AT&T to Cingular and back again

Killing Cingular Softly: In Defense Of AT&T

Marketers can be a sentimental bunch. ….How else to explain the marketing community’s continuing defense of Cingular Wireless?

Hmm, let’s see. Something called brand experience.

This is a case, however, where emotion is coloring the facts…

Yes, yes it is. Emotion is coloring the response. That’s what a brand experience is all about — connecting with customers on a level where they care about the brand.

Creative WordPress themes

As I contemplate moving this blog to its own domain name, I’ve been browsing WordPress themes to use and/or manipulate for my re-launch. What I have noticed is that so many WP themes are similar, as though the creators merely substituted different bullet images, a different header image, and new colors for links, etc. Many stick with a standard-type sidebar on the left or right. How dull.

Maybe the authors save the most creative themes for themselves instead of releasing them to the public. ;-)

But there are a few creative/fun themes out there, and I thought I’d give them some props here:

snap what?

Okay, it’s really annoying me that wordpress.com has implemented this “snap” preview window thing that pops up whenever you hover over a link. Oy!

In a search engine, this “snap” thing is wonderful — you get a little preview of the site without the time and frustration of clicking and going back, etc.

But it really annoys me when I don’t expect it and it suddenly appears in my face. And when it interferes with using a site by covering up navigation links or (usually) by blocking what I was reading. Yeah, it goes away when you mouse off, but what about those pages with a lot of links? Hard to miss hitting one and setting the preview thing off again.

I realize that it’s possible to turn it off. There is an “options” link in the corner of the snap window — click that and you have the option of turning off the tool for this site or for all sites.

But I wish I had a choice about it appearing on my blog. Hmm. Might be enough to make me move this thing to my Dreamhost account.

cURL in PHP (update)

Ironically, today I discovered the PHP manual I wish I’d found back when I first tried learning about cURL: the Practical PHP Programming wiki written mosly by Paul Hudson.  Nice, easy-to-understand cURL and PHP explanations. And wouldn’t you know it, Paul Hudson wrote the O’Reilly book PHP in a Nutshell. Where was this search result 6 weeks ago?! ;-)

Well, I did promise an update, so I’ll post a brief one based on the code I posted yesterday. Remember, I was having trouble understanding how to use cURL instead of the PHP include function, so that’s all that this covers. To learn about using cURL in other ways, head over to Paul Hudson’s wiki. :-)

Google funness

Okay, this just amuses me to know no end.

A few days ago, I posted an image and link to a print I ordered from deviantArt.com called Buhito. I decided to look up the word “buhito” to see the exact definition — whether it had to do with owls in particular like the print, or if it was slang for something.

But no matter what online translator I used (though the free ones are admittedly unintelligent), none of them translated that word! I tried searching for the word in webpages other than English, and found it all over (though of course I didn’t know what they were saying). I copied the surrounding text from a page and tried that in the translator — it translated all the words, except for “buhito!”

How weird, I thought. Guess it’s slang. So I decided to try a more indirect search on Google. I typed, what does buhito mean?

And lo, there was my very own blog at the top of the list.

How bizarre is that?!

I guess it’ll be a lot harder figuring out “buhito” than I thought. :-)