Embattled clothing retailer American Apparel tweeted an Independence Day ad yesterday showing a stylized photo of the 1986 Challenger explosion with the hashtags "#smoke" and "#clouds." (I will not post the image here.)
Shortly after, they tweeted a heartfelt apology blaming the child that somehow they put in charge of social media. Unfortunately, they also have a child, Ryan Holiday (born in June 1987), running their entire marketing department, who threw his social media flunky under the bus to cover his own ignorance and ineptitude. The apology reads as follows:
We deeply apologize for today's Tumblr post of the Space Shuttle Challenger. The image was re-blogged in error by one of our social media employees who was born after the tragedy and was unaware of the event. We sincerely regret the insensitivity of that selection and the post has been deleted.
So, Ryan Holiday is an asshat (which one could infer from his writings), and obviously running with scissors in his current job. Note to Ryan: don't blame your subordinates in public for your own screw-up, especially when the purported cause of that person's mistake is a characteristic you share. And note John Luttell (interim CEO of American Apparel): Cleaning up Dov Charney's brand damage should begin with replacing your marketing director.
I wish, I really wish, more Americans knew something about history.
Last night I got an email from Microsoft saying the Windows Azure subscription that I got through work was disabled because it had run out of credits.
Some context:
- The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) gives developers access to all of Microsoft's software development projects, along with a monthly credit to use Windows Azure that can go as high as $150. Because West Monroe Partners wants to make sure all of us have the right tools, we get the subscriptions with the $150 credit.
- I activated my MSDN subscription a year ago, and so far have used only $7.25 of Azure services.
- Yesterday I spun up a JDK 7.2 virtual machine (VM), which, at 33c per hour, was unlikely to bust my Azure credit limit. Plus, I shut it down when I was done, having used only 2 hours of computing time.
Here's what I missed when I spun up the VM:
(Click on it to see full-size.)
Even at full size you probably didn't notice the little warning box lower-right that says, in 9-point type, "You selected an image that has special pricing information. Learn more." You also probably didn't realize that the special pricing image means Microsoft will disable your Azure account if you don't give them money once you spin up this VM.
I'll skip to the end. Here is the relevant part of the message I sent to Microsoft Customer Support after I resolved the ensuing hilarity:
All right, now that I’ve managed to re-enable my subscription after wasting an hour of my life, I have four serious complaints.
Complaint #1: Shutting down an entire Azure subscription without warning because it has a 34c balance—thirty four U.S. cents—is unacceptable.
Complaint #2: The Azure account portal (account.windowsazure.com) does not work with Microsoft Internet Explorer 11. The login session does not propagate to the dialog box that takes billing information. I had to make the change using Google Chrome.
Complaint #3: The Azure account, but not the subscription, already had payment information available. Yet the portal prevented me from merely applying the existing payment information to the new subscription at the “remove spending limit” dialog box.
Complaint #4: If, despite all common sense and reason, a change to the subscription could result in the subscription being disabled without notice, a very small “Pricing Information” note is insufficient warning. The portal should have an unambiguous, impossible-to-miss step in the virtual machine configuration dialog box.
Is this looking a gift horse in the mouth? No. This is a benefit Microsoft provides developers so we developers can learn their products and sell them. So the horse isn't exactly a gift; it's a demonstrator. And for a few hours last night, mine wouldn't leave his stall.
Everyone outside the U.S. use chip-and-PIN credit cards. That we still use magnetic strips explains how the U.S. accounted for half of all fraudulent transactions worldwide in 2012. Come October 2015, we'll get to the worldwide standard:
The switch will cost retailers hundreds of millions of dollars. But credit card companies have pushed for the change for years. Beginning in October 2015, they will start leaning harder on banks and merchants by shifting the legal liability for fraud to the party with the least-sophisticated technology. That will be a powerful incentive for retailers to upgrade their systems.
