Terry Howard

Personal blog of Terry Howard, guy from Orlando, Florida that likes fishing, literature, technology and saying what's on his mind.

Terry Howard
Orlando, Florida

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Orlando Weekly: Grow Up

Posted by Terry Howard @ 10/24/2007

Last week 3 employees of the Orlando Weekly, a local cultural and "alt-press" publication, were arrested by the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation for allegedly selling ad space in their paper to prostitutes, specifically "aiding and abetting prostitution" as the charges were laid out.

Their response? This excuse for journalism. Here's the deal guys. You got caught knowingly taking money and placing ads supporting a blatant criminal activity. The response of a 2 year old is to say, "but other kids were doing it to" and begin to point fingers around the room. The next step of an immature child being confronted with wrongdoing is to start bawling and say, "you hate me, you're just being mean." Guess what guys. That whole article, yeah, it was like listening to a 2 year old caught doing something wrong and acting like 100% a big fricken baby. Grow up and take your punishment like a man.

And freedom of the press arguments? Uh, that's lame. Freedom of the press doesn't give you license to profit from criminal activities. It just doesn't. I've been plenty critical of police organizations for various issues. But you know what? If I was running ads for crack cocaine alongside those articles and the hammer comes down, well, I would deserve it.

Labels: idiots, press

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Gooruze Needs To Go Back in the Oven

Posted by Terry Howard @ 10/17/2007

I learned about Gooruze, a new social network for online marketers, from Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim blog. Andy is partnering with this venture and the public launch of the site was earlier this week. It is such a good idea initially, it's like the incredibly useful and addictive Sphinn (Danny Sullivan's Digg style news site for marketers) but one step beyond and towards the FaceBook model.

So I jumped right on board when I read the initial launch press release. But I find myself having to just stop going to the site and try it again in maybe 3 months or so. After realizing that mine and everyone else's initial activity has been nothing more than pointing out the endless myriad of bugs, missing critical features, design flaws and on and on, I just have to ask myself: Why am I bothering?

It's a great alpha, but you guys opened this site up before you bothered to even implement relevant title tags, RSS feeds, or even basic cross browser testing for CSS issues. This should never have been launched in this state and presented to the online marketing industry of all people. You target audience should never be your beta testers.

Labels: marketing, social networks

Maybe .NET Needs Spell Check Too

Posted by Terry Howard @ 10/08/2007

So I'm working along in Microsoft AdCenter and suddenly the .NET monstrosity stops working. So I try to navigate back and get ASP errors thrown at me. Next I get 500 errors. Finally I get some kind of actual system delivered error page from the homepage of the service. It looked like this:

It had two misspellings, one right in the headline! The items are highlighted. Microsoft, you are too big a boy to be told that you need to perform quality control and spell check your public pages. But, there you have it. Perhaps I'll let customer support know about the error, if I ever get to log back in. Been about 30 minutes now and the whole service is still down, 3pm EST on a Monday. Wow.

Labels: failure, microsoft