Archive for the ‘cranky’ Category
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
Whatever the qualifications for “Field Supervisor” is at Cleanscapes, it doesn’t seem to include an ability to follow basic laws of the road, not to mention simple human decency. Just watched one of these gems of industry nearly hit a woman in the crosswalk at work. Lucky for the inattentive driving jerk, she was paying attention and quick on her feet, and literally jumped out of the way in the nick of time. We shall see just how seriously they take safety at the company; I called in and reported the guy. He had no excuse. The sun is out, there were no obstructions blocking his view.
UPDATE: I did get a call back from the safety manager at Cleanscapes, who gathered some more details and promised that he would track down who it was, and discipline them appropriately.
Tags: crosswalk, grar, safety
Posted in cranky, oh-well, seattle | Comments Off
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
Tivo used to be a great device for giving you control of your TV.
Now it’s just another advertising platform that tries to get in your face as much as possible.
Every time you pause live, you are forced to see a pop-up ad for some crappy ‘thing’ called Morning Joe.
Maybe there are people who paid good money so that they could see more ads, instead of fewer. I’m not one of them. Whatever Morning Joe is, it must be a terrible product,show, person, or pile of festering crap left rotting in the sun. If you are in charge of advertising for Morning Joe, you really suck at your job. You’ve made sure I hate your product before I’ve even seen it, and created a lifelong (minor) arch-enemy. I’m not going out of my way to bring your justified doom upon you, but every chance I get, where it’s legal and effortless on my part, I’m going to shit on you. Good use of those advertising dollars.
Tags: badidea, crap, morningjoesucks, tivosucks, wastedadvertising
Posted in cranky, oh-well, tech stuff, tv | Comments Off
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
I am not a fan of the ‘new’ look for Gmail.
And it would seem I’m not alone in that distaste.
But Google did user testing, and they all said they liked the changes. Thing is, if you read their explanation of the testing, you’ll notice that “Stay the same” wasn’t ever on the table for fellow googlers, so it seems kind of dishonest to claim feedback was positive there. And any outside usability group you put together was inevitably going to be filled only with people who like to try new things. People who don’t like change aren’t going to sign up, so no matter how diverse by age, gender, etc your group was, it wasn’t a representative sample of the actual user base, and gives you no data about how the change would be received at large.
It would seem that some of the feedback is getting through, slowly.
But some of the worst offenses aren’t ever going to go away, no matter how many people complain, because they would interfere with the big Facebook-ification that is their ultimate goal. I get it, you want people to use Google+. Thing is, I’m not going to post everything twice, and everyone is already on Facebook, so that’s where that stuff goes. I have gigs of pictures and metadata on flickr, and that’s where that stuff goes.
Trying to mimic Facebook is a bad idea. Fads come and go. Instead of trying to reproduce the look of someone else’s website, Google should have been trying to build a tool that integrates all the social platforms seamlessly. I would kill for something that let me post my pictures to Flickr, and my words to my own blog, and lets me control how that gets shared with fine grained control, then automatically takes care of the minutia of which service which person is on. That would be good. Not evil.
Tags: annoyance, facebook, feedback, force, gmail, google, hate, lame, suck, testing
Posted in cranky, idea, mis-cognition, oh-well, review, tech stuff | Comments Off
Friday, December 9th, 2011
So last week, I get an automated phone call from Comcast letting me know that although they upgraded my billing for the new higher tier or cable speed they call “Blast”, a good six months ago, it would seem my modem was never capable of delivering the promised speeds, and I need to replace it with a more modern one.
Fine, whatever. I’ve been meaning to buy my own modem eventually, and stop paying the rental fee like a sucker, thinking I might switch back to DSL. Amazon delivered me a nice new DOCIS 3.0 modem that’s on comcast’s list of approved modems for Blast service. Now I fire up chat with the comcast support rep to give him the MAC address for the new modem, only to have this idiot waste 10 minutes playing some weird passive-aggressive game before he finally tells me I have to bring the modem into one of their service centers, physically, before they will update their system. I can understand offering that choice to the few people who can’t figure out the instructions “turn device over, read label that says MAC address”, but not having a self-service option seems downright stupid.
Maybe I will switch to DSL after all.
UPDATE: I got a message from Comcast to let me know the chat representative was incorrect, and that they can do the change over the phone. Lesson learned, the chat staff are useless.
Tags: cableinternet, comcast, hardware, modem, stupid
Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, tech stuff | Comments Off
Thursday, December 8th, 2011
You’d think the people who work at Real Networks would treat the only division that actually has a future, Rhapsody, with a little respect. They are the only part of the company that has any sort of potential for revenue and profit these days. And yet they managed to release an update that completely breaks the Rhapsody client. That means they literally didn’t do a single smoke test on the product before release. Talk about a massive display of incompetence. If I worked in QA at Real networks, I’d be polishing my resume, because I would know I deserve to be fired. I mean for crimmeny’s sake, you just days ago announced your big acquisition and transition for all the Napster people, and you break your own product during that critical getting-to-know-the-new-guys phase. You might as well have poured all the money you spent on the Best Buy customers down the drain for all the goodwill you’ve wasted.
