Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Overpriced? Oh, come on.

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(Disclaimer: Long, rambling post ahead. This originally started as a comment in response to some comments on this post and others I’ve seen in the past day. This probably isn’t my best written or most coherent rant ever, but here it is.)

Since the official feature and pricing list for TypePad went up yesterday evening, I’ve seen quite a few people grousing about TypePad being overpriced, especially for the Pro package. I don’t think it’s overpriced at all, and will be quite happily signing up for an TypePad Pro account.

First off, about this “free MovableType” that people keep referencing. Sure, MT can be legally downloaded and used for free — however, it’s far better to give a donation if you continue to use it. I’ll save the ranting on the current desire for everything to be free for later, but for now, suffice to say that I’m of the belief that purchasing the software you use regularly is a good thing. The Trotts have put incredible amounts of time and effort into creating what I feel is the best blogging back end application available, and I quite happily sent in a donation to pay for my MT license.

Now, about my present server situation. I’ve been running my personal website, including a MT powered blog, off of my own computer in my apartment for years now. In other words, essentially free, without even the costs of paying for a hosting provider. Theoretically unlimited disk space (as long as I can add new drives, I won’t run out of space). No monthly bandwidth cap. No ads. No limitations on what I can do with my site (I could, in theory, run a porn server without any hassle. It’s a direction I’ve never wanted to go, but I could). My only sacrifices are that my transfer speed is somewhat limited by my DSL line (which, when dealing with text and images, isn’t much of a sacrifice at all over a T1-speed DSL connection), and I don’t have a top-of-the-line server, so it’s not always the speediest on the ‘net (again, though, the majority of the time this isn’t even noticed when just serving text and graphics).

So, I’ve been living with most of the benefits of paying for a hosting service, without the costs, and with the added benefits of having total control over my webserver. I can tweak Apache’s http.conf file to my heart’s content. I can install any number of CGI scripts, SQL databases, or other toys without limit. I don’t even have to deal with uploading and downloading files to my site — all I have to do is copy from one directory on my computer to another, and everything’s good to go.

Why in the world, then, would I want to pay $15/month (not counting any discounts I get for being a TypePad beta tester) to relinquish that amount of control over my site?

Quite a few reasons, actually.

First off, when did $15 become so horridly expensive a price? That’s nothing. It’s the price of an evening at the movies (ticket plus drink and snack) for one person. It’s what, two and a half decent sized coffee’s from Starbucks? Less than the price of having a single medium Domino’s pizza delivered to your door. Less than three packs of cigarettes, if you’re a smoker (and heavy smokers can go through that in a day, let alone a month). These days, it’s less than a full tank of gas.

Next, everything you get with your account. Merely looking at the feature list doesn’t really convey how completely cool some of these features are. You get all the functionality and benefits of a MovableType installation (plus quite a few) without having to bother with the installation itself, without having to worry about which Perl modules are or aren’t installed (Do I have access to Image::Magick? If not, can I get it installed? What about the alternatives?), without having to worry about your hosting provider throttling MT when it tries to grab processor time during a rebuild. Basically, without any of the issues that running your own installation can present. Now, admittedly, for many people, these issues are trivial, and easily dealt with — I’ve faced and conquered quite a few myself — but many other people aren’t going to want to have to worry about things like this.

You also get the extras that are built into TypePad, some of which have been covered this week during the Five Days of TypePad series. Simple, built-in moblogging, allowing you to quickly and easily post from your cell phone, PDA, or by e-mail — a feature I haven’t played with, but other people have said good things about. Amazingly easy photo albums. TypeLists, which have made maintaining the sidebars on this website incredibly easy — the four blogrolls on the right, and the ‘Destinations’, ‘Bookshelf’, and ‘Noises’ lists on the left are all TypeLists.

Beyond all that, there’s the interface itself. The template builder makes the basic layout and design of a simple weblog ridiculously easy: choose a basic layout style, which features you want displayed, and drag and drop them into place. If you want to go beyond the basics, you have access to the source code, complete with all of the MovableType template tags you’re already used to using, and you can tweak and customize to your hearts content. I could easily have duplicated the design and style of my old weblog here at TypePad if I’d wanted to, however it was more fun to play with the built-in tools until I got a basic design that I liked, then go into the code to tweak it from there, with an end result that I like better than what I had before.

