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Volvo, Save Thy Own Life!

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[the following is a response to Volvo’s corporate statement regarding customer concerns about the Geely sale. VCNA’s Stephen Odell basically said that business will be as usual, and that if a dealer is doing well they have “nothing to worry about”, presumably allaying fears of dealers having to close]

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I think Stephen Odell’s words about the dealers having nothing to worry about are central to my problems with Volvo’ pre- and post- sale experience.

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I believe they have plenty to worry about.

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My local dealership, Hughes Volvo in Santa Barbara, CA, is so cataclysmically unprofessional and ineffectual that I can’t even set foot there for parts anymore. The location is dirty and ramshackle, salespeople intimidating and clueless about the cars themselves, and the parts guy is about as helpful as a barnacle. To say nothing of the fact that every Volvo I’ve ever seen go there for service emerges worse than ever, owner unhappy about being essentially raped for overpriced parts and shoddy service.

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After searching for a rare black P2 V70R for three years, literally traveling around the US, I recently drove 120 miles north to purchase it from Smith Volvo in San Luis Obispo. I was attracted to this dealer because they also sold Porsches, Lotuses and other marques where buyers expect a quality experience from presale to ownership. The staff seemed more knowledgeable than the salespeople at other dealers I visited— most of whom had not even heard of the V70R! I still had the feeling, as I sat on a 1970s cafeteria chair, writing a five-figure check on a Bakelite tabletop to a gentleman without all his teeth, that it would never be this distasteful to purchase an Audi, BMW, even a VW.

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I believe that is because those companies, including their semi-independent dealers, take pride in the fact that owners are loyal for a reason, and do not take it for granted. They know what it takes to earn our loyalty (heck I’m easy… An inviting office and knowledgeable staff is not asking much).

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Volvo, I believe you’ve needed a reality check for a while. This S60 launch and its market positioning shows that you acknowledge the “image” aspect of building brand loyalty. Now show us loyal buyers, especially those skeptical of the Geely deal, that you mean to tackle the serious problem of your dealers.

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Pandora’s Beast(ly Widget)

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The Internet is for Porn - an Avenue Q review

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The Internet is for Porn - an Avenue Q review by Keith Moore

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The internet is for porn. I learned this, and other such wicked revelations at last night’s opening of the Broadway musical Avenue Q. With a masterful young people-and-puppets cast, undeniably infectious music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and a cantankerous collection of doesn’t-life-suck-sometimes skits, this production is an adorably dirty bomb of wit aimed directly at the post-college creative underclass. Channeling such disparate influences as “Will and Grace” and Milton, the show opens like “R.E.N.T.” but takes a sharp left turn onto a very dirty “Sesame Street”. As an homage to the latter, video screens come down at intervals for humorous, mixed-media-savvy visualization of a concept. Hilarious and obnoxious social commentary, often directed at the audience directly, recalls the verve of Punch and Judy shows. Watching the cast deftly play off each other with irreverent motifs of racism and lasting friendship, of jealous passion and utter apathy, of life’s purpose and existential masturbation — it becomes clear that there is real poignancy to be found here.

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Avenue Q is the fictional borough of New York City where Princeton, our puppet protagonist, moves to begin his adult life. As the newcomer to this decidedly lower-rent suburb, he enlists the help of his new neighbors in finding his “purpose” in life. After a few flameouts in his love life and career, he begins to understand, quite existentially, that he alone is the architect of his path in life. He finds that helping his girlfriend Kate Monster open a school makes him feel good, teaching Princeton that good deeds need not be selfless — a sentiment echoed by that old windbag Rand.

