Monthly Archives: January 2005

Opera, the Forgotten Browser

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For some reason, Wired Magazine seams to think Opera is a forgotten browser.

It may not be the most popular, however Opera is far from forgotten. ;) I’ll let everyone else have their FireFox. It’s good, but, IMO, it is far from superior to Opera.

Anyway, check out the Wired mag article. It’s a pretty good read. :)

An Open Letter To Google. Re: Blogger.com

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Below is a copy of an email sent to Google/Blogger.com. Let’s see if it does anything. ;) I’ve also posted on Google Groups.

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I was wondering what future plans you have for Blogger.com. It seams that nothing has really been done to it in sometime. There are a lot of features that I see people want, however they are always referred to third parties (e.g. Chatterbox, Quizzilla, Haloscan, or BraveNet).

While all of these third parties offer nice services, it is impossible to really integrate it into a person’s site/blog. For example, I cannot use Chatterbox, and limit it to only register blogger members.

I see sites like TypePad, Xanga, Live Journal, and MSN Spaces offering members all sorts of features that Blogger.com doesn’t. Some are simple, while some are not. Heck, I wouldn’t mind paying a small fee for some of the better features that the other services offer.

Now, I know that in reference to the Blogger*Plus, your site states:

“… we’re working as hard as we can to build fun, new stuff into Blogger!”

What is coming? When is it coming? That statement was there before I joined Blogger. It’d be nice to know what to expect to see in the future. I know, I know, Google doesn’t like to comment on future plans.

Personally, I’d love to see Blogger.com start to offer a full flavored CMS system (e.g 107, PHP-Nuke, Post Nuke, etc) to their customers. Make it so that when logged into Blogger.com people can reply to my topics, vote/comment in polls, or add me to their blogroll, or maybe even be greeted by a personal welcome message on my site. Even if this kind of setup were only for paying customers, it, IMO, would be an awesome thing. I know you’d make at least one sale.

Adding the ability for members to join a blog ring or two would be another nice feature. In addition, it would help with Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I guess that’s enough for now. I could continue on all day, but rather I’ll sum it up by saying I’d just like to see Blogger offer more to it’s members. ;)

Thanks,
Bryan

NEVER Going Back To That Wal*Mart

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Before I got married, I can only remember going to the Wal*Mart on Clinton Highway a few times. It wasn’t the closest one to my parent’s house, so if I went it was usually because I was with someone else (usually Mike, a guy I went to High School with).

Well, sometime last year they decided to make this Wal*Mart a Super Wal*Mart (are there any non-super stores left?). They finally completed “upgrade” to the store after the wedding, and being that it was right down from the house, one might think it would be a good place to shop.

Wrong.

As I stood in line last night with Farrah, I tried to think of a time when I haven’t left that Wal*Mart pissed or disappointed. You know what, I couldn’t think of a single time.

Farrah and I love green tea. We probably go through two gallons of it a week. I use to live off of Arizona Tea and then one day at Wal*Mart I came across another brand, Trade winds. This tea was awesome. Since then, that’s pretty much what we’ve gotten.

Well, the local Wal*Mart for the past 5 months has not had any in stock. Which meant when we needed tea, I had to drive to another store. No biggie you might think, but it gets worse. They never have anything in stock. I’ve not seen cases of C2 on their shelves in months. Two weeks ago, I went to buy some stuff Farrah wanted which included Apple Juice and Granola bars. Both items were out of stock. I could go on and give you an entire grocery list of stuff that is always missing from their shelves, but I wont.

Well, last night Farrah and I went to Target to get some stuff, and then went across the road to grocery shop at Wal*Mart. While shopping, I thought that the management at that store had been replaced, or at least gotten their act together. Everything we were after was in stock. Items that I hadn’t seen there in months were actually on the shelves.

Finally, we managed to get everything we needed I thought as we headed to the checkout lanes. The extremely long, checkout lanes. After standing in the lane for a few minutes I noticed that our lane wasn’t moving. In fact, none of the lanes were moving. Not only were the lanes not moving, the cashers weren’t ringing anything up.

So, we waited… and waited… and waited… nothing was happening. Finally the guy in front of us got fed up and pushed his full cart off to the side and left. This was the first time out line moved in 5 minutes. 10 minutes later, we were still standing in line, not moving.

After a good 20 minutes of standing there, doing nothing, Farrah and I did what many other unhappy customers were doing. Pushed our full shopping cart to the side and walked off. Keep in mind, that our cart was full of milk, hamburger meat, and several frozen things. All of this, if not returned to the refrigeration areas soon would go bad.

Not once while we were there did a Wal*Mart staff member come by and apologize to anyone or explain what was going on. No announcement was made, nothing. A simple explanation to the store could have saved Wal*Mart a lot of money last night.

Not only did they lose my business that night, they lost a lot of others. That combined with the food they were going to have to throw away had to hurt. All due to lack of communication.

Thankfully, there are other Wal*Mart stores near by. I don’t mind shopping at them, I just won’t be shopping at the one on Clinton Highway again.