Netsuite, for those of you who are still blissfully unaware, can be described as a giant, Cthulu-esque ecommerce platform, graced with enough tentacles to integrate warehousing and distribution, product development, management, accounting, and the front-end webstore.

To be fair, the webstore, and thus the products assigned to it, is really the only part of Netsuite that I have anything to do with. I get the impression that the webstore area was a tacked-on afterthought that has since grown, and I can promise you that Netsuite corporate either didn’t talk to, or didn’t listen to, any good usability guys while building it. So it’s possible that the warehousing and financial areas of the system are screamingly stellar, and it’s just the webstore part that makes me want to break my own fingers.

Like with so many of the truly evil influences in my life, I have a love-hate relationship with Netsuite. When one of my clients opted to buy Netsuite’s Gold Support option, I discovered that the NS guys were so on the ball, I had to resist the urge to ask them for relationship advice and stock tips. One of their Indian support reps actually wrote me a Javascript function off the top of his head that not only solved the problem I was calling about, but several other issues besides, and which, I’m sure, would have produced cold fusion if I’d passed it the right arguments. And that wasn’t an isolated incident.

On the other hand, well… allow me to demonstrate with a real-life example:

The problem: 450 images were uploaded to the Netsuite images folder with the wrong name. I need to delete them, and re-upload them with the correct name.

Easy-peasy. I’ll just search the file cabinet for the wayward images and delete the returned results. Here are the results now:

Wait, what? There’s NO MASS DELETE OPTION FOR RETURNED SEARCH RESULTS?

In fact, there’s no delete option on this screen at all. The only way to delete from a returned search is to click “Edit” for each file, then click here:

At which point you’re not returned to the search results, you’re returned to the File Cabinet screen:

… which a) erases your search results and b) tantalizes you with a giant “Delete Files” button, which, being the spawn of the devil, takes you to another screen, where file cabinet images are not sortable by any kind of criteria, and on which page NO FILE PATH IS SHOWN, making it completely IMPOSSIBLE to know whether or not you’re even deleting the right item from the right place and <hysteria> oh god oh god oh god you already have a checkbox on the file cabinet screen! Just add another checkbox! All the pieces are there! Just ONE MORE CHECKBOX! AND I CAN CLICK IT AND DELETE THINGS! RIGHT FROM HERE! WITHOUT GOING ANYWHERE!</hysteria>

*ahem*

That’s right – 5 clicks to delete each item. 450 items. 3 unbillable hours. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have case of carpal tunnel to cultivate.

When the code you’re handed is kind of shitty, roll it into a ball that’s 250 times heavier than your body weight and bury it.

Me: Hi! I’d really love to buy your new Drupal module. I was wondering if you guys do custom scripting? Could you integrate a checkout of some kind? What would be a ballpark quote for that?

Him: Uh…. yeah, we talked about it, but that would be a lot of work.

Me: *eyeshift* Okay. Still, though, when you say “a lot of work”, how much are we talking about?

Him: I mean it would pretty much be impossible. We’re super busy for the next few months.

Me: But I can get someone else to modify it instead, then? Hire a freelancer?

Him: Um, yeah, we’re legally required to let you do that.

Me: … Good? Anyway, if you can’t do that modification, would it be possible to do a slightly easier modification?

Him: Theoretically.

Me: …

Him: We’re really busy.

Me: For the next few months.

Him: At least.

Me: (silence)

Him: (silence)

Me: So, uh, can I buy your module? As is?

Him (sighing heavily): Why don’t you shoot me an email and I’ll pass it along to the guy that handles this stuff, and he’ll let you know what you have to do. I’m the More Technical Guy.

I still haven’t heard from them.

The biggest fail here is not that More Technical Guy was kind of a dick. I mean, I have a thing for antisocial coders. They’re hot. Where I’m concerned, on a normal day, the word “theoretically” constitutes a wildly successful pick-up line.

The fail is that the CEO is letting More Technical Guy pick up incoming calls from clients. Unless your coding team is made up of peppy, well-informed girls named Amber, I don’t want to talk to them first. Nay, YOU don’t want me to talk to them. Ever. Why? Because even though the merest whiff of a sales pitch would have had me forking over, I still have my money right now.

