Archive for the ‘cranky’ Category

Embezler’s Best Friend

Friday, February 19th, 2010

The seemingly corrupt US District Court Judge John C. Coughenour should be ashamed.  He was faced with a father and son duo that had been convicted of stealing thousands from the 401k of their employees, and instead of giving them the jail time recommended by prosecution, has given them a slap on the wrist probation sentence, with a fine less than a third of what they had stolen.

Dishonorable John, thanks for making the problem worse, you waste of judicial space.  I look forward to seeing your obituary, so an honest man can be appointed to replace you.  If you had any semblance of human decency, you’d resign your position in shame, but I’m not holding my breath.

Pennywise, Pennyfoolish

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Someone was smart enough to write up a system that inserts an extra flyer in every new county library card, that goes to a city resident, to let them know that they won’t be allowed to make book hold requests.  In a library system with 45+ branches over hundreds of miles, that’s basically saying, “this card is useless to you, unless you can afford to drive all over the place”.

They weren’t smart enough to make that a prominent notice during the on the online application form, once you give them a Seattle residence.

Cost of inserting an extra piece of paper in a mailing?  more than zero times number-of-new-cards.

Cost of inserting an extra piece of html in the application webpage?  more than zero, but only once.

Add in the chances that some of the cards you mailed out will never be used because of the policy.

Add in the costs of fulfilling interlibrary loan requests from the city library.  The library that will charge the same patron $5.   I’m sure they’ll send on some of that money, but seems like a whole lotta waste when the county library could just charge the fee themselves, saving wear and tear on the poor book, if nothing else.

I blame Tim Eyman, just like I blame him for the way Olympic Security guards stood by and watched a 15 year old girl get kicked in the head, after she came up to them begging for help.  They were chosen because they are cheaper, because they aren’t paid to intervene, only watch.  They replaced effective guards that were too expensive after Tim cut transportation taxes.

(non-) Fulfillment by Amazon

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

So Amazon has this program that sounds all sorts of nifty for the marketplace seller and buyer, Fulfillment by Amazon.  The theory goes, the seller sends Amazon all their inventory, Amazon stores it in their warehouse with everything else, and when something gets bought, it goes into the system like any other product sold by amazon, complete with free super-saver shipping and all that.  Sounds nice.

The reality seems to be somewhat less than it could be.  I ordered two items that are supposedly in stock in the Fulfillment by Amazon system, and two items that are supposedly In Stock as part of amazon’s regular system.  For no reason I can figure out, they won’t be shipping anything out till next week, a full 7 days after the order was placed.  The only reason I picked the Fulfillment by Amazon seller over one of the others, was the assumption that Amazon would actually ship out the item in a reasonable timeframe.  schmucks.

“Amazon locates your products using our advanced web-to-warehouse, high-speed picking and sorting system.” –any system that takes a week to find two books doesn’t deserve the name “high-speed”.

UPDATE:  Looks like I’m not the only one feeling the Fulfillment By Amazon hate.

UPDATE2:  How interesting.  It would seem that complaining had an effect, they shipped the order early, this morning.

Starbucks Disaster!

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Oh noes!

I got the inside word today, Starbucks is discontinuing the Signature Hot Chocolate.  First it was my chantico, then the Odwalla, and now the siggy.  They just really don’t want my non-coffee-money. =(

They can’t all be drinking games

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Every friday at work, we have some sort of fun, random, activity.  Usually they are really cool things, like the playdough food contest, or the scotch identification contest.  This week, it was some annoying test-conference parlor game of reverse engineering the ‘algorithm’ the presenter had come up with.  I’m not clear if the people I work with with just being polite, or if they really found some sort of value out of the experience.  I personally, found it a very annoying waste of time on an already over packed day.  I know how to reverse engineer, I don’t take jobs that would require that level of tedium for a reason.

And it didn’t help that, despite making it quite clear to my team, that I really didn’t give a shit about this stupid activity, one of the guys just keeps needling me to solve it for him.  Dude, there are 2 other guys on the team, ask them a fucking question, leave me the fuck alone.  Stop poking the bear that just bit you with a stick.

Wow.  Synchronicity.  Guy who poked me with a stick just came by to apologize.  He’s a bigger man than I.

No More Warcraft

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Oh Blizzard.

It’s not enough to make millions off the masses of weed smoking college students wasting away their education, no you have to help track down low level pot dealers who’ve fled to Canada.  I’m willing to let you do most anything you want with my $45/month, but not that.

I’ve got plenty of books to catch up on reading anyways.

More craptastic Kindle service from Amazon / resolved

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Just when you thought the issue was dead and buried, the less than stellar group in charge of Kindle support manages to make a mess all over again.  Seems that they are claiming they never received the damaged Kindle.  Unfortunately for them, I kept the UPS tracking number for both kindles I returned to them, and can verify that they indeed were successfully delivered.  Jeff Bezos, your staff is really making me regret my latest Kindle purchase.  Starting to think a Nook looks sexy, even with it’s silly touch screen.

UPDATE:  I dug up the UPS tracking numbers, which thankfully still work a month after the package got there, and they relented.  for now.  They seem dead set on making me regret convincing my family to go digital with me.

New Camera (Nikon D90) for Christmas

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

My big self-gift for the year is my first proper Digital SLR.    Back in the long ago days, I had a film SLR, even got paid to take pictures with it for a while.

When digital came around, I held off on buying a decent camera, in hopes that they would eventually make replacement back-frames for my existing camera, so I could upgrade to digital without changing the basic hardware.  Well, despite some initial positive press, that market never seemed to come together.  In the meantime, I bought a series of mid-range digital point and shoot cameras that did a good enough job.  The last one was even waterproof, so I could take it everywhere.  But I missed the control and expandability of the SLR.

