amassed lust Blog of Raymond Angel; Startup Enthusiast, CEO

Even though changes are afoot at MOSH mobile I’ve still been slammed with a plethora of things that need done.

We’ve got a new podcast coming soon to Startup Hero that I’m pretty excited about and I hope to be sharing details about in the next several days with everyone.

I might have some news tomorrow in regard to the whole career aspect of my life. I’ll try to let you all know about that as much as I can as soon as I can.

I did get married recently so I’ve been busy entertaining Mrs. Angel and between everything I just haven’t had a lot of free time to myself.

More to come when I get the chance.

The guys over at Blog Indiana have posted some details about the upcoming Blog Indiana Conference including a more through schedule and list of presentations.

If you live in Indiana or even one of those close states then you should check out attending the Blog Indiana Conference because it contains a wide range of speakers, panels, and networking opportunities.

Some of the topics that will be covered are legal issues, corporate blogging, brand consistancy, building your readership, making money with blogging, and much more.

As I’ve said on Startup Hero my favorite startup of the moment is isocket and John Ramey the CEO of isocket will be doing a panel at this awesome event.

The event costs a mere $49 dollars to attend and to be quite honest with you I’ve never seen such an amazing lineup of bloggers, and such a full schedule packed in to a two day conference for a price point so low.

I have nothing to gain by telling you about this conference, I’m not involved in the planning, I’m not making any money from it, I just feel it is going to be the one event that each Hoosier who is blogging or thinking about blogging should attend this year.

A long list of sponsors have signed up, a long list of people have already reserved a spot, and time to get registered is running out. If you’ve been on the fence about this event now is the time to just make the jump and get registered because time really is running down.

The Blog Indiana Conference will be the place to be August 16th and 17th. It will be held at the amazing Indiana University School of Informatics in beautiful Indianapolis.

I’m back after a bit of downtime due to a database issue. More to come soon.

Let’s talk about cool technologies for a moment. Especially cool blog related technologies seeing as how Andrew just announced his new gig at TechStars.

Intense Debate is a new comment management system for blogs that allows better tracking, increased commenting, a slick interface and more.

I was recently introduced to it by Andrew Hyde and have been considering installing it on my blog for a few days before I decided to just check out the blog and see how hard it was to get going.

I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that I didn’t have to edit any of my Wordpress files, that I didn’t have to do any strange new code setups and that installation was as easy as dropping a single file in to my Wordpress Plugins directory!

Go ahead… make a comment on this post… try out Intense Debate and see if it is for you.

I’ve been pretty busy with the awesomeness that is Startup Weekend so I haven’t had a lot of time between that and MOSH mobile to get a post up here recently.

Things are going great in life. I’ve been having a lot of fun talking and meeting people for Startup Weekend and getting some new weekends lined up for everyone.

Things on the front at MOSH mobile have also been exceptionally busy as we have some things coming down the pipe in the next two weeks that required my attention.

I’ve cut down my days at MOSH mobile that I’ll actually be spending in the office so I can focus on Startup Weekend and properly balancing my life/work balance. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I can work on both projects from my balcony outside if I so wish as the weather warms up and I must say I love working outside. This is a nice change of pace for a few weeks so I can get outside, enjoy the warm weather and focus on everything going on.

I recently posted on my bad experiences at Walmart and Dawn posted about a sour experience at a loan location.

What makes companies feel that bad customer service is the right customer service?

I guess the jokes on Blizzard today.

One of the web guys and one of the developers at Blizzard thought it would be a funny prank for April Fool’s Day to post images of a fake new hero class to the website featuring a guitar playing Bard with Guitar Hero graphics.

In a funny twist the guys at Activision’s legal department who apparently have no sense of humor nor sense of intelligence are suing the Blizzard side of the newly formed Activision Blizzard for infringing on trademarks with Guitar Hero like images on the page.

All I can really say is that it provides me great laughs that not only would Blizzard post Guitar Hero images but that Activision which is the same company would then try to sue them for it.

Today I’d like to educate you about what my local Walmart is the WORST Walmart in the chain.

I’ll be presenting you a series of stories that will illustrate how my Walmart experience is almost never a positive one in Columbia City, Indiana.