The entire structure of a programming firm is based around keeping the coders in the most comfortable, moist… est (most moist? really?), dumb-proof bomb-shelter you can manage, away away away from annoying client questions like “Can I buy that?”, and all the way on the other end of the office from the chipper morning people. Let’s stick with that, mmmkay?

That is all.

Dear Papa John’s: I will fail to perform a usability assessment for *way less* than your guys are charging.

Behold, a maze of digital dungeons and garden-topped horror… *flashback dream sequence*

SCREEN ONE: THE HOMEPAGE

Giant picture of stretchy cheese, check. In-your-face order button, check. Masturbatory picture of founder making a manly basketball shot. Um, check. The door to the labyrinth is deliciously disguised in garlands of high-calorie photography. Pizza: I want it.

Except for the one that’s in Spanish, the nav buttons are looking pretty useful. Hell, standing here, I feel like I can do anything. I’m on top of the world. I can even follow Papa John’s on Twitter (“Making another pizza!” posted at 10:25a.m. “Making another pizza!” posted at 10:25-and-a-half-a.m. “Making another pizza!” posted at…). Turns out that what I can’t do is view the menu without plugging in my zip code.

Not that this is unique to Papa John’s. Thanks to the joys of franchising, each menu is probably a bit different, and they need your location to give you accurate readings. So we’ll cut them some slack, and click on “Menu & Specials”.

Which brings us to…

SCREEN TWO: PLUGGING IN YOUR ADDRESS

The problem here is that plugging in your address and zip code takes you to one screen, while plugging in your city and state takes you to a completely different and way more confusing screen. In a futile bid for expediency, let’s pretend I don’t know that, and I’ll jump straight into the ordering process by filling in an address and zip.

SCREEN 3: THE MENU

Helllooooo, ugly! But OK. Large pizza, plz.

SCREEN 4: CHOICES, CHOICES

If the choose-your-toppings screen has to be this long, then it better be fun to navigate. It had better not, Papa Johns, look like an interactive Privacy Policy. Bottom of the page, I’m presented with two options: “Add to Order”, and “Add to order & checkout”.

I’ve picked a large pizza, I’ve added some topping goodness, and now I want to eat it, so I’m gonna go ahead and “Add to order & checkout”.

SCREEN 5: OHEZ NOES!

But… I don’t have an account. The email address that auto-appears belongs to someone else who used this computer months ago. And there’s no “Not You? Sign up for a new account” option. Save me, Firefox Back Button!

SCREEN 4… AGAIN

Following the trail of garlic-powdered breadcrumbs I’ve cunningly strewn along my path, I land back on the Choices screen, where I, imitating the casual pizza buyer, fail to notice that all of my selections have been wiped, meaning I’ll need to plug them again. Getting hungrier, I try the other button. Add to Cart.

SCREEN 5’s EVIL TWIN: AN ERROR HAS BEEN DETECTOREDZ

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That would be the funniest prank call ever. “Yeah, hi, Papa Johns? Oh good. I’d just like to report that there are invalid items in deal code EDO89, but I think that’s only for restaurant number 369.”

I am so tempted to call them right now and actually… oh, no wait. Even if I wanted to, I can’t make that phone call, because there is no number, Neo. There is also no useful error text to explain to the user what actually went wrong. And in an age of live field authentication, there is no need for this screen.

I’m guessing I landed here because I didn’t re-do the choices screen. So let’s hit “Continue”, which should take me back to that screen, where I can modify my… oh. Nevermind.

SCREEN 3: WRATH OF KHAN

Aaaand we’re back to the menu. Aaaand I now have 2 items in my cart, though I only wanted one. I don’t see a checkout button. “View Cart”, maybe?

And another thing: I try really hard not to get my panties in a bunch over “their” vs. “they’re” mistakes and other small annoyances in casual writing. I don’t want to be that girl. But if you were to see mah panties in the presence of crappy grammar, you might rightly point out that they do wad up a little. And I can’t help feeling like having a “View Cart” button for a pizza delivery checkout is a copywriting fail. Just as there is, in fact, no crying in baseball, so there are also no carts in pizza.

Point is, it doesn’t matter what you put on the button, as long as your customers know exactly and immediately how to give you money. “View Cart” doesn’t do it for me.

SCREEN 6: CART

After removing the superfluous pizza, my order looks right, and I would really, really, really like to eat now. Checkout button gets some love.

