OneMind

I just talked to the local AT&T store about getting a new iPhone 3G. Back ordered two to three weeks. Ludicrous. Apple has frequently had difficulty over the years anticipating demand and finding itself with backlogs but with a product with a track record like the iPhone had before the new one was launched, this is just lousy management.

One of my favorite newsletters is Mark Hurst’s Good Experience. I met Mark back in the days when I was at CNET and I’ve admired his work on user experience design across the broad spectrum of media over the years. His is one of the few newsletters I read from top to bottom as soon as I can after it arrives.

This week, his newsletter is about JetBlue, an airline that worked hard to build a rep for exceptional customer service and has now squandered it away. Mark talks about how in its early days, the company developed a genuine buzz among travelers but points out that, “Customer experience isn’t a one-time thing. It requires constant, constant, constant focus on the basics. A slick ad campaign counts for next to nothing, unless it describes the benefits of the customer experience. And it may even be harmful, if it diverts resources away from the customer experience.”

How many times have you visited a new restaurant in your town, been imprssed by the quality of the food and service, recommended it to friends, made it a regular stop, and then watched over the next few months as it went steadily downhill? It’s almost as if these businesses think that they can rest on the laurels of a reputation once it’s earned. But there are always new restaurants opening, new levels of expectation being set, and new channels through which customers can communicate their feelings and recommendations.

Over the years I often found myself incensed at the Righties’ completely disingenuous use of deliberately deceptive labels as a substitute for rational thought and argument. My all-time favorite is the way they convinced the mainstream media — yeah, those allegedly liberally biased dolts — to adopt the term “right to life” to describe their abortion stance when it is clear to even the most muddle-headed thinker that the issue isn’t over anyone’s right to life but it’s over a woman’s right to choose. By making themselves “pro-life” (equally silly label and more insidious), they try to set up a situation where anyone who opposes them is by definition “anti-life.” I don’t know one single pro-choice person who would describe himself or herself as “pro-abortion.” These people aren’t out advocating abortion as a positive good. But the right is clever in its manipulation of truth. Christians, indeed! Not my brand of Christians.

So it came as no real surprise to me this morning when I read that the Christofascist movement, which has succeeded in placing a horrific proposition on California’s November ballot overturning a recent state Supreme Court ruling allowing marriages by same-sex partners, screamed bloody murder when the Attorney General labeled the proposition accurately.

These holier-than-thou enemies of anything that is different from them don’t like seeing their new toy called what it is: “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.” They claim the label is “inflammatory” and will result in people being deceived into voting against it. Presumably they prefer something like “Protects Traditional Definition of Marriage,” which, of course would never trick anyone into voting for it. Hypocrisy is rampant.

I’m proud of AG Jerry Brown (yeah, that Jerry Brown, God bless him!) for calling it what it is. The proposition would do exactly what the label says. Its backers call it the Marriage Protection Act. It has nothing to do with protecting marriage. It has to do with protecting one group’s narrow definition of marriage.

It’s too bad there’s no law that requires Truth in Labeling for political positions.

I just posted an entry on my spiritual blog about a marvelous series of TV interviews I’ve just been connected to by my friend Tony Seton. The particular video in question features an interview of Astrologer and Mystic Caroline Casey by On Faith’s Sally Quinn.

In the interview, Ms. Casey says, among other things, “We are electing a story. We’re electing ourselves. This is the most mythologically potent election…probably ever, or at least since the Founding Fathers.” She has a few other mightily interesting tidbits to share in this highlight and the extended interview is also there. This is part of a collection of dozens of such topical interviews. What a find!

When Google announced the first release of its 3D virtual world technology Lively last week, they got the predictably huge press play anything from GoogleLand gets (and most often deserves). As it happens, I’m in the midst of a major project involving using such environments to create and conduct business, so I’m keeping a particularly keen eye on the market.

I will probably have more to say about the product itself when I have time to check it out. First, I have to install it on Windows. Yeah, that’s right. Google, the folks who would be God of the Internet, still makes some products and technologies that don’t work cross-browser or cross-platform. That’s just stupid, bordering on unforgivable.

