by Andy Bell | Dec 7, 2011 | News |
Let’s talk about Skinny-Jean-gate.
BYU-Idaho is in the news for all the wrong reasons right now. In the last 24 hours there are over 600 results for “BYU-Idaho skinny jeans” on Google. And while some media outlets have done a good job trying to get the facts straight, the one that basically first reported the story on the internet hasn’t gotten it right.
On December 6, The Student Review, an independent newspaper run by BYU students, posted an article titled “BYU-Idaho bans skinny jeans.” I’m not going to try to get into whether or not skinny jeans should be banned or not. I’m also not going to try to define what constitutes “skinny jeans.” Instead I’d like to try to clarify a few things. My primary sources will be quotes obtained by Gawker from two BYU-Idaho Vice Presidents, and an article from the front page of the December 6th issue of the Scroll, the school newspaper, titled “Testing Center disapproves of tight pants” by Dan Sisco, a Scroll staff member. (Sadly, as of writing, the Scroll article is not published online, so I’ll be quoting liberally from it instead of using shorter quotes and linking to it.) The Scroll article is now online here. Please go read it because it provides a lot of additional information and context on the skinny jeans issue.
(more…)
by Andy Bell | May 15, 2011 | News |
Well, at least it’s finally coming back on. The PlayStation Network is finally coming back online. The outage was certainly way too long and Sony handled things very incorrectly. But at least it’s back now.
by Andy Bell | May 4, 2011 | News |
Everyone’s heard of the problems Sony’s been having by now, including Congress. (Though Sony has some words in reply to the lawmakers.) They may even be fined in the UK. The problem is that, in my opinion, everything about this situation was handled improperly by Sony. And I don’t even own or use a PlayStation. Or subscribe to Sony Online Entertainment products. But if I did, I would be very mad right now.
First, Sony’s PlayStation Network went down. People got error messages and what did Sony have to say about it? Nothing. They shut it down and then said that it was down. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that they finally told people that in intrusion had happened and they shut the system down. By that point, the attack had happened close to a week earlier. And Sony still didn’t have answers. They didn’t know how much information was taken, what information, and, most importantly, if credit cards were part of the stolen information. Around two weeks after the intrusion, Sony still doesn’t know if credit card numbers were stolen for sure, though they now know that information about all 77 million users was taken.
Sony is facing a PR disaster here. And they brought it upon themselves. They could have avoided much of the bad press if they had stated what they had known much faster. Hopefully companies in the future realize that transparency goes a long way in leading to customer happiness.
