Mr. France-y Pants

If you can believe it, I disappeared over the past few days to Paris, France. Yes, that Paris, France: land of unconscionably good baked goods, storybook architecture and head-shakingly beautiful women. Since my father now lives there, I’ll be visiting fairly often (even if my last trip there was nearly a year ago), which poses a semi-interesting question for blogging purposes: should I even bother posting about a trip to a romantic locale when those trips are common-place enough to be not particularly romantic? It wouldn’t seem to make for particularly good reading if I did, which is part of the reason I didn’t even bother to leave a ‘Gone to France’ post last Thursday afternoon, when I flew out.

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The War on Error-ism

Movable TypeSomething’s up with my installation of Movable Type and/or the MySQL database powering it. Often, during the publishing process — after hitting Save or Rebuild — the application will fail in its attempt to get a response back from the server. What results is a message that says, “Internal Server Error.” Fun, right?

This was something I started to see a few months ago, about the same time that I upgraded, after much delay, to Movable Type version 3.3. (To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that the upgrade was the cause of the problem.)

At first, I thought I was only seeing it on the administrative end, when I was editing posts, creating new ones, or managing comments. Then I started to realize that users were seeing it, too, because I suddenly started to get multiple copies of comments, often published in quick succession. Obviously, people were — and in fact, all evidence indicates that they still are — submitting their comments, encountering this error, and then, thinking their remarks weren’t successfully published, submitting them again until some sort of confirmation indication appears.

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Good Experience: Thoughts on Customer-led Marketing

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2 of 5 stars
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“This trend, so the thinking goes, allows customers to ‘own’ a brand by creating their own uses and extensions of it… Like all quick-hit trends, [customer-led marketing is) as delicious as the maraschino cherry on top of a sundae; and about as nutritious, too. Taste it, perhaps, but don’t forget the ‘meal,’ no matter how everyday or unglamorous it may seem::providing a simple, basic customer experience.”

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