“Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”

- Theodore Roosevelt

Sorry I asked, I really was only trying to be polite.

Leave it to Kanye West to produce one of the most infamous moments in VMAs history before the 2009 show was even an hour old. It happened after Taylor Swift’s victory in the Best Female Video category for “You Belong With Me,” which beat out Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).” Just moments after Swift accepted the Moonman and began her acceptance speech, West stormed the stage, taking the microphone from Swift to announce Beyoncé deserved the award.

“Thank you so much!” Swift began. “I always dreamed about what it would be like to maybe win one of these some day, but I never actually thought it would have happened. I sing country music so thank you so much for giving me a chance to win a VMA award.”

Before she could continue, West broke in. “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” Kanye shouted to a mortified Swift and the speechless audience. And as quickly as he ran onstage — MTV cut away to show Pink applauding Taylor, and when they flashed back to Swift, West already had the mic in his hand — he was off, leaving a shocked Swift in his wake.

Beyoncé on the other hand is a class act who invited Ms. Swift on stage to finish the acceptance speech West interrupted:

Step 1: Break folk singer Dave Carroll’s guitar.
Step 2: Give Dave the run around for 9 months before finally telling him to get stuffed.
Step 3: Leave Dave so frustrated that he writes song called “United Breaks Guitars”, records it and then produces a music video that he posts on YouTube on July 6, 2009:

1.4 million views and counting later United is apologizing and offering to make things right.

Background Dave’s story here and here (including United’s response).

Bottom line Dave Carroll’s story should be a lesson for every organization large and small… Social media is a game changer that can turn bad customer service into a PR disaster that can be far more costly than making things right in the first place.

I’d love to give United a hearty at-a-boy for offering to do the right thing but I don’t believe for a minute they’d be offering to make things right if they didn’t have a major PR disaster on their hands.

H/T: Alex Eckelberry.

Now back to our reguarly scheduled blogging.

Check out her web site or MySpace page for tour dates.

Microsoft’s Zune Hit With Glitch

By Jessica Hodgson, Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2009

Microsoft Corp.’s Zune portable music player is suffering from a glitch that may have frozen thousands of units, in the latest setback for the world’s biggest software company.

On Wednesday, Zune owners flooded blogs and Internet chat sites to complain that they couldn’t listen to music on the 30 gigabyte version of the Zune, an early version of the device, because it wouldn’t start up properly. The postings noted that the digital music players get stuck on the Zune logo screen when the machine’s software is loading.

A message on the Zune support Web site acknowledged the problem and informed customers Microsoft was working to address it, but didn’t identify the cause. Microsoft declined to say how many devices were affected.

“We are aware that customers with Zune 30GB devices are experiencing issues with their Zune device,” a Microsoft spokesman, in a separate statement, said.

“We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a plan to address it. We will keep customers informed on next steps via the support page on zune.net.”

The Zune devices appear to have started freezing early Wednesday, according to multiple blog postings. In a video posted on the Internet, one Zune user described how his device, after having been fully charged, froze and wouldn’t move past the Zune user screen. Read the rest…

Jennifer LeClaire has more at Newsfactor.com:

While the rumor mill is focused on Apple developing a larger-screen iPod touch, the blogosphere is churning with angry reports about frozen 30GB Microsoft Zunes.

Discussions board like ZuneUser.com, ZuneScene.com and Zune.net offer first-hand accounts of the problems with Microsoft’s music player. It seems the Zunes reboot, then freeze once the status bar reaches 100 percent.

Some are calling it the “Z2K” problem, playing off the infamous Y2K bug that many thought would throw the computing industry in chaos at the beginning of the century when dates changed from 1999 to 2000. That’s because the problem seems to have started at exactly midnight PST Wednesday — the first moments of the last day of 2008.

Makes me glad I bought an iPod.

One of my favorite albums is “Through the Fire” from an incredibly soulful R&B singer named Shay Dillon.

Check her out at ShayDillon.com or on MySpace.

Check her out at ShayDillon.com