Google Chrome

Google has taken its eye off the ball with its too-hasty release of the Chrome browser. While its handling of each tab as an independent entity is just what's needed in an imperfect Web 2.0 world --and hopefully will be emulated by IE and Firefox developers -- Chrome falls short of implementing the usability that has long attracted users to Google products.

Because of a non-compliant proprietary JavaScript engine, Chrome does not work with many websites that IE and Firefox handle gracefully. For shame!

But the deal-breaker for me is that Chrome doesn't work with the widely-used Roboform password manager. Yes, Chrome offers to save passwords. But I've got literally hundreds of site-specific passwords and (a) I need portability from browser to browser and PC to PC, and (b) I'm not trusting my passwords even to the worthies at Google.

Chrome is clean, and quick. But without Roboform, it's stupid.

Why Vista Gets a Bad Rap

I know, it's cool to bash Microsoft. And sometimes, it's appropriate. Windows ME was truly bloatware, and Internet Explorer didn't really shape up until the competition showed the way. But Vista is a worthy extension of XP, and all it gets is grief.

As an old gray beard who's been a geek tweaking PCs since before the words "geek", "tweak", and "PC" took on meaning, I'm amazed that the armchair techies -- whose jobs depend on the existence of Gates, Microsoft, and Windows -- can find nothing to like in Vista.

And then it hit me. Every negative comment or review about Vista carps about (a) cost and activation, and (b) UAC -- User Account Control. And that's because they're techies, not end users!

Techies have multiple computers and like to switch systems and play. Software that's not free and not authorized for multiple machines, is a pain for techies, who are notoriously clever but impecunious.

And techies, almost by definition, are continually downloading, installing, configuring, and reworking new software -- all conditions that trigger the UAC pop-up in Vista. For a techie, UAC is a toothache that smarts with every chew.

But for the great mass of users -- one machine, and very infrequent technical changes -- Vista is fast, fun, sexy, safe, and stable. Would they like it to be free? Sure, but what a silly idea. In the real world, users expect to pay for their cars, their combs, and the computers, including the operating system.

Now that it's out of the starting gate and over the speed humps, what's not to like about Vista?

Network Solutions Scam

As if you needed another reason to avoid the high-handed, high-priced offerings at Network Solutions (NetSol), here's another quirky NetSol scam masquerading as a service.

Catherine Palmiere is the President of Adam Personnel and Adam Temporary Services, one of New York City's premiere employment agencies and staffing services. Catherine asked me to register a new domain name for her company and point it to the Temps page on her primary website. She suggested www.adamtemporaryservices.com and www.adamtemps.com.

We decided on the latter, which I promptly checked for availability. To my surprise, it was taken. Looking further, I noticed it had been "taken" just moments before her email to me. Wow, what a coincidence. But wait, lighting struck twice! The other domain, too, was taken. And guess who had 'em both: Network Solutions, LLC. Both were "registered" for one year, with nameservers set to reserveddomainname.com.

It turns out the domains are actually available, but with a catch. The domain records say "This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com, 13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300, HERNDON, VA 20171 US." You can't directly register these domains with another registrar, say GoDaddy or Tucows, unless you fork over fees to a go-between or domain name broker. But you can register them directly at NetSol -- and pay their inflated fees.

In case you haven't guessed yet, what happened here was that Cathy at Adam had checked availability for these domains on the NetSol website and NetSol immediately registered the names. Since Cathy has a NetSol account and was logged in when she checked availability, this sort of made sense. She's their customer and reserving the names for her made sure she'd have them available.

But wait. NetSol will also let me -- or you or anybody -- register those names, as long as we do it through NetSol. So maybe the preemptive, protective reservations weren't for Cathy's benefit, but for NetSol's. To test this, I used a no-cookies PC to check the availability on the NetSol website (without logging in, of course) of a silly domain name, viz. cranberryham.com. I don't know if cranberry ham is Kosher or not, but I do know that (a) I'm not a NetSol client, (b) I researched the domain first elsewhere, and found "no registered match", then checked at NetSol, and (c) as of today, it's now reserved by them for a year*! And that ain't Kosher for sure.

The problem here is simple. It's called conflict of interest. The company which issues domain names -- in the public's interest -- shouldn't be allowed to register, reserve or otherwise control any names other than the ones it needs for its own website and email. It's time to get the fox out of the henhouse. And let the cranberries propagate without grafting or layering.

* Although the record shows an expiry one year after the creation date, the "registration," is probably set to expire in five days. After all, NetSol is tricky, not stupid. Registrars can create a registration, then delete it within five days at no cost. The five-day grace period was designed to allow them to fix mistakes without penalty. The scam is they're using it to penalize clients!

P.S. Others have discovered and commented on this Networks Solution scam as well.

Philadelphia: Brotherly Love and Great Appraisers

The Philadelphia Chapter of the American Society of Appraisers (ASA) asked me to take over and make over their ailing website. Makeovers are hard -- the originals are usually flawed technically, weak on navigation, and lacking in search engine optimization -- but I agreed because the Philadelphia Chapter is a wellspring of professionalism and enthusiasm.

