I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Microsoft Expression, a free vector-based illustration application for Windows and Mac OS. I could try to run it under Wine, but I don’t think I can be bothered… Sodipodi does me just fine, most days of the week. Besides, I don’t do the whole drawing thing, sorry.
That said, I saw this over on Veerle’s blog, and thought it cool enough to share. So, here it is, shared! If you’re in a position to use it, enjoy :)
As the title of this post says, Freetel are evil. I’m currently too furious to write a rational and reasonable post about it, without swearing, but I plan to edit this as soon as possible to detail exactly how and why this is the case.
Later: Josh has calmed down, and commences writing a rant about the issue. The long turnaround is because I was out last night/this morning, not because I took that long to calm down. Still annoyed, though…
I read with some amusement, mere minutes after receiving a phone call from Freetel, a post on Slashdot entitled “Spam Over Internet Telephony (SPIT) to Come?“, which points to an article by NewScientist, “Move over spam, make way for “spit”“. The scenario detailed in this article is one which I’m yet to experience in that form, as a by-product of my failure to yet adopt VoIP telephony solutions, however this kind of marketing is hardly new.
Do you want to discuss the cost-saving benefits of this over conventional telemarketing schemes? I’m sure that data is far cheaper in this day and age than the ridiculous “circuit-switched” (and you have to wonder how much of it is, anymore) pricing schemes of the telco organisations around the world. Not in dispute. I’m also (fairly) sure that in most of the world, it’s cheaper to have a computer sitting there making phone calls, rather than a person. Additionally, you’re just as likely to hit people sufficiently impulsive and/or stupid enough to buy your product. Don’t believe me? A study released earlier this year revealed that unsolicited bulk email actually WAS effective, simply because the returns only had to be minimal to cover the even more minimal cost. People spam, people do telemarketing — There, case for VoIP marketing.
And what about a combination of the two technologies? We all know frogs go… I mean… we all know that VoIP takeup in this continent at least leaves a fair bit to be desired, so far as extensive telemarketing potential audiences are concerned. And that said, those who have adopted here are most likely those who wouldn’t respond so well to telemarketing anyway — indeed, telemarketing may have been one of the reasons behind their moving away from conventional telephony services, so they can use VoIP gateways to automatically screen callers based on CID information, and other things… I’m not going to go too geeky at this point, but it’s been discussed at length in the past.
So, there’s no market worth touching in VoIP marketing in Australia as yet. That doesn’t mean EvilBusinesses™ can’t capitalise on the cost-cutting benefits of using computers to make phone calls, instead of people. Qovia, an Internet Appliance/VoIP monitoring equipment provider, has developed a system to send out 1,000 calls every five seconds, according to this CNET News article. And they’re the good guys. (So, they’re not selling that tech to anyone… big deal. Think conceptually, that’s far more important.)
There is a perfectly legitimate application of this technology, of course. My local library uses an automated calling system to notify and remind members of overdue books, which is excellent. I’m sure that this could be applied in many other spheres, too — not the least of which is any sizeable consultation business, specifically thinking of those in the medical field. Administration times could be cut, if calls were automatically made to say “Good [time of day], [name]. [Business name] is calling to remind you of your appointment tomorrow, [date], at [time]. If you believe this time is incorrect, contact us on [callback], or press [key number] to speak to an operator.”
That’s a concept, of course, but one which could be very easily and readily implemented (heck, for all I know, it probably has been)… the point stands, there are “good” applications for this technology, which I wouldn’t object to at all. That said, Freetel aren’t applying this in a “good” manner.
I don’t know if they’re using a VoIP/POTS gateway, or what. More to the point, I don’t care. I’m vaguely curious, but only because I have a vague ambition of doing something to break it. Technically, if I were really interested, there are people I can speak to about how this stuff works… besides, Google has most of the answers, anyway.
A company with whom I have had no previous association or foreknowledge of, Freetel, called my landline telephone number (ADSL line) yesterday afternoon. I don’t recall the exact details of the call, so to avoid accusations of libel at a later time, the following version of events is that to the best of my recollection. I say this, because it was impossible for me to record the call in a more definite manner, by means of recording device, or manual transcription, seeing I wasn’t expecting a phone call of this nature. So if you wish to sue, please, make my day. I haven’t got money for lawyers, but meh. Oh, I’m sorry, I published content of a questionable nature on my personal website, visited by close friends and a few others. If it makes you feel any better, I would have probably slandered your company’s good name to them in other personal correspondence by the time you read this message. All good? Excellent. Continuing.
