RSS feedAs part the maturing process, I’ve begun the journey from angry young punk, frustrated with the stupidity of the human race, to the more tolerant and hopefully partially wise old man, frustrated with the stupidity of the human race. All this really means is that my rants are tending to shift from the angry to the amused. Human beings are never going to stop being stupid, evolution is clearly working with us on this, so we each do our own little bit, then move on. So here’s my little bit, before I move on… on Telstra and Krispy Kreme. 🙂
I’ve spoken before about the intelligence behind bringing Krispy Kreme to our (now becoming less than) fine country, and how they blur the lines between fundraising and charity, especially through our schools. If you were in Sydney these past six months, you’d think that Krispy Kreme invented the doughnut, and were the first to bake them in Australia, which goes nicely with the myth that kangaroos regularly hop down George St. in the middle of Sydney’s CBD.
Here’s a great example from early 2004 of how they enter new markets. Strangely titled NEWINGTON — The illuminated red, neon light outside a Krispy Kreme can only mean one thing: There are freshly made, hot doughnuts in the store, you’d be excused for thinking this newspaper article was in fact an advertisement.
Telstra of course, I’ve spoken about before, with their Sensis search engine, and the Twelve Days of Telstra it took to transfer my ADSL connection.
So imagine my delight when I started hearing about the decline and fall of Krispy Kreme. Krispy Kreme crisis increases losses is probably the most appropriate reporting of the story, from a baking industry rag, but if you want some rather amusing headlines, you can’t go past Google News for 1570 negative news stories about krispy kreme. Here’s a few literary stand outs:
- Krispy Kreme losing its glaze
International Herald Tribune, France - Krispy Kreme watches its sweet run turn sour
Chicago Tribune, IL - Investors blast holes in Krispy Kreme stock
Houston Chronicle, TX - Souring profit fries Krispy Kreme
Sun-Sentinal.com, FL - A hole in Krispy Kreme’s earnings
CNN International - Krispy-Kreme is Getting Harder to Stomach
TheStreet.com, NY - Krispy Kreme Earnings Not So Sweet
9NEWS.com, CO - SEC Inquiry Weighs On Krispy Kreme
Forbes, NT - Krispy Kreme in new sticky mess
BBC News, UK - Krispy Kreme has $3m hole
Telegraph.co.uk
You can’t beat the UK press on headlines and triple entendres, although I’m sure there’s more plays on the doughnut theme waiting in the wings.
Finally, what made my week, and I apologise for the quite verbose preamble just to get to this gag, was when I stumbled across the web advertisement pictured here. And I can’t help but quote:
Telstra IP is helping Krispy Kreme make dough
I love you guys! Where do I sign my company up?
I recently wrote to Vodafone about my new Vodafone branded Sony Ericsson k700i, which Vodafone have disabled a number of features on, including preventing the use of downloaded MP3 files as ringtones, forcing you to pay to download only their MP3 ringtones, and ignoring the fact that as a musician I actually own music or sound effects that I’ve written or recorded, and should be able to use them on my phone. If I hadn’t bought the Vodafone branded version, I wouldn’t have this DRM problem.
Please pass this on to the appropriate departments. I would suggest marketing, as well as customer service.
I have been an Australian Vodafone customer since my very first mobile phone, and I spend a fair amount of money each month on calls. My phone number is […]. My name is Richard […].
I recently purchased a Vodafone branded Sony Ericsson K700i from you, and am absolutely disgusted with not only the poorer quality software on the phone and the offensive DRM lock-in you have on MP3s, but also the attitude you’ve had towards your customers who have been complaining about these problems to you directly and in forums on the web.
I am in the technology R&D industry, and I also produce a technology based radio program. I will be actively giving Vodafone as much negative publicity as possible on this issue, as well as slamming Sony Ericsson for even entering into such a slimey licensing deal. Sony of all people who have just globally renounced DRM on all their products.
I am a great customer for you, I tend to keep phones and contracts for a long time, paying lots of money each and every month for access to your network, and I’m a bit of a maven, recommending products I use to other people, especially on the radio program. I am the sort of person who can have trickle on effects for your prospect and customer base.
