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Memories: The Leonard Speiser Mask & GoldenPalace.com

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

A couple weeks ago, there was a great reunion party for many eBay Product Managers & User Experience Designers from the past decade.  I didn’t get an exact count, but at least 70 people were there, including many of the early Product Managers from before I joined the company in 2003.

I was happily reminded of an event that I absolutely would have shared on this blog at the time – if I had been writing this blog at the time.  It seemed worthy of a posting now, three years later, especially since it comes with some dot-com bragging rights.

The event?  The time I sold a Leonard Speiser mask to Golden Palace Casino on eBay for $400.

speiser01_pic_1011

Strangely disturbing, isn’t it?

Details

The auction was put up in May, 2005, shortly after the official “going away” party for Leonard, which we held at the Tied House in Mountain View.  It was a large event, and we took up the back room.  There was food, drink, and the requisite roasting of Leonard “see attachment” Speiser.  (We’re not rolling back, we’re rolling forward!) It also included infamous video from a particular usability test, on permanent re-run.

It was a fun time, and as party favors everyone was given these hand-made copies of Leonard’s face, taken from his Halloween rendition of Harry Potter.  They were just color copies, stapled onto rulers.

On a lark, I listed one that night on eBay, hoping to raise money for his going away present.  I had recently launched the first version of eBay Pulse, a popularity page ranking queries, stores, and most watched items on eBay.  (There is actually a patent pending on the latter).  Through a grass roots email campaign, I got a sufficient number of eBay employees to watch the item, propelling it onto the “Top 10” list for most watched items on eBay.

At that point, Golden Palace Casino found it.  At the time, they were buying up crazy items on eBay as a form of PR, starting with the famous Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich.  Yes, I know the memories are coming back to you now.

After some furious bidding, they won the item for $400, providing enough cash to buy Leonard an engraved video iPod (the hot item at the time).   He claims he still has it.  🙂

In any case, we delivered the item, signed, to Golden Palace, and they posted it on their website.   It’s hard to find now, but a little Google sleuthing uncovered it.  Here’s what they had to say:

A handheld sign, made from a ruler and a cut-out of Leonardï’s head, was sold on eBay for $400.00. GoldenPalace.com bought the item, which was made for Leonard Speiser, an eBay Product Manager who was leaving his job. In order to raise money for the send-off party and roast, the sign was auctioned off on eBay. The sign has staples in it to roughly make a slot for the ruler, which you use to hold it up.

Itï’s funny to see actual eBay employees putting items up on eBay, but we are assured that: “this listing in no way, shape, or form represents any type of official eBay business. This listing is purely a loving gesture for one of the truly great members of the eBay community.”  Leonard will apparently be greatly missed by many, and they are trying to raise money for a going away present, to be given to him at the party. All the online casino got for their money is the sign and ruler; nothing more, nothing less.

Leonard Speiser went on to found Bix.com, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2006.  Leonard is still there, as you can see from his current LinkedIn profile.

Just in case he tries to feign ignorance of this whole event, I have proof he was a party to it:

speiser01_pic_100

This is such a fun memory, really symbolic of some of the best times at eBay… I’m really happy that I’m getting a chance to capture it here.

How to Fix SMTP Errors from Yahoo/AT&T DSL on Mac OS X Mail

/ Adam Nash / 18 Comments

I probably shouldn’t blog about this while I’m fuming, but right now it feels like AT&T Yahoo DSL is literally the worst ISP in the history of the Internet.  Give me a few moments to calm down.

Background:

About 3-4 weeks ago, I started getting a lot of spurious SMTP errors in Mac OS X Mail.app from different accounts.  This surprised me, because I’ve been careful to set up my various mail accounts with the correct SSL port settings

The symptoms were strange because outgoing mail would go through usually on the 2nd or 3rd try.  Annoying, but I assumed it was some sort of spurious error on the AT&T side.

Fine, Pick on Me, But Not My Family

Then things got worse.  My mother & father started complaining to me that they were getting errors trying to send mail.  My wife started complaining.  My grandmother.  All the same symptoms.  Countless searches through help produced lots of interesting, out-of-date help pages, with ages from 2002 to 2007.  Nothing fixed the problem.

Gmail to the rescue… not quite

Last week I found a workaround.  Gmail.com offers an SMTP server for anyone with a Google account.  GREAT!  Only problem is, it converts the “From:” and “Reply-To:” addresses to your Gmail account.  Drat.  No good.

Finally, the answer.

Today, I finally found the answer.  Yahoo even has a help page for it.  Too bad it never showed up for any onsite searches.  I found it by searching the Apple Insider forums.

Here is the deal: in order to send mail from any account, you now have to go online to Yahoo Mail and register every single account, verifying some of them (not all), and linking them to you Yahoo account.

Now, given the spam issues, I’m sure Yahoo needs to implement protection to prevent abuse of its servers.  Fine.  And I’m sure I am atypical because I actually have 12 different email accounts configured on one client.  Fine.  But seriously, let’s count the mistakes in handling this problem:

  1. AT&T/Yahoo could have sent mail to every user that had used SMTP on it’s services for another account ahead of time.  They didn’t.
  2. AT&T/Yahoo could have allowed connections through a certain number of times, and emailed a warning message giving users instructions on how to register.
  3. AT&T/Yahoo could have given accounts with over 12 months good standing a free pass (grandfathering)
  4. AT&T/Yahoo could have given everyone a free pass to use a small number of accounts in any 24 hour period – not a spam pattern.  Or a small number of messages (under 100).
  5. AT&T/Yahoo could have made the errors absolute – very strange to get the error/bounce sporadically.  Made it seem like a “bug” not a “Feature”
  6. AT&T/Yahoo could have trained their support staff on this issue.  They didn’t.
  7. AT&T/Yahoo could have implemented a help search on their site that actually returned the right answer.
  8. AT&T/Yahoo could have updated their existing help content with a pointer to this new issue.
  9. AT&T/Yahoo could have found a different solution to this security issue.

Instead, AT&T/Yahoo basically just created a huge amount of churn in its user base around it’s most important function – email.  Great.

You can bet that when I upgrade to HD through Comcast, I’ll be taking a close look at their ISP package.  Sometimes I miss the 1990s when there was hope for independent ISPs… I guess we can all hope that someday, some new technology (WiMax?) will eviscerate the cable & phone companies.  They just shouldn’t be in the customer service business at all.