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Other denizens of Avenue Q step forward by turns to add their voice to the show’s thematic crescendo, which struck me as unusually brave for the writers of a musical. Unable to arrive at a concrete resolution for the characters’ existential quandary, the writers instead leave us with an unexpectedly Zen ending number. “It’s Only For Now” is, true to it’s title, an extremely alacritous summary of the lessons our friends on the Avenue have learned. Not a very uplifting (or darkly dramatic) message to leave us with. No, the rousing enthusiasm perceived by (and lauded by) the audience here is due to an unrelenting lack of irony in the cast’s performance. These actors, many of whom have experience in children’s television, know that integral to the show’s message is their emotively earnest delivery. Their candor — coupled with the undeniably slick writing, Broadway-perfect sets and technical direction — make Avenue Q an undeniably meaningful, yet uproariously entertaining musical masterpiece.

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\x0a $\x0aA phenomenal artist and our friend, Kate Desrochers, is having a rare show of her work at Carr Winery in Santa Barbara this Saturday, the 18th. [UPDATE 7-20] Photos from the event are here.\x0a[UPDATE 8-25] Katie’s gallery site (designed by FireYourDesigner.com , toot toot!) is here for your enjoyment: http://brush-pass.com/$ \x0a \x0a \x0a

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$there\'s an app for that. by writememoore$ $\'greaser\' seth by writememoore$ $observ\'d by writememoore$ $kate\'s fan club by writememoore$ $Gather\'d by writememoore$ $Conspir\'d by writememoore$ $settl\'d by writememoore$ $gather\'d II by writememoore$ $gesture\'d by writememoore$ $gather\'d III by writememoore$ $gather\'d IV by writememoore$ $consult\'d by writememoore$ $can-didn\'t by writememoore$

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A phenomenal artist and our friend, Kate Desrochers, is having a rare show of her work at Carr Winery in Santa Barbara this Saturday, the 18th. [UPDATE 7-20] Photos from the event are here.

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[UPDATE 8-25] Katie’s gallery site (designed by FireYourDesigner.com , toot toot!) is here for your enjoyment: http://brush-pass.com/