Also, for me (and this is somewhat specific to my situation), the speed is a definite improvement. As I mentioned above, my home server isn’t the speediest in the word. While this doesn’t affect me much for simple page serving, it does tend to show a little bit when people are leaving comments on my site, and it shows more for me on the administration end when I’m navigating within the MT interface. By moving to TypePad, everything’s far speedier to work with — combine that with the ease of use of the new interface, and it’s well worth it.

Now, there are a few things that I’m giving up in order to move over here. TypePad users don’t have the ability to muck around directly with the source code of the back end software. This precludes using some of the hacks that involved tweaking the MovableType source code. Adding MovableType plug-ins is also not an option. For some people, this is going to be a very strong and valid reason not to use TypePad — there are a lot of very impressive, very powerful hacks and plug-ins available for MovableType. Some of these I’ve used, and losing their functionality is a little disappointing — however, the majority of the time (for me), they fell into the “here’s a neat trick, I’m going to play with it for a while” category, and not the “this is functionality that I don’t want to live without” category, so I’m willing to lose those specific bells and whistles for the new bells and whistles I get to use here at TypePad.

In the end, for me, the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages. That may not be the case for everyone, and I realize this — however, I think that the complaint that TypePad is overpriced is silly at best, and almost offensively self-centered at worst. There are already a good few years of development sunk into MovableType, plus the extra time and effort that has been put into scaling MovableType up into a public service like TypePad. Is all that time worth nothing at all? From the number of people declaring how they’ll stay with MovableType because it’s free, it seems that that seems to be a very prominent (and sad) attitude.

For myself, though, I’ve paid for MovableType, and I’m going to pay for my continued residence here at TypePad. For me, the features are worth it, the ease of use is worth it, and I’m supporting the hard work that Ben and Mena (and Anil, Brenna, and anyone else at Six Apart) have put into MovableType over the years. They’ve done an incredible job with the services and software packages that they offer, and I’m happy to stick with them.

So I’m staying. :)

Construction is fun!

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The building I work in on the Microsoft campus (123) is flanked on the south and east by two buildings that used to belong to another company, but were purchased by Microsoft sometime in the past year. Until yesterday, the buildings had sat unused for the past few months. However, yesterday barricades went up blocking off the parking lot for the two buildings, and today signs declaring ‘DANGER: CONSTRUCTION AREA’ went up. Looks like there is going to be renovation work on the two buildings, plus the addition of a four-story parking garage (I’m guess that that’s going to replace the parking lot, but I’m not terribly sure on that). The barricades are up, workmen are starting to clear out some of the landscaping, and trucks are starting to fill the parking lot.

Talking about this with one of my co-workers, I found out that there’s also a rumor that our building might be slated for work, too. This one’s purely in the rumor stage, so who knows how accurate it is, but still.

I just can’t seem to escape construction these days. If it’s not my apartment building, it’s my job. What fun!

Leadership

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A leader is best
when people barely know he exists;
…when his work is done, his aim fulfilled;
they will say,
“We did it ourselves.”

— Lao Tzu

I wanna push da button!

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Rock on — there’s a couple workmen poking around at the elevator right now. I’m not going to lay any bets that it’ll be working today (or even in the next month), especially since it’s been broken for the past three months or so (this apartment wasn’t a fourth-floor walkup when I moved in), but at least someone’s looking at it. This gives me hope.

Remembering Binky

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Can anyone find me the famous picture from around 1994 of Binky the polar bear prancing around his cage in the Alaska Zoo with the Australian tourist’s sneaker hanging out of his mouth?

Just in case you’re not an Alaskan (or Austrailan, I hear the story was pretty popular down there, too), and want to know what I’m babbling about…

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)- A polar bear that chewed on a couple of folks may seem an unlikely cult hero. But this is Alaska, and, well, things are different here.

Not that people don’t feel sympathy for those nursing their wounds, it’s just that Alaskans think you get what you deserve when you act stupid around a wild animal – even one that lives in a zoo.

