Posts Tagged ‘fail’
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011
I don’t get why Microsoft bothered to pay people to develop their iOS app, given that it doesn’t seem to provide a compelling experience to anyone who has used one of the competing cloud services. You can’t send documents to the app of your choice, and their built-in viewer is horrible. Shameful and sad horrible. Like if you developed it and you are reading this review now, as much as you are considering suicide, there are good jobs out there where you aren’t asked to humiliate yourself, so please consider taking one of them instead of your own life. But seriously, you should be ashamed to have your name on this product, even if just in the source code files.
Tags: cloud, fail, ios, pointless, poor, skydrive
Posted in microsoft, mis-cognition, tech stuff | No Comments »
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 | No Comments »
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
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
Out of the 7 musical projects I’ve sponsored on Kickstarter so far, only one has delivered everything they were supposed to, and recorded their cover song. One is in jail, awaiting deportation, so who knows where that project is going. Another responded to my first email and says they’ll have my stuff in a month or two. One responded within hours of my posting something to the project page, having never responded to emails, and sent me a picture of the package about to go into the mail this morning. A third, though not responding directly to my query, has posted another update which, while setting the stage for more disappointment (the artist apparently never had plans to follow through on the physical discs unless he got a regular label to sponsor him, grar), claims that someday he will. One artist has made no response at all, and seems to be actively ignoring kickstarter now, since she is posting to her facebook and website.
The 3 projects that are for physical goods seem to be progressing more reliably, if status updates are to be believed, though one is getting into the danger zone of non-communication (2 weeks since “shipping soon!”).
The software project isn’t saying much, but their expected lead time is a bit longer.
In the end, we shall see. I certainly won’t be sponsoring anything more, until Kickstarter come up with some way of escrowing the funds to ensure people get what they paid for.
Tags: delivery, fail, kickstarter, responsiblity
Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, music, oh-well, tech stuff, wonderments | Comments Off
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
Put in “sole”, it translates correctly as “sun”.
Put in “mio”, it translates correctly as “my”.
Put in “sole mio”, it translates correctly as “my sun”.
Put in “o sole mio”, and it gives up and just returns “o sole mio”.
UPDATE: Looks like it’s an intentional ‘feature’ for anything it thinks is a song title? It does the same thing for “frere jacques”. It will display the correct translation for “frere” right up until you add the ‘u’ to jacques, at which point it just transcribes instead of translating.
UPDATE2: Looking through the translator forums, it looks like it also helpfully corrects political commentary, translating “hasina is bad” into the Bengali equivalent of “hasina is good”. According to the poster who discovered this, this action reflects a local government policy of silencing dissent. So much for “don’t be evil”.
Tags: fail, google, translate
Posted in cranky, tech stuff | Comments Off
Thursday, June 9th, 2011
We have a push to production today for the project I work on. My go-live task is to verify the support website is updated correctly, so I’ve been waiting all day for the message that the process is done. The message comes, so I begin my task, and find that the person who sent the message didn’t bother to make sure they’d actually finished the task successfully. EVERY page is a 404, so she didn’t even make a single attempt to verify her work.
GRAR.
Tags: fail, grar, work
Posted in cranky, work | Comments Off
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
Amazon and Lady Gaga put together what would be a pretty sweet deal to encourage people to use the new Cloud Player, if it actually worked. They are offering her latest album, they say in full, for just $0.99. The problem is, after they’ve taken your money, they only give you access to the 2 song on the album, Americano and Scheibe. Half price is still a deal, but it’s not the deal promised, and it’s not the two tracks I would have picked. We’ll see how long it takes them to clear up their mess.
UPDATE: The album was eventually available, within 24 hours for sure. And now they are giving everyone a $5 credit on anything at amazon, not just mp3′s…they are trying to recover, I’ll give them that. We’ll all get to see how apple’s cloud handles it’s opening day someday.
Tags: amazon, cloud, d'oh, fail, ladygaga
Posted in music, tech stuff | Comments Off
Monday, March 28th, 2011
Quite out of character, I posted an ad to Craiglists’ missed connections section. When I made eye contact with the guy driving past, I almost pulled around but was running late for something less important than true love. I knew it was a long shot, but something in those eyes made me figure it was worth a try. Imagine my surprise when I get a response a few days after posting. I suspect something is up when the guy seems really focused on quick sex rather than coffee and conversation, and when he gives me his digits to switch from email to SMS, a quick google reveals he once posted his number to a facebook group for a friend who’d lost their phone, and the profile pic, while hardly high-rez or detailed, shows enough that I can tell this dude is older, fatter, taller and way different skin tone than the guy I saw. Did he really think I wouldn’t notice if we’d met in person? He also lives a good half-hour away by car, so there’s zero chance he was walking around my neighborhood.
Once again, I am amazed at people’s lack of google-awareness in the online dating world. Or perhaps I’m underestimating the desperational willingness to just go along with whatever comes one’s way that is expected out of a CL meet up?
The lesson learned is to turn the car around and say hi next time.
Tags: craigslist, dating, deception, detection, fail, googlewareness, seattle
Posted in mis-cognition, oh-well, seattle, wonderments | Comments Off
Friday, February 4th, 2011
I get that in the midst of a cooling failure, you’ve got to shut some machines down in the lab. What I don’t get is why you went through unplugging some machines at random, while leaving others still running, but in basically-dead-state so that they were still generating heat, but weren’t usable to anyone. And didn’t tell anyone.
Tags: argh, fail, work
Posted in cranky, tech stuff | Comments Off