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\x0a $The peerless one thousand word Google Chrome lowdown, as interpreted by a vet of the browser wars:\x0aIn recent years, as part of my new brand-neutral coda of computing, I’ve decided to start experimenting with more ‘alternative’ software. I whetted my appetite with open-source projects like osx86/hackintosh, which although fun and gratifying, ultimately cause me to succumb to their bedeviling details. I prefer to use the best overall tool for the job, and although I find OSX beautiful (and conducive to getting real work done), I have always envied the more granular control of technical specifications you can have with wintel hardware.\x0aEven more recently, I have been fortunate enough to add two new models to my already excessive workstation count… A MacBook Pro, and a Dell Studio XPS. Both have comparable processor and graphics chipsets, and run the latest Adobe and Apple Pro software suites similarly. The rest of that comparo is for another post, however… I’m focusing on BROWSER WARS.\x0aIt all began for me in Lynx. Then I experienced the original Mozilla creation, Gecko. Followed in close succession by Netscape, Navigator, Communicator, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Camino, iCab, Firefox, and now Chrome. I distilled my experience with each into The Three Most Important Things to me in a browser: speed/lightweight, plugin performance/availability, and text/CSS rendering.\x0aMy workflow on the computer is much faster that it can be in real life. The computers I use are, however, beholden to the reality of their prosumer-class performance limits. Which means I do a lot of waiting for the computer. In that time I’m always thinking about and comparing the lag to alternative ways of doing the same task, for example editing a .rtf in GoogDocs vs. MS Word vs. Pages. In the case of the browsers, I am always shocked by the poor attention given to scrolling perfomance. Google Chrome, for example, has no ‘smooth scrolling’ option at all in current builds, while Firefox Mac/PC seems to use an archaic and heinously slow/CPU intensive method of smooth scrolling - and it’s almost never what I would call truly ‘smooth’. Contrast that with the MacBook Pro’s multi-touch scrolling in Safari, which is always ultra smooth and slightly accelerated. However, if you’re using a non-apple mouse, you’re in chunky-scroll hell. When your bleary eyes are reading long pages of code or text, this block-scrolling really, really sucks. Over on the PC, only Internet Explorer (gasp!) offers well-controlled, smoothly-rendered scrolling with little performance impact.\x0aAs a hulu and Vimeo junkie, I need Flash to load quickly and be well-multithreaded so as to provide low CPU/GPU load percentage, but also to avoid dropped frames and sluggish flash UI performance. Many people believe this is dictated by your computer’s hardware specs. To an extent it is, but I was blown away by the differences in Flash performance across browsers and platforms using the same hardware.\x0aBlasphemous as it may be, on an x64 build of Windows 7 (you’ll be using it soon enough), I have seen much better flash plugin silkiness with IE7 than in any other browser on any platform. An example of silkiness would be where you click the ‘fullscreen’ icon on YouTube, Vimeo, or hulu with no hiccup in the video playing. Some sites attempt to animate the zooming-to-fullscreen process a la QuickTime Player, to generally abysmal-looking results. On the mac, when you ‘right-click’ on a page containing a video, the flash performance stutters horribly in both Firefox and Safari, as it does when the browser window is “inactive” or in the background.\x0aChrome seems to gloss over all of these plebeian quibbles, preferring to focus on it’s proprietary, speedy implementations of plugins and rendering. There’s no arguing that it’s speedy. To boot, to load, to refresh, to render CSS and AJAX. But there are places you can see the underlying wires and gears… The options dialog, by example: Here’s where the ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ concept gets away from them. Tabs are poorly laid out, the panels have display refresh issues when scrolling (shouldn’t be scrolling at all), and they attempt the mac convention of omitting the ‘OK/Cancel/Apply’ buttons. It all feels a bit sophomoric, and detrimental to their cause as a code juggernaut. Font hinting and smoothing under Vista and Windows 7 (I can’t speak to XP performance) leaves much to be desired, even compared to the similarly-afflicted Safari for Windows.\x0aOther examples of plugin performance would include Firefox’s Flashblock and Move Player (a common tiered-stream web video plugin). Flashblock is a godsend for navigating the screaming sea of flash advertisements. It replaces any instance of a flash object with a transparent box, which you can optionally click to load that “movie”. Move Player uses a tiered-bitrate-stream system to deliver you the highest quality video your connection and hardware setup allow. I appreciate the thought, and the video itself looks gorgeous, but the plugin itself is not widely compatible, and there is no ‘silkiness’ to speak of.\x0aAs a content designer and reader, I need the content to look as perfect as possible on as many platforms as possible. That means well-hinted, crisply anti-aliased fonts and perfect CSS adherence. In order of admirable HTML/CSS/AJAX rendering performance, I rank my browsers: Safari Mac/PC, Firefox 3.5/PC, Firefox 3.5/Mac, Chrome beta/PC, Opera Mac/PC, just about any other browser, Internet Explorer 7.\x0aA good way to view this is through the tired school-grade metaphor. On my scorecard, Google Chrome only gets a C+. But that’s not necessarily accurate. Because, you see, I was the C+ student most of the way through high school and parts of college. Not only am I [indulgently] convinced that I retain far more from my classes than many of my substance-addled, GPA-uber-alles peers, but I believe that I gained a perspective not offered to those who are content to rest on their dubiously-achieved laurels. Applied to Google’s browser-child, this could indicate that Google’s ambition and hive-intelligence assets render any initial imperfections temporary if there’s a “sqeaky wheel”; and could set the stage for an omni-faceted internet-app presence there currently exists no precedent for. Scary… and cool!\x0aKind of like my old favorite verge-of-megalomania company circa 2001.$ \x0a \x0a \x0a

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The peerless one thousand word Google Chrome lowdown, as interpreted by a vet of the browser wars:

\x0a

In recent years, as part of my new brand-neutral coda of computing, I’ve decided to start experimenting with more ‘alternative’ software. I whetted my appetite with open-source projects like osx86/hackintosh, which although fun and gratifying, ultimately cause me to succumb to their bedeviling details. I prefer to use the best overall tool for the job, and although I find OSX beautiful (and conducive to getting real work done), I have always envied the more granular control of technical specifications you can have with wintel hardware.