SCREEN 5: BACK IN BLACK

Dude, you have got to be kidding me. And don’t even ask me what happens here when you have a second Papa John’s tab open, because I’ll lose d6 sanity points. If you were gonna force me to login (which I shouldn’t actually have to do to order from you), then all login information should have been gathered when a) you were gathering zip code data and b) I was still excited about ordering.

This is where 95% of your frustrated customers pick up the phone and just call the order in, begging the question: Why, pray tell, did you spend 20 grand on an online ordering system?

With the Horn of Gondor ringing in my ears, I decide this is no longer about pizza. This is about war.

A very careful perusal of the screen I’m staring at yields up a clue:

A HAH!

SCREEN 7: A NEW ACCOUNT SIGNUP BUTTON!

Sigh. Click.

(Also, “Online Need Help Guide?” Yes, online help you need.)

SCREEN 8: FILLING OUT MY TAX RETURN

After filling out a strangely dual-paneled questionnaire (nice mushrooms) in which I tell PJ’s my marital status, favorite Crayon color and consistency of my last stool sample we get to:

SCREEN 9: NOW WITH 100% MORE POINTLESS CLICKING

SCREEN 10: MAKE IT STOP

SCREEN… 3

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

“I am so offended right now,” said my husband, giving up and logging onto Dominos, “that I’d rather be repeatedly kneed in the balls by the Noid than pay Papa John’s twenty bucks to not fix their interface. And I don’t even like Dominos.”

We were going for cheap, fast, and simple, simple, simple, so in terms of a design, I settled on the blissfully free Grace Photoblog Theme developed by the UK’s own 7879 Designs.

Price: 5 out of 5

There’s only one f-word I like better than “Free”. And that’s Fibrous Astrocyte.

Functionality: 4 out of 5

Grace comes with a couple of delectable features: an optional “featured content” image rotator that pulls posts from a pre-determined category and displays their attached images on the homepage; and a auto-resizing thumbnail script that, um, auto-resizes thumbnails.

There was some “hrm”ing, some turning the box upside down and shaking it, and some re-re-re-referencing the Grace homepage comments to get the rotator kicked off, and I gather that a few other users had installation issues, but it did work. If you’d like a demo of the rotator, it’s been disabled on patriciapschaefer.com, so check out the live demo courtesy of 7879.

The thumbnail script works like a charm, with each post only requiring one image upload. Grace takes your main image, tosses it up at the top of your post, makes a thumbnail out of it, and drops that thumbnail into the home page. If you’d prefer to control the look and feel of the thumbnails yourself, making them by hand, the Grace admin panel lets you toggle auto thumbnails off and on.

Out-of-the-box Design: 3 out of 5

The beauty of Grace Photoblog is the simple media engine that drives the theme, and in the fact that the photographer’s work, not the web design, is what the theme highlights.

Grace puts the photographer’s creations front and center, with a default capacity for 900px width for each photo – that’s a maximum size I couldn’t find from any other free theme, particularly while the photo is still residing inside the template (not linked off-site or in another tab / window). In terms of photographic display, I think Grace has everything a photographer likes to see.

But an overlarge header that drops photo content too far below the fold, ultra-basic CSS, and a dubious grungy background make Grace in desperate need of some pre-launch tweaks.

Ease of Modification: 5 out of 5

Though the out-of-the-box design isn’t all that much to look at, Grace doesn’t need too much work to look sharp. I made four extremely fast mods to this theme:

1) Took the header height down to a manageable size.
2) Added a dark wood background
3) Added the “wp-pagenumbers” plug-in, which replaces the default Wordpress “<< Previous – Next >>” links with proper page numbers.
4) Dropped in a new logo.

Grace landing page before:

Aaaand after:

And then I gave myself a Girl Scouts sloganeering badge for coming up with Grace: the easy-bake oven of WP-powered photoblogs. Eh? Eh? All in a day’s work.

So, in conclusion…

Awesome for: Photo-centric sites with bare-bones content and navigation, or for use as a “blank slate” engine to design on top of.

Not so much with the: Integrated design.

