Posts Tagged ‘incompetence’

iTunes store search broken on iPad/iPhone/iTouch

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

There’s something seriously messed up with searching the iTunes app store from an iDevice.  I’ve found at least two consistent examples of applications that are searchable and downloadable via iTunes-on-a-desktop, but are not even visible in search results from an iDevice like the pad, touch, or phone.

Nike+ GPS

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine

It’s an odd error condition, my guess would be it’s caused by having a separate search index for the mobile devices.  What is particularly annoying about the error is that auto suggest will start to fill in the name of the apps correctly, but then gives you no results.  Following a direct link to the app from safari just gives you an error once the device switches from browser to store mode.    Another great job of QA there apple.

UPDATE:  Darshan the useless, why does Apple pay you?  Then again, at least you could get email, even if you couldn’t understand basic english enough to do your job (or maybe you understood just fine, and have taken an American attitude towards your job); nike’s app support page just sticks you in a never ending loop if you try to submit feedback to them.

UPDATE2:  If you want to send feedback to Nike, ignore the big orange button that says “feedback”.  Look for the smaller link that says “contact us”…that one isn’t broken.

UPDATE3:  “resolved”

It turns out the problem is the lack of synchronization on iOS 4.x availability.  In their infinite wisdom, apple decided to have search pretend an app doesn’t exist, if your device isn’t running the required OS version.  Seems like the smarter, more user friendly UI design would be to return the items marked unavailable with a reason why, but I guess someone wanted to make sure the call center in India had enough pointless work to do.

Housing GRAR

Monday, August 16th, 2010

I get home today to find a 10-day quit-or-comply notice on my door.

WTF?

It turns out they somehow ‘forgot’ my cat deposit/etc, and now want another pet deposit, plus they want to start charging $10/month for pet-rent.  I went down, and the lady flips through the paperwork several times, before she finally finds a deposit in my name that says “$400 total, $200S, $200P”.  I also point out that my lease is not up for renewal, so they can’t start charging extra until it is.  While I’m waiting for her to look up these basic facts, another 2 tenants in the same position of having paid their deposits years ago, and now getting nastygrams, show up to complain as well.

Without something in writing from these people appologizing for their terrible record keeping, I’m not inclined to trust that they won’t still be trying to evict me in 10 days.  Time to call the Tenants Union of Washington State, I think.

And starting the painful process of sorting through 4 years of piled up “too important to throw away” papers that I didn’t get sorted properly when they first came in.  D’oh.  If lawyers end up involved, they’ll want those papers, I’m sure.

UPDATE:  Found the original lease, which indeed has the check box marked for pet deposit paid.  When I go down to show her where to look on her copy, there are 2 other people waiting to do the same basic thing, and a 4th shows up before she gets back.  She accepts are proof with good grace and tries to explain that the corporate office is in texas, and is unresponsive, and that we should expect things to get worse, and to have lots of empty apartments in the near future.  oh joy.

Hampton Inn, the hardsell stay

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

Congrats to Hampton Inn for being the only people with any rooms left in Portland for a short notice journey.  De-grats for the ultra-cheesey hard-sell after I made the reservation.  Poor guy can’t possibly manage to keep too many people on the line with a terrible script like that.  What kind of marketing moron thinks that sort of crap was their best use of a semi-captive audience?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still staying there for the reservation I made, but next time….

Flickrsanity

Monday, June 21st, 2010

You gotta love when a small company gets taken over by a big faceless giant, and you start getting left-hand/right-hand problems where, for example, one group in a company will add a nifty feature to the product that reduces the pain of working with said company tremendously, only to have someone else in the same company make a change that sabotages all the work of the first group.

Someone at Yahoo added a feature to the Flickr Uploader that lets it automatically determine image rotation.

Someone else at Yahoo added a feature to the website that lets it automatically determine image rotation.

No one at Yahoo bothered to see if the two systems work together, so you have situation where the auto-rotation-magic of the Flickr Uploader is wiped out by the auto-rotation-magic of the website’s back end processes.