\x0a

Even more recently, I have been fortunate enough to add two new models to my already excessive workstation count… A MacBook Pro, and a Dell Studio XPS. Both have comparable processor and graphics chipsets, and run the latest Adobe and Apple Pro software suites similarly. The rest of that comparo is for another post, however… I’m focusing on BROWSER WARS.

\x0a

It all began for me in Lynx. Then I experienced the original Mozilla creation, Gecko. Followed in close succession by Netscape, Navigator, Communicator, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Camino, iCab, Firefox, and now Chrome. I distilled my experience with each into The Three Most Important Things to me in a browser: speed/lightweight, plugin performance/availability, and text/CSS rendering.

\x0a

My workflow on the computer is much faster that it can be in real life. The computers I use are, however, beholden to the reality of their prosumer-class performance limits. Which means I do a lot of waiting for the computer. In that time I’m always thinking about and comparing the lag to alternative ways of doing the same task, for example editing a .rtf in GoogDocs vs. MS Word vs. Pages. In the case of the browsers, I am always shocked by the poor attention given to scrolling perfomance. Google Chrome, for example, has no ‘smooth scrolling’ option at all in current builds, while Firefox Mac/PC seems to use an archaic and heinously slow/CPU intensive method of smooth scrolling - and it’s almost never what I would call truly ‘smooth’. Contrast that with the MacBook Pro’s multi-touch scrolling in Safari, which is always ultra smooth and slightly accelerated. However, if you’re using a non-apple mouse, you’re in chunky-scroll hell. When your bleary eyes are reading long pages of code or text, this block-scrolling really, really sucks. Over on the PC, only Internet Explorer (gasp!) offers well-controlled, smoothly-rendered scrolling with little performance impact.

\x0a

As a hulu and Vimeo junkie, I need Flash to load quickly and be well-multithreaded so as to provide low CPU/GPU load percentage, but also to avoid dropped frames and sluggish flash UI performance. Many people believe this is dictated by your computer’s hardware specs. To an extent it is, but I was blown away by the differences in Flash performance across browsers and platforms using the same hardware.

\x0a

Blasphemous as it may be, on an x64 build of Windows 7 (you’ll be using it soon enough), I have seen much better flash plugin silkiness with IE7 than in any other browser on any platform. An example of silkiness would be where you click the ‘fullscreen’ icon on YouTube, Vimeo, or hulu with no hiccup in the video playing. Some sites attempt to animate the zooming-to-fullscreen process a la QuickTime Player, to generally abysmal-looking results. On the mac, when you ‘right-click’ on a page containing a video, the flash performance stutters horribly in both Firefox and Safari, as it does when the browser window is “inactive” or in the background.

\x0a

Chrome seems to gloss over all of these plebeian quibbles, preferring to focus on it’s proprietary, speedy implementations of plugins and rendering. There’s no arguing that it’s speedy. To boot, to load, to refresh, to render CSS and AJAX. But there are places you can see the underlying wires and gears… The options dialog, by example: Here’s where the ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ concept gets away from them. Tabs are poorly laid out, the panels have display refresh issues when scrolling (shouldn’t be scrolling at all), and they attempt the mac convention of omitting the ‘OK/Cancel/Apply’ buttons. It all feels a bit sophomoric, and detrimental to their cause as a code juggernaut. Font hinting and smoothing under Vista and Windows 7 (I can’t speak to XP performance) leaves much to be desired, even compared to the similarly-afflicted Safari for Windows.

