My New Novel: Bill The Vampire

I am pleased to announce that my new horror/comedy novel, Bill The Vampire is now available!

It is currently available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook. Available soon in Apple iBooks and in paperback format.

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There are reasons we fear the night.
He isn't one of them.

Meet Bill Ryder: programmer, gamer geek, and hopeless dweeb when it comes to women. All he ever asked for out of life was to collect his paycheck, hang out with his buds, and eventually (someday) ask out the girl of his dreams.

However, then Bill met Sally. She was mysterious, aggressive, and best of all...smoking hot. Bill never stood a chance. Before he knew what was happening Sally had lead him to his death, and that was only the beginning of his troubles.

Now Bill awakes to find himself an undead predator of the night. The only problem is he's still at the bottom of the food chain.

He's in way over his head, surrounded by creatures more dangerous, better looking, and a whole lot cooler than he is. Worst of all is the dreaded Night Razor, a master vampire who just can't stand him. He gives Bill a 90 day deadline to either prove himself or meet a more permanent kind of death, and the deck is definitely stacked against him.

But Bill isn't exactly average. A vampire like him hasn't been seen in over five centuries. He's got a few tricks up his sleeve, unlikely allies to help him out, and an attitude problem that makes him just too damn obnoxious to quit. He may just pull it off...if he doesn't get his teeth kicked in first.

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Please follow any of the links above and download a sample chapter. If you like what you see, the full text is available for $2.99

Busy week

I realize it's been a while since I posted. Besides being a semi slow news week (at least for anything I felt like discussing), I've also been fairly busy with a new novel I've been writing. It's in the finishing stages (minus editing) and I imagine I'll be done in another week or two and be able to give this blog some TLC again.

Head in the Cloud(s)

A few weeks back I posted my thoughts on the Dropbox situation, and also stated a few of my thoughts on "The Cloud" in general. With the recent announcements by Apple as to IOS 5, this is even more relevant.

Now don't get me wrong. I am very excited about some of the features of IOS 5, some of the cloud functionality amongst the things I'm excited about. I love the idea of using the cloud to house my media (songs, photos, video) for playback regardless where I am. I also, to a degree, like the idea of doing the same with some of my documents. Notice how I said some. That's the kicker. Some information, I have no problem being out there hosted on some servers that I have no control over. However, some I very much do mind. Hopefully IOS 5 will be smart enough to allow me to pick and choose which information I want backed up, and which I do not.

Case in point: my resume: fly it away to the clouds, I say.
My taxes: No, so sorry. I'd prefer to be the sole non-government owner of that information.

My concerns here are both privacy and security minded. I believe what I've mentioned above should cover most of the privacy portion just fine. As for the rest, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out with regards to law enforcement. Personally I'm not worried about this one for myself, but certainly there will come a case where the police demand access to someone's slice of the cloud, whether or not justified. We should all be keeping an eye out to see what sort of precedents get set once that happens.

As for security, just to get it out of the way, let's not be silly. I have no delusions that whatever safeguards Apple will have in place won't look like Fort Knox compared to my tiny (but fairly solid) home network security. That being said, Apple is also a much larger target than myself.

I'm uneasy with the prospect of potentially sensitive information being stolen as part of a mass data breach. Obviously, if my home network is compromised the data is just as gone. However, as I just mentioned there's the concept of scope here. Outside of a virus or other malware that manages to slip through my scanners, someone targeting me would need to actually target me. That probably means that somewhere down the line I pissed off someone I shouldn't have. That's kind of on my head. Outside of that, I have some relative security through the obscurity of just being another pc in my neighborhood. In short, I don't stay up most nights worrying about hackers brute-force attacking me. Whatever encryption and other security Apple or other tenders of the Cloud have in place, they're going to be major targets and I for one would prefer to not have my deepest darkest secrets just lying around in the Cloud should another Sony PSN debacle come about.

How about just watching the movie you paid to see?

Reblogged from a link from gizmodo, comes this story. I love this. In this day and age we all know how important customer service is. However, having been there myself a few times, I can attest that the customer is not always right. This is especially true if accommodating one individual's inappropriateness comes at the cost of harming the whole. In other words, I love that this company not only sticks to its guns with regards to their policy, but isn't afraid to throw it back in your face if you feel entitled to violate it (and annoy the rest of the theater). Kudos to them, and here's hoping that the 'victim' of this maybe has a moment of introspection down the line and realizes the wrongness of their attitude. I doubt it'll happen, but one can always hope.