However, after this debacle, I will be buying a new phone very soon, and I will be moving off Vodafone forever. The appropriate public and private recommendations will then follow.
Your response to this message is not only welcome, but I look forward to seeing whether you are able to rectify this situation for me. I have supported you for many years, perhaps it is your turn to return the favour.
Their almost form letter reply, which exhibits an exceptional yet unusual understanding of customer service, has perfectly explained to me why I should never be a customer of Vodafone ever again.
Dear Richard,
Thank you for your feedback.
We regret that you have been disappointed with your recent upgrade to the K700i.
Please note there is a software update currently available which allows the K700i to use only the pre-installed MP3’s as ringtones.
Please be advised there is another patch which we hope will be released next month, this patch is planned to allow MP3 downloads via the Vodafone Live! service. Once released, the patch will be issued to approved Sony Ericsson repairers, we recommend you contact Sony Ericsson for your nearest Service Centre contact details, they may then advise you when they have access to the patch.
Sony Ericsson may be contacted by phoning 1300 650 050, or by e-mail via their website at www.sonyericsson.com.au.
We trust this has addressed your concerns.
You trust wrong.
Lesson number one would be assigning a real person to reply to me, instead of clicking the “Standard reply #43” button on your CRM system. Lesson number two would be to listen to the Internet community, or dare I mention it, the blogosphere, where a simple Google search for vodafone k700i mp3 problem comes up with 19600 results, which at AUD$600 per phone is roughly AUD$11760000 (one and three quarter million Australian dollars, or roughly US$9,277,464) in bad will. Lesson number three would be firing the person who replied to me, or their supervisor, as all they have done is show how uncaring your company is for your customers. In this day and age of global communications and the Internet, the customer is everything.
Anyone have a good recommendation on a good camera phone and an appropriate customer caring network provider?
The REXX programming language rocks. It is one of the best scripting languages I’ve ever used, PHP and Perl included.
I’ve held off on this one for a few weeks now, for fear of letting on would be spammers. But what the heck.
With comment spam increasing over the past few months, and my seeming daily maintenance to delete them, I wrote some code to look for certain patterns, and then not reject them, but do some amusing things like make them visible to the poster’s IP address but nobody else, and then delete them after an hour or so. There’s a bunch of other tricks in there as well, but I don’t want to give too much away to them.
These spammers seem to automate their posting engines, so another neat trick is to generate random form button names, to prevent them from automating http POST requests.
Anyway, it makes for amusing reading each week, looking through the site logs, watching these guys try their stuff. Some waltz in, make their spam post and then move on, without realising their work just disappeared down the old bit bucket. Others stick around and check that the post stuck before moving on. And yet others, like the one tonight, sniffed something was wrong, and instead of trying to hack something up that works, just tried the same post over and over again. I haven’t seen that since the early computing days, when new users would just keep on clicking the same old button over and over again if something didn’t work.
I learned a few tricks from my copy protection days, the main one being not to let on that you’re working against them. The RIAA of course, being new to this game, seems to fail to understand that bragging about or claiming superiority, either moral or technical, is like a rag to a bull.
An old Apple II game called Threshold used to protect the disk with a nibble count, which I won’t go into now, but to defeat the nibble count you’d have to patch the nibble counting code, which was fine if you knew how to do it. The amusing part was that late in the game, another routine would checksum the nibble counting code, and if there was a change, would ever so gradually corrupt the graphics, making you think that the disk was corrupted. I’ve seen a lot of supposed cracks for this game which missed this later checksum, because they assumed it was just a corrupted disk and so didn’t bother looking for it.
So anyway, not only do I have a good read each week, watching these people play away, but I also sit here with a rather smug look on my face, knowing that these people have paid good money for their automated spamming tools which they think are working, but which aren’t.
Although I am flattered that they’ve coded for my custom built site. Thanks guys, you’ve made my day. Your mileage may vary.
Sound is a wonderous thing, and contrary to the popular choice, is the most
important of all my senses. Without sight, I could sense the world
through sound, but without hearing, I would be blinded by a cacophony of
inner voices, never again to perceive the physics of the 3 dimensional
world in which we live.