It’s not just Eric, either. I used to country-hop a lot, and I remember being baffled when my change-challenged friends would moan about the terrors of packing up your life and unpacking it again elsewhere. It’s so easy – just buy a ticket and follow the signs. Hell, if you’re on the road and you stop paying attention for a couple of hours, chances are good that you’ll snap out of it in the midst of a complimentary continental breakfast.

This is partially due to a fairly standardized transportation system and the well-worn grooves of the several million rolling suitcase wheels that have gone before. But it’s also made possible by an entire world of nice people. Where my caravan would once have had to keep a vigilant eye on the bandit-ridden horizon, now I can enjoy a gin tonic and happily drool on myself for 15 blissful hours without the appearance of so much as a single saber.

So say we’re morally corrupted as a culture if it makes you feel fashionable. Tell yourself we’re circling the drain of courtesy. But I have an Amazon gift card here that says otherwise. Thanks, Eric.

We now return to our regularly scheduled pessimism.

Oh, and Papyrus, the web designer’s nightmare. Papyrus in every coffee table bookshop window, on every photo gallery awning, and on the logo of every locally-grown bag of backwater pecans. We turned it into a snarky scavenger hunt. “Look, honey – pralines. From ancient Egypt.”

I used to think that in-jokes and ideas like that were custom-tailored for me to have while doing unique, eccentric things like wearing Wellies with shorts in the middle of summer and taking pictures of abandoned shopping carts. But as I discovered that every indie girl worth her bowling shoes had 7 bajillion shots of her own feet on her hard drive, so I also found that however original my idea, there’s an overwhelming likelihood that someone else has had it first, fleshed it out with a thoroughness I can only flail at, and started a blog about it.

Exhibit A:Papyrus Watch, a blog which – and I love this – “sets out to document and expose the overuse of the Papyrus font.” And overused it most certainly is. I don’t blame the designers; we all need an old-world, distressed-edge font to fall back on. Especially when the world is full of hippy cat ladies starting lines of organic, botanical, natural, eco-friendly, green, environmentally-conscious bath products. But Papyrus has had its day, and if you simply must reach for the old school font, these are, if not better designed, at the very least, more original. And if I couldn’t picture it on a bottle of said cat lady juice, it wasn’t included in the collection.

Squint, and Film Cryptic could pass fairly well.

Caliph shares a certain aesthetic with Papyrus.

Licinia Aged is, to me, vaguely reminiscent of post-Gutenberg typeface.

Pompeji Petit doesn’t particularly sing, but mess with the type spacing or pull it into Illustrator, and I see possibilities.

Carolus Roman see’s Papyrus’ elegance and raises it a sharper curve.

A classic, with a slightly distressed edge.

I see grunge brushes in your future.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Anyway, my biggest issue has always been figuring out what there was to do with Linux after I got it installed. I mean, I went through all that trouble, I want my machine to rock. I want it to turn me into a power user just by dint of typing on it. I want its USB cables to go up my nose, plug into my brain, and install an assembly language babelfish. Seriously.

But since those things only happen to cartoon Japanese people, I’ll give you a quick rundown on a few different programs you can look into, sorted by purpose and need (audio, security, etc.). Depending on what distribution you have, the instructions may be a bit different, but the idea is the same.

This is not a troubleshooting tutorial. It assumes your installation of Linux went successfully, and you’re sitting there staring at your keyboard, quickly running out of cool ideas. It also assumes you’re generally a Linux beginner, but that you know a few basics.

Things You Really, Really, Really Need to Know Before Diving In

1) Get familiar with the applications manager and package managers for your distribution. Google “[your distribution] package manager” and “[your distribution] add and remove programs”.

What’s a package / applications manager? Imagine if all of the established updates, programs, and plug-ins that anyone had ever made for Windows were all in one easily accessible place, and all you had to do was click “install”, and Bob’s your scary, unemployed uncle. Well, most versions of Linux have that functionality.

Windows is so big and bulky because it comes with tons of programs, extras, features, and extensions, many of which you’ll never need or use. Linux takes the opposite tack: it comes equipped with some lightweight basics, definitely enough to get you started, but it leaves the real add-ons up to you. You get to pick and choose which programs get added to your system, meaning you can customize Linux to be anything you want it to be.

The drawback is that many times, when you first get Linux running, there’s a whole lot of extra installing to do as you forge your perfect setup.