Tempted by Best Buy’s 18 months no interest deal, I finally settled on the Nikon D90.  I got a package deal, with a decent wide-to-zoom lens, and a proper zoom-to-super-zoom lens.  I haven’t had a chance yet to do any significant shooting with it, the size and weight are too much for any bag I’ve got currently, and the bag that came with the package, while fitting the body and two lenses inside, does so in an ungainly and annoying way.  You can’t store all the items in the bag if any lens is actually attached to the camera, and with my cat and his fur, I hate the idea of having to open and close the body up so often.

It’s odd, how much heavier and bulky the digital cameras are, versus the old school film SLR.

The coolest thing I’ve discovered about the camera so far is the depth of data it adds to the EXIF.  Amongst the many bits of data it records and stores with an image is something called “Focal Length In35mm Format”.

So tempted to get the little GPS dongle.

UPDATE:  Finally got word back from Nikon tech support, they are aware that months after Snow Leopard was released, they still don’t have a compatible version of their RAW format viewer program, ViewNX.  They do have it scheduled for release by the end of January 2010.   Strikes me as an annoyingly pathetic effort on their part, but then again, I noticed that some part of their program is still written in PowerPC code, and requires Rosetta installed to run.  Sounds like they really don’t give much attention to their software devs outside the camera.  I can only hope they show more care with the software inside the camera, though without a way to use the RAW images, it’s all an exercise in futility.  If you are thinking of buying a Nikon D90 for someone this year (who has a MAC, and Snow Leopard), don’t bother, they aren’t ready for you yet, and you will only annoy the person you give it to.

UPDATE2:  Major points against the Nikon tech support drone “David”, who failed to mention that Apple’s own photo programs have support for the NEF format used by the D90.  That’s the difference between quality support, who goes the extra 2 inches, not even a mile, to find a workaround, and the kind of crap support you get from Nikon, where they just want to find the quickest way to close out your question, regardless of how helpful the answer is to fixing the problem.  Another reason not to buy from Nikon this year.

Kindle DX, now with pre-dead battery

Friday, November 20th, 2009

So, I’m guessing that perhaps the Kindle DX isn’t selling as quickly as the regular kindle.

I guess this because the one my mom just bought me, happy birthday to me oi oi oi, won’t charge it’s battery.  It’s acting like it sat in a warehouse with a partial charge so long, the battery has a memory.  Or mabye I was just lucky enough to get a defective unit.  I’m following the instructions from the first line of support.  We shall see.

It is friggin huge, compared to the original.  Haven’t yet tried a PDF on it.  Have to find one that isn’t just pictures….then again, it’d be nice if the MAD magazine Official PDFs worked with it.

UPDATE: Oh the life of a tech support drone, having to follow a script, even when it’s obvious the device has a hardware fault.  So, in addition to having to redownload my books, and reconvert the personal documents–not paying to resend them again, we’ll see about getting a credit for that bit when we proved the battery is pre-toasted–I have to wait Another 3 hours to prove to them it still doesn’t charge.

UPDATE2:  Well, another charge cycle attempt ends in failure, but at least the new kindle is one the way, and ranting politely got me a $20 credit for future purchases.  shrug.  I’d rather have the working kindle now, but Monday is better than nothing.

UPDATE3:  Oh come on!  I thought everything was golden yesterday, well as golden as it can be with a lost weekend of reading.  Then I get an email from amazon, “congratulations, we have shipped your order.  for a kindle dx COVER.”   It’s like they are trying to make this the worst kindle shopping experience ever.  If we believe the latest support droid, the replacement kindle will still be here on monday.  I’m not holding my breath.

UPDATE4:  The nightmare continues.  Turns out this droid shipped the kindle alright, to my mother’s house in vegas, where no one will be for weeks, AND they won’t take it on faith to ship the kindle to the correct address, but instead are making me wait the full 2 weeks it’ll take for Fedex to give up and return it to them, before they’ll start the re-re-return process.  But I still have less than 5 days to ship them the broken DX.

UPDATE5:  All’s well that ends well, so sayeth the bard, and I’ll defer to him this time.  My mother got someone at Amazon to do the return-to-sender on their end for the kindle they sent to the wrong place, and got them to fedex one out to the right address in time for the T-day trip.  I’m still not used to the extra size of it all.

Kindle 2 vs DX

The PDF support is … interesting.  With a mostly text pdf, it’s a little small, but readable.  You can’t highlight or look up words though, or even write notes attached to the file in general, which is most annoying, since there isn’t a generic note taking app built in, so there’s no workaround solution.   With a DX conversion address, they won’t even attempt to convert a text pdf to an azw, they just send you back the pdf.   I tried one of the MAD magazine pdf’s.  The lack of zoom made it unusable, but it did work.

Grrrr HTC G1 battery woes

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Well under the 1 year mark, and my G1 battery has gone kapput. You can try to call me, and I might be near an outlet and plugged in, but don’t count on it.

woo hoo technology =p

UPDATE:  Bought a new, OEM, battery at the tmobile store (way overpriced, but I wanted my phone to be working again now, silly me), and the phone refuses to charge it too,  so that was a big waste of time.

UPDATE2:  Just noticed, the user manual doesn’t mention the orange LED, only the green and red.  Strange.

UPDATE3:  t-mobile customer service rocks.  they are 2-daying me a replacement phone, no major grief, and refunded the new battery that didn’t help.  HTC, on the other hand, makes a crap phone it seems.

UPDATE4: so, replacement phone came, and it won’t charge the old battery now…sigh.