Upon answering the phone, the manner and ambient noise (or lack thereof) distinguished the caller instantly as a recording. So that was stupid. The voice-actor responsible performed poorly, and the post-work on the recording was equally unimpressive; both should be shot. First suspicious element? I think one of the earliest words spoken was “congratulations”. I had, apparently, been selected as one of one-hundred (that number I recall with clarity) lucky people in “my area” (what they define “my area” as remains unclarified… I tend to think “my area” may have been the one-hundred numbers immediately above and below my own, but this is speculation) to receive this amazing offer of FREE phone calls! Wow!
You have no idea how stoked I am at this point. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited by a telemarketer. Now, maybe I’m just lucky, but I don’t think I’ve ever been hit with a telemarketing call which sounded this genuinely dodgy. For example, I’ve never been offered a free set of steak-knives, or anything else for that matter, whilst on the phone. Possibly something extra for no additional cost, but certainly not just outright “free”. So that was stupid. The copy for this recording was poorly prepared, and the copy writer responsible should be shot.
I’m holding the phone, still, although shaking somewhat. I’ve realised, this is the first electronic phone-spam I’ve ever received — far from being a historic moment, I’m furious. This is not an experience I’d like to become commonplace, as I hold the telephony medium in some esteem for its’ direct, peer-to-peer nature, in which instant feedback is possible. I’m reading a book at the minute, entitled “Alphabet to Email“, by Naomi S. Baron, a Professor of Linguistics at American University. In it, she has a chapter entitled “Why the Jury’s Still Out on Email”, which begins with two quotations, reading
It might help to consider the [email] message as a written verbal communication rather than real writing.1
[Computer conferencing is like] writing letters which are mailed over the telephone.2
1. Shapiro and Anderson 1985:21
2. Jim Girard, quoted in Spitzer 1986:19
I’d disagree. I think that approaching an electronic medium such as email in that manner restricts it, and isn’t true to the significant differences the medium holds to others — telephony being the pertinent example here. The inside-cover recto page of this book contains an expanded blurb. Get this:
Many children who seldom spoke to their parents at home now communicate with them through email.
Bang? At any rate, there are significant differences between the two mediums, and, as far as I’m concerned, neither of them encroaches on the space of the other. Telephony provides potential for immediate feedback (at least, in the conventional approach taken to it), whilst email permits time for greater consideration and response. The likening of email to “written verbal communication” is the result of narrow-minded people who have adapted to, rather than grown with, technology, failing to view it as being directly analogous with another medium, and thus drawing loose similarities in bold lines, to make themselves more comforable with a “different” media form. No, I haven’t got a degree in this stuff. Yes, I want one. In this instance, however, I like to think that I’m right, and they’re confused. This isn’t Wagner’s mixed-up world of magnificently combined multimedia — I’m sorry. Mediums are separate, and that’s how they’ll remain in some instances. They don’t have to be “the same” as what came before, not even similar. Think outside the square.
Yes, outside the square. That’s what these computer-powered telemarketers seem to be doing — applying a medium proven effective by mass application, rather than relative effectiveness, and (theoretically) benefiting from it.
Well, I’m sorry. That doesn’t appeal to me. You know what? If your product will filter out voice-spam calls, then I’m happy. I’ll buy it… if it displays value for money compared to what I’ve got already. Oh, yeah, and if your initial contact isn’t so dodgy that I wouldn’t consider following it up to purchase. And if you think you do anti-evil-call filtering, then wake up — you’re not Qovia (who, incidentally, have already filed for patent on this one), so get over yourselves. Meanwhile, I’ll just sit here, white-faced and shaking, every time I receive a phone call from a computer. But, you know what makes all of this worse? The system behind it was evidently poorly developed, even from a user perspective. A few kilometers up this rather lengthy blog post, I discussed the potential of this technology for appointment reminders, using customisable elements as part of a voice-call macro.
Ideally, Freetel would have utilised a similar method, such that when the phone number was skimmed from a database (presumably from White Pages/Telstra/Sensis‘ directory on CD, or similar), the name was also recorded. Hence, it would be possible to initiate the call with “Good [time of day], [gender title] [last name]. I am calling from a telemarketing sc… erm… Freetel” — note that not even a time-greeting was included.
The reason I’m commenting on this at all is not simply because I believe it’d make the system more personable, but because they’ve failed so miserably at making any attempt to do so. Example? Okay. The first stage of the recording concludes, and the user is given a single prompt. Yes, that’s right. It’s perfectly linear — there is no alternative, but to hang up; something that people may do at any time of their own volition even without prompting — and yet the user is still presented with a “choice”. The prompt goes something like “Press 1 to find out how to take advantage of this amazing offer.”, and then a recording gives a message. From a usability point, this is stupid. This has been discussed (on Web Standards Group, amongst other places) more than a few times with people who deal with human/machine interaction systems, and the conclusion we always seem to wind up at is that programmers don’t give users enough credit, in most instances. This doesn’t mean don’t code systems without usability in mind, but it does mean you needn’t put in extra pointless steps to “explain” things to users. So, the human interaction specialists should be shot.