\x0a

Other examples of plugin performance would include Firefox’s Flashblock and Move Player (a common tiered-stream web video plugin). Flashblock is a godsend for navigating the screaming sea of flash advertisements. It replaces any instance of a flash object with a transparent box, which you can optionally click to load that “movie”. Move Player uses a tiered-bitrate-stream system to deliver you the highest quality video your connection and hardware setup allow. I appreciate the thought, and the video itself looks gorgeous, but the plugin itself is not widely compatible, and there is no ‘silkiness’ to speak of.

\x0a

As a content designer and reader, I need the content to look as perfect as possible on as many platforms as possible. That means well-hinted, crisply anti-aliased fonts and perfect CSS adherence. In order of admirable HTML/CSS/AJAX rendering performance, I rank my browsers: Safari Mac/PC, Firefox 3.5/PC, Firefox 3.5/Mac, Chrome beta/PC, Opera Mac/PC, just about any other browser, Internet Explorer 7.

\x0a

A good way to view this is through the tired school-grade metaphor. On my scorecard, Google Chrome only gets a C+. But that’s not necessarily accurate. Because, you see, I was the C+ student most of the way through high school and parts of college. Not only am I [indulgently] convinced that I retain far more from my classes than many of my substance-addled, GPA-uber-alles peers, but I believe that I gained a perspective not offered to those who are content to rest on their dubiously-achieved laurels. Applied to Google’s browser-child, this could indicate that Google’s ambition and hive-intelligence assets render any initial imperfections temporary if there’s a “sqeaky wheel”; and could set the stage for an omni-faceted internet-app presence there currently exists no precedent for. Scary… and cool!

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Kind of like my old favorite verge-of-megalomania company circa 2001.

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Rails, Road, Code, Stop.

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Hi. Hi there. Yeah, this is going to be one of those posts. But the last!

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Anyway, please indulge your author this bit of an overshare, I believe everyone’s allowed a few. I’m the author of everything on this blog. Up until now it has been a distraction at best, a personal sanctioning of dubious memes at worst. Displeased with the amount of organic content this blog’s attitude limits me to, I’ve made a momentous decision to turn over the reins of the blog to my esteemed editor and business advisor alter-ego, Keith. Some of the readers may know him, he’s the kid who dressed up as an Apple CEO for Halloween ‘91. As in, not Steve Jobs. More recently his profile has been somewhat lower, preferring to set his sights on establishing a solid foundation of technical knowledge and silently amassing cohorts in the great heist of entrepreneurship (I wrote that, not he).

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From this paragraph on, the posts found on this blog will be authored by Keith or one of the editing partners.

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Let me first express my thanks, and frankly bemusement, at the fact that you, my dear acolyte [He’s kidding -ed] are still reading. We have not had many quality posts on the blog in recent days, as the process of re-establishing our interests and motivations has been consumptive. Having said that, I can promise many more relevant and engaging posts to come. I will be focusing on the things that I enjoy pursuing in the public space, and in my head-space. Hopefully there will be an intersection of my ability and your curiosity thereabout. Some things I will be covering are my recent web and media projects - solo, with Scripps, and with my cohort Spencer of Citrus Media…

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Over the past ten months, and especially since I left my discouraging full-time job, Spencer has been a positive influence on my learning process. Most recently he got me up to speed with the web development platform Ruby on Rails, RoR to the coderati. As most people do, I learn about technology best when I am working in tandem with someone or some people. It speaks to my curiously masculine-competitive nature, which if you’ve met me in person, is rather a laugh.

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Another facet of ongoing coverage on the blog will be the art and culture scene in Santa Barbara, specifically with an eye to clever marketing (I know it when I see it) and successful design/creative haberdashery. Another cohort of mine you may know is the arresting force known as Kate, or Face, or Facé. Working with and continually being arrested by this creative organ sac has been an eye-opening, not to mention claw-sharpening experience for me. What I lack in creative intuit and edge Kate has more than apprised me of. Where she’s thirsty for technical know how or NSFM, I have shared a tipple from my skills-font. [He’s had too much coffee -ed] I am sure you will see a cross-post from her occasionally and experience her raper wit. [typo, keeping it -ed]

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Perhaps most importantly, I intend to take on a great many peers in the blogosphere who take it upon themselves to make the written-media revolution known by the most heinous syntactical, grammatical, and colloquialism-laden dreck-text since, uh, engrish anime cartoons? I have a diverse biblio-background, having only read literature as a child and teen, yet simultaneously engaging my hobbies in cars and gadgets by reading pop rags like MacAddict and Car and Driver. And of course, I began weaning to the Internet and an indy-film, alt-music addiction at an early age. So I have a decidedly wide frame of reference regarding the style and semantics of prose.

