Cox Crow

On Death and Dying

The Big Sister came up with a shocker this morning. What does dead mean?

Well, it's the opposite of living. (I'm not sure that worked too well as an explanation.) Why do you ask?

In that movie that [my 6 year-old uncle] talks about, there's a place where that guy goes, where he dies.

You mean Star Wars, where Darth Vadar kills Obi-Wan Kenobi?

Yeah.

Ah. Sometimes if a bad person hits someone so hard, they stop living. Uh. You know how Gaston wants to kill the Beast?

Gaston's not nice. Sometimes, Gaston picks up the Little Guy and throws him in the snow. [laughs, covering her mouth] That's funny.

4:21:29 PM # Google It!
categories: Family

Trail of Tears

Lockergnome, via Jenny Levine, laments that AT&T Broadband Comcast customers' e-mail addresses are changing.

There is no good technical reason for eliminating a domain during a mass migration such as this. Instead, it will cause more problems by collapsing two namespaces into one.

This is a poorly thought out decision to emphasize the COMCAST brand over the ATTBI brand. Unless you've purchased your domain, or are using a third-party to redirect mail to your address du jour, the e-mail address ties you to the vendor. If the vendor changes the e-mail address, this is an excellent opportunity for them to lose customers, and for you to change providers. The only device more effective for customer retention is geography — and the lack of options.

Let's look at a counter-example. In November 2001, SBC purchased Prodigy. Almost immediately afterward, they announced an strategic partnership with Yahoo!. SBC, Prodigy and Yahoo! customers now have the option to upgrade to the SBC Yahoo! bundle of Y! services and SBC Internet access. Customers keep their e-mail addresses, and we arrange for the delivery of prodigy.net, flash.net, wans.net, snet.net, ameritech.net, pacbell.net, nvbell.net, swbell.net, and sbcglobal.net addresses to the appropriate mailbox.

If Comcast needs assistance with integrating the attbi.com domain, I have a few friends who can help.

3:05:42 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Typographical Errors in Standards Documents

Shelley Powers found that the removal of the cite element from the most recent XHTML working draft was a mistake.

11:43:05 AM # Google It!

How to Load a Moving Van

Like Sam Ruby, Brian St. Pierre has moved from Radio Userland to blosxom. More importantly, he wrote up the procedure for doing so. Doesn't it feel good when your data isn't held captive?

11:20:42 AM # Google It!

Truth in Advertising

Michael Radwin noticed that

Someone bought an ad on Google to help spread the word faster than the Google search engine can index pages about the virus!

What a mensch.

9:16:40 AM # Google It!