I’ve been contemplating writing this blog entry for some time now. Most of the times I will run in to a nice employee at this Walmart and then I feel guilty about coming home and bitching about this store but finally I’ve had enough.

Sit down, prepare yourself to hear my rants and raves about our Walmart and enjoy my woes.

Recently I went in to Walmart at about 11pm at night. I often hit Walmart at this time to purchase Nintendo Wii games. Hell I even bought my first Nintendo Wii at this Walmart location one night at about midnight. I get done working on work stuff and need something to help me unwind so I head to Walmart and find myself a Nintendo Wii game.

One night while doing this I went to the electronics section and noticed some new gaming magazines. One of which caught my eye so I picked it up and checked it over to see if it was something that I’d be interested in purchasing.

I started to put in back in the holder when a police officer and a store employee approached me.

At first I was glad to see the store employee… I was going to purchase three Nintendo Wii games and they keep them locked up so she could get them out for me so I could buy them.

She had a mean look on her face though. She approached me and asked to see my ID. I declined and told her I didn’t have it with me. Why would she need to see my ID? I hadn’t yet asked to purchase any games and when I did I would have gladly provided it. Right now I was simply looking at various items.

What she doesn’t realize is that I am a young adult. As such I have what we call a disposable income. I many times will spend my hard earned cash on video games, sodas, and other things that won’t really mean jack in a few years.

I digress, the police officer approached me and then asked me for ID. Knowing my rights I declined. It was about this time that I decided to leave the Walmart and take my purchase elsewhere.

I started to head for the door of the Walmart fully expecting the police officer to have more police officers in the area ready to pull me over for no reason (that is how my town police rolls).

I didn’t make it to the door however. The employee stopped me again and said if I didn’t show her my ID she would have me arrested. I said that I would not.

She then told me I needed to leave the Walmart. As I began to tell her that was what I intended the police officer approached and said he would be handcuffing me if I didn’t leave right now.

At the time I was two days away from entering the Indiana State Police academy so I didn’t want any trouble and agreed to leave. I would have honestly agreed to leave anyways because I am NOT a trouble maker and never have been.

The employee stops me again on my way to the door. She tells me if I let her see my ID and I can prove that I am at least 18 I can stay in the store. That Columbia City has a curfew and Walmart enforces it. I tell her I am twenty-two years old, that I am the President of the local company and that I am highly offended. She tells me to “get the fuck out”.

I leave the Walmart.

The next morning I call Walmart and ask to speak with the manager. I ask for her specifically by name and when she will not take my call I leave a message saying that I will call back again the next day.

The next day I call back again. I finally get a hold of her and tell her my story and that I would never shop at Walmart again. At least not her Walmart and that I was considering calling her District Manager and reporting my story.

She was actually a kind soul and I couldn’t be terribly mad at her because of the actions of a rouge employee. She explained to me that it is not Walmart’s policy to enforce the city curfew because Walmart is a private business and not the police.

I couldn’t agree more with her assessment of the situation and she assures me that it will be fixed.

Regardless of the case I stay away from that Walmart for a period of time.

My fiancee loves Walmart sadly. Granted she was mad when I told her what happened but she claims it is the only place to shop in our town. Which is true… we could always go ten minutes up the road to the next town where a great deal of stores are but she won’t do that.

So we start going to the worst Walmart in the chain again. The Columbia City Walmart.

This particular Walmart store even before the ID incident wasn’t my favorite store in the world.

It is almost always horribly dirty. You will often see huge stains on the floor, spilled product, leaks and water coming down from the ceiling, the bathroom if often a mess, the merchandise is often in shambles and doesn’t look like it has been front-faced or laser-lined in weeks, the items you get from the bakery are often old, hard, and crusty the day you get them and the store is almost always out of stock of the most basic items.

I already am not a fan of Walmart. If I have to shop at a Walmart store though I’ll go out of my way to go to another store in the chain because many times the selection and environment is just better.

Not my fiancee though. She is just another blind consumer. Sigh.

Meaning we of course return to the worst Walmart in the chain often because she likes to be a blind consumer and doesn’t care how shitty the place is because the prices are good (not really that good though).

Finally this past week she started to see what I’ve been saying for months about this Walmart. She started to get angry and taking it out on me. Which of course just let to a large argument and later my typing of this blog entry to get my stress out.

