Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

Today's Lyric

Let's see action
Let's see people
Let's see freedom
In the air

Let's see action
Let's see people
Let's be free
Let's see who cares

> Pete Townsend > Let's See Action > Who Came First

Blockbuster Online First Impressions

Ever the early adopter, I signed up for Blockbuster's beta release of their new online movie rental service. Here are my first impressions.

1. If you live in the Dallas area, don't be concerned with delivery time. Blockbuster clearly has a major distribution center (their only?) in Dallas as I've regularly received movies one day after shipping. In fact, I signed up on a Friday around 1:00 in the afternoon, filled my queue, and received three movies in the mail at noon on Saturday.

2. The Blockbuster mailers are 95% identical to the Netflix version, the only difference being slightly higher quality paper and small tweaks to the sealing process.

3. Even though the program is still in early release, and presumably is underused currently, I already have two movies that are flagged as Very Long Wait, though nearly everything else is Available Now.

4. The site is clearly beta for a reason. I have odd occurences on the site, particularly being sent to the login screen as if my session had timed out, even though I had remained active. I've also had new movies ship before old movies are returned, to the point when I had four movies out at once, even though the plan is for three. And do not try to submit your credit card information on a Mac using anything other than an IE browser.

5. The two coupons for in-store rentals are provided online each month to print out and take to the store. I haven't had the opportunity to try them, but they do expire after one month. Everytime I describe the Blockbuster offering to anyone, by the far the biggest selling points are being $2 cheaper than Netflix and the two free in-store rentals each month, which overcomes the main limitation of online rentals, instant gratification!

My main disappointment with Blockbuster Online is that they had the chance to fix the most frustrating part of the Netflix site and decided to imitate instead. Which piece? The queue.

On both sites, your pending movie queue is a single long list (typically 30+) of titles with numeric text boxes next to each one. If you want to reorder your movies, you have to change the numbers of each movie you want to move and then click update. Imagine if you decide to move #20 to #5, and move every other movie down one. You would actually have to change every movie between #5 and #20 before hitting submit.

Compare that to how Typepad allows you organize your individual content sections by simply dragging the titles to where you want them and then adjusting the rest as necessary. With the amount of money and development going into each of these sites, I am sure they have the ability to develop a more intuitive, user-friendly, drag-and-drop version.

Overall, I've been very pleased with the Blockbuster service. The price and value are there, the selection had been very complete so far, and everything has worked very well for a beta program.

Live Review of Kerry's Speech

Here is my review of John Kerry's acceptance speech, focusing on the quality of the writing and whether it serves his political purposes, rather than the actual politics of it. You can read the text of the speech online here.

Simply put, I am shocked at how bad this is.

"I'm John Kerry...reporting for service" accompanied by a salute?

Over five minutes on his parents, including details about scouts, trees, and baseball gloves?

A very weak joke about being born in the west wing of a hospital?

And then, when he finally starts to get into substance, he marries himself to the idealistic liberalism of the 60's by praising the years of marches, announcing that they did change the world, and that they're not done yet? The primary causes he has focused on during his introduction to the country are women's rights and the environment.

Here is the first moment when a huge percentage of the country is sitting down at the same time to finally give John Kerry a chance. They've heard bits and pieces over the past few months, including many claims that he is the most liberal member of the senate who just happens to be from the same state as a gentleman named Dukakis. However, American's are a generous group who like to make up their own mind, so they gather in front of their televisions to give this man a chance.

And this is the best 15 minutes they could come up with? If I'm watching this with a relatively open mind, I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, they were actually right about this guy!"

"I promise to restore truth and credibility to the White House. I ask you to judge me by my record. As a young prosecutor, I fought for victim's rights and made crimes against women..."

Sorry, what does this have to do with truth and credibility? Have we already moved past that and are now working through your public service record? I can't remember a once-in-a-lifetime political speech that has been as disorganized and lacked any real flow or purpose. He hasn't even accepted the nomination yet.

Kerry has now moved on to attacking the president (mislead the public into war), the vice-president (secret meetings to rewrite environmental laws), the secretary of defense (ignoring military advice), and the attorney general (failure to uphold the Constitution).