After this message, the user is told to leave their name and phone number after the tone. In hindsight, I wish I’d left a longer message — I said something along the lines of “Hi, I’m the person you just called. Go jump.” Now, regardless as to the call cost, I was tying up a POTS line somewhere… that’s one less other call they could be making at that time. I was sufficiently abusive, I think, but in retrospect I’m wishing I had left my name and website address… as it stands, I’m going to have to now chase them up, find contact numbers, and then point them in the direction of this post. If you’re reading this, hi guys… you should be shot.
In the anarchy and chaos which has reigned since this “let’s sell the house” thing began, this geek has been feeling alone and screwdriver-less. Well, that’s not quite true. I did have the screwdriver, for a time, living discreetly behind my D-Link ADSL modem thing. At some point in time, one of the co-residents appears to have borrowed and not returned this spectacularly useful device to its’ temporary home.
This event saddens me greatly, as I maintain that this screwdriver was, without a doubt, the best in the world. Sadly, I can’t find a photo at this time — if/when we are reunited, I’ll be sure to post happy-snaps for all the world to see.
In the meantime, I must be content with using the world’s bluntest not-Swiss-Army knife, and the garden clips you see on the right of your screen (or, if you’re using a browser which sucks, the image located slightly above… at least, the alt description is “The Wilkinson Sword, garden clippers extraordinaire!”). Spectacular though these utilities may be, I miss my screwdriver.
Yes, I really did use those garden clips on a computer, and no, I feel no remorse. Someone whinged at me about blunting them, but I promptly started whinging back about how some horrible monster had swallowed my screwdriver, magnetic tips and all, so they soon shut up. The network card in question is no worse off, I’m glad to inform you all. And neither is the Voodoo 5, to the best of my knowledge… it’s currently sitting, quite unused, on my desk doing absolutely nothing.
Why? Well, it was sitting in my makeshift “router”, wasn’t it… and that’s just throughly stupid! In fact, that router was equipped with an overclocked Pentium 3 running at 560MHz (112MHz FSB), 256MB of RAM, a 64MB Voodoo 5 5500, and a Creative PCI soundcard, the model of which I haven’t bothered to ascertain… although, from vague memory, I think it’s a Vibra 128. Oh, yeah, and an intel Pro NIC and another generic Realtek 8139 card. Does that seem utterly pointless to anyone else?
I know, other people are (or were, once upon a time) running equally stupid Smoothwall system configurations, but that doesn’t make it any better — I have this vague dream in which I manage to build a router that is actually QUIET for once! Shocking, I know. Well, this Pentium 3, when I grabbed it from the shelf, was already so much quieter than the old router was — despite having a graphics card which needs molex power, and has two fans running at full bore… not to mention the extra case fan or two.
That doesn’t matter, though. The old router sounded much like a jet engine when starting up… I’ve been meaning to ask an environmental audio guy if I can borrow a meter for the weekend some time, just for the fun of having some real numbers. At any rate, even the new system was more noisy than it should be; let’s not start on power consumption.
I opened it up, removed the sound card, which was UTTERLY unnecessary, using the painfully BLUNT knife as a screwdriver. Next up? That graphics card has to go! Unplug molex (why is that always so hard?!), try to unscrew with knife. This isn’t working. A few minutes before, I’d tried to remove the graphics card from the old router, to swap out (yeah, I had plenty of others around, but I knew this one worked, and couldn’t be bothered sorting through those which didn’t… that’s another activity for a rainy day) with that in the new Pentium 3 system. Bzzzzzzt.
Hurray for burred screws! Of course, they were only so burred that it would cause a problem for anything that didn’t fit the hole nicely — my usual screwdriver would have! Logical solution to the problem? Pliers. Had any of them survived the garage-stuffing holocaust? Unlikely!
I furtively glanced around the kitchen for an implement suited to the purpose. Someone had been outside, gardening, and brought the snips inside when they finished. VICTORY IS MINE!!! I don’t care that they’re garden snips, if they work, score 1 to Josh! Needless to say, they did.
The cards were swapped, and all lived happily ever after. Now, if only I could figure out how to make Smoothwall APM aware…
Hmm. My original post about this thing didn’t exactly go as planned, so I’ve addressed the only feedback I recieved, and am back again with the results.
If you were one of the three who commented previously, it’s probably worth wandering over to the old post, and reading my ammendment (after all the comments were made, but hey). There were two or three technical problems at that stage, but really, I was perfectly aware of them, and it wasn’t intended to be a permanent situation by anyones reckoning.
