Initially posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday April 18, 2007 - 10:42am (CDT)
About what, I'm not entirely sure, but listen for yourself. (I'd recommend that you click on "open" instead of "download" after you right click on the link on the page you'll be going to, as the file packs more than 1 MB worth of mayoral babbling into a 30 second soundbite. That has to be some kind of record). At moments like this, I listen to Daley stumble through a speech and think "it could be worse". Then I take a look at what Daley has let Rubloff et al. do to Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, compare that to what I've seen in the French Quarter and Garden District and think "but not by much".
Credits: I found the .mp3 on Metroblogging New Orleans in this post by Laureen Lentz, reachable at http://tinyurl.com/ywrflc
If you were looking for the link a little while ago and not finding it, that was not an accident, as this note I just sent to support at a particularly worthless service will explain. The service is hotlinkfiles.com, and I would strongly urge you to not do business with these people.
I used your service to upload a copy of a segment of a speech by Mayor Roy Nagins of New Orleans for posting on a blog. I soon regretted my decision to do so, as the moment I clicked on the link that would take a visitor to the recording on your site, I got an error message stating that Internet Explorer needed to close. No such error message was to be had when I clicked on the original, nor when I clicked on the copy on my own hard disk.
Occasional downtime, I can understand. Browser crashing, on the other hand, is absolutely not cool. But looking over your TOS, I see you feel otherwise, specifically stating that you don't support "Safari", raising the question of how a hapless surfer using that browser is supposed to know that he's about to run into trouble when he visits a site run by one of your users.
Outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. I am not in the business of laying out boobytraps for those visiting my sites and I question the decency and sanity of those running any service who work from the assumption that I should. As soon as I send this message, I will check to see if there is any way in which I can delete this account, but even if there is not, rest assured that I will never use it again, and I will warn others to not use it in the first place.
Go have a good laugh, as I'm sure you will, but as hard as you may find this to understand, I think that you'll find that by and large that people do care about the experiences had by visitors to their websites, and don't think too highly of site admins who adopt a "f**k you" attitude in response to reports of bad experiences their bad coding are causing those visitors and then try to hide behind their TOS, as if a bad attitude could become anything other than a bad attitude just by being made a matter of policy. Here is looking forward to your speedy bankruptcy, not just on a company level, but G-d willing, on a personal one as well.
People like you are what is wrong with the Internet.
I will always make the effort to not be one of those people, myself, which is why the link is gone, for now. Having just gone through the process of looking for a provider that doesn't delete sound files once every month and then taking the time to apply - only to find out that my time has been wasted by somebody else's grossly unprofessional attitude, I'll hold off for a while before taking the time to do this again. I do, however, hope to eventually find a free file hosting service that isn't a bad joke. You never know - I might even succeed. Until then, sorry about the annoyances involved in visiting my current (temporary) upload location, but this is the best that I can do, for now.
This industry is in bad need of governmental regulation.
