeks. She called 911, worried that she hadn’t heard from her son and begging them to go with her to Staley’s home.

The police kicked in the door of Staley’s apartment and there, on the couch lit by a flickering TV, next to several spray-paint cans on the floor, not far from a stash of coke and two crack pipes on the coffee table sat the remains of the rock singer. At 6’1″, Layne weighed just 86 pounds, having died on April 5, 2002 from an overdose of heroin and cocaine. At 34, Staley had achieved success that most only dream about, and lost it all to his addiction.

Wake up young man, it’s time to wake up
Your love affair has got to go
For 10 long years, for 10 long years, The leaves to rake up
Slow suicide’s no way to go
Wake up, wake up, wake up

- Mad Season, “Wake Up“

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Naheed Nenshi is the mayor of Calgary.

Calgary is looking better and better every day.

If only they had decent skiing.

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Kinda neat!

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Here’s one frequent fliers recent experience with the program (“CK” is “ConciergeKey”, you can figure out the rest of the abbreviations, or just insert the names of random cities ) -

My flight was delayed this morning. Got an email (standard from the website, anybody can get that, on any airline I think, and you better be doing it too). Said my SAT-DFW flight was delayed half an hour. No real problem, I had a 2 hour layover at DFW. Cool.

Then my phone rings. Some number I don’t recognize. Check voicemail. It’s CK, telling me, we know about the problem, we’ll track it, you’re fine for now, here’s what’s causing the delay.

Bloody awesome.

An hour goes by. Three more delays. Emails say, you ain’t gonna make it, son.

CK calls again. This time, I answer. Sorry for the trouble, you won’t make your connection, but we have you on another flight, and it’s all good.

So on one hand, this program is a really, really sweet reward for customers that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with the airline.

And at some level, I suppose it is also intended to influence the purchasing decisions of customers that haven’t yet qualified for the program.

The problem is that for 99.9999% of the population, it just isn’t possible to make these levels of miles, so it really isn’t all that influential – at least not in my thinking.

Worse still, in the earlier story, the airline can offer this level of personalized service to each person that flies their airline. Technology makes it completely possible to automatically re-book passengers and even though it might be hard to have a person call everyone on every flight, most people wouldn’t mind getting a ping from a computer outlining the problems and the options available. Hell, some of us might even pay slightly more for a ticket that included these services as an upgrade.

As is, I find these programs insulting and disrespectful. When a restaurant can’t deliver the meal I ordered, they bend over backwards to make it right. Why can’t the airlines? This is just basic customer service. Perhaps in the ancient times before automated dialers and high-tech booking systems were practical, I could understand how the costs might outweigh the benefits, but given the current state of technology it feels more like laziness and a lack of innovation.

Moreover, I think if these frequent fliers thought hard for a second about the pain the airlines inflicted on them while they pursued these luxurious “perks”, they’d probably agree with me.

For what we’re paying for airline tickets, we all deserve a better class of service.

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My first inclination was that this was spam promoting Pornhub. Silly me, that’s just a regular link – a spammer would at least include an affiliate URL or some other means to make money.

No, this is actually a Viagra spam. If you follow the link to the protest, you will end up at a Pharma page trying to sell you little blue pills. I can’t imagine that the conversation rate would be all that good, but again, spam is a volume game. Even with 1 buyer for every 10,000 spam message sent, these scumbags send enough volume to make it profitable.

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AllThingsD reports that Seesmic is buckling down to focus on its social tools, which presumably includes its Seesmic Ping product, so it might yet find a winner that it can run with.

My hope is that they seize this new focus and use it as an opportunity to revitalize their customer relationships, start communicating and work with its loyal and passionate users so that we are part of the solution.

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But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.

–A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left
Of another string of blocks and crunching it up–

It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way–
The General loses his stars and the block-men die

“John Brown’s Body” – Stephen Vincent Benet, most recently via the Manager-Tools newsletter.

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For my part, I’ve now invested 45 minutes troubleshooting and trying to understand the situation better – that’s 45 minutes wasted if Seesmic is going to shut down Ping.FM. And, if they don’t have the courtesy to keep me in the loop now, I can’t really expect the situation will improve if I pay them money. In my experience, companies that offer great service don’t wait to show their stripes until you’ve ponied up some cash.

I was able to find a few WordPress plugins that offer similar functionality – a total PITA to install and configure, but not much more time on top of the time I’ve already wasted trying to solve this.

Updated: Since posting this, I’ve found WordSocial, a nice plugin that handles posting to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and wasn’t much of a hassle to install. I pulled the earlier plugins I was wrestling with and I’m quite pleased with the results.

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