I'm horribly confused at this point. I watched Clinton's address, the keynote address by Barack Obama and John Edward's acceptance speech. All three were far, far better than I expected, especially the last two. There were many reports about how the Kerry campaign had required the convention rhetoric to be toned down and direct attacks against the administration be limited. In fact, both Obama and Edward's were nearly entirely positive and rarely attacked the Bush administration directly. And you know what? It worked! It was refreshing to have the opposition party paint their vision without a constant drumbeat of negativity and attacks.

So, why oh why would you save that for your nominee? Why would you leave it to your nominee to give the party faithful the red meat they were waiting for? So far, Kerry is coming across as an angry, dour, liberal. Could that possibly have been the intention?

After finally accepting the nomination, he has now spent over five minutes on Edward, Teresa, each of his children, his veteran friends, and each person he beat for the nomination. This is the part of the victory speech after a primary when all of the networks cut away from the live feed. Why would you use the first 20 minutes of your introduction to the country to talk about Sharpton and Kucinich?

Kerry is now celebrating his approach to complex issues and accusing the president of being simple-minded. This is certainly an attack I would expect, but in a normal convention you would have your VP take care of that for you. I also find it a bit funny that he attacks the president for fighting a war "on the cheap", when first, few people (including critics) would claim that and, second, Kerry himself voted against additional funding (for what, I am sure, were "complex" reasons).

His speech at this points sounds more like a lecture, as if he is talking down to us. He is not nearly as a good of a speaker as any of the three mentioned above. He steps on his own lines regularly and I'm sure his handlers are chagrined as the sweat grows across his face and shots of him wiping his forehead become more common, even though he's only at the half way point.

After some details of economic and education plans, and a goofy reference to his web site, Kerry uses a fairly common trick, asking that the president join him in an optimistic campaign free from attacks, with the request and nearly all of the speech featuring just those sort of attacks.

In summary, I have high expectation for an acceptance speech and would hope that the words would stand the test of time. For me, there were far too many gimmicks. The speech was inconsistent and flowed almost randomly from personal tales and family references to rhetoric to policy decriptions. I would expect a much better, more coherent speech from President Bush in a month, which seems odd considering common expectations.

Update: The fact that in the post-speech wrap-up, Tom Brokaw claimed there were no attacks on the president, and Tim Russert said it appeared to be a homerun, indicates to me that professional journalists are as succeptible to the sight of 20,000 cheering, flag-waving partisans as you might expect. Every significant political speech, of either party, ends with the network achors calling it a complete success, with soaring rhetoric and an impressive delivery sure to win over a skeptical public. The only criticism I can recall hearing is of the length, which is probably the only thing a network actually cares about. Only later does a speech gather a more nuanced reputation. It would be so helpful to have the relatively objective press offer a more thorough evaluation instead of having to tune into the assorted pundits giving their entirely predictable opinions.

Friends of Bill

A Microsoft intern describes his recent visit to the home of Bill Gates for dinner. Highly entertaining!

Should a Church Utilize ASP-based Software Solutions?

A second question facing church technology professionals is, Should we use ASP software solutions?

Whenever possible, we try to utilize ASP (Application Service Providers) based software. Even a church of our size that is blessed with full-time IT employees (a rarity in most churches) understands the great benefits of having someone else host, monitor and maintain applications on our behalf. Our entire church management system, Fellowship One, help desk tracking, and payroll are accessed by staff through a simple web browser, with no software or data maintained onsite.

For a fairly low ongoing cost, the ASP maintains the servers, software, network, and security necessary to use the application. This saves us a great deal of ongoing work and support, and often money as well.

The more you utilize ASP's, the more you will need to make sure your staff has access to a great, high-bandwidth Internet connection to make the experience as pleasant and reliable as possible.

Again, this decision often comes down to one question: Where do we as a church want to invest? As much as possible, we try to put our resources into ministry rather than hire, build and support the necessary infrastructure to go it alone. Sometimes, we have no choice, but when we do, an ASP is a great alternative.