The Chapter is home to several ASA Regional Governors, including business valuation appraiser Mark Penny, the current Governor, and also has spawned at least two ASA International Presidents. But more importantly, it boasts nationally recognized appraisers like Samuel F. Luceno (real estate) and Shirley S. Swaab (personal property), appraisers noted both for their appraisals and for mentoring. In fact, the Chapter has won the annual ASA trophy for Best Mentoring Program three times in the past six years. Now that's Brotherly Love!

Shirley Swaab is a good example of what I like to call the DaVinci principle -- the fact that the efforts of a single person can make a world of difference. Ms. Swaab, who is a well-respected appraiser, is also a noted collector of decorative and fine art items. Year after year she lectures, teaches, and conducts hands-on seminars, bringing items from her own collections for participants to pass around and examine. She's a perennial on the Maine Antique Digest circuit, and of course, at ASA both nationally and locally. How many speakers do you know who have people wait-listed for their next engagement?

It's axiomatic that every project takes at least twice as long as expected. The ASA Philadelphia makeover was no exception. But it was fun. The Chapter has a treasure trove of newsletters, articles, Q&A items, strong appraisers, rich seminars, and a long tradition. That made it interesting. The hard part was honoring our self-imposed commitment to keeping the site online throughout the makeover with no "under construction" signs, dead links, or missing pages. Done, but fun. Looking for a business valuation, gems & jewelry, machinery & equipment, personal property or real estate appraiser in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or Delaware? Take a look at ASA Philadelphia!

Getting the (E)Mail Through

At its best, email is fast, fun and tremendously productive. But email, like the weather, is largely unpredictable. That's because it depends on the Internet, which belongs at once to everyone and no one. In short, no one's in charge of making sure email gets through.

While there are no delivery guarantees, it is possible to tilt the odds in your favor. Here are some tips in order of importance.

Address Book. Most undelivered email fails because of a bad email address. Although email addresses are not case sensitive, everything else about an email address must be just right. You can avoid typos and misspellings by addressing email from verified addresses in your address book. This also prevents common substitutions, e.g. name@com for name@org or name@edu, and incorrectly transcribed addresses, i.e., my friend Michael spells his name Micheal; was that Coles, or Kohls, or Coals? Remember, even the owners of email addresses misspell them. Don't click on Reply to send an email. Use your address book!

Sidestep SPAM Filters. Today, most hosts filter inbound email to quarantine or delete SPAM and viruses. Some hosts, notably AOL and Hotmail, are notoriously aggressive, generating a high percentage of false positives. Even Big Blue (the famous chess-playing IBM computer) can't outwit SPAM filters. The best solution is an end-run around the filter: ask your contacts to add your email address to the list of accounts whose email will be accepted without filtering. This may be called a Friend's List, Contact List, White List, Acceptance List, etc.

You Get What They Paid For. Some email accounts are more equal than others. Many users have so-called free (meaning ad-supported) email accounts. Others pay. You can't sex them by looking at the email domain. For example, I have an email account at hotmail.com which is free, and an account at yahoo.com, which I pay for. It won't surprise you to learn that email to my paid Yahoo! account gets through virtually all the time, with intelligent SPAM filtering, virus and spyware protection. Email to my Hotmail account is pokey, unreliable, and likely to wind up in the SPAM bin. The best defense against a pokey recipient is to join the fray. If you're having difficulty getting through to a recipient who uses AOL, open an AOL account and send from there. Intra-ISP transmission is fast, and subject to few rejections and misclassifications.

Don't Play in Traffic. Just as there are good and bad times to go to the mall, cross a busy street, or call a help desk for service, timing counts when sending email. As you might expect, first thing in the morning is a busy time for email, and Monday mornings are generally worst of all. Your email is more likely to get through quickly and with the least likelihood of loss if you send it later in the day, and in the middle of the week. Need more timing info? Check out the Internet Traffic Report .

Size Counts. Size counts in two ways. Large emails automatically receive a low priority and are delivered more slowly than small ones. And some emails, usually with large attachments, may be accepted on your end but turned away or just deleted on the receiving end. In general, emails less than 10 MB in size will get through -- eventually.

Makeup Matters. The makeup of your email -- how it looks and what it contains -- matters. Not only do the Intenet routers assign a lower priority to email with attachments, but many receiving ISPs, including AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Earthlink, and Yahoo!, check incoming mail for viruses and spyware, and machine-read email to filter for SPAM, and to place contextual ads.

HTML-formatted email and email with attachments that can harbor viruses or run spyware -- including *.doc, *.html, *.exe, *.pif, *.swf, *.com, *.bat -- will be processed more slowly, and sometimes mistakenly rejected or deleted. NB: AOL is infamous for deleting inbound email without notifying the sender or the recipient. Emails that include URLs, viz. website or email addresses, may also be misclassified. If your email address is not in your recipient's Accept List, makeup with care! Your best bet is short, plain-text email with no attachments.

