Peng’s links for Saturday, 24 May

I have a few extra links today since I was unable to get links posted yesterday, plus this am was crazy enough that I didn’t even get to fire up my RSS reader until mid afternoon to see what stories were out there today.

• BBC News: Web users ‘getting more selfish’. An excellent look at how users respond to search engines and things online in general. Shows the problem of throwing more widgets, etc., on a site to make it more “interesting.” It makes me need to talk with Nanci about what we have in our sidebars here. Thanks to mightyglydd on the MozillaZine Forums for bringing it to my attention.
• New York Times: LifeLock Identity Fraud Service Finds Skeptics. The company now has over a million users, but also some lawsuits for some unexpected reasons.
• New York Times: Far From Always Being Right, the Customer Is on Hold. When I started working at a Kmart after getting out of high school my supervisor made sure I knew “the customer is always right.” Unfortunately companies have not only forgotten this, they’ve made it a major pain in the arse when we try to contact a company about a problem. Alina Tugend points out not only why customer service call centers find us so upset, but that some companies have realized they should stop ticking us off. We do take our dollars elsewhere.
• Yuriy Kozlov/Planet Ubuntu: Exploration Ubuntu. The Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community (LoCo) team used to have what they called InstallFests, but they realized many people don’t know what an InstallFest is, let alone why they’d want to attend one, so as of today they’re hosting what they’re calling “Exploration Ubuntu.” (I meant to get this on sooner, especially since it ends at 5 pm today. My bad!)
• Wil Clouser/Planet Mozilla: AMO 3.4.3 update scheduled for June 5th. Would you believe 43 bugs are targeted for fixing this week on Abominations.Mozilla.org? They’d be put online this week but with the Memorial Day holiday here in the US the AMO update has been pushed back one week. Wil has links to not only what bugs are getting fixed but where you can get a preview of them, if you’re so inclined.
• Ken Gurnick: Kershaw to start Sunday for LA. Rookie pitching phenom Clayton Kershaw got the call and will start for the Dodgers tomorrow in the rubber game against St. Louis. This 20 year old is so good he got the call from Double-A Jacksonville without even spending time in AAA ball. he impressed the team that much during spring training.
• TVShowsOnDVD.com: Sports Night - Full Press Release & Hi-Res Package Art for Sports Night - The 10th Anniversary Edition. I’ve actually had a bookmark sitting on my desktop for over a week trying to remember to blog this. Before The West Wing and long before Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme had a wonderful little sitcom on ABC about the goings on behind the scenes at a SportsCenter-type show. It only lasted two seasons but with the 10th anniversary of the show coming this fall Shout! Factory has put together an 8-disk set with extras that fans have been waiting for.

Before I close out (perhaps for the extended weekend) I want to send a great big CONGRATS! out to my “favorite niece” who graduated from CSUN the other day. I’ll have to figure out a way to watch the QuickTime media stream so I can watch her graduate. I wish I knew why the plugin isn’t working right in Fx3.

Senator Kennedy diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor

This story is just breaking so I don’t have a lot of details, but Senator Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant glioma.

Boston loses one of its daily papers

Part of my routine every morning is picking up a free copy of the BostonNOW newspaper either on the bus going to the subway or at the subway station, but yesterday there were no copies on the bus and nobody handing them out at the station. Today I saw why in the other free daily paper, the Metro. The parent company of BostonNOW has been sold and the new owners closed the paper as of yesterday due to the poor economy, despite the fact that circulation and revenue have been growing.

Stop waiting for Ubuntu info with Ubuntu Live Stats

Peng and I saw some things about Ubuntu Live Stats over the last couple of days, but neither of us saw things that needed to be blogged now. But I just followed a link from yet another story on it and I have to admit this new site brings the wow factor to keeping up with our favorite Linux distro.

The strike is over!

various media outlets are reporting that the members of teh Writer’s Guild of America have voted to end their strike against the producer’s guild (actually the major studios) that has shut down nearly all production in Los Angeles.

The story’s still developing, but I wanted to pass along the good news.  Hopefully we’ll be able to get some of our favorite shows back on the air in the next couple months.

For more infocheck Writers vote to end 3-month strike that crippled Hollywood from the Los Angeles Times and Hollywood writers vote to lift 14-week strike from Reuters, as well as any updated stories links from those articles.

It’s ironic that just as the news was breaking one of our favorite shows is finally back on the air after making us wait too damn long to get back on teh air.

Is the writer’s strike ending?

It looks like the good news coming out of Hollywood and New York all week is paying off as the Writer’s Guild board gave their unanimous approval of the deal worked out with the producer’s guild.