Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I’m filing this away for tomorrow:

Win a Trip with Nick Kristof

I’m hoping that you’ll be changed when you see a boy dying of malaria because his parents couldn’t afford a $5 mosquito net, or when you talk to a smart young girl who is at the top of her class but is forced to drop out of school because she can’t afford a school uniform. I’m not saying you’ll turn into an aid worker — but I’m hoping you’ll remember how much of the world lives and carry that memory through your life and let it affect your work and priorities. I began backpacking through Africa and Asia when I was in university, and the experiences changed me as I hope this trip will change you.

I’ve never been outside of North America except for a brief NAFTA visa run to the Mexico border a couple times when I used to live in Phoenix and before my greencard came. I’ve never pumped gas, worked theatre popcorn, or mopped floors, let alone done hard, bluecollar labour. My skill with computers has mostly isolated me from the hard, gritty parts of life. Even our American bums make enough to eat every day–where do I go on this continent to find the truly poor? I’ve travelled extensively and never seen anything shocking enough to change my life. Perhaps travelling to a third-world developing nation would let me experience life’s struggle instead the American dream.

There’s good and bad about Google’s new Finance portal. If you want to hear about the bad, take a look here:

• Google v.s. Yahoo finance
• Why Google Finance makes me sad
• Bloggers explore the art of corporate trashing
• No, Yahoo sucks

Now, here’s some of what makes it killer for me. Most of these are cute little interace extras, but some are really useful.

Major Index Overlays

If you look at the main page, they have a section for the Dow, Nasdaq, etc. The relevant graph changes with the selection by mouseover:

Recent Quotes

You can track the last 5 quotes you looked at with just a click from the home page:

News Overlay

Like IMDB pro, the new Google Finance attempts to correlate news with stock price points, generally unsuccessfully at this point. However, the accuracy should improve in the future:

Read it off the chart

You drag your mouse, and the vital statistics update in the upper right. No more staring at graphs with a ruler in hand:

Management Bio Overlays

When you go to see who is running the company, you get a nice rollover set of links and photos. Now you can see what that CEO really looks like, and how much he or she earns:

Misc Google Integration

Why not tie in more than just News, but also Blogsearch and Newsgroups! It’s a good idea to cross reference all other Google services:

This isn’t all that’s new or great about Google Finance–just a few things that turn me on.

As you can imagine, I’ve been having some trouble with 1and1. They nixed by site by placing some kind of “lock” on it. When I get that straightened out, I should be able to recover my images. Until then, I have an old backup of the images. I’m slowing restoring my other sites. What’s weird, though, is that I can’t get SSH access to my account.

Please ignore the mess–a new theme is coming soon. This is just a stopover stopgap method.

Update

Here is the email they sent me three days after locking my Business Hosting account:

Recently we have noticed that your web site(s)is consuming a disproportionate amount of server resources. Due to this, we have had to move your account off of the shared hosting server to an auxilliary server host. We will now request that you consider purchasing a Managed or Dedicated Server in order to continue hosting services with 1&1 Internet.

Your account was moved based on a decision made by the system administrators in order to improve the quality of service to the rest of our clients on the shared hosting server you were previously hosted on. Your account’s resource needs
were exceeding the capacity of that server to capably host the other accounts, thus it had to be moved to mitigate the server load. Though we could move your site back to the original shared hosting server, it is not recommended. Your account activity has showed that it deserves its own server to better suite its performance needs.

Please visit 1and1.com to review the server products we offer. You will have one(1) month to make a decision and migrate your account over to 1&1 server or another host provider. You can choose to return your account back to the shared server systems if you wish, provided that you take steps to reduce the load generated by your websites. If the account has to be moved off the
shared server system again you will only have the option of purchasing a dedicated server account to continue hosting with 1&1 Internet.

As I have received over 44,000 hits on this single website today (there are others, although they are still down), it makes sense that I might be overloading their poor shared server. However, they should at least have called or emailed me before taking any action that would impact the state of my website! If I do get a dedicated server in the future, it won’t be their’s.

Update 2

OK, dreamhost says I’m using about 940 cpu minutes a day, which is about 20 times more than I should be. Looks like I’ll need dedicated hosting soon, unless WP-cache really does drop my CPU usage by the 53x it claims. Here’s a graph of traffic impact, for the bored:

Update 3

As I really want them to return my files, I’ve sent the following snarky email to the 1and1 admins:

Dear 1and1 admins,

This is the third email I’ve sent you regarding this issue, three days from your initial notification, which was sent to me at least two days late after you locked my 1and1 account. I need immediate access to all of my files via SSH. Traffic has been redirected via DNS to another hosting provider, so no 1and1 resources will continue to be consumed at their former prodigious rate. As you specified below:

> You can choose to return your account back to the shared server systems if you wish, provided that you take steps to reduce the load generated by your websites.
Now that I have taken those steps, you must immediately:

1) Restore access to my business hosting account for elliottback.com
2) Notify me in writing thereof

Your response time and attention to customer service issues is terrible. If you do not restore access to my account and files in a reasonable amount of time, I may have to pursue legal or other non-desirable actions for your business.

Update 4

I called them last night, and a guy said he’d give me an update before the end of his shift. Admins are apparently scarce on weekends. Guess what? No update.

Update 5

Somehow I’ve got access again. Once I rip all my files, I’m going to cancel. Images should start working again in another hour or so. I’ve got a lot (100s of mb) to transfer, so it will be just a bit more!

Here are some more resources for people considering 1and1:

• 1&1 Internet is the devil
• DRAMATIC ACTION WAS REQUIRED
• 1&1, oneandone, 1and1, one and one, sucks!
• Why 1and1.com sucks?
• When 1 & 1 makes 3

Tiffany and Co wants me to tell them which country I’m from:

UPS who can get items to my door overnight can’t figure it out:

Wikipedia doesn’t know what country I am from and what language should be used there.

Fedex also likes to waste time, and look ugly doing it.

You’ll make $500,000+ at Goldman Sachs, but you’ll still have to waste 5s a day going through their sourcing menu.

Siemens is a tech leader, but not a global usability leader.

As you can see, big international companies with web presence divided by geographic location seem to prefer these “choose a country” drop down lists over automatically detecting the user’s country from their IP address (IBM and GE are two good examples that do it right). Therefore, I call for an immediate ban of such lists. Any company with a select your country drop down list is a company that doesn’t understand the web and IT. Something that can be trivially automated to remove a step in the user’s workflow should always be automated. For example, let me remodel Tiffany & Co’s website widget:

I’ve removed any options, allowed the user to change his country, and automatically detected it. A slight gradient improves text legibility. Every company should replace their country drop downs with little boxes like this. There is no excuse.

I don’t see why BIG.com is getting any attention at all:

In Chinese I could say, ????????. In English, “Big isn’t better.” Just taking Google (or whatever mix of search results) and making everything larger and slightly more textually simple isn’t at all an innovation. In this regard, the infamous gada.be is more innovative at meta-search than Big.

Russell Beattie decided to make his pages all big. Great. The Search Engine Watch says “it’s pretty cool.” I say it’s nothing worth looking at, and something nobody would ever want to actually use. It’s also a terrible waste of a three-letter-word domain name.

Update: I am really sorry that I rank in the SERPs for the keywords you’re using to get here, but it’s all your fault. It just took one of you to search for “big xxxxx” and then the rest poured in. Now GO AWAY!