Internet People
May 30, 2008 05:49
“You can’t trust those internet people” she said, with an air of caution.
I gave her a blank stare.
When I started the process of buying a home, I knew only two things regarding the subject:
- You need to find a place
- You need a loan
Even though I’ve made two separate websites for Realtors in the last few years, the knowledge that home buying begins with a Realtor was foreign to me. So I turned to the internet, as I do with everything else.
I had a set of criteria for what I’d want in a home, but I needed to know if I could afford it, and whether I could get a loan for it.
I began looking through homes on Trulia that met my criteria, and I came up with a rough estimate for how much I’d need to borrow. I was familiar with that site because I generally keep up with “Web 2.0” sites, and I work at an apartment-finding website where we look at other implementations while deciding how to build ours.
As far as finding a loan, I resorted to a site I had seen advertising on television — Lending Tree. The concept of websites advertising on TV seems strange to me, but it apparently worked in this case, cause I entered my personal financial information into it, and found a lender almost immediately.
By this time, I had pretty much already found the house I wanted, judging from the description and the pictures, so it seemed to me that I satisfied all of the requirements to buying it. Little did I know that the pain was about to begin.
The Lending Tree connected me with a real estate company, Coldwell Banker, who matched me with a Realtor of their choosing. Unfortunately, this lady:
- never once pronounced my name right, despite many, many corrections
- repeatedly listed off properties other than the one I wanted, which were obviously out of my price range
- continuously tried to convince me to buy a new home, where she gets a much higher commission
- insisted that I let Coldwell Banker provide the loan, at a higher interest rate
- made suggestions in writing the contract that had to be overwritten multiple times
- insulted “internet people,” even after I told her that I work in the internet industry
Now, I normally don’t get offended by anything, and I never even really thought of myself as an internet person. But for some reason, when she spoke poorly of people on the internet, it really struck a nerve. The rest of the day, I was thinking about it, even going so far as to quoting to myself “Slimy? Mudhole? My home this is!”
The next day, rationality set in, and I could once again analyze things objectively. It occurred to me that she was right, in a way. You can’t, by default, trust people on the internet. There are so many scammers, cheaters, and marketers that you learn to watch yourself, and are forced to find ways of verifying the honesty of others. Another quote came to mind,* but this time it may have been more accurate: “You will never find the more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”
The thing I love the most about the internet is that it’s open and free. This freedom comes with a price, however, a big warning label telling users to watch themselves. But for those brave enough to delve into the spaceport, there are many people willing to help, and the rewards can be very beneficial — like finding the right house with a low interest rate mortgage.
Anyway... Hello, I’m Micah. Welcome to the neighborhood.
* I realize that having two gratuitous Star Wars quotes in one post puts me over the line, but I’m willing to accept the penalties.
City in the Clouds
April 14, 2008 23:43
Buzzwords on the web have often been a good indicator for pointing out people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Before this happens, however, there is a special time when they are a smoke signal, rising from a spreading wildfire in the industry.
One of the most recent buzzwords, building in the last year or so, is “the cloud.” In essence, it’s the idea of content or digital property being stored or managed in a huge network. This idea works for data as well as processing time, though the concept of cloud storage has been around longer than cloud computing.
Rather than storing your data on a harddrive at home, putting it in the cloud would mean that your data is out on the internet, easily accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection. Security and encryption ensures that you have control over it, but it does require that you place your faith in others.
Cloud computing is similar to this, in that instead of owning or renting one server or machine, you can rent out time in a large network of machines. If one of them goes down, you start up another instance on a different one. The only thing you own is the information you put on the computer, which can be pretty much anything.
Both of these concepts lends credence to the idea that computers are becoming simple appliances — the portal to your data and applications, but never actually saving information to whichever terminal you happen to be using at the time.
The most popular and useful examples of these concepts in action are the Amazon Web Services. It’s strange to think that a large book store would become host to the future of the internet, but most people would not have believed that a search engine could be the biggest company on the web.
Speaking of Google, another large-scale example of the cloud in action is the recently announced Google App Engine. Although it hasn’t officially been released for primetime yet, it takes away another level of server management in that it doesn’t require any configuration at all, as long as you don’t mind writing your web application specifically for their setup.
