Year: 2005

Meetup Introduces Fees

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Meetups can be great fun but I’ve often wondered how Meetup Inc planned to pay its bills. I mean, surely the cost of bandwidth alone would be significant for them. Well, now we have our answer: monthly group fees. Granted, the fees are only charged to organizers (and not participants) but they’re not exactly cheap — if you’re an existing organizer, you can get a special 2005 rate of “only” $9/month, while new organizers will be stuck with paying $19/month (as will existing organizers after 2005, presumably).

I understand that companies have a right to make a profit, but I’m not sure this is the right way to go about this. That $9/month might be enough to make an organizer think twice about continuing his/her group if his/her group is only puttering along. And, say you have a movie fan that's thinking about organizing a movie fan Meetup. He could either pay the $19/month to get the group started or he could put that money towards a Netflix account instead. One choice has uncertain success while the other offers a stack of DVDs in one’s mailbox every month :-/.

In some ways, this reminds me of the debacle when Six Apart changed the licensing terms for Movable Type last spring. The Six Apart guys probably sought an increase in revenue (which is fine) but they dove in head first which turned a lot of people off. (I still think that Six Apart's move to start charging for non-commercial use of Movable Type was one of the best things to ever happen to WordPress.)

But, getting back to Meetup, they offer a separate FAQ on their decision to add fees where they ask the question I had mind: “Why don’t you increase the advertising on the site?”, to which they reply “If we tried to get most of our revenue from advertising, we'd spend too much time serving advertisers, and not enough time serving you.”. The words sound benign enough but I can't help but wonder how adding fees is “serving” me more than adding some ads to the site. Concerns aside, I hope Meetup Inc pulls through. I’ve rather enjoyed the recent WordPress Meetups in particular and I wouldn’t want those to go away. Perhaps they’ll take a cue from Six Apart and revise their new licensing plans.

(Via: Asymptomatic)

Update 04-14: In a Slashdot story on this subject, several commenters pointed out some free alternatives to Meetup — EventWiki (which looks a bit sparse), My People Connection (which only has 17 cities) and MEETin.org (which looks promising).

Target Can’t Keep Their Shelves Stocked

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I stopped by Target this evening to pick up a few things and I figured it would be a routine trip. My shopping list wasn’t terribly out of the ordinary but I wasn’t very successful…

  • Full spectrum light bulbs, 75 watt — I prefer the lighting of full spectrum light bulbs and I was running low on 75 watt bulbs (though I had plenty of 60 watt bulbs). Well, what do you know — Target also had plenty of 60 watt bulbs (and even 100 watt bulbs) but no full spectrum 75 watt bulbs.

  • Natural peanut butter, creamy — I've become somewhat of a peanut butter fiend and I probably go through a jar a week. I often have to pick up one or two more jars when I make a trip to Target. So, I walked over to Aisle One in search of creamy natural peanut butter — no such luck. Sure, they had Natural Peanut Butter with Honey and, as tasty as that sounded, I didn’t really want the extra sugar. And, they even had regular Natural Peanut Butter but it was the crunchy kind.

  • Scrubbie brush for the sink at work — our new office at work now has a sink and I was thinking that I could use it to clean my glass at the end of the day. (I have a glass which I keep filled with water and I just clean it in the bathroom at the moment.) Target let me down here as well. They had a couple scrubbie brushes but they were all cyan and I couldn’t bring myself to buy a cyan scrubbie brush (would black have been too much to ask?).

  • Toothbrush — my old toothbrush was looking a little scraggly and I figured I should opt for a new one. And, as usually is the case, it was mostly a guessing game once I got to the toothbrush aisle — they have about a hundred varieties and all kinds of numbers (what the heck does “soft 40” mean anyway?) and I ended up picking one that kinda resembled my old one.

I had four things on my list and could only buy one of them. Come on Target, get your act together, eh? Among other things, I’ll now have to ration my peanut butter intake as I think I'm on my last jar (and about halfway through it, at that). I have half a mind to take my business elsewhere but it seems that the other major supermarkets have adopted those silly cards and, privacy concerns aside, I don’t want those cluttering my wallet.

