Update to my last post, thanks to one of the comments.

In addition to the lack of Mac-expected interface features, Excel 2011’s performance is a bit uneven. When you’re scrolling large spreadsheets (either by clicking and holding on a thumb scroller or by drag-scrolling), the sheet feels like it’s moving quite slowly, even on current hardware. In back-to-back comparisons between Excel 2004, 2008, and 2011, the 2011 release was easily the slowest of the three, it took over six times as long to scroll through my test document as did Excel 2004. (Microsoft has told us they slowed the scrolling down due to user complaints about it being too fast. While it may have been too fast in Excel 2004, it’s currently twice as slow as Excel 2008, which seems like an excessive slowdown to me.) When you add in the lag-on-window-resize, the Excel 2011 interface can feel slow at times. (Rob Griffiths at MacWorld via TechWorld)

This is exactly my experience. While I appreciate the increased speed in calculations, (I have noticed this – It’s very quick) in this day and age, I find it simply irresponsible to create a user experience as unfriendly as this.

Isigi promises herself to one day sit down and organize all her online subscriptions and back up all her files. But she’s accepted that there’s a price to pay for using the services.

“At some point you just have to surrender control,” she said.

(via As Web sites come and go, so too could the information you entrust them with – The Washington Post.)

The key is to limit the information you put out there in the first place.

Ever since I started my new job in October, I’ve been working with Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. As I’ve been working with Excel more than I have in the past, I noticed that I wasn’t seeing some of the features that my PC-using co-workers had access to. So, we installed Parallels, Windows 7, and Office 2010 on my MacBook Pro.

Here’s the rub: Office 2010 running through Parallels is much faster, more responsive, and just a better overall experience than Office 2011 running on Mac OS X Lion.

And this bugs me! I can’t figure this out. I’ll have to put some numbers together and see if I can nail it down.

From the Nov. 7, 2011 issue:

Three years ago Ross was waiting with his mother for a flight from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles. The plane was delayed, and Ross sat for several hours, people watching. “I noticed all these nonrevenue sports teams—men’s lacrosse, tennis and other teams from the Big East—that were catching flights,” he recalls. “One of them was the Seton Hall tennis team, which was flying back from playing Marquette. It occurred to me how little sense that made. Why was Seton Hall paying to fly tennis players to Milwaukee? Why didn’t they just take a bus to a school that’s close by?”

(via Sports Illustrated)

I’m definitely not an expert on the best solution to the problems facing the NCAA and pay-for-play. It seems like there can be a better solution than saying “Let’s just pay all the student athletes.”

Speaking of NCAA:

In other words, some lucky handful of incoming freshmen will be handed $2,000 without jeopardizing their status as amateurs. Yet any other college athlete who manages to get his hands on an extra $2,000 — by taking money from an overenthusiastic booster, say, or selling some of their team paraphernalia, as a few Ohio State football players did — will be violating the N.C.A.A.’s rules regarding amateurism and will probably face a multigame suspension. Behold the logic of the N.C.A.A. at work.

(via Let’s Start Paying College Athletes – NYTimes.com.)

The N.C.A.A. would have you believe that it is the great protector of amateur athletics, preventing college athletes from being tainted by the river of money pouring over college sports.In fact, the N.C.A.A.’s real role is to oversee the collusion of university athletic departments, whose goal is to maximize revenue and suppress the wages of its captive labor force, a k a the players.

(via The College Sports Cartel – NYTimes.com.)

There’s a lot of hullabaloo going around about the NYTimes recent email gaffe.

First the timeline:

An email was sent out in the early afternoon (I got mine at 12:24 PM Central Time) stating:

As a valued Times reader we invite you to continue your current subscription at an exclusive rate of 50% off for 16 weeks. This is a limited-time offer and will no longer be valid once your current subscription ends.*

At 3:42 PM, a mere 3 hours later, I received an email with the subject and content:

SUBJECT: CORRECTION: Important information regarding your subscription

Dear New York Times Reader,

You may have received an e-mail today from The New York Times with the subject line “Important information regarding your subscription.”

This e-mail was sent by us in error. Please disregard the message. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

Sincerely,

The New York Times

Then the confusion really starts:

Then a little bit later:

I believe it’s much to do about nothing. Really.

There’s two things at work here:

1. The New York Times made a mistake.
2. A bunch of rabid internet users jumped on the chance to yell “fire” before figuring out what happened.

We can’t really address the latter concern professionally, so let’s look at how the Times handled the situation.

I applaud the fact that the Times sent out a correction email so quickly. However, you might as well have had Netflix CEO Reed Hastings write the email. All the correction told us was that the Times made the mistake. It didn’t say what happened. It didn’t say anything about account security. It didn’t say if the Times sent out the email, or if a separate company sent out the email. (Kudos for not going “Chrysler” on their employee(s) who made the mistake.)

I would’ve liked to seen an email address those concerns, the concerns brought up by people commenting on the Media Decoder blog on the Times website and on Twitter.

I see that as room for improvement. All in all, it was a mistake. Seems pretty innocuous, but gives the bloggers and tweetdom something to chat about, right?

Can you take a look at the lead photograph and tell me if that’s a teleprompter in the back of the room? I mean, Republicans never make fun of Obama’s teleprompter.

Update: The Times changed the lead photo.

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said in a press release published on Friday. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.” (via GoDaddy Pulls SOPA Support Following Customer Backlash.)

Pretty psyched about this. But the decision does need to be put in perspective. It doesn’t sound like GoDaddy would have pulled its support, had it not been a purely financial decision.

“Ben Huh, CEO of the popular Cheezburger blog network,announced that he would pull his 1,000 domains from Go Daddy if the company continued its support of the bill.”

I think it’s clear that SOPA is a pure financial move for media companies and for them to say otherwise is BS. The fact that our legislators don’t know anything about the bill and don’t even pretend to car about knowing is pretty telling about the state of our political system.

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp. (via NYTimes)

In today’s age of WikiLeaks and electronic documents, one of the largest intelligence coups for the media (or almost anyone) of the last 10 years comes from one reporter’s simple situational awareness.  In our line of work (marketing and/or social media), it’s important to remember to keep your head up, and your eyes open to all opportunities. An advantage can take many forms, and it doesn’t necessarily come through the newest high-tech gadget.