A Series of Tubes

So I’ve been having problems with my roomba and I looked all over for a solution (Roombas are vacuuming robots if you didn’t already know).  I finally found the best and most comprehensive guide to solving problems with your roomba from this FAQ.  The FAQ was so comprehensive in fact that it also helped a lot with my friend’s marriage issues too.  It’s that good.

And just for fun, here is a video of a cat riding a roomba:

There is an article over at eastbayexpress.com about how Yelp is asking for money from restaurants to help them hide bad reviews.  In response to the article, the CEO of yelp responded on his blog about the incident and goes into detail about how the reporter did not do a good job of fact checking (apparently she did, see the update below).  The article has a bold claim against a popular website and is driving a lot of traffic to their own website (I had never been to eastbayexpress.com before and the article in question has been the #1 article on the website for some time).  Unfortunately the claim that it is extorting restaurants looks likely  is not proven (I guess it’s not totally unproven either) and in the end only servers to put into question eastbayexpress’s reporting.  They didn’t mention in their article that eastbayexpress owns and operates a competing service for restaurant reviews.  The damage done to yelp has already been done as the article is getting wide circulation due to being posted on sites such as slashdot.org.

Update:  I have had friends anecdotally tell me that yelp participates in extortion practices.  Eastbay express has follow up article, as pointed out by Dano in the comments and yelp has yet to respond.  I emailed yelp for a response just to see what they say (I kinda expect them to ignore me.  Maybe I’ll call them).  The initial claim appears to have some legs.  That kind of sucks since I like the idea of a community review site.  I just wish there was a trustworthy version.  The articles seem to have effected yelps own rating on it’s own site from an average of 4 stars down to 3 stars (click the image for a larger view):

East Bay Express also took the time to trash talk the Mercury New’s coverage of Yelp as well.  The only large competing service is yahoo local, and there is no guarantee that yahoo local will be any better considering that yahoo does not have the greatest track record in the morality department.  I guess I’ll start using yahoo local, but my brand loyalty to it is less than stellar.

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So Amazon recently released the kindle 2.  It is an ebook reader that allows you to download your books over a 3G connection (provided by sprint).  The interesting thing about it is that you can have a device that will automatically download the days news for you and have it ready in a convenient reader waiting for you on your kitchen table.  I spent some time looking into the device and below are my thoughts.

I would make a few changes to the kindle:

1)  I would make it spill proof and drop proof.  I’m not the most coordinated when I wake up so if I spill something on my newspaper it doesn’t matter much but if I spill something on a $400 ebook reader I tend to care a whole lot more.  This is not an unreasonable request considering the OLPC.

2) Price:  We’re in a recession/depression and at an electronic book for $360 + other expenses, in more detail below, is a bit much.

Raining on the Kindle 2’s parade: There are some problems with the Kindle.

I can go to a used bookstore and get a book for cheap and not worry about breaking it, losing it, having it stolen, or having the battery die.  There is not a lengthy EULA associated with the used book I just bought.  I will also know that amazon will not have a database of all of my reading material (including blogs, websites, newspaper and magazine subscriptions).  I cannot find a privacy policy that states that they will not sell this information or will not share this information with other corporations or with any governments.  I’m not allowed to modify the kindle, even if I know how to make it better and I share the information with everyone.

Unless you are using the wireless Internet connection on the kindle to buy stuff from amazon, then the kindle will send you a bill for the data other data. If the pricing is anything like the charges that most cell phones bill you for, and there is no reason to expect it to be different, then I would recommend never ever using the wireless abilities of the kindle…ever. Just to visit a blog or a popular website will cost you about $2 per website per month if you purchase that ability for the kindle.  So if you have a computer you can look at the website for free.  For every registered website that amazon decides that it wants to allow you to look at on your kindle, because amazon gets to decide what websites do not get access to on the kindle 2), you have to pay.  going to slashdot costs $2 a month, yet I can visit it for free on my computer or laptop or .  As if paying $360 up front to amazon wasn’t enough, now they want to ding you for even more money for things that should be free.

I guess if I were to include these problems into the how I would change the kindle it would be not to have my privacy violated and my rights stripped by a team of lawyers at amazon.com and not to get charged money to visit websites that I can view on a laptop for free, in color, faster, without amazon tracking me, and for many other reasons as well.  Actually if you are thinking of getting a kindle you should probably just get a good laptop instead since you can just go to the websites of various newspapers for free and get the same content.

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When going to a party where you don’t know the politics or religious beliefs of the other guests I tend to avoid the subjects.  When someone brings up either topic I tend to get similar shooting glances from my girlfriend as the ones described in the following video:

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