“I feel sorry for the people who got hurt, but in both cases it was their own fault,” says Sammye Seawell, director of the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage, where Binky the polar bear lives.

The first problem arose in July, when an Australian tourist paid a high price for venturing too close to Binky’s cage.

The woman was climbing over the second of two safety rails to get a close-up photo when the 850-pound bear stuck his head through the bars and grabbed her in his jaws.

She escaped with a broken leg and bite wounds. Another visitor caught the scuffle on videotape, including a shot of Binky pacing around his pen later with the woman’s red and white running shoe in his mouth.

That attack spawned a T-shirt featuring Binky, the shoe and the words \”Send more tourists – this one got away.

Alaska shook its collective head and chalked the mauling up to tourist naivete. The woman later earned a measure of local respect by admitting she was at fault and promising not to sue.

Six weeks later, the 20-year-old bear was back on the front page. Two Anchorage teenagers decided – apparently after a long night of drinking – to take a dip in the pool Binky shares with his furry companion, Nuka.

Police say the pair snuck into the zoo and were stripping down in front of the cage when Binky showed up and locked his jaws onto one of them.

The teen was pulled away by his friend, but not before Binky had left him with leg injuries. Both teens face trespassing and underage drinking charges.

Since then, it’s been take-no-prisoners Binkymania.

There are jokes – “The state won’t be asking for any jail time for the kid – it already has its pound of flesh.”

There are more hot-selling T-shirts – “Binky for Governor: Take a Bite Out of Crime.” There is music – a local comedy revue worked up a rap song by “Bad Blood Binky” that includes the lines “Drink a case of Bud and act real cool – Like a teenage mutant brain-dead fool.”

There have been editorial cartoons – one shows Binky saying to Nuka, “Mauled teen-ager, my butt – how about ‘Hero bear prevents youth from drowning?”

And there have been letters to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News. Lots of them, all pro-Binky.

“When foolish people place their name on Binky’s dinner menu, we should have the decency to allow Binky to eat his entire meal, in peace,” one said.

Another encouraged zoo keepers to set aside a day for people to come and play with Binky if they want to: \”This program would solve two problems. The food bill for Binky would be reduced and the test scores for our schools would certainly rise.

Zoo director Seawell says she’s gotten more than 100 letters from around the world, and not one of them blamed the bear.

To protect the bears from the visitors, the zoo has erected two strands of electric wire outside the cage and installed a motion detector that blares an alarm.

— AP report from Sept. 1994

Man-U 4, Celtic 0

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That. So. Rocked.

Manchester United vs. Celtic

Phil and I bailed from work a little after 7pm, caught the bus into town, and got off just about four blocks from Seahawks Stadium. Walked in, and found our way to our seats — which, as you can see from the above shot, were incredible! About thirteen rows back, practically right on the goal line. Even better, the entrance that the teams came out of to get on the field was directly to our left — there were a few too many people in the way for me to get a really good shot of them taking the field, though. Still, just being close enough that I could clearly see their faces was great.

Turns out that Seattle is definitely primarily a Man-U town. There were definitely Celtic fans in the crowd, but the roar every time Man-U scored or prevented a goal was pretty telling. The game itself was almost schizophrenic, though. Celtic played a very offensive game, and Man-U couldn’t seem to keep the ball out of their side of the field for the majority of the game, but the few times they did manage to push the ball down the field they scored almost every time. Their goalie, though, did an astounding job for the whole game — while the defense was good enough that Celtic didn’t get too many shots, he didn’t let any of them get through. Just gorgeous to watch.

In the end, Man-U took the game, four to nothing — a total shutout. There was also an announcement midway through the second half of the game that the final attendance tally was 66,722 people in the stadium! Blew my mind, and apparently that was record attendance for the stadium, too! Kind of funny when a soccer game creates more of a draw than the local sports teams do — but then, this was one hell of a soccer game.

All in all, one hell of an evening. While I’m sorry that Phil’s girlfriend couldn’t make it…damn but that was fun!

Update: Writeups are already posted on the local news sites.