(I hope wordpress is okay with this embed.)

I recently had a similar head scratching moment with your company PBwiki.

I’ve been using your site for about a year now and wanted to upgrade to a premium account for the storage space. I filled out the form to upgrade on a Saturday but was surprised to find that it was just a contact form, I couldn’t upgrade online I had to wait for a sales rep to contact me. Your sales rep did contact me back on Sunday morning no less, but he said that you only offer annual contracts and that he would email me a contract for me to sign and fax back? I thought he was joking, I can’t remember doing a web transaction like that since maybe ‘97 when I had to transfer a domain name.

Your new site PB 2.0 is great, I really like it, but not being able to upgrade your account online and signing and faxing annual contracts is a really inefficient way to do business online. Like I said I think PB2.0 is great and I will continue to use it, but stick with the free version while storing and embedding my documents into the wiki with http://www.docstoc.com to avoid having to spend an hour printing, signing, scanning, emailing documents back and forth like it was a mortgage for an $8 monthly charge.

Also, annual contracts are very cell phone company like, you will keep me as a customer if you keep innovating like you have over the last year not because I signed a contract - 37Signals has the right approach by giving you the first month free and paying month to month after that.

I hope this feedback is valuable and thanks for a great product!

-Brian

I’m not sure I agree the singularity is past, but I will agree it the start of it is past. Even if it is past, what’s next?

“What you get done is more important than what you do” seems in perfect alignment with the Druckerism “focus on what you can contribute, not what you can achieve.”

Regarding determinism, it’s been a struggle for me to deny the obviously deterministic behavior of the universe when a teleological model seems to be much more rewarding as purposeful beings ourselves. Free will could be an illusion, but so could determinism. Is the glass half full or half empty? In reality it’s both, but one perspective is definitely more *useful* than the other. Right?

<3

Let’s hope that we become more socially responsible and move away from the McMansions or at least have them be “green”! (perhaps an oxymoron)

I personally don’t feel these homes are warm and inviting but they do serve a purpose for corporate executives who have a lifestyle where it’s expected they live & entertain in these types of homes. Perhaps an adjustment in mind-set is in order?

It is encouraging that segments of our population are asking for eco-friendly homes and homes which are designed with open living spaces and spaces which are used on a daily basis.

One of my favorite books on responsible design is by Sarah Susanka, The Not so Big House:

http://www.notsobighouse.com/books.asp

I think statistically, it’s a fairly small portion of our population that can afford the McMansions & a larger segment who are driving the demand for sustainable housing. San Francisco is becoming a leader in this arena with both commercial and residential projects!

Thanks for your thoughtful, speedy, and personal response. The service seems very useful so I could definitely see engaging it at some point. But yes, it sounds like your CS reps could use a little retraining. ^_^

-David

This is not what Boingo strives for in customer service, and I apologize for such service. We are currently in the process of refresher courses in our CS offices, and tracking down who you spoke with - and retraining them from step one. This is not how we treat our customers at Boingo, and not the service we provide. Ping me via email and I’ll set you up and show you why Boingo is a great service for road warriors. GoBoingo is a pretty cool product, where it lets you know when you are in a Boingo hotspot wherever you are (100K+ hotspots worldwide).

BTW, we have a few 6 degree connections - Kyle from your past, Kristine from your present.

I think one of the reasons people really like all the semi-useless details found in modern new houses is that it really lets them know that they aren’t living in an apartment anymore.

If you go on craigslist and look at pictures of apartments for rent, 70% of them have completely interchangeable interiors, no matter where they are in the country. It’s that style that started in the 1960s two-story stucco box apartments - the interiors of these buildings almost invariably have small bedrooms with white walls, 3 inch wide white plastic vertical blinds, and a dingy beige carpet. If you look at the kitchen, it will have fluorescent lights and speckled or beige formica countertops. It’s not really inspiring. Obviously the styles differ more in the northeastern cities that have a lot of older apartment stock.

But I think there is still a widespread appeal of really feeling like you have moved up a level in terms of your “residence consumption.”

As a side note, I don’t even think the classic postmodernist buildings of the late 70s-90s got the public spaces right. They may be scorned in architectural circles, but the neo-historical buildings that try to look old do actually manage to feel inviting.

- Rem Koolhaas, designer of the Seattle Public Library, one of my other favorite libraries for totally different reasons

This is one of the reasons why I want to go into Historic Preservation. Modern architecture neglects the details in the rush to make building cheaper and faster. There are hundreds of magazines revolving around an attempt at “gracious living” inspired by the homes of a century past, but not a single one succeeds. The style is derivative, passed through the lens of a modern designer’s eye without the necessary attention to detail, much less any understanding of the *reasons* for those details. Thus, modern attempts at reproduction fall short, feel hollow and unsatisfying, leave their tenants shifty and unhappy once the initial period of novelty wears off.

There’s a great article on reproduction bias in clothing called “Ruritanian Purple Feathers and Other Problems of Documentation”, which is sadly no longer available without ordering a large volume of SCA lore. The gist of the article is that every person copying *anything* (a painting, a page of text, an architectural style, etc) adds their own bias, and it takes long study and careful practice to overcome that. Most people have not the time or the inclination to invest that much in something that’s viewed as patently unoriginal. Americans hate anything that could be deemed “unoriginal”. It’s one of the biggest insults handed around. From an anthropological viewpoint, it’s interesting to see the tension between “originality” and “authenticity.” Design originality is seen as authentic to the individual, but authenticity to something else is considered copying.

The anthropologist in me also observes that the addition of the wing may have been intentionally industrial. Back in the 60’s, industrial was modern and exciting. We were going to the moon! We were working on building computers weighing under a ton! We could make clothes out of plastic! Industrial was futuristic and high tech and neato, and the designers didn’t have a sense of the isolating and alienating effect that it would have further down the line. In a few years, I suspect that it’ll start to look quaint and nostalgic among a certain set, the same as 1956 Cheverolets, push-button transmissions, and Mid-century Modern designs do today.

What you’ve observed about master suites and master retreats is true. The current trends in design are for privacy, and some would argue alienation and loneliness. (The meatspace reaction to a lack of privacy online?) Buildings today are bigger, not more thoughtful, because we’re still trying to get over our bigger-is-better mindset. But Hummer dealerships are going out of business, and the suburban populations are collapsing in on themselves and drifting more and more into the cities, so change is coming. The problem, at least in domestic architecture as I see it, is that these ideas don’t trickle-up well, and those who have the money have spent a long time getting it in order to gratify their (possibly now-outmoded) wishes. We have to wait for the next generation of builders, I think, to get much in the way of new design schema.

http://blog.mozilla.com/mrz/2008/01/24/china-amsterdam-san-jose-and-global-load-balancing/

through

http://blog.mozilla.com/mrz/2008/03/10/hello-china-part-iii./