I love the garage band sound on some of the Stones’ early records.

Speaking of the garage band sound, an awesome song by The Stone Roses.

And finally some newer garage band vibe from The Raveonettes.

I’m about to save you some time, and make your mobile videos a lot more interesting.

If you have any interest whatsoever in filming anything at all on your iPhone, you need to buy Video Camera from i4software.  All the creativity they did not use when thinking up that name was spent making an amazingly simple but powerful app that lets you edit video while you film it, compile clips, create transitions, add music and credits and then share it with a single click.  All from your iPhone.

Here’s a test video I made within the first 5 minutes after I bought the app.

The point is not that this is a great film.  It’s not.  The point is that the film is 2 minutes long and took about three minutes, total, to make.  Then I uploaded it to YouTube, right from the app.

You can even use multiple iOS devices and combine the clips into a single project.  There are some helpful tutorials to get you started here.

Video Camera (I’m guessing the developer’s dog’s name is Dog) costs $8.00, which is a lot in app dollars.  But it’s a screaming bargain when you see how easy it is to make and share videos.

The experience is not perfect.  I had some crashes, especially when re-editing a saved project.  The audio import function doesn’t play well with iCloud (the iCloud based songs show up on the list but cannot be imported).

Video Camera will record in 1080- be sure to go to the settings and increase the quality right away.  But my video exported to YouTube in 360p.  That’s not good enough.  I could probably import the less compressed video via my iMac, but that sort of defeats the purpose.

There’s some work to be done, but for quick and easy video projects, Video Camera is just about perfect.

Cat Boxing, 1894.  That’s right 18.

Cat Juggling

So Who’s the Real Pussy, Again?

My current favorite of the mix-tape sites is 8tracks.

Here’s our third mix.  25 great alt. county songs you’ve probably never heard.  Probably the best mix I’ve ever rolled.

Enjoy.  Share.  Tell your friends.

Rancho Mix Volume 3 from newsome on 8tracks.

Archive

Rancho Mix Volume 1
Rancho Mix Volume 2

If you don’t think SOPA and PIPA will affect you, you are wrong.  If you aren’t adding your voice to the millions who oppose these bills, you should.  Now.  Before it’s too late.

Learn.

Sign.

Write.

Scream, yell, stomp your foot.

Be heard.  Make a difference.

Not this.

I hope trying to fix Yahoo doesn’t turn the latter into the former.  So I’m going to help.  You want to fix Yahoo, here’s an easy place to start.

News.  Stay with me here, Scott.  I’m serious.

I’m neither a Yahoo lover nor a Yahoo hater.  I don’t and won’t use it for email or web searches.  I do like (and pay for) Flickr, but that’s not a big enough application to be a flagship product.

What I like best about Yahoo is its news.  For whatever reason, I find myself reading current news at or via Yahoo more than any other source.  Either via My Yahoo or the news headlines I have programed onto my start page.  I just like the way Yahoo news stories are presented and formatted.

Much of my news was, for many years, consumed via My Yahoo, until I capitulated  to iGoogle (and specifically the Google News widget there) sometime last year.  But still, My Yahoo is much more user friendly.  Among other reasons, because it doesn’t put your stock portfolio in micro, barely readable fonts.  But like many Yahoo products, it seems like it’s being ignored into oblivion.  In fact, much of Yahoo news is being ignored.

For example, at the bottom of many Yahoo news pages are so-called “Editor’s Picks” articles.  I noticed these hard to miss British flag boots months ago.

The problem is that the same story has been an “Editor’s Pick” since June 23, 2011.  Those are some lazy editors.

It doesn’t give me much incentive to click through to those picks.  Not very sticky.

I think Yahoo could be a real player in the personalized news aggregation space, if it would devote some time and resources to My Yahoo and its news offerings.  Microsoft can’t market its way out of a wet paper bag when it comes to online offerings.  Apple doesn’t care about being an online news source.  Neither does Amazon.  The Huffington Post isn’t very appealing, presentation wise.  iGoogle is butt-ugly. Google News is nice, but not very customizable.  Contrary to what some people would like you to believe,  Twitter (follow me via that link) sucks for news (actually in general, including for news).   There seems to be an opportunity here.

So, c’mon Scott, go for it.

And as my payment for putting you on the right track, please don’t kill off Yahoo Pipes.  Still the most under-appreciated thing on the internets.

Today comes a mind-boggling- at least to me- related development.

Microsoft is allegedly thinking about paying retail sales people a bounty on each Windows 7 phone they sell:

According to Paul Thurrott, Microsoft has put together a $200MM war chest of cash to help promote Windows Phone 7, and is willing to pay store staff between $10 and $15 bounty for each Windows Phone 7 handset they sell, depending on how many units each person sells.

Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time (which is a position taken by some commenters in the Cult of Mac post linked above).  Maybe the hidden agenda is everywhere.  Maybe every retail store is a just a  giant carnival with con artists barking out snake oil offers to unsuspecting marks.  But, damn, I hope not.  Whether this is happening everywhere or just in the case of struggling smart phones manufactured by companies with lots of cash to burn, it stinks.

It completely invalidates the entire concept of the in-store recommendation, at least from the customer’s point of view.

There is simply no way you can compensate someone for making a specific decision and expect that person to be unbiased.  Even if you’re the most honest person in the mall (the whole wide mall), your recommendations will be impacted by a bounty.  Your level of honestly only affects the degree of the resulting bias.  Shoot, if someone recommends a Windows 7 phone because he thinks it is the best handset on the market, even that recommendation is tainted by the bounty.

Let me put it this way.  If this sort of thing is truly widespread, then shoppers need to treat retail stores with the same skepticism they treat carnival games.  It may look like a simple game of shooting a ball through the hoop to win a giant teddy bear for your girl, but the hoop, the ball and the entire setup is designed to put you at a disguised disadvantage.

At a bare minimum, sales people should have to disclose up front that they will get a bounty if you choose a certain item over another one.  Even that is wrong.  But at least then you’d know to stop wasting your time in search of an unbiased recommendation.

Rather than try to circumvent the buying process, why doesn’t Microsoft give a bunch of phones to sales people, so they can see for themselves how good they are?  Maybe come up with a better advertising campaign (I’m sure there are Windows 7 phone ads, but I can’t remember seeing any of them).  Win the game on the field, so to speak.  The craziest thing is that, by most accounts, Windows 7 phones are very well designed.  As a committed iPhone user,  nothing would make me happier than some competition to keep Apple on its game.  Someone needs to take up the role of contender, with the demise of the Blackberry.  In fact, it seems to me that Windows 7 phones could take a huge bite out of Blackberry’s market share based on Microsoft’s Enterprise penetration alone.

I wonder how the owners of these stores will react to this?  Will they stop this madness in its tracks?  Will they require disclosure?  Will they demand a cut?  Are the hardware manufacturers buying their cooperation by subsidizing salaries?  What a confusing web of cross-purposes.

At the end of the day, it’s just one more reason to shop online.  One more problem for bricks and mortar stores to deal with, which is the last thing they need.  Whether they know it or not.

That is bullshit.  Period.

If someone wants my business, whether it’s an online store, an allegedly mom and pop operation or a gigantic retail chain, there are only four things that matter:

1. Give me a decent price.

2. Give me good customer service, before and after the sale.

3. Don’t waste my time.

4. Sell me what I want to buy, not what you want to sell me.

Of these four things, having the absolute lowest price is probably the least important.  My time is, figuratively and literally, worth more than the few bucks I might save by pricing every possible source.  For the same reason, numbers 3 and 4 are very important.

Amazon is the undisputed leader in all four.  The Apple Store is the best of the bricks & mortar crowd.  Home Depot is pretty good at it, particularly when it comes to getting me in and out quickly.

Show me a needlessly long line, and I’ll show you a place I’ll never be again.  Make more than a nominal effort to upsell me and you’ll never see me again.

When someone is more focused on what they want to sell than what I want to buy, things are about to get ugly.

Forbes has a must-read article that puts much of this in perspective, using Best Buy as an example.  I shop at Best Buy now and then (on the rare occasion when I need something immediately), and have not personally experienced these issues.  But if I did, I’d likely never go back.

Among the store-killers in that article:

But my friend decided to buy some other blu-ray discs.  Or at least he tried to, until we were “assisted” by a young, poorly groomed sales clerk from the TV department, who wandered over to interrogate us.  What kind of TV do you have?  Do you have a cable service, or a satellite service?  Do you have a triple play service plan?

This would drive me completely bonkers.  Or more directly, to Amazon.Com.

More gospel:

But this is hardly customer service.  It’s actually getting in the way of a customer who’s trying to self-service because there’s no one around who can answer a basic question about the store’s confusing layout.  It’s anti-service.

There’s only one rule retailers need to impress on their employees: If customers can more easily get what they want elsewhere, they will.

Sure, “easy” includes price, but it includes a lot of other things too.

I also don’t know how I’ve never heard of Mars Bluff, SC, given that is is only 52 miles from where I grew up.

It seems that in 1958, a US Air Force B-47 dropped a nuclear bomb on Mars Bluff.  Fortunately, the bomb did not contain the removable core of fissionable uranium and plutonium, which was stored in a containment area onboard the plane.

Crazy.

(via Mental Floss)