Everything is new and improved. I'm not really a new and improved kinda guy, it's not my market, I buy what I have to, what inspires me, and that's it.
But there's a market for it. It's been created, the stage set with 50 years of laundry detergent and dish soap getting better and better, until finally you would think it would wash the sins from the world, yet somehow still it's only laundry detergent...
The laundry detergent was only the marketing research. Then came technology, with obvious and noticeable improvements. The kind that demanded you replace things every couple of years. They caught on to this, the technology people, exploited it by building their products to fail should you ignore the cultural imperative to upgrade. More Memory, more RAM, flat screen TV's, flatter screened TV's, richer streaming content, games and media. Most people have more technology on their desktop than NASA had when they sent people to the moon. It is used in over 90% of instances as a diversion, recreation, an escape. This is the world of New and Improved.
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There was so much they could have done with this....
Front page news in the Calgary Herald. The headline something like "Gorilla with knife scares visitors to Calgary Zoo", or the like.
What it should have been was "Proof of Evolution" or "The Missing Link Discovered" or "Gorilla takes hostage, threatens euthenasia if demands not met...", "Gorilla prepares for Calgary Stampede" or a hundred other far more entertaining possibilities.
A shame the photographer sold the rights to the Herald.
The real story was much more mundane, a zookeeper had forgotten his knife in the enclosure, curious gorilla picks it up, aghast visitor snaps photo. What was remarkable was the comments posted on the site, hundreds of irate Calgarians demanding that the zoo be closed, cleverly observing the obvious fact that the zoo is inhumane, ignoring the obvious contradiction that our bloated lifestyles have stolen from the Gorillas the last of their habitat, if not for the zoo then they soon may well not exist at all....
Funny how people look at things.
And then the case of poor the woman crushed by the falling cement slab in Montreal, initial headline "Woman crushed by cement slab in Montreal", then, as the story updates (Woman was sitting on outdoor patio at cafe celebrating birthday with her husband, slab falls from builing and crushes her) the headline is changed to "Woman asked to sit there...", a morality tale for demanding customers, implicit is the fact that by requesting this seat she was somehow responsible for her misfortune, the classic case of a demanding customer somehow getting her just desserts...
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A client wanted a donate button on her website. It was to send money to the kids cancer fund, a worthy cause, and so she went on to Paypal's website and used one of their little generators to make up a button, then sent me the code to post on her site.
Which, of course, I did.
But there was a problem. In firefox the button worked just fine. But in Internet Explorer the button takes you to a Paypal error page. "Sorry, an error occurred after you clicked the last link" .
There is no way to make the donation.
Now it is odd for a couple of reasons. Reason #1 - Paypal provided the client with the code. Provided the client with code that doesn't work on around 80% of the browsers out there.
I went and found other sites with donate buttons and tried to click on them. Same thing.
So they've essentially cut themselves off from 80% of the internet.
Now this is dumb. Beyond dumb. This is a company that makes it's living off of processing payments - a rake off and commission on both ends, charging the payer and the collector. And their own code doesn't work on 80% of the browsers.
Possibly it's just a temporary glitch, so I Google the error message.
26,900,000 results.
And I go to some of the forums, hosted on Paypal itself, reading tirades of customer abuse and threats of lawsuits, see for yourself here:
And the forums go on and on, with the paypal staff denying there's a problem, developers acknowledging there is a problem, problem not being fixed....
The developers propose workarounds, but for all the home based web authors who are not technically inclined they are absolutely useless.
Absolutely useless. Why should they troubleshoot something when it's Paypal themselves who provided them the code? Don't they want their money, or what? The 26, 900, 000 results, that's only the people irate enough to post, how many people quietly drop it, remove the code, don't complain, leave their money in limbo....? And how many posts did they delete from their forums with the excuse that users were using foul language, or not adhering to forum rules? One can imagine getting upset about this, something about a company illegally siezing or freezing your funds tends to raise your blood pressure.....
The forum? Read the dates on the posts. 11-17-2008 06:21 AM. Almost a year. And the issue is ongoing, they're still generating code that doesn't work, and even more remarkably, they're still in business.
In technical terms, this is an easy thing to fix. Come up with code that works across all browsers, even if it has to be a hardcoded URL. It doesn't get too much simpler than this. But they haven't done it. They refuse to do it.
Yet they're still in business. If you ever need to send me money, for whatever reason, use Canada post or Western Union. Never, ever, ever use Paypal.
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I have to confess, I occasionally read the news. The online version, it's a way of postponing work that needs to be done, of procrastinating the endless list of chores that will devour my day. I rationalize it by believing it "Keeps me informed".
It doesn't really. But on that note here's a summary of todays headlines in the Calgary Herald:
It's kinda tough to read, so feel free to enlarge it by clicking. It'll still be tough to read, but bigger. My notes in red....
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