Morons.

Door to Duh Storage

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Grrr.  You have a perfectly working payment website, complete with user logins and emails already set up.  You decide to replace it, I guess because someone needed an excuse to still be employed, so you wipe out the old system and build a new one from scratch.  And because you are extra stupid, and want to waste a bunch of money on customer service phone calls, you can’t be bothered to use the same email address-to-account linkup that you had in the system, and instead make everyone call in, all on the same day, because you didn’t bother to warn people you were intentionally breaking your system ahead of time.  Incompetent jerks.

Door to Door does an OK job of storing your stuff, but their billing department is staffed by losers.  Remind me to tell you sometime about the 6 months it took to get them to stop double-billing me.  Months of phone calls and messages, never answered nor returned, before I finally just started calling other departments and asking them if anyone actually worked in the billing department.

I don’t get it (mini-Opera browser)

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Opera makes a big announcement about getting their browser approved for the iphone.  Hooray for them.

The press release makes no mention of an iPad compatible version being around the corner, or being rejected.  It’s like having a big blank spot in the middle of your advertisement, an elephant in the room sort of howthefuckdoyounotnotice-ism.  And lets be clear, the Opera browser looks like ass on the iPad.   You have to wonder why they even bothered releasing a has-been-before-it-was-born product, instead of taking the 10 extra minutes to recompile as a universal plus application.    I guess being a project manager at a one-product company, someone felt the need to justify their existence, at least for the short term, willfully ignoring how detrimental it might be to his/her career in the long-term, once everyone could see the finished product was so pathetic.

It definitely seems to prove my theory that Opera exists purely for the contrarian;  Opera caters to people who care more about who their browser isn’t made by, than what features it actually provides, or if it actually works at all.    I sure wouldn’t pay for it.

Google Morons

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

A big hand to the pathetic group of morons that google has assigned to Google Desktop Search. They took a product that has had perfectly working 64-bit XP support for 2 YEARS, and forced an auto-update to a 32 bit version that doesn’t work on 64 bit systems (not runs in 32 bit mode, plain refuses to run, a sure sign of developer incompetence, since all the 64 bit windows systems have perfectly working backwards compatible modes). Given there can’t be a revenue stream for GDS, I’m not surprised they put their worst people there. I guess you get what you pay for.

UPDATE:  They finally released a 32/64-bit agnostic version of google desktop.

Stupid Adobe

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

What idiots. If you install the collaborative version of acrobat, you loose your ability to view local PDFs. The only fix is to uninstall Acrobat.com and Acrobat Air, and start over with Acrobat Reader.

Tivo Fails to record Saturday Night Live

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

The error it gives in the ToDo list’s history function is “this program was not recorded because it was no longer in the program guide”, which is a lie, since I was able to see the listing in the guide still, the next morning. ah suxor.

SNL may be hit and miss, but I’m always interested in seeing what Steve Martin is up to these days.

Glenn Johnson thinks you’re an idiot

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Glenn Johnson is CFO for Alaskan Airlines.  And he thinks you are as stupid as he must be.

Here’s why I know you are a liar, Glenn, your title.  It’s not Cheif Fairness Officer, it’s Chief Financial Officer, which means it’s your job to worry about competition.

It’s the fact that you didn’t file this petition when times were good, but when they went bad, that confirms my belief that you, Glenn Johnson, are a liar, and a very bad one at that.

Seriously, Alaskan, you didn’t have anyone in-house that could come up with a more believable story than the idiot Glenn Johnson?

So Glenn the idiot, keep on wasting your company resources whining about how unfair it is that someone can provide better service, at a better price than you.  I’ll keep NOT flying Alaskan, not because I’m an anglophile with a hard-on for Virgin Air, but because they do a better job.  If you cared about your job, you’d be working on fixing the problems with your company.  I hope to see you in the unemployment line sooner than later, you certainly don’t deserve your job.