Thinking aloud: Azure, AWS, DevOps, cars and opinion from Alex Neihaus

  • Steal not this unreadable blog

    I’ve written here before about the almost religious feelings I have about WordPress (here and here)…and about the amazing community it has spawned. It was a big disappointment for me that I wasn’t able to attend WordCamp last month. As a consolation, PodCamp Boston 2 is coming up and I can’t wait. One of the…

  • reCAPTCHA isn’t Boston-ese for being repeatedly tagged for speeding on the Pike

    Try as I might, I just khant imitate a Boston accent

  • Brand building, BMW style or…how to make your community go crazy with desire

    I am well-known to be car crazy. And BMW is well-known as one of the most desirable brands in the world. So, it’s no surprise I draw many lessons from them and try to apply them to high-technology marketing in general. Trust me, this brand has enthusiasts (“a community” in Web 2.0-speak) to die for.…

  • AT&T teaches Apple a lesson about control

    While everyone else was drooling over the iPhone, I knew to stay away. I suspected a consumer disaster of epic proportions when Apple, rightly famous for its brilliant products and exquisite marketing, collided in the marketplace with AT&T, one of the worst consumer vendors in the history of Earth. Cellular One…no AT&T Wireless…no Cingular…no AT&T…

  • With Alli, my lunch is in my pants

    (Photo courtesy of J. Star, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) OK, so I know that what you blog about is a more-or-less semi-permanent record of you. Plus, I have clients who read this blog. And I might be just a little more over the top than usual with this post, but there’s a real marketing…

  • iTunes won’t sync USB iPods under Windows Vista

    I apologize for the knowledge-base-like title of this post, but I did it in hopes the search engines will index it and save some other poor shlub the four months of effort it took me to get my iPod to synch with my HP Pavilion desktop. In case you found this post after months and…

  • Why the Red Sox are in first place

    Unlike many members of Red Sox Nation, I don’t wear it on my sleeve. But my infatuation with the Olde Town Team goes back to my days as a BU student living in Kenmore Square, watching the ’75 World Series on TV with the sound turned down and the windows open in Myles Standish where…

  • Pharma’s snake-oil marketing to voodoo doctors

    If the title doesn’t make it clear that I’m upset, let me start by saying that an article I’ve just read on nytimes.com (registration required) has me neck-vein-throbbing apoplectic. (It’s my blog, and I’ll use 50¢ words if I want to, 50¢ words if I want to.) In short, I don’t understand how the marketing…

  • ‘Cause Google’s the taxman

    Mid-April! So metaphor rich: the Boston Marathon…tax season in the US…EMI and Apple Corps have settled their disputes. What’s a blogger to do with all this? Easy: cram it all into a rant about Google. You will advertise your product or service on Google. You will allow your competitors to bid against you for the…

  • Brevity, baby.

    To the surprising large number of people who’ve emailed, called, IM’ed and otherwise let me know that you’re wondering why I haven’t posted lately, I offer as a short interlude this post with its “a picture tells a 1000 words” explanation.” This is like the overly-long intermissions in 1960’s film musicals like My Fair Lady…

  • C’mon and gimme that ole time subculture

    First, I hope this racy image won’t have the MPAA giving my blog an R rating…but it was such a cool graphic I couldn’t help myself. Well…ahem…back to the post at hand. I’ve been taking some…uh…commentary from both friends and business associates about my apparent infatuation with all things blog and podcast, but especially about…

  • iPod audio gettin’ better all the time

    I’ve been Turkmen-bashing Apple here a lot (just read the most hilarious obit for Saparmurat Niyazov) for not yet having released a Vista-compatible iTunes. I can’t decide if it’s out of what I suspect is pique at Microsoft having shipped an OS that’s so Mac-like or, more probably, if it’s being a big, slow and…