The other day we went in with a very simple shopping list.

As we began shopping we noticed they didn’t have any sugar in stock. Not a big deal.

Then we begin to look for salt, Coke,  and a plethora of other basic items and found them to be out of stock on nearly everything. Tiffany started to get very frustrated.

I try not to let it frustrate me… everything about Walmart is already a huge frustration for me. Especially this Walmart.

In the end we weren’t able to get over 30 items on our shopping list.

The people at the Columbia City Walmart as I’ve already said are horribly unprofessional as this week proved to me once again.

We went to a self-checkout lane. Apparently the lady who was using it before us only got one item. She realized she forgot milk at the back of the store and took her one item and left the self-checkout to get her milk. We didn’t know this of course, walk up and scan our first item. Ten seconds later the lady watching over the self-checkouts comes over and says… “You should look next time someone may be using it”. I thought WHAT THE FUCK. I can think of no reason at all for her to be such a bitch over nothing.

So we started putting our items in the bag and she came over and asked us to stop and before saying anything more voids our transaction and tells us to move to another lane because “this one was already being used”.

Uhhhh. Okay?!?

So we move to the one next to it and I make a remark to Tiffany about how much Walmart sucks and what a bitch that lady was not knowing she was right behind me. She gets mad and voids our transaction and tells us to go to a regular checkout lane.

Even better on the way out we are stopped and our bags searched.

Yeah Walmart in Columbia City… its great… let me tell you
The people aren’t the worst thing though. Our Walmart is the DIRTIEST you are going to find in the chain. We’ve seen and taken pictures of roaches and even rats in our Walmart in the past week. We made some calls to a few insepectors and the good news is Walmart has one week to fix it…. or get closed. Which of course makes me happy.

They somehow passed the inspection yesterday… at least as far as the infestation goes and now they are in trouble because the roof is falling in and has tons of holes in it.

Nothing makes me feel better about shopping then having to avoid tripping over buckets every other isle that catch the water coming in from the roof.

Again… my Walmart is the win…. oh wait… teh fail. My bad.

Don’t post a comment telling me to stop shopping at this local Walmart because I already have. I know I should have a long time ago but getting Tiffany to stop… it hasn’t been easy. Even after I got escorted out for shopping “after curfew”.

Those of you with keen eyes have already supported the fancy countdown button on the sidebar of my blog and most likely have already clicked over to see what it was all about.

For those of you who haven’t yet but live in Indiana I wanted to tell you about an AWESOME conference that will be in Indianapolis in August of this year.

Why is this going to be such an awesome conference?

Well for one my good friend Noah is one of the guys behind it with Shawn and they have been working on putting together all of the pieces for the past several months.

Blog Indiana 2008 is a 2-day conference for both experienced and new bloggers alike. Sessions will include topics such as blogging for beginners, using blogs in your business, monetizing your blog, political blogging and more advanced topics. In the past, most blogging and technology-related conferences have either been too expensive or too far out-of-state. Blog Indiana 2008 seeks to bring a low-cost, high-value conference to Hoosier bloggers.

Seating is limited to 250 attendees so if you haven’t registered yet then PLEASE DO SO. Registration is only $49 which for a two-day conference is an amazing bargain.

Can’t wait to see you August 16th - 17th!

Noah posted an interesting concept to his blog recently that I thought I should bring to the attention to my readers in Indiana.

This post is the first in a multi-part “interactive case study” on domain flipping. By interactive I mean I’m seeking your advice on what steps to take and will give updates as this project continues. I have very recently acquired the domain name IndyDivorce.com. There is no website attached to it. However, I feel like it could be rather valuable for a local law firm.

Noah recently purchased IndyDivorce.com and is looking for the advice of YOU guys on what he should do with it. When he initially told me he was purchasing the domain my first thought was it would be amazing for a lawyer in Indy and that he should start approaching some. Then he took the idea a bit futher and decided to do a “flip this domain” sort of idea. I happen to be a big fan of the show “Flip This House” and was sold on the idea almost immediately. So what are your thoughts? Head on over here and let Noah know what you are thinking.

A lot of people have been talking about all of the hype surrounding WordPress 2.5 and how amazing it is going to be with the new design and all of the new features.