Consider The Alternatives. Email is free. You can't pay anyone to guarantee when or if it's delivered. Important communications need to be sent by postal mail or a parcel delivery service. For quick and easy communication with a friend or collaboration with a business partner, consider Instant Messaging (AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Google, ICQ all offer free, and generally reliable services) or text messaging (Short Messaging Service). When it comes to communications, we can all take a lesson from the under-30 crowd.

Machinery & Equipment Appraisals

Kal Barrow, a machinery and equipment appraiser and the recent past President of the Northern New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Appraisers , asked " How come I'm not included in the Chapter's Directory of Appraisers ?"

The answer is that the Directory is a website directory -- you have to have a website to be in it, just as you need a telephone to be listed in the phone book. The analogy is apt. A modern business without a website is like one without a telephone two generations ago.

To get Kal into the Chapter Directory, we needed to get him a website. After checking out several alternatives, I set up a Gmail account for Kal, which let me build a site using Google's Page Creator . This looked good for several reasons: no cost, good choice of templates (skins), easy set up, no ads, and hosted by a company not likely to go out of business.

I gave it a good effort, but Page Creator is a poor choice if you're trying to build something other than a blog. Formatting the text was formidably difficult -- and I'm a website designer. I liked the layout and color scheme but had to fight to change font size, line spacing, centering, boldening, etc. Sayonara Page Creator.

I'd previously built a similar courtesy website for another machinery and equipment appraiser, Jim Tonkinson. But Jim's site took too long, and is hosted on my servers, so Jim has to contact me for updates and changes. I wanted something Kal could change and perhaps customize himself.

Having just completed a PBWiki for the Binghamton, NY July Fest , I decided to use that platform again. The wiki for Barrow Appraisal Associates is a little noisy visually -- wikis always are, especially free ones that include advertising -- but it tells Kal's story quickly and neatly.

Machinery and equipment appraisers are typically called in when a business changes hands -- think sales, acquisitions, mergers, bankruptcies, partnership dissolutions, estate settlements -- or needs financing. Often they collaborate with business valuation and real estate appraisers to get the full picture. They do appraisals and cost surveys, often giving testimony in court cases as expert witnesses. Their work covers most industries, including mines, factories, offices, etc. The best part of their job? Most, like Kal, are very well-traveled!

Kal offers over 40 years experience worldwide for a variety of clients and industries. Educated at New York University, he is a popular speaker and writer who "gives back" by teaching and contributing to professional organizations, like the American Society of Appraisers (ASA). If you're an attorney, accountant, business owner, manager, or governmental official looking for a top machinery and equipment appraiser, visit the Barrow Appraisal Associates website.

Binghamton, NY July Fest Wiki

What's a website designer doing with a PBWiki? Creating a webpage for Binghamton, NY's 44th annual July Fest , of course!

The July Fest arts and music festival is sponsored by the Downtown Binghamton Business Association (DBBA) of which my clients, Bob & Sallie Connelly, are prominent members and ardent supporters. One of the attractions this year is Bob Connelly's Binghamton Antique Roadshow, a free appraisal clinic that Bob, a master appraiser and local celebrity, will run with help from other area appraisers. When Sallie asked me to put the clinic on their Calendar of Events , I agreed, but noted that I couldn't find a webpage for the July Fest.

"Oh," said Sallie, "funds are low, and the DBBA never gets around to it. I'll send you the July Fest flyer , and when you put up the Clinic notice, I'll ask the papers to link to it."

Well, I wrote up Bob Connelly's Appraisal Clinic for their Calendar, wrote a PRWEB press release to get a little action for the Clinic and publicity for Bob (he deserves it) and the Fest, and decided to use this month's public service hours building a webpage for the July Fest.

I found a few mentions of past July Fests on the web and even one current mention, but relied on the flyer for most of the current information. First I made a list of the sponsors (where would a fest be without backers?), using Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search to ferret out websites and tag lines. Beside Bob and Sallie Connelly , the Fest has some really major sponsors -- IBM , Clear Channel Radio , and Crowley Foods -- and lots of local merchants, including some spirited ones, like the Brunelli Gallery and M&D-R-Nuts . Then I made a list of events, taking graphics from the flyer and making some to illustrate Bob's Appraisal Clinic, the Arts & Crafts Show, Artist's Showcase, Antique Car & Truck Show, Children's Area, and live music by Splash and the Morgan String Band .

I was writing the introduction when I realized that July Fest is an annual event and much of what I was preparing for this year's outing would be good for next year, and maybe some of what I was doing was inaccurate, or could be supplemented to advantage by others with more resources. And then I thought wiki. A wiki is a perfect way to display information about a topic in a way that can be easily modified, both by the original editor and by others, including others the editor wouldn't and couldn't know to invite.

And that's the story of the Binghamton July Fest wiki . Check it out, and if you're in the Binghamton, NY area on July 7 or 8, go see it in person. It's got something for everyone!