I have been using Yahoo! Alerts to alert me to changes in my custom RSS feeds, crawled from CalTrans, for changes in the status of Interstate 80 over the Sierra. I noticed today that although my RSS feed has picked up the recent changes, Yahoo! Alerts doesn’t seem to be crawling it, and their view of it is 5 days stale at this point. There is no “refresh” button on Yahoo! Alerts, but I can see their list of items matches up with 5 days ago in my feed. I have it set to send me changes “as they happen”, since I need to know the road conditions to drive back and forth to Reno. Anything else is kind of worthless. What’s up with that?
Category Archives: Yahoo!
Yahoo! Mash: Officially Lame
A week ago I got a useless invite for Yahoo! Mash — useless since the service wasn’t open even by invitation yet, and required a Yahoo! Backyard (employee only) login. The service has now officially launched, so I gave my invite a try again, and it worked! It’s invitation-only, so forgive me if you can’t follow along.
There seems to be a damn good reason it is invitation-only… it is totally lame. It is nowhere near ready for the public, embarrassingly so. It’s kind of amusing actually. Lots of things are broken, several things want you to type in e.g. size of pictures in pixels. The lameness comes from many things, not the least of which is that it comes with a “Mash Pet” which is kind of a Tamagotchi composed of pictures of a whiteboard smiley face.
The service overall is like a mix between MySpace and Facebook, and overall pretty lame. Actually, the only thing that it seems to have that is innovative (and a feature people have been wanting for YEARS) is a “this is fugly” link to turn off the custom styling of a profile. Yawn.
Leaving Yahoo!; storage, consulting
As many of you know already, I’ve decided to leave Yahoo!. Today was my last day. I’ve had a great time at Yahoo! and worked with a bunch of brilliant people. I will miss you all!
Where am I headed? That’s actually a complicated question. I’ll be working part time at Pivot3, a mature startup that’s doing great things in the storage industry. Contact me if you’re interesting in cutting storage costs, getting some amazing management tools, and some awesome performance. I would love to tell you more! MySQL will absolutely rock on this platform.
Yes, I said part time. I have a startup of my own, Proven Scaling, providing advanced MySQL consulting and training services. Looking to get more performance, scalability, or reliability out of MySQL? Need help with replication? Designing a database solution that really scales? Need help interviewing a candidate for a MySQL position? We can help.
New York, not the police
When you try to dial a number in area code 212 at Yahoo!, it’s really easy to end up trying to call the cops.
A number like “9 1 212…” is easily misdialed as “911…” by missing the first 2. Of course, they intercept “911” calls even though they are not fully qualified. (You’d have to dial 9911 to get the real 911, although I think they intercept that here, too.)
So it goes like this:
Jeremy dials 9 1 212 but misses the first two, notices, and hangs up to try again.
Phone rings.
Mission Control: Mission Control, 911 was dialed from this phone.
Jeremy: Ooops, I was trying to call 9 1 212 …
They must get that a few times a day…
He’s Not Moving
We’re moving cubes tomorrow. All of us but the manager, it seems… hah.
Manager: [exasperated] I’m not moving. I’m not on the move list!
Employee: Isn’t that a good thing?
Manager: No! I’m supposed to be moving! I don’t want to be the only one left over here!
I’m sure they’ll sort it out. :)
Jeremy Cole 