What is the Focus of a Church Website?

In preparing for our first online chat for Fellowship Connection, Fellowship's association of churches from around the world, I started to think through some of the issues facing all of us who are blessed to serve our local churches through technology.

The first question each of us has to address is, What should be the focus of our website?

Each church must balance the need to attract and inform people who are interested in trying your church with serving the ongoing needs of members. The site must be dynamic, highly attractive, and easy to use in order to hold the attention of a first-time visitor who has basic questions (When are your services? How do I get there? What are they like? What should I wear? What will I do with my children?). Your site must answer these question quickly and make the visitor feel welcome, much as the greeters and parkers do in person.

In order to serve members and keep them plugged into the website, provide as much day-to-day church-related functionality on your site as possible. We direct people to our website constantly through our bulletin and all marketing materials. If someone wants to register for a class, find out the latest news about upcoming events, give, or find a small group, they are encouraged to use the website.

Why? Because every time someone uses the web for these tasks, that allows our staff to focus on ministry instead of data entry and processing.

We have slowly moved away from offering portal-type services that members can get elsewhere, often superior solutions that are better and free. We are phasing out offering free email accounts, as well as web searches, news, weather and other services. No church website is going to be a single source destination on the web, and shouldn't need to be. We try to focus on what only we can do.

Heavenly Feeds

Looking for daily, Bible RSS feeds delivered straight to your news aggregator?

Daily Manna from the Net provides a different NIV verse each day. There is also a collection of English Standard Version (ESV) feeds that include a daily verse as well as various One Year Bible study versions.

I would love to see King James and The Message versions, as well as more daily devotionals made available, but these sites are a terrific and generous start!

Today's Lyric

Broken heart don't feel so bad
Ain't got half a what you thought you had
Rock your baby to and fro
Not too fast and not too slow

And I say row, Jimmy, row
Gonna get there?
I don't know
Seems a common way to go
Get down and row, row, row

> Grateful Dead > Row Jimmy

Blog Load

Well done post by Chad Dickerson, CTO of InfoWorld on the impact of weblogs on an IT department's infrastructure. Chad's weblog is also a great example of a technology weblog.

Building a Mo' Better Blog

Earlier this month, I wrote about Building a Better Blog. Since then, I've been reminded of two more tips, which you'll find below.

Tell Us Who You Are and How to Contact You

I often find myself on an interesting blog and decide I'd like to link to it or contact the author. Other times, I might find an opinion or perspective unique or challenging, but then realize that I don't know what the author's role is within an organization, or whether he or she is an employee, vendor or user.

A surprising number of weblogs have none of this information. Often weblogs start as a way of communicating with a small number of people who are all part of your inner circle and know exactly who you are. But you can be sure that soon Google will find you, and then others will land on your site and they need to be able to get the basics about you quickly. You don't want to be dismissed as a gadfly when you're actually the lead developer for a highly anticipated piece of software.

So, unless you have specific reasons for confidentiality, include your full name, position and role (if your blog is related to your professional life), and a way to contact you directly.

Don't Be Afraid to Promote

I've written a number of posts that I thought would be of interest to other bloggers or sites, such as Robert Scoble, MacSurfer, and Hacking Netflix. My first hope was that the writing would be so captivating that the posts would slowly rise to the top of the blogosphere and be noticed. Not a good plan!

My second hope was that by linking to these sites and clicking on those links, my site would show up in the referrer logs for those sites, which would spark curiousity and bring my post to their attention. This works fairly well, but relies on the site owners and authors religiously monitoring their traffic or subscribing to weblog search sites such as PubSub and Feedster. Better, but still inadequate.

Finally, I stumbled upon a brilliant, but underused technique: Tell them about it!. People who are active in the weblog world are active precisely because they are curious people who are always looking for new perspectives. I find that sending a short, polite email that introduces yourself, offers a thank you or general kindness regarding their site, and then brings your post to their attention, is generally very successful. I never specifically ask for a link and wouldn't recommend it. Your purpose is simply to be read by people you respect and if you achieve that, you have been successful. The choice of whether to link to your site is entirely up to them.