In our never ending Verizon Wireless vs. AT&T battles, we are forever bickering about price, coverage, call quality and, naturally, coolness of available handsets. Now that VZW has a bevy of what most everyone agrees are cool handsets, and since pricing is almost the same on both when setting up a new account (go ahead, look it up*), what’s left?
No much, really. Just one small thing that I’m going to give you.
For reasons unknown to pretty much anyone, the CDMA carriers in the United States (Verizon Wireless and Sprint) have a penchant for loading their handsets up with junk apps and bloatware. Think back to the days when that new Compaq you picked up for $500 was loaded with so much bloatware that it took your PC 3 days to boot. Or, better still, the “free” PC you got because you signed up for a 2 years MSN account.
With 1 minor difference. You see, on the PC, you could spend a few hours and uninstall all of those apps. It would be terribly time consuming, but you could get it done. Or, you could always format the drive and excluding installing that crap altogether. Not so with a VZW phone.
Not only that, but VZW also like to push apps to it’s subscribers. Bing for search, something for media, NASCAR apps, what have you. Wouldn’t be a terribly huge deal except you are unable to delete or uninstall said pushed apps.
Think if Microsoft or Apple included something in an update or installation (Safari with iTunes on Windows comes to mind) that you didn’t want and then didn’t let you remove it. My god! Mr. and Mrs. PC user would be so bent out of shape it’s not even funny. Mac users would probably be overjoyed with the fact that Steve thought highly enough of this particular app that it must be made of pure awesome, rainbows and unicorn tears.
But I digress.
It’s really not that big of a deal, really. More of an annoyance than anything else. It’s not going to drive me away from Verizon for my phone service or anything like that. I just wish they asked first, or provided an uninstall option for this crap.
Because I don’t want it.
450 voice minutes, unlimited texting and required data plan. AT&T is $84.99 (2GB Data), Verizon Wireless is $89.98 (5GB Data). Pricing based on new accounts, not the account you have now.
I was feeling silly the other night. I was also drinking a very nice bottle of wine. Silly + wine = this video.
From my YouTube channel, if you like that sort of thing.
The post has a prerequisite. Please take a moment to read this. Here is the take away quote.
Manipulating social networks is easier still. There are firms that manipulate which stories are posted and which blogs are linked to, and for years there are firms that have worked to manipulate which links come up higher on the search results as well. As these signposts become more, not less, important, there’s a significant market opportunity for someone who can, as Billboard did, clean up the charts and make the payola worthless or at least more transparent. In the meantime, be skeptical.
By design, I’m a cynic. It has taken me many years of practice and getting burned or watching my customers get burned by fly-by-night outfits or independent contractors that just don’t get it. And nothing gets me more riled up than people that take advantage of others because they do not know what to look for.
Sure, you could employ the services of a black hat SEO wizard to boost your google ranking, but does that really help you out? Sure, short term if you have a website covered in Google ads and your only goal is to get as many clicks as possible. But should you?
I don’t think so.
It’s not always about the quantity of traffic, but also about the quality. Covering your pages with ads creates a bad user experience and draws away from your content. Your audience see that you are nothing more than a money grubbing whore and might not come back. Or they will use some kind of ad-blocking technology or Readability which makes all of those ads useless.
Why not create something that your audience enjoys or finds relevant? Interact with your audience via Twitter, Facebook or email and get them to come back? Everyone calls this Social Media best practices, but I call it basic customer service. It’s not rocket science, it’s just plain common sense that gets lost in a flurry of buzz-words spouted by very nice fellows with very white teeth, square-tipped shoes and a leased BMW in the parking lot.
If you rush, you’ll get the traffic you want. But you might not get it back. Take your time, take care of your customers and keep them coming back. Google might bring them to you, but it is your job to keep them!
Recently I’m reminded that many of you have digital cameras. I also know from previous experience that, once you have taken the photos, you have no idea what to do with them.
Just like our good friend John says above, your camera is not the best place to store your photos. I mean, why look at those old pictures on that tiny screen of your camera when you can upload them to your computer and view them on the screen or easily get them printed? Let’s jump right in!
This is going to be geared toward you Windows users among us. But many of things we are going to discuss, like getting prints made, will work for anyone.
The first thing you need to do is find a way to suck your photos off of your camera to your computer, keep them organized and be able to do some light processing on them (cropping, red eye removal, color adjustments). If you have anything installed on your PC now that contains the words Sony, Adobe, Kodak or Roxio along with the word(s) photo, picture or image, go into the control panel and uninstall them. While some people may like them, I find they are too complicated, move your photos to odd places on your hard drive and usually not terribly stable.
Done? Good! Now, go over to google.com/picasa and click the download button. Once downloaded, click run and let it install. VERY IMPORTANT. You will see 2 screens once Picasa is installed. One of them is to let it handle all of your images. Leave that one alone. The other will be asking you where you want Picasa to look for images. Unless you want to see every image on your computer (including those from your internet cache), I highly recommend selecting the Desktop and Documents option. Once that is done, Picasa will start building a database that contains all of the photos on your desktop and in your photo folder.
Easy right?
As soon as the database build is complete, plug your camera into your computer either by the supplied USB cable or by inserting the memory card into a slot on the front/side. Picasa should open automatically and ask to import those photos to your computer. Go ahead. Heck, you can even let it delete the photos when you are done. No, really, it’s ok.
Now that your photos are organized and easily accessible in Picasa, spend more than a few minutes poking around to see what it can do. Don’t worry about making changes to anything because Picasa, much like iPhoto on the Mac, does non-destructive edits. That means no matter what you do to a photo, you can always revert back to the original.
How about some prints to show those photos off to friends and family? This one is equally easy and there are more than a few ways to do it.
You can burn the photos you want prints of to a CD and take them to your local CostCo and they will happily print them for you. Good quality, fast turn around and not too expensive. You can also go to Walgreens.com, upload the photos you want printed and pick them up at your local Walgreens Drug Store. Again, good quality, fast turn around and not to expensive. Not to mention super duper easy!
The only thing left is backing those photos up! I’m gonna hammer on you about this until the end of time, you know that, right? I don’t care if you email yourself the most important documents and photos, get an external drive or sign-up for an account at Carbonite, just make it happen, ok?
Comments are open if you have any questions! Myself and the rest of the donburnside.com readers would love to help!
Happy 4th of July! Be safe and sane out there. If you can’t manage that, at least blow something up with enough explosives to leave a good sized divot in the backyard.
Yet another for the portfolio page and one of my highest profiles sites to date! This one for the SpeedTV show Chop Cut Rebuild.
If you’re a hard-core gear-head, you’re on the road to the right place. Get your fix with host Dan Woods as he reveals what it takes to be a custom classic builder. With demanding deadlines quickly becoming a reality and roadblocks rising left and right, two talented teams must come up with dynamic, innovative ways to survive the mission.
This site took me a while to get right and I still have a little bit of tweaking to do. This is my first magazine style WordPress theme that I’ve used on a live site and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I used some of my better CSS tricks and a few of my favorite plugins to get the job done, and the customer is pleased with the results.
This is one that I wanted to work on for quite a while. Let me show you why.
Oh yea, Flash navigation in a page created with Microsoft Front Page. No way for it to get updated unless they called their web guy and he always wanted the obligatory $500 to do said updates. Moving them to WordPress will not only save them money, but give them the ability to update the site themselves whenever they like or need, providing their audience with the freshest content possible.
I can do this for you, too. Just let me know when.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Feel free to use my stuff, just Be sure to let me know.