Is it easy to do great Web apps that run in all browsers on all OSes? Of course not. It should be, but it’s not. But if anyone can and should be leading the way on that front, it’s Google. That they couldn’t be bothered to create this tool — which is already such a Johnny=come-lately to the party that timeliness of delivery was clearly not an issue — so it runs on Mac and Linux doesn’t speak well for the company’s understanding of the market.

There is simply no excuse for a Web-based product or tool that doesn’t run across those boundaries. None. You could write the bulk of the app in NOLOH and accomplish it without a lot of sweat or thought or effort. It’s just annoying when players like Google don’t care enough about the need for platform agnosticism because it makes others think it’s not a necessary consideration.

Regular readers of this space know the high regard in which I hold FactCheck.org and its nonpartisan analysis of political advertising and campaigning. It has, over the years, proven quite even-handed in its treatment of Democrats and Republicans, a rare find in a world of decreasing news and increasing “analysis” (aka opinions).

But today’s post charging the AFl-CIO with “unduly harsh” treatment of McCain feels a bit like a group that is trying perhaps a bit too hard to be even-handed.

The ad in question says McCain “took Bush’s side against increasing health care benefits for veterans.” In fact, he did that and FactCheck admits it. The organization says McCain “voted to increase veterans’ health care benefits, thought not by as much as Democrats proposed.” That is precisely taking Bush’s side. In 2004-2006, McCain voted against such increases in the amounts of $1.8 billion, $2.8 billion, and $1.5 billion. Later he supported significantly reduced bills approving $1.5 billion, a paltry $410 million and an only-slightly-better $823 million, respectively.

If the Bush Regime hadn’t been so blindly and incomprehensibly opposed to veterans health benefit funding, the VA in those years would have had a combined total of $6.1 billion rather than the roughly $2.5 billion they ended up with. Thus it is absolutely legitimate to claim that McCain voted against more than 50% of veterans health benefits.

The only reason McCain keeps getting credit for being veterans’ choice for the White House is because nobody in the mainstream media has the courage or intelligence to look at his voting record and examine how veterans organizations have rated his leadership in the past few years.

In what is a great move at least symbolically, Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama has announced that he’s taking his acceptance speech out of the convention arena and into an outdoor stadium that seats 75,000. That’s a gutsy move given that there’s no guarantee there won’t be a lot of empty seats in that place that will make him look bad.

But you gotta know that a ton of people will want to be there for the event if they can get there.

The symbolism is brilliant. Every Presidential nominee in the past has accepted the nomination in front of the convention that offered it, where only party insiders and activists can go. In a sense, the acceptance speech was a way of paying homage to the party leaders. This makes a clear statement that he owes this nomination not to the partiati but to the people of America.

I don’t like some of his shifts to the center of late but I have to say, this guy is a master of political theater, better than any Democrat in at least 45 years.

I see MacWorld has reviewed the Flip Video camera. Great piece of hardware and very Mac-like. My wife uses hers constantly now that we have temporarily taken custody of our seven-month-old granddaughter Mattie. This sucker is amazing. Ease of use is unbelievable. There’s literally nothing to it.

The only thing the reviewer didn’t comment on is that the Flip Video has a zoom lens feature as well. This sucker’s well worth the price.

Molly Holzschlag has a cool idea on her blog. She suggests a new microformat called “Microtude” that would use the class attribute with various values to delineate an attitude associated with a post. For example, you could code a blog entry like this:

<p class = “sarcasm”>Now there’s an idea we can all get behind!</p>

I like it. Molly asked for suggestions for classes that ought to be included. Here’s my start on such a list:

• anger
• disgust
• justkidding
• preachy
• belligerence

That post led me to another interesting one over at Glenn McAnally’s site where a new style called “sarcastic” is being touted and a whole new movement being born.

I like WebWhimsy.

This is too funny not to share. Sent to me by my buddy George Sidman.