The three things, in no particular order, were as follows
blockquote and wondering what on earth this rambling soul was speaking of, that’s probably because the image wasn’t displaying, as my computer was turned off. Apologies if you’re in another timezone and were trying to view it… the problem is fixed now, so heyAnd they’re the three. I’m a little curious as to how Stuart managed to form an opinion of the graphic, seeing I’m moderately certain my computer wasn’t on, and hadn’t been for several hours, at the time he posted, but hey… I can only presume that he was simply agreeing with previous statements about the size of the image.
So, here’s what has happened. I cut a production version of the image, which (predictably) did very little for the filesize, as it was all whitespace anyway, something modern compression algorithms deal with quite effectively. That shaved a grand total of 1KB from the total file size, when saved as a PNG. There wasn’t a whole lot else I could do, other than screw with compression options and hope it did something useful. The file got bigger, inevitably… that’s what happens when Josh doesn’t know what he’s doing!
Time to give the dreaded, horrible GIF format a go. Yay, I’ve got 255 shades of grey to play with. You wouldn’t believe it, but that isn’t enough… I’m sure there is all kinds of stuff I could have done fiddling with indexed palettes, were I using something more powerful… The GIMP is great, but a tad obscure with some things. That said, the last time I played with indexed palettes was mid-2003, when I was working over at Designate — and even then, it was only because the archaic version of Flash I was using at the time didn’t like what various Adobe packages were throwing at it. Plus, I was surrounded by people who lived and breathed that stuff, so it’s not like I was stuck out on a limb, negotiating unfamiliar software territory alone.
So, the GIF image, with transparency, ended up at an impressively tiny 891 bytes for a 200 by 200 pixel image. The only problem was, it looked as though that were the file size compared to the purer PNG and shop files, too. Scrap that idea, it’s a complete corruption of all design which went into this element! Not that there was a substantial amount, but for a concept sketch and a 10 minute implementation… still, I’m fairly proud of the aesthetics of it, and conversion to GIF format completely destroyed that.
There is one option left, at this point, for web-distribution. And it doesn’t involve transparency, or alpha channels, or any of the fun stuff which I’d really prefer to use in this case… yes, I’m speaking of JPG images. I just changed the colour of my backing layer to the background colour of my blockquote element, and it worked… nothing particularly amazing or special about any of this, so I won’t detail it. For those who are curious, the hex code for the backing colour is #D3D3D3 — in RGB-speak, that’s 211 for all (obviously, that means HSV would be 0,0,211).
And the outcome? At 7.51KB, it’s still a little bigger than perhaps it should be. I’m over it, though. It’s a non-essential element of the design, and can load in however long it wants… if people see the graphic, great. If not, well… I’d hope that other elements of design make up for it.
This time around, I’m inviting all comment, technical or artistic. If you have some idea how to use indexed palettes in The GIMP properly, let me know!
To see this blockquote element in action, take a look at either of these two posts:
http://www.joahua.com/blog/2004/09/24/killer-photography
http://www.joahua.com/blog/2004/09/22/solid-linux-rss-reader
I just stumbled upon Andy Budd’s Travel Photography website, and it’s incredible, both in terms of presentation and photography/content itself.
Next time I’ve got a free hour or four somewhere with a Flash install (Steve?), I want to see if I can figure out a way to automate the cool presentation style he’s got happening over there, using Flash/ActionScript or something… of course, my photography is garbage compared to his work, but hey! I’m hoping something will crop up so that I can justify spending time on such a project… I can think of a few immediate applications off the top of my head, but it’s pretty unnecessary, if very cool. We shall see.
On a standards-related aside, the folks over at Web Standards Group have been clawing at each others throats for the last few days, regarding the best way to implement Flash in a standards compliant manner with XHTML. Umm. Okay, whatever. The answer, as best as I’ve understood it, is simply to revert to HTML 4.01, or just to get over it. I throughly agree with David McKinnon’s response on the issue, which I’ve reproduced in part here:
This may sound like heresy in this list, but the goal of using Web standards
is not to get your site to validate. (Wait, put down that pitchfork!) The
way I see it people, is that it’s all about people. The goal is to make it
better for people. Better for viewers, who don’t get things looking like
krud because they choose the ‘wrong’ browser or platform. Better for people
with special needs. Better for people who build and maintain the site and
better for the people who will redesign the site when it comes to that.
Then, when the forces of good rise up to crush the forces of tyranny all
people will live in…Er… sorry, got a bit carried away there…
Anyway it may just be better to use the flash default code because it works
even if it doesn’t validate.
Amen.