Those of us who travel internationally for business are already used to the difference between American readers and those used in much of the rest of the world—and the accompanying inconveniences. Many automated machines, which are common at petrol stations and supermarkets, do not accept American swipe-and-sign cards at all. And tell a European cashier that you want to sign for a transaction and you will often be met with a bemused look. For those Americans who don't yet have chip-and-pin cards (and that's most of us, since few banks offered them before last year), the coming change will eliminate that awkwardness once and for all. The bottom line for business travellers: if you're not already using a pin with your credit cards, get used to the idea—and start thinking of a good one.
Yes, one of the annoyances of traveling abroad right now is that when I present my chip-and-sign card overseas, I still have to sign a little chit. My bank says they'll switch to PIN with my next card, coming soon.
We've been using Microsoft Azure virtual machines for development for a while. This means we run our Visual Studio instances in the cloud up on special virtual machines that have nothing on them except the bare minimum required for writing software. This keeps different projects separate from each other, and also speeds up network access, which is useful for network-intensive applications.
We started noticing, however, that going to MSDN or Google or other big sites became...challenging. All of these sites started acting as if our VMs were located in Brazil, when we knew perfectly well that they were in Virginia. Microsoft has finally explained the problem:
IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the United States, meaning there is no additional IPv4 address space available. This requires Microsoft to use the IPv4 address space available to us globally for the addressing of new services. The result is that we will have to use IPv4 address space assigned to a non-US region to address services which may be in a US region. It is not possible to transfer registration because the IP space is allocated to the registration authorities by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
At times your service may appear to be hosted in a non-US location.
It is important to note that the IP address registration authority does not equate to IP address physical location (i.e., you can have an IP address registered in Brazil but allocated to a device or service physically located in Virginia). Thus when you deploy to a U.S. region, your service is still hosted in U.S. and your customer data will remain in the U.S.
In other words, Microsoft's cloud service is so popular that they have run out of addresses to assign to it. Microsoft, it should be noted, has tens of millions of IPv4 addresses available. (Of course, IPv4 has only 4.2 trillion possible addresses, though fully 43 billion are in private IP ranges.)
When I set up the appointment for Comcast to come out and install a new internet connection at IDTWHQ, I explained to them that (a) I have a satellite dish and (b) my building has common cable. In fact, they needed the building's account number to set up the service.
So when the installer got here at 11:45 (still between 8 and noon, at least) and noticed that (a) I have a satellite dish and (b) my building has common cable, he explained that he couldn't actually install my new Internet service because, it turns out, (a) I have a satellite dish and (b) my building has common cable, so they have to run a new coaxial cable through my wall.
They can send the drilling team out as early as June 26th, which is unfortunately during my first week at my new job.
In other words, I might have to suffer with this crap:
...for another three weeks.
And people wonder why American internet service is the worst in the OECD.
Long-time readers know I rarely post directly about my personal life, but this one is kind of big.
After nearly three years, I'm moving from 10th Magnitude to take a new position as a .NET Architect with West Monroe Partners. I've learned a lot working with 10th, and I wish everyone there the best in the future.
I'll have more to say about this in the coming weeks. I'm excited about the change, and looking forward to some totally new challenges with WMP.
Yesterday I mentioned three things that weren't connected except they all ended recently. This morning Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal has an op-ed about one of them:
HomeMade Pizza Co. was in the right business and exactly the wrong place.
We consumers indeed are buying more fresh prepared meals to eat at home or elsewhere, like the take-and-bake pizzas HomeMade hawked from 1997 until its abrupt closing Friday. These kinds of meals have become a $26 billion business in this country and are growing at a healthy clip.
But we're not buying most of those grab-and-go meals at stand-alone storefront operations, where costs for an operator like HomeMade, which had more than 20 outlets when it shut down, include the lease and utilities, and whatever it takes to let potential customers know that it's there and why it's worth a visit.
The fresh pre-prepared food business is proving a boon to food/drug stores, where almost three-quarters of these meals are being sold, according to NPD Group. Savvy supermarket operators are offering an expanding array of menu items, increasingly going beyond heat-and-serve home-style meals. Some have added restaurant-quality entrees, various cuisines and occasionally palate-challenging fare.
