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I’m a big podcast fan. Originally, I was mostly into music podcasts like the amazing Coverville and the excellent Shifted Sound. Over the last few months I’ve been shifting to speculative fiction podcasts and postcast novels (podiobooks - in spite of my issues with the name). What I haven’t found, until recently, was a good tech podcast. Tech podcasts are either boring, or just fixated on very narrow topics. Stack Overflow is neither.

The legendary Joel Spolsky and the brilliant Jeff Atwood have a great on mic chemistry, and their discussions cover a broad spectrum of tech subjects, from a software, hardware and business perspective.

The most recent podcast discusses the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program Reading List used for management interns at Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software. I have found the reading list to be a great resource for some time, but it is great to hear Joel and Jeff’s opinions on many of the volumes and recommendations on the best ones to read.

If you are in the tech industry, I highly recommend the Stack Overflow podcast, and suggest looking at the reading list. There are some great resources there.

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My company, e-Marketing Partner, is proud to announce the launch of Greeley Rewards.

Greeley Rewards is a site where local merchants can provide discounts and savings to local customers. Check it out!

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Dell Inc. will charge customers up to $50 for factory-installed Windows XP on some PCs after Wednesday, according to the company’s Web site.

The amazing floundering that is Microsoft Vista continues. A year and a half after it’s release, the public is still not convinced. Even though XP is scheduled to be pulled from the shelves on June 30th, there is still demand for XP on new computers and Dell is going to charge to meet that demand.

Even though Microsoft is going to stop selling XP licenses, it’s still within the terms of the Vista license to ‘downgrade’ a Vista Business or Vista Ultimate version to the XP Professional version.

Vista was released commercially in January 2007, nearly 17 months ago, but even with the release of Service Pack 1, the OS has not achieved widespread acceptance. In fact, it seems that anti-Vista sentiment is higher than ever. Back in January of this year Infoworld named Vista #2 on a list of all time PC flops, a dubious honor.

If you are in the market for a new PC and wondering if paying $50 for “last year’s technology” is worth it, you might want to take a peek at this tongue in cheek article reviewing an “upgrade” from Windows Vista to Windows XP.

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In what could end up being the corporate blunder of the year, Walmart has blown off the video company that has been taping it’s corporate meetings for the last 30 years.

Flagler Productions Inc., a small video production company, had been taping all of the goings on at Walmart for 30 years based on a verbal contract. In 2006 Walmart decided to dump Flagler for a newer, glitzier production company. There was no written contract concerning the content that had been recorded, so Flagler offered to sell it back to Walmart for $145 million. Walmart countered with an offer of $500,000 because they didn’t think anyone else would be interested in the footage… appearantly they were wrong. Since Walmart wasn’t interested, Flagler is now allowing public access to the archive, for a price.

Now there are videos of Walmart execs in drag on youtube and who knows how much more shennaniganary. Lawyers are climbing all over themselves looking for evidence to use in court cases involving the retail behemoth. This is not only an embarrassment for Walmart, it’s a potentially costly blunder. How could they possibly let someone have this content without making a reasonable attempt at negotiating a purchase?

In a way I feel bad for Walmart, the silly things that went on in their corporate meetings and picnics shouldn’t really qualify as evidence for lawsuits, or be a basis for criticizing a corporate mentality. If they want to have some fun and do something crazy behind closed doors - who cares? Guess they should have ponied up and bought the footage - might have saved them money and headaches in the long run.

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If you have viewed any of the links in the margins of this blog, you have probably noticed Greeley Search and Fort Collins Search.

Both of these sites were originally started as website directories for their specific locales. The motivation was to encourage technology use by local businesses and promote spending dollars in the local community rather than on ebay, amazon or any other online retailer.

Lately I’ve been attempting to figure out if there is any value to these sites, and if so, what it is. I haven’t had many local people submit sites to them, it doesn’t seem like my efforts have been appreciated much. My question to you, the reader, is do you think there is any value in sites like these? Do they help organic results in Google? Is there a good way to acquire advertisers? Is there a good, cost effective, way to market them locally?

