Beach Day

We (my family) went to our favorite beach today - Kiawah. This is a very nice little beach that is about a 40 minute drive from our home, but its worth the drive. We have a bunch of closer beaches, but they are ridiculously overcrowded in the summer, and the traffic makes the travel time about the same anyway. Besides, Kiawah is a lot more natural looking and there are lots more shells and birds and such to admire. Today of course it was packed because of the holiday weekend - the most people I've ever seen at this beach since we moved here. We still managed to have a really good time even with the extra bodies on the sand. I have some pics up on my Flickr page.



To update yesterday's post, the whole TextAmerica debacle got me curious so I went and checked out their sign-up page to see if they really put the kibosh on their free accounts. Well, it turns out I wasn't the only pissed off person. Here's the message that was posted on the sign-up page:

We are pleased to announce: In light of recent changes and the outpour of positive support, textamerica will continue to provide free memberships to users. In celebration of our existing users that have recently upgraded, all accounts upgraded on or before 7/15/06 will hold “Founding Memberships” with special VIP privileges not available to other users. We are currently finalizing stipulations to new & existing memberships, terms and conditions to be announced 7/8/06. In honor of your greatly appreciated enthusiasm and participation in helping to keep the community strong, the “lifetime membership” contest will continue until the new TA is finalized (contest.textamerica.com). Thank You.

Lets take a second to dissect this statement...

"In light of recent changes and the outpour of positive support, textamerica will continue to provide free memberships to users."

OK, lets see - this should read "Because we realized that the majority of our users were going to bail for freer pastures, we are keeping the free accounts".

"In celebration of our existing users that have recently upgraded, all accounts upgraded on or before 7/15/06 will hold “Founding Memberships” with special VIP privileges not available to other users."

This one basically states that a minority of the users panicked and forked over $99 to keep their account active. Now that TA has decided to change their tune, they actually state 2 alarming things in the sentence that follows: "We are currently finalizing stipulations to new & existing memberships, terms and conditions to be announced 7/8/06", which translates into: "We don't know exactly how we are going to appease the suckers who payed already and we're hashing it out, and we're still going to screw the freebies in some way".

The rest of the statement is marketing crap and irrelevant to what the message is. The fact is that when you give out a service for free for 2 or more years, you can't just pull the carpet out from everyone's feet. You need to do it one thread at a time so that people don't say F you and drop you like a sack of cancer. Oh well, they certainly F'ed up for anyone who decided to investigate the other options out there and find that services like Flickr are years ahead of them technologically and offer pro accounts that are 1/4 of the amount.

While I'm on the photography topic, I must say, I still want that camera dammit. I mean, I have learned to be somewhat patient in my older age of 29. I have not taken the plunge to replace my powerbook with a black Macbook yet. And that is a legitimate upgrade since my notebook is 3 years old and can't run Windows like the new Intel Macs can. I have had one too many calls where I lugged a PC notebook along with my Powerbook to complete a job and having a machine that boots into both environments would be a blessing as well as a smart investment. But alas, I do like my 12" Powerbook more than the current line-up of Apple notebooks, and the Intel version of the Mac OS is still in need of a lot of native apps that don't need to run in emulation. Besides, its known lore in the tech world that you never buy the first rev of a new product as it's the public who will be working out all of the bugs. I can wait on that one, but man do I still want that camera.