A lot of people have also been talking about how much they hate certain aspects of WordPress 2.5

Most of the complaints have been about the WordPress 2.5 ‘Write Post’ page which I will of course speak about later in this post I find that I have far more complaints.

The first one being the new “Widget” section of WordPress 2.5. I have mixed feelings about this section. I find that I myself understand it but when I was showing it to people who are not experienced bloggers they were confused for a good thirty seconds before they understood it.

I know a lot of people who aren’t very computer savvy and yet still blog. The majority of them use TypePad which is a great product if you are just starting but one that isn’t known for a lot of customizable power.

One feature that every person I know that uses TypePad enjoys is the way TypePad handles themes for blogging. It has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. You want a widget moved up or down on your sidebar? Easy enough… drag it from the bin and move it around on the sidebar until you find the place you want it.

For a long time it was the same thing with WordPress. You could easily drag and drop the items you wanted to and from the sidebar and then up or down.

The new setup is just confusing to those who are just starting.

In the original pre 2.5 setup you would select the items you wanted and drag them to either sidebar 1 or sidebar 2 and sometimes if your design had it even a third or fourth sidebar. This was intuitive.

I always, always, always use people that I know aren’t savvy with technology to test ideas on. I brought in a few of those people such as my mother and some friends to sit down and attempt to use the old WordPress and then the “new” WordPress and then observed as much as I could to make sure I wasn’t just plain crazy on this.

In the first situation I sat my mom down with 2.5 and asked her to move some items around on my sidebar. She was able to determine she wanted the design system and once she understood what the word widget meant that the widget section is the part she wanted.

My mother has used TypePad because I wrote a major book about the platform. Her first attempt was to drag and drop what she wanted to the sidebar. It didn’t work. After about 25 seconds she realized she had to click the Add buton.

Next I told her I wanted the widget to below the comments widget and so she started looking for the ability to do so. Again she wasted about 20 seconds to find that she could drag and drop the items up or down.

She was confused as to why she could drag and drop on one section but not another.

Which basically had proven my initial thoughts that the new design for handling widgets in your theme is a blunder. They don’t stop with that though.

I have a great deal of posts set as drafts at any given time. I often start having thoughts about a blog post but because of the nature of my job will need to stop writing and take care of something. One feature I love is the ability to simply hit Write and then have my drafts appear at the top so I can click them and keep working on them later.

In 2.5 that is no longer possible.

To get to a draft you actually click the drafts link on the dashboard.

This actually makes more sense to have all my drafts show up in one place and will most likely prove to be beneficial to newer bloggers and less tech savvy individuals but it will require an adjustment on my part and I know I’ll get used to the new way in time.
Everyone had issues with the Write Post page. When I read all of the negative blogs I was assuming that they simply didn’t like change and that the new layout couldn’t be that bad.

Again… mixed feelings with this section.

The new design is much more focused on the actual writing process and less so on the meta and additional tasks that goes with writing a blog entry. I assume this is because a lot of users don’t modify WordPress and simply just use it to post quick entries.

For power users such as myself who make sure each post has a tag, often times add custom fields and other various meta information I find the new layout to require more clicks and as such time consuming and awful to an extent.

Honestly though this is another issue that I think given a bit of time will become a non-issue as I slowly adjust my WordPress habits.

A great deal of complaints have also been focused at the navigation and tabs at the top of the admin panel. I personally have no complaints with the new setup. The new tabs are simplified, the process of moving from one task to another seems more logical and the design overall seems easier for a new user to pick up and begin using.

The new color scheme feels a bit like a Six Apart product and I’m not sure I approve of that
The colors are pleasant and easy on the eyes but after a long period of time writing the same post (such as this one) it gets old quickly and doesn’t feel like home as the old scheme did. The good news is that plugins will be able to change the color scheme and I’ve heard rumors that you can revert back to classic in the settings but I’ve yet to see that option if it even really exists.

The new dashboard actually makes a great deal of sense and I haven’t seen or heard many complaints about it as of yet but I’m sure some elitist will have something negative to say.

Overall my first impression of WordPress 2.5 is mixed. I think a fresh new look is required but I’m not sure that the changes are going to make blogging easier for newer users as the design firm behind it claim.

Who knows… maybe I’m an idiot who knows nothing of blogging though.