In Ubuntu 8.10 with Gnome installed, you can find your Applications Manager by clicking Applications > Add / Remove…. This’ll bring up a list of all of the established programs easily available to you. There are quite a few 3rd party programs out there that aren’t on this list. If they’re not on the list, however, they take a little bit of command line fu to install, and you should know how to do that.

2) Know how to at least open the terminal and run a couple commands, such as:

apt-get / apt-get install: You need to know this. You also need to know how to unpack a couple of different types of .tar file from the command line (the .tar file is the Linux equivalent of .zip). You need to know this because not all programs are available from that applications manager thingie, and when they’re not, you should be able to install programs manually. Read about it here.

wget : Lets you download pretty much anything from online, providing you know its URL… even stuff you’re not really supposed to have. For example, want to grab an embedded video, embedded mp3, or picture that doesn’t allow right-clicking? Just use the wget command in your terminal, and Linux will pluck your prize for you.

There’s a great wget tutorial on www.thegeekstuff.com

su or sudo: You probably already know what this is, but do go read about it.

Okay, on to the good stuff.

Using Linux as a Plain-Jane, All-Purpose Machine

Better get the basics working, then, huh?

Set up your Email: If you used to use a Mac, you’re probably already familiar with Thunderbird. It’s kind of like Microsoft Outlook – an email client, RSS feed reader, address book, etc. With it, you can consolidate all of your email accounts into one location, and perform communicative tasks. Most newish Linux platforms either already come with Thunderbird, or it’s easily accessible from the command line. Ubuntu 8.10 comes with Evolution Mail, which I personally don’t like, but Thunderbird was an easy install.

Poke around in the OpenOffice tools, and start moving your doc over to your new OS: Most Linux distros now come with the OpenOffice suite, which is the Linux equivalent of Microsoft Word. Except OpenOffice is free. There’s a PowerPoint equivalent, a word processing program, an something similar to Excel. And yes, they can all read Microsoft Office files.

Making Linux Look Shiny

Install Compiz, which does wicked cool things to your desktop. This should be available in your applications manager.

Most of the “shiny” in Linux is built on top of your desktop environment. There are two standard desktop environments for Linux: one is KDE, the other is Gnome. You typically choose which desktop environment you’ll be using during installation. Depending on which one you picked, you’ve got a different set of options for pimping your Linux desktop.

If you’re running KDE, check out http://www.kde-look.org/ for the latest themes, wallpapers, color schemes, icon sets, mouse states and more.

For Gnome, go to Gnome Art.

Here’s an interesting blog post on switching themes and icon sets in Linux.

Using Linux for Graphic / Web Design

Though this is slowly changing, almost no one migrates to Linux for the sole purpose of graphic design. But whereas the entire Adobe design suite (Windows / Mac) costs several thousand dollars, the Linux graphic design programs are, amazingly, free. And so two things are happening: an increasing number of people are coming to rely on open source graphic design software, and FOSS design software is getting better. There really is some great stuff available, so why not try it out?

Install Inkscape: This is hands-down the best vector graphics editor for Linux. It also runs on Windows and Mac, but not quite as well. This should be available from you Add / Remove programs application manager, so remember, you don’t have to download and install this from the Inskcape project website. In fact, it’s probably best that you don’t if you don’t have to – a manual install is harder.

Install GIMP Image Editor: This may already be installed, so check your programs. This is the open source version of Photoshop, and should also be available in your application manager.

Install Blender: This one equates to Maya 3D. It’s an open source application that lets you create 3D applications and animation.

Install Scribus: Scribus is a bit like InDesign – it’s a great page layout program for magazines and print graphics.

Install XAMPP: You may have heard of WAMP, the Apache server environment for Windows that comes bundled with all that cool stuff. XAMPP (the AMP stands for Apache MySQL PHP) has a Linux version. This lets web designers and PHP coders basically run a webserver, either locally or live. I personally use one to practice PHP, install Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress to test my theme designs locally, and a whole bunch of other great stuff.

Unfortunately, I can’t see a XAMPP package in my applications manager, and this is a bit of a complicated install, so tackle it when you’ve got some time. Read up on how to get these running here.

Install Cssed Editor: While I think that Cssed Editor still needs some work, it’s a pretty good CSS and HTML editing platform. Some people love it. Give it a go.