I'm taking my internets and going home

Fox News reports that Iran is building their own internet because the current one isn't to their government's liking what with all the free thinking going on. Yeah I'm sure that'll work just 'fine'.

When will governments (and businesses for that matter) learn, it's too late. The cat's already out of the bag with regards to online. The more you tell people 'no', the harder they'll try to get around you. The more security you put in place to stop them, the more innovative they'll become to circumvent it.

There have already been many reported protests across the world with regards to tampering with online access (see France and their 3 strikes law). In Egypt, cutting off internet access, was apparently the last item in a long list of grievances that caused them to rise up against their government. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before there's a full scale rebellion somewhere in the world based entirely on a government's attempt at online censorship.

Tablet advertising rant

Over the memorial day weekend, I happened to catch a couple of different commercials advertising Research In Motion's Blackberry Playbook. The two Playbook commercials respectively showed their users watching Thor and X-Men: First Class on it. Thor is only a few weeks old and still in the movie theaters. X-Men isn't even out yet. So either these commercials were telling me I could potentially watch either new or unreleased movies on this tablet, or they were telling me I could watch their trailers on the Playbook. If the first, then this is grossly misleading as I don't seem to be able to find these movies for sale or for rent anywhere other then an actual theater yet. Unless of course, RIM is suggesting I can watch pirated movies on my new tablet. If so, this is a novel advertising technique. If the latter, which is more likely, however, then now all they're telling me is I can do the same thing I can do on an ipad, smartphone, or literally ANYTHING I can get an internet connection on. My son has an old Samsung Instinct feature phone, and he can watch movie trailers on it. Not much of an advertising incentive in that case.

I seem to recall a Motorola Xoom commercial doing the same a few months back. Sadly, this seems to be a trend in advertising for devices such as these, showing media that you simply cannot obtain legally at the time of the devices' launch. The other alternative is that they're giving me a glimpse into a possible future where I MIGHT be able to one day watch Thor on my Playbook. Unfortunately, I don't buy products based on what they might offer me months down the line. Judging by the sales of the Xoom, which has been out for a while now, neither do a lot of other people. It still remains to be seen whether the same will be said of the Playbook.

Price Matching

As an e-commerce professional I personally consider it a negative value-add if the retail stores of whatever company I am working for refuse to match the price shown on the company e-commerce website. As a customer, this practice absolutely ticks me off to no end. Yet I seem to be running into it more and more and so are many others. The Consumerist website has many such 'horror' stories, including this one of a Best Buy that outright says up front, sorry, no website match for you. Of course, I'm sure a good deal of you are also familiar with Best Buy being caught, in the past, hosting a different version of their website, with different pricing, within their stores. So whether or not their assistance with helping you place an online order gives you any peace of mind is entirely up to you.

As for the practice as a whole, I understand cost of goods sold and the finances involved, yet what I don't understand is why stores are willing to alienate their customers' future purchases by doing this. For starters it adds confusion. Persons not as well versed in the retail environment will probably not understand why your website has the item listed as cheaper. Double this confusion if your website offers 1) free shipping and/or 2) in-store pickup. More importantly, you've just scored yourself a customer with a negative experience. We've already established the customer is already versed with the web (having figured out the price differences already), thus it's probably fair to assume this negative experience will be shared via facebook or twitter. As this customer is presumably at least partially web-savvy, he / she also knows how easy it is to just go elsewhere. Sure you might make a few extra dollars on that in-store sale, if I really need the item today. However, you can be sure that I'll think twice before coming back to you in either online or offline format.

While one negative experience and potential lost future customer might not mean a lot, think of that multiplied. Once mighty chains such as Blockbuster and Borders have either disappeared or are on the brink of doing so, because customers went elsewhere for whatever reason. As a business owner or manager, there are definitely lines in the sand you want to draw when it comes to customer concessions. This, however, I don't think is one of them. An unruly customer who asks for an unreasonable discount is one thing, a customer who simply asks you to match the price another division of the SAME company is already offering is a completely different thing.

In a perfect world online and offline prices would match. Please be sure to let me know when you find that perfect world so I can move there too. However, in the case where store price doesn't match the online price, a policy of just "no" makes little sense. If a customer checks out and pays your offline price, that's great. No harm, no foul. However, if they specifically ask to speak to a manager regarding the discrepancy, consider the positives and the negatives of the situation. You could be setting in motion a chain of events that will effect your future. Whether those events are positive or negative is largely up to you.