Jesse Schibilia

Apple’s Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook mentioned at a recent Goldman Sachs investor conference that in addition to still aiming for 10 milllion iPhones sold in fiscal year 2008, “Apple is not married to the single, exclusive-carrier model”.

Let me speak for all of the Verizon Wireless subscribers in the northeast who don’t want to switch over to the poor coverage of AT&T Wireless when I say “WANT!“

I don’t think that Apple will be able to sell 10 million units if they don’t go outside of one carrier. Though it is true that the iPhone in it’s current manifestation would not work on VZW’s network (GSM chip on CDMA network), it is possible with currently available, off the shelf CDMA chips. Since Apple has about 18 billion in cash on hand and no long term debt to speak of, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a buy out of the five-year exclusive contract.

What a whirlwind of a month:

New apartment in North Brunswick. New HDTV. New Wii. The Burning Crusade. I will have my time filled with plenty of things to do.

Dear Daniel, Nicole, Brian, Jay, and Kevin,

Let me start by saying that I am not a user interaction designer by trade.

I want to let you know that the new interface for Digg (my finger on the pulse of the planet since early 2005) has left me shaken and upset beyond the point of new design disorientation.

I am happy that you have utilized the wide screen format (I am a PowerBook user).  The new layout takes more advantage of my screen real estate, and for that, I am thankful.

I understand the idea behind moving videos into their own portal.  Digg is getting to a point where there is critical mass on story submission; videos do not necessarily fall under the news umbrella.  This move is only logical (plus it parallels with the portal for Podcasts).

My main gripe is that you have gimped my filtering and searching capabilities!

I use Digg as a link repository.  When I read a story that I like, I know that I will want to share it in the future.  It just so happens that I was trying to show my co-workers something on Monday morning when the changes were made.  I was unable to search through my dugg stories.  This was not a trivial matter for me.  It took me about 15 minutes to find the story that I had already dugg.

I can also no longer filter my search by a category.   For example, if I were digging in the Gaming section, I would be able to search just the Gaming section by clicking the radio button for ‘Gaming’ next to the search box, entering my search string, and hitting enter.  Now, I am forced to search all of Digg, all the time!  I’m not telling you how to run your servers, but that is probably expensive in the way of database queries.

I often cannot look at Digg for extended periods of time while I am at work.  Some days, I can’t touch Digg (which is a travesty for me).  That is why the ‘Top Stories - Yesterday’ filter was very helpful to me.  Now, I don’t have that option, instead being forced to look at an entire week of dugg stories.

There is a strong difference between the top dugg stories in the last 24 hours, and the top stories today.  The last 24 hours filter is a constantly rolling series of stories.  I loved being able to stroll in to work and see what has been dugg to the front page that morning by clicking the ‘Top Stories - Today’ filter.  This made my digging manageable, and gave me a baseline of what had already happened that day on Digg.  I could leave Digg and actually work for a few hours, come back, and know exactly what had happened since I left off.

The rolling paradigm does not order chronologically, which places a heavy cognitive load on me that the system used to handle beautifully.

I have noticed that you guys are bringing Digg up and down during the day.  I hope that other folks are having the same problems and are being as vocal as I am.  I know that you are a great company and I have been with you since very early in revolution.  I know that you listen to your users, because without us, you wouldn’t have a service.  Thank you so much for providing this indispensable part of my life.

Sincerely,

Jesse Schibilia (Digg user: schibs)
Instructional Designer
Office of Instructional and Research Technology
http://www.schibs.net/blog

This is the first major Digg interface overhaul that has drastically changed the architecture of the site itself. Digg has moved to a widescreen format for their content. This forces the navigation to the top of the screen. This disoriented me. One of the last things you want to do in unleashing a new UI design is to disorient your users. They become insecure. I can get over the disorientation, but I am going to miss the AJAX disclosure of the sub-categories in the left menu.

They have changed the way that you can view your news chronologically. The interface used to offer a link to yesterday’s top stories. Conceptually, this would make a call to the database that would show you the top stories from yesterday. I will dearly miss this because I often miss out on a day’s top stories because I am at work all day. Now you can only get today’s top stories, this week’s top stories, this month’s top stories, and this year’s top stories.

They have moved videos into their own category of the site. I think this is an important move for them, because videos generally do not fall under the category of news. The way that I used the site before, however, was as a giant repository of media. I would be able to search everything on the site in one fell swoop. Now if I want to search for a video, I have to enter the video portal. I then have to go back to the news portal to search for news. This is an inconvenience to me as it forces me to change my usage habits.

The worst part for me, is that I can no longer search my own profile (my dugg stories). As I mentioned, I use Digg as a link repository. The fact that I can no longer restrict my searches to the things that I have already dugg will severely limit the way I use Digg in the future.

My concerns may very well be invalid. I may just be disoriented with the new interface in a way that I am not sure where things are yet. However, I am sure that I am not the only one with these concerns. Fortunately, Digg has shown that they listen to their users. Their users are what power their service. Without the users, Digg would be worthless.

EDIT: I just realized that the new chronological filtering gives you the top stories in the last 24 hours, not today’s top stories.  This gives me my recent news in more of a rolling format.  It also orders these stories by diggs, not by time.  This takes away my ability to visit digg throughout the day and start browsing stories from where I left off earlier in the day.  What a gimp.

So after a frustrating eight month period of looking for a place to start my career, I’ve finally landed myself a full-time position.

As of December 1st, 2006, I am the newest Instructional Designer at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

This coming Monday, I will be representing Rutgers University at the Sakai Conference in Atlanta, GA.  It is going to be my first professional conference so I am of course very excited.

