brentashley

At the recent Ajax Summit, one of the links I pointed out to the group during the “where to go from here” portion of my presentation was to Michael Mahemoff’s post AJAX Patterns: Design Patterns for AJAX Usability.

Michael has since picked up his own ball and run with it, building a whole Wiki site dedicated to Ajax Patterns.

I just got the baton from Mike Papageorge

So, here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer:

Yeah, bite me, RIAA – nice meme idea. I’m not falling for it.

The last CD I bought was:

“How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”

jazz standards by Beverly Taft

Bought directly from the artist at a show. Boo hoo for the middleman.

Song playing right now:

“Record Body Count”

Rheostatics – Melville album

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

Jane Monheit – Honeysuckle Rose
Jimmy Smith – Blues for J
Nat King Cole – Route 66
Dave Brubeck – Take Five
Rob McConnell, Ed Bickert, Don Thompson – Sleepin’ Bee

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

Tim Aiello
Adam Marsh
Ian Marsman
Joey de Villa
Roland Tanglao

As an example of a cool Ajax app in action, I’ve reinstated the embedded Blogchat on my blog here. If I’m online, you’ll be able to chat with me when you visit my blog. You can detach the Blogchat into a separate window if you like.

Seth Dillingham wonders what’s up with weblogs.com, which seems to be ignoring pings from at least a number of blogs hosted at Conversant.

My friend Terry Frazier, very much alive, laments the implications of the ignored pings.

I was talking to Technorati‘s Derek Powazek this week at the Ajax Summit and he was telling us how their service uses these pings (and other external services from furl and del.icio.us) to do their magic.

If we can’t be reasonably confident of service levels from these resources, how can we be confident in the other services upon which they rely? What recourse have we to demand that problems are fixed or to expect that emails will receive responses?

There’s a bit of a hooplah going on about modifying or deleting a blog entry or comment after it has been posted.

Scoble weighs in with his personal policy on the matter.

I often delete comments due to spam content, but never due to a difference of opinion. I suppose the main reason I might *want* to delete or modify something on my blog is because I’ve said something that I regret, and yet, I make it a policy not to.

For instance, I was somewhat snippy with a commenter recently. I dropped the f-bomb as I am sometimes wont to do, and I rather wish I hadn’t, however it was said and I don’t think it’s fair for me to a) unsay it, or b) change its tone after the fact.

If I really felt it necessary to mitigate every f-bomb on my blog, I’d go back and connect each one of them to their contributing factors – I’m pretty sure this particular one had some vintage inspiration.

I had an email conversation with a blogger recently who had disagreed with me (conversation via email because comments were broken). I pointed out how I believed he had misread me and his response was to remove his original post. I hope that once his comments are working again he reinstates it with my comment and his response to that.

Blogging can keep a history of discussions and not only their outcome but the mistakes we make along the way to finding the truth. It’s of benefit to those who follow to see the whole path, not just the end point.

Scott Rosenberg sums up all my thoughts about the Terry Schiavo case. If Dubya manages to step in despite years of due process, he might as well declare himself American Monarch and Defender of the Faith while he’s at it.

I finally did get an email from Groove on Feb 8th, a week after my last email sent to them. It was from the support center manager, who was able to push the right buttons in their organization to get me fixed up to my satisfaction on the 10th. No excuses, just solution, and not one that imposed a lot of effort on me.

From what I understand there is quite a large backlog. That backlog gave me two weeks and a lot of motive to evaluate other solutions. I’ve not yet determined my long-term outcome, but I’m glad to say I’m not as critically worried right now.

Again I’m waiting days with no response from Groove’s support folks.

Sorry, can’t do business like this. I’m not expecting them to jump through hoops for me, responding to my emails even to tell me to go away is better than no contact at all.

I’m not looking forward to moving all my data out of Groove to something else, but I can’t see another solution under the circumstances.