While you're chewing on that, here's another passing: the Cubs are ending their 90-year relationship with radio station WGN:
The team tomorrow will reportedly announce a new seven-year agreement with WBBM-AM/780 to air the team's games beginning in 2015, ending a run with WGN-AM/720 that dates back to 1924.
"The economic terms just don't make sense for us,” WGN Radio President Jimmy de Castro told media columnist Robert Feder. “So it's really not us saying we don't want them anymore. It's the Cubs saying that the economics they need are much greater than what we think they're worth or what we'll pay. They chose to go another way economically and made a decision to move on.”
Sic transit gloria etuli.
This is overdue, but I'm very happy about it:
When Santa Barbara startup FindTheBest (FTB) was sued by a patent troll called Lumen View last year, it vowed to fight back rather than pay up the $50,000 licensing fee Lumen was asking for. Company CEO Kevin O'Connor made it personal, pledging $1 million of his own money to fight the legal battle.
Now the judge overseeing the case has ruled (PDF) that it's Lumen View, not FindTheBest, that should have to pay [FTB's $200,000 legal] expenses. In a first-of-its-kind implementation of new fee-shifting rules mandated by the Supreme Court, US District Judge Denise Cote found that the Lumen View lawsuit was a "prototypical exceptional case."
These guys are extortionists, and I am overjoyed that the law finally recognizes them as such. FTB has a pending appeal on a RICO action against Lumen, which the district court denied. That would be even sweeter.
A couple weeks ago I read a Snopes article about how Atari may have buried millions of E.T. game cartridges in New Mexico. After reading it, I found a copy of Zap! The rise and fall of Atari, on which much of the article was based.
The book was fascinating. Author Scott Cohen describes the meteoric rise of the company from Nolan Bushnell's Pong game until the company's self-inflicted and fatal shot to the head on 7 December 1982. Since Cohen wrote it in late 1983, the story ends a few months before the company did. But Atari had already been measured twice by that point, so no one reading the book when it came out would have any doubt about its prospects.
It always astounds me how companies keep making the same mistakes. Societies do too; but one can explain the timescale of human idiocy (usually 75-125 years) because people who would have known better tend to die eventually. Companies can flame out in just a few years.
Take Atari. In short, the company died because management—in particular CEO Ray Kassar—made a series of horrible decisions and ignored the lessons from their consequences. The initial growth and success of the company after Kassar took over was impressive, but it happened despite management, not because of it. The company's future sales required continuous development of new games, but management thought creating software wasn't any different than building cars.
At one point, four of Atari's top engineers, the guys creating the products Atari needed to sell, asked for commissions on the millions of game cartridges that people bought. In other words, they wanted recognition for their successes. Kassar responded, "You are no more important to that game than the guy on the assembly line who puts it together." The engineers quit and formed Activision, which then ate Atari's lunch.
With massive turnover in engineering, a game console that had not been upgraded in six years, over-saturation of the game cartridge market, poorly-reviewed products, and direct competition from technically superior products like personal computers, one would think management would notice the problem. Nope. On 7 December 1982, Atari announced disappointing earnings and precipitated the video game crash that left none of the original players standing.
The book concludes with a description of Silicon Valley as the new Detroit:
Silicon Valley is no longer the place for development and technology that it was. Now it's a meat market. What is happening to the Valley happened to Detroit, except there it was spread out over forty years. There are more companies in the Valley now than before, but it's not the hot spot it was. More companies are thinking about moving to the Midwest, since "cheap" labor down South is no longer cheap. Much of Silicon Valley will probably end up in Detroit, where all those auto workers are standing around with nothing to do.
So, not all of the book is accurate... It was a good read, though.
The deployment, I mean. Everything works, at least on the browsers I've used to test it. I ran the deployment three times in Test first, starting from a copy of the Production database each time, so I was as confident as I could be when I finally ran it against the Production database itself. And, I made sure I can swap everything back to the old version in about 15 minutes.
Also, I snuck away to shoot publicity photos for Spectralia again, same as last year. I'll have some up by the end of the week, after the director has seen them.