Let me know what you think.

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Business Blog Consulting had a nice post last week about the awesome customer service of Zappos, and the horrid customer service of Spirit Airlines. Now I have never used either of these companies, I don’t fly much and I buy all my clothes (OK, not all, but most) from Ross. Actually bought a way cool pair of Rocket Dog shoes for $13 last week on clearance at Ross - way cheaper than Zappos.

Regardless, if Zappos customer service is as good as it sounds, YOU should probably buy from them.

On a completely unrelated note, the Boston Red Sox swept our Colorado Rockies in the World Series last night. I guess The Lisa was right about her beloved baseball team. Grrr…

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One thing just struck me this week. After six months of self employment I made a realization.

For my whole work life, my normal day was spent watching the clock. This isn’t to say that I didn’t have a good work ethic and my employers weren’t happy with my work, but every day was a timed event.

These days I find that work is much different. I still work a fairly normal 8-5 work day, of course with much more flexibility, but I gauge my day much more on the tasks that are in my inbox. I often find myself working on things late into the night, or on the weekends. The days seem to flow together much differently than they used to.

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So, anyone out there know what the killer online store software is?

Currently I’m working with creloaded, and am NOT impressed. It’s buggy, requires a tremendous amount of code editing for proper installation, has a limited feature set like no support for local (city/county) tax zones, poorly documented and just hard to use overall - and I bought the ‘pro’ version.

If anyone has thoughts or reviews on store software, please let me know.

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A little over a year ago I moved my bank account to Compass Bank. Everything has been excellent since then… until today.

Today, I was checking my bank account online and I found that there was a late charge on my Credit Card statement. This seemed odd to me since I have made regular payments. The Compass Credit Card statement comes in the mail, not electronically, and isn’t even visible through the online interface. Since I can’t see the statements online, I typically just pay more than the minimum amount monthly and don’t worry about the actual due dates. This hasn’t ever been a problem until this month.

Between June 20 and August 10th I made three payments, all about three times the monthly payment. Unfortunately, the second payment, made in the first week of July, was ONE DAY before the actual date of the statement.

Looking at my account, I assumed this was the issue, so I called the Compass credit card people. After entering my credit card number into the phone four times, going through several levels of menus, explaining the situation multiple times to the young woman that finally answered and being on hold for about 20 minutes, she explained the situation. The payment was early (which I already assumed), so she couldn’t refund the late payment fee.

Just to clarify, I was penalized by the Compass Bank credit card division for making a payment a day early. Insane.

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Read this article today about YouTube’s defense of the lawsuit brought by Viacom and other copyright holders.

One thing that caught my eye was

…lawsuits brought against YouTube by Viacom International Inc., England’s top soccer league — The Football Association Premier League Ltd. — and indie music publisher Bourne Co.

I thought to myself, “Wow, an Indie music publisher is suing YouTube?”. So I decided to do some research.

First, for those of you not really acquainted with the indie music and film scene, there is a certain connotation that goes along with the term indie (short for independant).

Wikipedia defines indie like this:

The term indie is short for “independent” and refers to artistic creations outside the commercial mainstream, without the support of a major record label, major movie studio, or other source of a large budget.

So, I did some research on this so called indie music publisher, Bourne Co.

BOURNE CO., one of the largest independent international music publishers, has since its founding in 1919, never lost its passion for the art of song writing or its deep respect for the creative processes involved in that art

So, they are one of the largest publishers of sheet music in the world. In this context, independant means ‘privately owned’, not ‘outside the commercial mainstream’. It really sounds to me like either the author of the article, Viacom or the AP is trying to spin this and make it sound like indie musicians are against YouTube, and that is just not the case. In reality it’s just a bunch of large companies (Viacom, Bourne Co., Football Association Premier League) angry because YouTube is making money off content they ‘own’. In reality, these publishers should be suing the individuals that actually post the copyrighted content to YouTube, but as the RIAA has shown us, that’s not a great PR move.

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