Thursday, January 3, 2002

Travel

I'm driving to L.A. and back today (in a few hours after I get some sleep). It'll shoot the day.

Meanwhile, I don't have an answer for Mike's question about Opinion Journalism (opine amongst yourselves), but I do appreciate his pointage to Uncorked.com's Medley blog, which features the 2001 Medley Medals, which point to a whole parallel universe of Other Blogs, most of which are drawn from The Portal, a huge blogrolling list that overlaps surprisingly little with my own blogrolling list, and with those of those who tend to link to me and the people I link to a lot, etc. Which is good for cross-pollination and all that.

Anyway, the award winners are worthy discoveries. (I really like Isomorphisms, for example. Dig the writing in Letter to Vancouver.)

Blog spawn

In addition to correcting the RadioUserland rule by which this blog dates itself, Steve Hooker treats us to a list of his own blogs that bloggles the mind.

Marek's Familiar Quotations

The blogeur of Soapbox treats us to a long list of Bartlett's-worthy quotes from Gonzo Marketing on the Cluetrain List. One morsel: The most successful branding campaign ever carried out was the branding of brand itself.

Crow? It's not bad. Eat it all the time.

A year ago, Accenture was an object of mockery (scroll down to "Who? Wha?). Now it's one of 2001's true success stories (scroll down to the Accenture logo).

Next target: silliness

Remember Monty Python's Terry Jones? He says this in the Telegraph:

WHAT really alarms me about President Bush's "war on terrorism" is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? It's rather like bombing murder.

Imagine if Bush had said: "We're going to bomb murder wherever it lurks. We are going to seek out the murderers and the would-be murderers, and bomb any government that harbours murderers."

Later he adds,

It's hard for abstract nouns to surrender. In fact it's very hard for abstract nouns to do anything at all of their own volition - even trained philologists can't negotiate with them. It's difficult to find their hide-outs, useless to try to cut off their supplies.

Thanks to Breaching the Web and Pith & Vinegar for that one.

Discredit card services

I'm catching up on some year-end stuff. Expense reports, things like that. Going through my files and piles, I seem to be missing several credit card statements. Long since paid, I'm only looking for the data: plane fares, payments to hotels, etc. So my sister suggests that I sign up and take advantage the card's online customer service system. All the credit card companies have them, she figures. So I go to FirstUSA, which administers my United Mileage Plus VISA card, and sign up for Cardmember Services. So far so good.

Then I see I have basically three choices: 1) look at my current account satatus (available credit, next payment due date, pending charges, cash advance limit, etc.); 2) Pay online; and 3) transfer a balance (a mild expression for moving debt from elsewhere to this card).

What about looking up old statements? I click on Explore Cardmember Services. Nothing there. I click on the Select Actions pop-out menu. Nice: I can look at any of the last three statements, plus activity since the last statement. It's current through 1/1/02. I can also search through activity over the last 90 days. But what about the older activity?

The best I can do is "Download Activity." Here I have a choice of "Download to Microsoft Money," Download to Quicken" and "Download QIF Files." QIF is apparently an older Quicken format. What's wrong with Excel (.xls)? Or just plain text separated by commas or tabs? Because it doesn't involve partnerships with software companies, methinks.

The thing is, I don't want this information in my accounting package anyway. I just want the facts. Dates, names and amounts. It's not that complicated.

Anyway, it smells of e-marketing, and it's annoying. So: nyah.