http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/what-it-feels-like-to-be-rich/
After reading his post about being rich, I was most struck as how much problems alot of money can bring. And also not everyone who is rich sips on Dom Pérignon and eats caviar all day.
This has to be the shortest subscription I have ever had. I recently upgraded my AppleTv to 4.3(4.2) and was intrigued to see the MLB and NBA applications. I am more of a basketball fan than baseball so I had watched all of the free videos highlights for a few days and decided to purchase a subscription. The only entertainment related subscriptions are for World of Warcraft and Netflix.
First of all, to buy a subscription, you must go to nba.com/appletv and create a login and purchase your subscription. First flag was there were three different options to choose from and I wasn't sure which one was the one I needed to buy for the appletv.
I was looking for an appletv subscription or something like that. Now that I think about it, NBA has no way of knowing that I am buying a subscription for the AppleTv since I couldn't subscribe via AppleTv.
So I get signed up and rush downstairs to watch a previous game to try out my new subscription and that's where I run into my second problem. None of the highlighted games allow me to watch them. Something about not having either of the teams in a list to follow. So I walk back upstairs visibly irritated that I can't watch any games and the grayed out games complain about some blackout. Since I live in Omaha, NE I wasn't aware of any local programming related to the SUNS and LAKERS game.
I log back into NBA.com and proceed to get lost. I have no idea where anything is and the site reminds me of geocities or myspace on steroids. Lots of distracting stuff everywhere! I go to my account thinking I can edit the subscription there and I select my favorite team and player Lakers/Kobe at the bottom of the screen.
.
I go back downstairs to the AppleTv and try to view the same game I tried before with the same results. I am getting pissed off at this point. I paid my money now where is my content? Back on the site, I find a support page. First thing I notice is that the support page looks even worse than the main site.
The image links don't work, so I have to guess where the ADD button is on some screen I have yet to find to add my teams so I can at least view the content I paid for. To be honest, I have no idea how I found the right page. After a couple of minutes clicking all of links that might have vaguely made sense, I get to the 2010-11 league pass weekly schedule and clicked the big red button.
I got a nice friendly popup window with the text Alternative Content. They can't even degrade their site properly. nice.
I have been mostly flash free ( I use safari ) since I read Gruber's(Daring Fireball) post
Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It so I fire up Google Chrome ( Flash fallback ) and log in again and in the popup window I see where I can finally add teams.
Why they need flash to add teams to a list is beyond me. If I were on my iPad, I guess I would have stopped a long time ago. Add the Lakers and go back to the AppleTv thinking that this was it.. I could finally watch a game. Nada.. same error.
It was at this time I decided NBA didn't deserve my money so I found a support page where I could cancel my subscription. Maybe a form to cancel since it only took a form to signup. I was wrong once again..
So I draft the following email:
>
and a few minutes later I received a reply
In the end I expected a much better experience and I think this incident also reflects poorly on Apple as well since they promoted the NBA content with the new update. I have become accustomed to better experiences from Apple and their partners and I am surprised this even got through. If you had the new Macbook air and no flash, how are you going to follow teams so you can at least watch the games without installing flash or using a browser like Chrome?
In the end, NBA forever lost me as a customer. If I pay money for something, I want that something in a reasonable amount of time and effort. When you are hostile to me after I have paid you, then you don't need nor deserve my money.
I have decided fairly recently to move my blog off of tumblr. First off let me say that I love tumblr and think it is a great platform and service. There have been times where I have found the service to be a bit limiting though.
At ninthdivision we recently switched from subversion to mercurial. We have had a few ideas around writing extensions for mercurial to better fit in with our overall workflow. Neither Andy nor myself know much about the python language so I started writing a few utilities in python and felt that I needed a project to really learn the language. I started looking for python web frameworks and settled on django.
I find django is be perfect for what I'm using it for so far. On a personal level I rather like python and would like write more software in it. So writing blog software seemed like a good start. I figured it would give me some experience in python,django and overall deployment of a website.
This site runs on Ubuntu with nginx/apache, python/django and postgresql. So far this has been a pleasant experience and strangely therapeutic. I have always enjoyed writing software, but that pales in comparison when it is your own software. I am reminded of a time in my career when everything was new and I was just in awe of all of the awesome things one could do with code.
With all of that said, I know this isn't for everyone whether you write code or not. I would hop every few years from one blog to another always looking for some feature that the last one didn't have. I have to add whatever feature I need in the timeframe that I want it. It is strangely liberating and yet daunting at the same time. Since I am now fully responsible, it is up to me to worry about backups, databases, load etc.. And since I am new at this it is inevitable that mistakes will be made.
I sincerely hope that this process will enable me to write more content and for me to learn how to communicate more effectively. So far it has been a blast and I plan to keep adding stuff as needed. It is nice having a corner on the web that only belongs to you.
I was brought to tears towards the end.. I think this really profound and I hope it catches on in more parts of the country. It is a refreshing look on how education can be improved. I really wish that the US government would take a hard look at this.