Tags: codec, error, fail, incompetent, QA, real, rhapsody
Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, music, oh-well, tech stuff, wonderments | Comments Off
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
No, there’s not a virus on the new Kindle Fire, but you wouldn’t know that if you tried to get support for the disappearing Box.Net for Android app. One of the many pre-written responses Amazon’s support agents throw out is an assertion that your problems must be caused by anti-virus software. If you point out that there isn’t anti-virus software on the Kindle, they write back to assure you that there’s no anti-virus software on the Kindle.
lol
Tags: amazonfail, box.net, cloud, competition, kindlefail, kindlesupportsucks
Posted in cranky, funny-haha, oh-well, tech stuff | Comments Off
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
After dozens of years of faithful service, I think it’s getting to be time to move on from Avast anti-virus products. This latest update goes through a lot of sleazy marketing hoops that just don’t engender the level of trust I feel I should have for my anti-virus vendor.
First there’s the way, during the required re-registration-of-the-free-product, you are presented with a dialogue that claims that trying the paid version for 20-days for free is easy to back out of, but then hides the ‘single button’ you have to click. Then there’s the way that they explicitly claim in that same dialogue, that going back to free won’t require a reinstall, but it does, and with a full reboot no less. It’s the kind of pathetic let’s just be annoying and see how many suckers are too lazy to move on business practices that Comcast is famous for. I would certainly be ashamed to work for anyplace that felt such behavior was necessary for survival.
Tags: annoying, antivirus, avast, deception, windows
Posted in cranky, microsoft, mis-cognition, tech stuff | Comments Off
Monday, November 21st, 2011
This morning, I’m trying to surf from my phone, and I get this content filtered err message saying my phone has been enabled for “Web Guard” which has determined I’m trying to go to a naughty page, which can’t be allowed.
So I call tech support. First there’s the ‘helpful’ phone system that says it understands speech and touch tones, but doesn’t understand either, and if it doesn’t like your response three times in a row, disconnects you entirely, instead of passing you on to a human. I finally figure out something it recognizes and get a human, who is full of fail on my problem, and of courses asks me to do the traditional reboot of the device. At which point my phone stops powering on correctly. It gets 75% through booting and then hangs on a blank screen.
Seriously? I call for messed up internet, and now I don’t have a working phone at all? And of course he helpfully suggests that I can buy a new phone since I’m out of warranty on this one.
Now I’m regretting not pick up one of birdie’s spare iphones.
UPDATE: I spent an hour or so seeing if there was any way to get at my storage on the phone, so I could backup anything non-cloud, but no joy. After doing a factory reset, the phone seems to be working again. At least with Android I’m not missing any contacts, just all the text messages since the last time my G1 died.
UPDATE2: It looks like this new life might be temporary. The phone is running hot and crashed once so far, while trying to re-download all my basic apps. And I notice it’s stuck in edge mode instead of 3G. Hrm.
Tags: android, argh, fail, g1, grar, sucks, tmobile
Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, oh-well, tech stuff | Comments Off
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
I uploaded a pdf and a txt yesterday, and they still weren’t showing up in the cloud zone on my Fire this morning. When I tried viewing the pdf within the browser on my pc at work, it let me know the file had been corrupted and couldn’t be repaired. I deleted the file and re-uploaded it, and I can get a viewer to launch for both the pdf and the txt from firefox, but they still aren’t showing up on the fire. I just tried adding a .mobi file as well. Still nothing shows up.
This wouldn’t be half as annoying if they hadn’t embargoed every other cloud app from the device. Well, they still let box.net in, I guess I can sign up for yet another service, but really, Amazon, you guys are acting ‘worse’ than apple.
Tags: amazon, clouddrive, fail, fire, kindle
Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, tech stuff | Comments Off
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011
It’s not been an impressive product release so far, for all that it happened a day early. First up, the first-power-on registration process was broken and required making a 20 minute call to tech support. Up next is the way many apps aren’t available for the Fire, even though they appeared in the TV add for the Fire, like IMDB. Hell, the front page of IMDB has three different links to the Kindle Fire, but you’d be a sucker to buy it for that, since it doesn’t actually friggin work on this device.
UPDATE: Interesting, in addition to lacking support for the IMDB app, they also don’t support the dropbox app, though they will auto-suggest box.net’s app instead. No Spideroak app either. I’d wonder if they weren’t preventing cloud competition by excluding these apps, but all three use Amazon S3 for their back-end, so it seems kinda random rather than malicious.
UPDATE2: How odd. The IMDB app is suddenly on my home page on the fire, but the app’s page on the amazon app store still says the fire isn’t supported.
UPDATE3: Looks like not a single epub reader is allowed on the kindle, even though there are dozens in the app store, some that even say they’d work on my decrepit G1 phone….
Tags: amazon, broken, firefail, imdb, kindle, kindlefail
Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, tech stuff | Comments Off