I am planning on relocating to Piscataway, NJ as soon as possible.  No more hour commutes for me!

I was just sent a Flickr Mail from an individual who seemingly represents jubble.com. Here is a partial excerpt.

“Can we show your outstanding animal pictures on our website?  We are putting together the most outstanding animal pictures available on the internet to create digital collection albums.  We would love to have this photo of your flickr portfolio on our website and be part of a jubble collection album.  Would you support us with our new idea and upload your outstanding animal shots?  Once your picture is part of a jubble collection album you will earn money every time your picture is collected!”

So I checked out the details on their website (link to details):

“Once your picture has been selected by the Jubble jury you are in! Every time your picture has been collected and ends up in the jubble collection albums, your jubble account will be credited with $0.025 per picture. At the end of every quarter, jubble will pay out the credit built up in your account (minimum pay-out sum is $50). If your quarterly balance is lower than $50, your credit will stay in your account until it reaches the $50 limit and will be paid out at the end of that quarter. Jubble will pay you through Paypal only. You have to make sure that you have a paypal account and that your account information holds the address of your Paypal account. Providing us with your Paypal account information is optional and can be done at anytime you feel comfortable (e.g. 3 months after signing up as a jubble member). Since our website has not been launched yet, we think this will make you feel more comfortable, so you can wait and see how our website works and you do not have to disclose any personal financial information to us right now.”

So let’s do the math here. My one photo that they want would have to be added to an album four times to get one penny. 400 times to get a dollar. To get to that minimum of $50, 20,000 users would have to add my photo to their collection.

How many users does this service think its going to pull? They won’t ever have to pay anyone because they won’t get 20,000 users (any time soon at least). This doesn’t seem like the type of viral app that everyone will be using in two years.

Until that happens, they’re going to have to come up with more than a quarter of a penny for me to hand over the rights to my photos.

EDIT: $.025 is 2.5 cents per view, not a quarter of a penny. This means 40 views for a dollar and 2000 views for 50 dollars. Sorry for being unfair to Jubble on the miscalculation.

Apple announced this morning that their line of professional notebooks will finally utilize Intel’s Merom dual-core processor.
This makes me so happy.  I have been waiting for this for months as I waded through rumors of this release.  I didn’t believe my eyes when I saw it on digg this morning.  But it’s actually true!

See article on Appleinsider.

I am still taking on challenges in the Office of Instructional and Research Technology at Rutgers University. I am getting more involved in the bug tracking process for Sakai. I am now a member of the international Quality Assurance working group for Sakai. I am in the process of verifying fixes that have been put in place for the release of the upcoming version. Closing bug tickets on an international level makes me feel very good about myself.

IT folks that are coming out of school should definitely try to volunteer their time to a well-organized open source community. I have learned so many different aspects of application development in the past few months. The Application Development Life Cycle has many parallels in other areas of IT and my experience with it on this project has been very educational.
I have also been charged with taking a look at the local CSS for the release of the next version. Rutgers wants to be ahead of the game when it comes to developing the next round of help documentation where we will most likely need a lot of new screenshots. If we can develop that documentation well before the release, that means less headaches come deployment time.

I am working to complete my Rutgers University IT Certification. While it has no validity outside of the University, I am interested in any supplemental education that I can get from the school. So far, the program has been very good. This morning I completed a class titled ‘Setting Objectives and Analyzing Risks’. It was a good refresher course for a lot of the research that I have already done in Risk Management.

Yesterday, OIRT attended the Rutgers President’s Award Ceremony. We were nominated for the Bridge Award which is for departments or groups that show extraordinary service to the University. We set up a table to talk with the folks there about Sakai and what it is we do. Here is a shot of our booth and the team, complete with chef hats (an homage to Hiriyuki Sakai, for whom the CMS is named).

For the last year or so, my house has had Satellite Internet through DirecWay. While the download speeds were much faster than the dial-up that we had for the previous nine years, the time it took to make a call to a server took forever. The upload speeds were also abymsal.

Embarq DSL was recently made available on the mountain, which is a god-send. While we can only get the lowest speed package (1.5 mbps/384 kbps) it is worlds faster than satellite or dial-up.

One problem that I was having was with Embarq’s DNS servers. Every five requests or so, I would have to wait 20-30 seconds for a response. I’m not sure if this is an overloading issue or if there is a cap that Embarq puts on requests from a given IP address.

To get around this issue, an individual on the DSLReports forums suggested that I use OpenDNS. OpenDNS is a free domain name resolution service with some extra features. Check out the Wikipedia article on OpenDNS.

I changed the primary and secondary DNS IP addresses on my modem, and it worked like a charm. Requests are instant. OpenDNS also has functionality for fixing spelling errors in a URL and for protecting against phishing attacks. OpenDNS is funded by advertising that shows up on a custom notification page when you spell a URL wrong that OpenDNS cannot resolve.

Upon further research, there seems to be some question as to user anonymity when using the OpenDNS service. When using your ISP’s DNS servers, you are largely anonymous because DNS is a highly distributed technology. When using OpenDNS, your lookups are centralized. This is scary, especially in light of AOL’s recent publication of twenty million search queries by 650,000 users over a three month period.

For the time being, I have switched my primary and DNS servers to 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2. These servers are run by Verizon/Level3 and are not restricted to Verizon customers. The lookups are similary quick when compared to OpenDNS. I will continue to use these servers while I research the anonymity issues of OpenDNS.