Using Linux as a Sooper Dooper Secret Haxor Base Station

I would totally laugh at you if I hadn’t done this like, six times.

Install Metasploit.

If you’re moving this way, you might want to read up on shell scripting and the terminal.

And if you’re feeling up to a challenge, consider switching from whatever Linux distribution you’re running right now over to Backtrack Linux, a distro made exclusively for penetration testing and hacking. It’s a great way to learn. And it’s also a great to way totally screw up the partitioning on your computer, so really, unless you’re in the mood to, um, “learn a lot”, you might want to wait until the Backtrack guys release an easy GUI installer, which is rumored to be up for release soon.

You could also consider…

Using Linux as a Programming Environment

Linux is a programmer’s wet dream, and no matter where you are on the programming skillz spectrum, Linux can do something for you. Start off by installing your favorite language(s) development environment:

Open your application manager, go to the “Programming” section, and start installing. Python programmers will be thrilled with the 1-click IDLE install (IDLE is the Python programming environment), the easy Ruby install, quick access to compilers, Eclipse, MySQL tools, RapidSVN (which is a GUI client for subversion), hex editors, debug programs, GUI designers, and on and on and on.

Using Linux as a Gaming Machine

Look, I’m all for this, but I’ll be honest, a) I don’t have much experience here, and b) every time I ask a Linux gamer where the FOSS gaming community is, they kind of chuckle, say there isn’t a big one, and then point me to www.linuxgames.com. So that site is probably your best bet.

Using Linux as an Audio Center

Likewise, Linux Audio has a great little community around it, though you kinda have to know where to look. There are DJ mixing programs and audio effects galore, as well as plenty of plain ol’ CD ripping and burning programs.

You can find a list of Linux audio applications on this wiki.

If you have KDE, download Amarok to manage your music (applications manager) and organize your music library. And if you’re running Gnome, there’s a fairly new project called Listen, which is marketing itself as the Amarok of Gnome.

Hope that gives you somewhere to start. Enjoy!

Kyle nursed me back to English-speaking, pop-culture health with a steady diet of tabloid articles about Kirsty Alley’s weight gain and the horrific blog posts about Duke leaving Freezepop.

This update is made possible with (and only with) the unwitting aid of Charleston Linux User Group member Eugene, whose digital camera contains the world’s only actual proof that I exist.  Proof which I gleeflully filched from his website and edited.

Okay, less talkie-talkie, more, um, rockie-rockie. *wince*

The ne’erdowells. Neer-do-wells. Neverdo’wells. Okay, until I can punctuate that, I’m forced to admit that we were actually pretty tame. But Shay did end up enjoying quite a few metrosexual daiquiris, and Louis hid out behind the gym (read: bathroom) smoking stogies (read: texting on his PDA) and Derek slept in his car.

This is KDE guy, a mere 10 hours away from our uber-awkward conversation. I was walking by his booth the next morning, and he was all “*mumble mumble* question?”, and I thought he said, “Can I ask you a question?” so I said “Sure,” and stared at him, and he stares at me, and then he’s all, “What?” and I’m all, “Wait, what did you say?” and he’s like, “I SAID, can I answer any of your questions?”.

And it somehow devolved into me asking him what KDE was, even though I already knew, just to smooth things over, but I hadn’t had any coffee, and I could barely hear him, but I didn’t want to take the long route to making it worse by bleating “what?” over and over, so instead I took the direct route to making it worse by saying something like, “Oh, um, so, it’s a desktop environment?” And then I ran off somewhere and banged my head into a wall. And he’s pretty cute, which made the whole thing extra sucky.

Louis is not only cool, he is also a total shwag whore. How much of a shwag whore, you ask? During the second trip back to the car to “drop his stuff off”, Louis was all, “What? It’s not like I go shopping ever.”

I’m  pretty sure this is during the morning keynote speech. I can tell because that’s my “Oh dear God I still haven’t had any coffee” face. I felt really horrible stealing the last of the coffee from the VIP speaker’s lounge, before I really realized it was “not for everyone” coffee. But then I had some. And I didn’t feel bad anymore.