Sound is a frequency band of air pressure waves, travelling through the
air between 20Hz and 22KHz. Slow moving waves, the 20Hz and bass end of
the spectrum, can travel through and around objects, an omnidirectional
flood of sound into and out of a space. These waves cause objects to
rumble and vibrate as they pass through, hence their tendency to at
times induce bowel movements. Fast moving waves, at the 20KHz upper
treble end of the band, are more directional waves, picking up partial
reflections and refractions as they bounce off objects of varying shape,
size, density and position, recombining and layering into the sound that
we ultimately hear. These subtle perceptive changes present a moving
snapshot or fingerprint for any space and the location of the sound
source and listener.
We all hear differently, we all have different ranges of hearing,
+/-20Hz at the low end, and +/- 2KHz at the top end, and we all perceive
sound based upon our experiences and emotional state. But still, they’re
just air pressure waves.
When we record sound, we don’t record a voice, an instrument or a single
sound effect, we record an impression of the space at the location of
the microphone’s diaphragm. Microphones work by using a movable
diaphragm or plate, much like a flag blowing in the wind, to transform air pressure waves into electrical
signals. At this point, the original sound will never again be
referenced, meaning that this is the most critical phase in the
recording of sound. Like with statistics, errors in the raw data, will
be amplified in the later output. A good sound card or speaker is nothing without
good raw data.
The quality and type of microphone will determine what it records at the
diaphragm. The material in the diaphragm, the material in the springs
which hold and release the diaphragm, the built in filters which
optionally remove or amplify certain frequency bands, all of these
components affect the sound in subtle ways, moments after it arrives at the diaphragm. Some are built intentionally into the microphone and others aren’t, but they all
manipulate the original sound so that it may never be restored once it
begins that arduous journey down the electrical signal path.
But before the microphone, there is an even more critical instrument in
the recording of sound. The space.
While a microphone will colour or embellish sound as it is recorded, it
is only as good as the raw sound which it is given as input. If that
sound is a human voice, dictated into a microphone, at a desk, in front
of a computer screen, in a four walled square office, what you have
recorded will be, specifically, a human voice bouncing off a glass
reflective computer screen, bass sounds dispersing as they travel
through the four square 90 degree angled walls, while the treble sounds,
the main frequency bands in the human voice, bounce off these now
vibrating and rumbling walls, with sound adding (amplification of
certain bands) and subtracting (phase cancellation of certain bands),
and the biggest problem of all, reverb. Reverb is those small yet
slightly delayed waves which bounce off the back wall of the office and
into the microphone, slightly delayed behind the original copies of
themselves, which give a perceptive depth to a 3 dimensional space.
In short, you have recorded “a guy in an office, talking into a
microphone”, not “a voice”. This is much like a web site which distracts
a user’s attention from the actual content, and makes them consciously
aware of the glaring yet inconsequential graphic design and layout.
This is why all professional recording is done in a specially, not just
sound proofed, but sound neutralised, studio. Limit the errors entering
into the microphone, and the range and quality of the output sound will
be exponentially greater. Want it to sound like you’re in an office, for
example the audio track for a drama series? Sure, at the final step, we
add a few delayed reverberations to make it sound like it is in an
office. Why not then actually record it in an office? Because then we
couldn’t instead place it in a barn, or a bigger office, or a different
office, or no office, because it would be “a recording of an office”.
But then, most people apparently cannot tell the difference between good
and bad audio. Do you think? If “ER” was recorded in a barn, do you
think the viewers would realise that something, even if they could not
put their finger on it, was wrong? Would the recordists bother using a
studio if people couldn’t, even unconsciously, tell the difference?
Sound quality is important. How important, is up to you, and will be dictated by the project you’re working on. However, you wouldn’t
have spelling mistakes or bad usability on your website, so why is sound
any different?
Most people don’t realise it, but while you cannot see sound
waves, much of what you perceive and “see” when you enter a room, is
presented to us by our hearing, not our sight. It is our most humble sense, and the one
which allows us to most accurately perceive a real 3 dimensional space.
Two thirds of Americans think Evolution not supported by evidence
And we wonder how Dubya got voted back in.
Real rotting corpse in TV doco
Sounds like Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Naughts.