Getting strtotime() Errors in WordPress When You Try to Write Pages?

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I was getting some odd errors when I tried to write a new Page in WordPress (even though it endedup working). “Pages”, if you aren’t familiar with them, Pages are static pages within your site such as a Contact Me page or an Accessibility Statement. Anyhow, I discovered that if you try to create a new page — and if you're running PHP5 — you get this error:

Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: Called with an empty time parameter. in /home/username/public_html/wordpress/ wp-includes/template-functions-links.php on line 55

There’s a bug report on this issue and it’s already been fixed. Well, it's been fixed in the codebase and it’ll presumably make it into the next release of WordPress (1.51). But if you want the fix now, you can modify edit-page-form.php on your own; it’s just a two-line change and you can copy-n-paste the new lines from the changeset attached to that bug.

The Language of Business Today

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

I thought some readers might get a chuckle out of this page of some phrases in use within business these days. Some of my favorites:

Core Competencies

  • Context: We need to focus on our core competencies in order to maintain our edge in the marketplace
  • Meaning: What you/your company does well

Quick Win

  • Context: Please come up with a list of quick wins we can look to implement
  • Meaning: Things that are fairly simple (in terms of time and/or cost) and will help improve the situation with regards to a project/product

Touch Base

  • Context — “I need to touch base with Fred on this one.”
  • Meaning — “I need to go a speak to Fred about something”

Are you enjoying this as much as I am? Well, the Interweb offers plenty more of this. (I mean, does anyone actually say “Pour the Kool-Aid”?)

So Much for Kojak

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

USA Network has a new series “Kojak”, based on the 70s series starring Telly Savalas. This time, Ving Rhames plays the title role. It looked interesting from the teasers and so I set my TiVo to record the pilot. What a mistake that was.

The show opens with a set of two detectives interrogating a suspect. They’re asking him about the location of something and who hired him — you know, the usual clichéd detective-suspect chatter. One detective is apparently named Crocker and the suspect mocks him about this, including some crack about how he must have been called “Betty Crocker” as a child (or something). Obviously, these detectives aren’t having much luck and so they walk out of the room, warning the suspect that Kojak is on his way.

Instead of having Rhames walk in at that moment, the producers treat us to a drawn-out introduction to Ving-Rhames-as-Kojak as he walks down a hallway. He’s mostly shot from behind or in silhouette — <sarcasm>ooh, he’s mysterious!</sarcasm>. Finally, Kojak reaches the interrogation room with his trademark lollipop dangling from his lips. He walks in and places his lollipop on the interrogation table; he then proceeds to empty his revolver (revolver!) of its bullets. He inserts a single bullet and spins the chamber, wild-west style.

You'll never guess what came next. Oh, wait, you can see this coming from a mile away? Quelle surprise. Naturally, Kojak slams the suspect’s head onto the table and places his revolver against the perp’s right temple. At first, the suspect calls Kojak’s bluff and continues his jibber-jabbering,but Kojak pulls his trigger a few times as the gun clicks emptily. The suspect soon realizes that the single bullet is soon coming his way; Kojak demands the location of the event and who he’s working for and the suspects whimperingly mumbles the relevant bits to our hero. Triumphantly, Kojak removes his gun and strolls off.

The next scene features Kojak at the scene of the event with a cadre of policemen, thwarting whatever crime was to take place. This was at about the ten-minute mark into the show (out of an hour) and I just stopped watching; I deleted the episode and removed the Season Pass from my TiVo. Clichés aside, I was annoyed by Kojak’s methods in this series (and I speak only of this Ving Rhames version as I’ve never seen Savalas’ version). The best part of detective shows (and, yes, I mean you, Monk) is the lead character’s puzzle-solving abilities. Here it was just brute force, which doesn’t make it much of a detective show, now does it?

I try to keep an open mind about “new original series” on cable (as they like to call them) as many of them can be quite good. But, this time around, I just don’t know what they were thinking. Kojak didn’t hold up as a traditional detective show and it didn’t have enough action to fill that genre either (unless something miraculous happened after that eleventh minute). If you were on the fence about this new edition about Kojak, you needn’t bother.