This is Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, the morning keynote speaker, and it’s a blessing from the gods – and the SELF organizers – that he was the first one we heard in the morning. Awesome, awesome speech. Though I do wish he’d warned us about the pelting-us-with-cool-stuff before he threw something at me, because I ducked, and in doing so I think I missed my chance at a penguin plushie. Yeah, those would be my highschool reflexes, thankyouverymuch.

Icculus, of icculus.org fame, gave a great lecture on the state of Linux gaming. His bowl-you-over-and-drag-you-along nervous energy was awesome to behold, his humor was effortless, and his passion was real. I love this guy for making me wanna crack open PyGame all over again. The precariously balanced, uncapped water bottles were a nice, edge-of-your-seat touch. Plus, he’s wearing a giant floppy flannel. Yes, please!

Not pictured: Random 2:00AM Magic the Gathering tournament, me trying to get coffee out of a waffle machine, and trying to explain “electroclash” on the ride home.

Extra thanks to Shay for the ride.

After wading through a sickening miasma of forehead-slappingly horrible hosting services, finding InMotion was like coming home to a basket of warm, buttery, PHP5-enabled muffins. It’s like the part at the end of the book where the whole adventuring party is back in the same tavern they started from, and the thief is all, “This story may be over, but our adventure has only just begun!”

Why do I love them? Let me count the ways:

1) Online support, billing and sales chat. Unlike Siteground, with their oh-so-reachable staff who magically teleport out of space-time the moment you pay for services (please to check out our online knowledge base kthanksbye!), InMotion has live phone and text chat with reasonable business hours. Everyone’s really nice, they mostly know what they’re talking about, and if they don’t know what they’re talking about, they go find out for you.

2) Enough security hoops to jump through that your sign-up is secure, not so many security hoops that you can’t effectively register a domain. The last – and final – time I registered with Siteground, they asked for my driver’s license, credit card and faxed signature. Well, I was living overseas at the time, and there was no fax in the house. So I took a picture of my signature and emailed that. Not good enough. I sent a picture of my passport. They wrote back that the bottom numbers were blurry. They asked for a birth certificate. No, I’m serious, they called me, verified my information, then asked me for my birth certificate. I asked them why I was having to beg to do business with them, and the account was miraculously approved.

Listen, people, if a thief wants my identity that bad, freakin’ take it. “Welcome to Kendraland. Hope you know Photoshop, or you’re about to get a bunch of irate phone calls.”

3) InMotion uses CPanel. I may heart InMotion, but I heart CPanel more. GoDaddy may be cheap, but what on God’s earth were they thinking building their own little special howdy-doody backend / site manager? Why do I have to open 4 billion different windows to find my email settings? Why do 12 different links with different names take me to the same location? And why, oh WHY, do I have to wait 5 minutes for every page to load? You guys just had to have your own special-wecial one, didn’t you? CPanel, please!

4) InMotion does Instant… stuff. While I’m on the GoDaddy tangent, let me pose yet another question: why does it take 5 hours to implement simple changes that should be a click-and-use affair? 4 hours to update my email settings? Are you freakin’ serious?

5) Great uptime. ‘Nuff said.

6) Everyone speaks English. While I’m the last person who’s likely to complain about multi-culturalism, being that I spent the last 7 years as an immigrant myself, the fact remains that if you’re offering web hosting to the American market, you have to actually speak English to deliver your services. I recently discovered that a friend of mine is hosted with IX Webhosting, whose tagline is “Please to be to our sites we like”. Okay, no, but it should be.

The web was once peppered with rave reviews for IX hosting. And then somewhere in the last year or so, the reviews changed their tone. “Used to be great, now it’s awful! What happened?”

What happened, as it turns out, is that the site is run entirely by a Russian support staff who take 15 minutes to respond to any question, and when they do get around to answering, it’s usually, “Must to speak with our more favoried high techers. Wait on the email, please.” I like to imagine IX was bought out by a cigar-smoking Moscow mob boss with lots of pomade, who says stuff like, “Vat iz dis web buziness, eh? I hyave too many vomen to care about zees”. Oh, come on. It helps me get through (the many) conversations with tech support.

7) They talk to techies like techies, and newbies like newbies. When I tell my mom “All you have to do is call and ask for Business Class hosting, Joomla 1.5 enabled”, and she calls me back all, “Okay, now what?” like it was the easiest thing ever, I know I’m referring people to the right place.

Go sign up. You won’t be sorry.