Of course, interaction with the cloud is normally facilitated through the use of a web browser. And although Firefox isn’t the most used browser yet, Mozilla understands the need for easily accessing your data and interacting with web applications. Because of this, they’ve also begun making a cloud of their own, known as Weave. The benefit to this would be the reliance on open standards, which would only aid in portability and, in effect, increase usage.
Each of these services (as well as ones I didn’t mention) are addressing needs that we didn’t know we had a few years ago, but will be vital in the future. And naturally, there will be many more clouds coming as the buzzword takes hold and more businesses try to start cashing in on it. Eventually we’ll be overrun with the word (like in this post), but for now we can just enjoy the excitement of looking at what the future holds for us.
Email Importing Reflections
September 14, 2007 20:33
On the verge of leaving for a week on a cruise through the Caribbean, I began to prepare my laptop for a lack of connectivity.
After installing the newest version of Thunderbird, which I did not have installed before, I fired off the request to download a couple thousand emails to my harddrive.
I watched as the subjects scrolled by on the screen, starting from the oldest to most recent, and a year of my life played before me. Each email reminded me of a host of thoughts, experiences, and feelings of that time. Interactions I had with close friends, some useless forwards, and quite a few freelance jobs that turned out to be far more trouble than they were worth.
In all of the web work that I’ve done, the jobs I enjoy the most are the ones I do for myself. However, like all freelancers will tell you, it doesn’t pay the bills.
Sure, there are some people that can bang out a killer site that takes off and shoots them into instant fortune, but most web startups are created in the Valley, by a team of skilled geeks.
Working for myself, alone, I don’t have the ability to separate tasks based on skillsets, and I have no one to tell me which ideas I have are stupid. It’s hard, but there’s no one to blame but myself.
Recently, I’ve been learning what I am best accustomed to doing, and have conceded certain areas of expertise to friends or coworkers. It’s very refreshing, and much more satisfying than I had thought.
However, I write this with the knowledge that I will spend a week working on my own projects, all by myself. That’s also satisfying, in a way.
How Mozilla Can Get the Frag
April 30, 2007 01:38
The other day I was reading through the chaos of Digg, and clicked through to a collection of the Tango icons, which are used in interfaces for a lot of popular open source software projects.
Having a consistent user interface is something that is ideally a good thing. Apple has been doing it awhile now, where you see almost all third-party developers create software that looks like it came directly from Apple.
I, myself, have noted how using Adobe products is great, because the hotkeys in Photoshop and Illustrator are similar to the ones in InDesign, and it is very easy to figure out new things, based on your knowledge of other Adobe products.
This got me also thinking about the Mozilla rendering engine, also known as Gecko, which is what drives Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other upcoming projects, like the Songbird media player.
The idea is that Gecko is based on XUL (pronounced like Zuul), which is XML for user interfaces. This is a great concept, because it means you use CSS and Javascript to create the interface, just like you do for websites.
So now, as opposed to open source projects revolving only around C and C++ programmers, you have an army of converted web designers and developers that can do your bidding. Of course you’ll still need (and have) your generic CS people to do part of it, but the floodgates are opened to allow many others to help as well.
What’s my point?
Well, right now, we’ve begun to see the end of Microsoft. The way that Google has become a giant overnight has got people talking about how they’ll bring down the ol’ MS. They are introducing a crazy amount of web apps that compete directly with MS Office, and have created a solid foundation over internet advertising, as well as a strange control over the content on the internet itself.
It’s true that they will break down Microsoft, bringing them to their knees. But it won’t kill them. As long as Google sticks primarily to web applications, it can never destroy a company founded on desktop applications. Who will? Why, Mozilla, of course.
With the Mozilla rendering engine and XUL, they are, right now laying the groundwork to unify and solidify the major open source applications. All it takes is for people to begin converting things like Open Office, the GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, and a host of others, over to Gecko, and it will have begun.
It won’t just affect Microsoft, of course. Adobe will feel it as well. Right now, they’ve been worried about MS as their future competitor, though in truth they have no real contenders. They probably would never even consider that a Gecko-fied descendent of the GIMP could dethrone them, but it is quite possible.
This may be ten years off, and it would require the unification of all of the applications that compete with Adobe, but once formed, they could potentially be superior to the entire Creative Suite. And free, to boot.
So, assuming that Google doesn’t consume the Mozilla Foundation, there is a strong possibility that it will one day rise up to control most of the software in the world. Granted, it will be Google who will do the most damage to Microsoft, but it’ll be the Gecko that finally comes in and gets the frag.