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What I cannot promise is that I won’t still occasionally use this blog (and my numerous other Internet outlets) for the kind of eye-roll-inducing navel-gazing that makes a great many otherwise merited blogs nearly unreadable. I’m only human, and an imperfect, overly-introspective one at that. I might even stoop to such nauseatingly bougie levels as writing about bike riding or hiking or other lifestyle-y crap. But hey! That’s why there is an Unfollow button. Thaaanks, Peter!

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Keeping it nerdy,

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Keith

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via Towleroad

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College wrestlers Paul Donahoe and Kenny Jordan speak to ESPN about their university’s decision to kick them out for doing a little porn.

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The last word on Matt Drudge.

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I get really tired of listening to otherwise clear-headed people defend the Drudge Report as an “unbiased” source of news. Honestly, he’s only slightly more subtle with his agenda than, say, Fox & Friends. But fine, everyone in his field has their political agenda.

Which brings us to what actually bothers me about him, the gently obfuscated homophobia. So gently obfuscated that even his denials to media inquiries about his own alleged homosexuality come off totally warped and clearly indicative of an alarming level of self-loathing.

I came across a post about his medusal mind-demons, and found this hilarious summation by BookishLookish in the comments:

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What a mess.

He has a sort of Victorian prudishness that, if he were honest about his sexuality, would be kinda charming. Since he cannot get out there and be a big old fag and be happy and proud in the company of other righteous gay men, that 1940s thing he is working is more a sad prison than a swingin’ style. He is trapped in another, pre-Stonewall era. And not living in your own time always winds up reading as kind of pathetic.

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Brilliantly put.

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\x0a $from Gawker:\x0aIs this the best story or what? “Best story” is the correct answer. A nutty young sociopath from Utah took Brooklyn by storm, sleeping with literally every boy and crashing on literally every couch in Williamsburg and landing a job at Vice—at Vice!!—and lying about cancer, repeatedly, to everyone, before someone actually Googled her and found out she was on the run from the law for theft and check fraud and just wow, Hipster Grifter, we love you. Kari Ferrell, Williamsburglar, pathological liar, crazy woman, keep living the dream.\x0aI thought, what if I could improve that douchey t-shirt I have with the cynical dye-discharge magic of Coolvetica [yes, that’s a real font] and simultaneously show my admiration for the fabled HG. Then I thought, I need a job.$ \x0a \x0a \x0a

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from Gawker:

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Is this the best story or what? “Best story” is the correct answer. A nutty young sociopath from Utah took Brooklyn by storm, sleeping with literally every boy and crashing on literally every couch in Williamsburg and landing a job at Vice—at Vice!!—and lying about cancer, repeatedly, to everyone, before someone actually Googled her and found out she was on the run from the law for theft and check fraud and just wow, Hipster Grifter, we love you. Kari Ferrell, Williamsburglar, pathological liar, crazy woman, keep living the dream.

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I thought, what if I could improve that douchey t-shirt I have with the cynical dye-discharge magic of Coolvetica [yes, that’s a real font] and simultaneously show my admiration for the fabled HG. Then I thought, I need a job.

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Quinnspired: Today’s activities included a hike to Inspiration Point with Bay Area expats / old friends Jen and Russell.

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Quinnspired: Today’s activities included a hike to Inspiration Point with Bay Area expats / old friends Jen and Russell.

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