Posts Tagged ‘resolved’

Bye-bye ping button

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

I’ve hated Apple’s Ping ever since they added it. I loved the idea the said it was going to be, but despised what was actually delivered. You couldn’t ping music that they couldn’t get a cut off of, amongst it’s many lame-ities. And most annoying, even if you’d turned Ping off for your account, you still saw a ‘Ping’ button on any selected track.

Until today, when I discovered that disabling Ping under Parental Controls removes the button. Well, it shrinks from the word ‘ping’ to a small arrow, and if you click the arrow, you get a drop-down menu that lets you go to the itunes store for the artist, album, or genre. I can live with that.

UPDATE: I notice that the jump-to-itunes-store button doesn’t work all that well. If I click on a Eurythmics track’s link to the artist page, it says nothing is available in the US store, but if you click on the album link for the same track, it works and you can see that they have plenty of other albums by them as well.

Tivo, great product, crappy support

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

This morning, my HD Tivo let me know it wasn’t capable of automatically adapting to my new network topology, unlike all the other boxes in my house.  Whatever.  And of course, there’s no option in setup to just reset the networking, no I have to reset the whole box.  OK, fine.  Hrm, stuck at a black screen?  Well, I have to go to work, maybe it’s just slow.  9 hours later, still stuck at a black screen?  Fine, hard boot it.  Oh look, it’s back up, oh crap, trying to do anything makes it reboot.  And reboot.  And reboot.  Sigh.  Time for Tivo support, my least favorite support team.

Dial dial, ring ring, oh nice, guy answered as soon as I got into the right queue.  But oh, he’s in a hurry to get to the next call, and keeps trying to close the case before it’s actually resolved.  His attitude is so annoyingly rude, I assume the guy is incompetent.  Turns out he’s just rude, looks like the box is working again, and haven’t found any lost recordings so far.  So, hooray for the unix dude who wrote whatever self-repairing file-system they use inside there.

UPDATE:  It occurred to me a possible reason why Tivo support favors trading out machines instead of doing any sort of real debugging…the lifetime tivo contract is only for the life of the box.  If they can get you to send them the box, they can probably make you buy a new contract.  Why would I not be surprised if that’s how they work, these days.

iPad 3G is dead =(

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

When I foursquared in this morning, it was all working fine, but by the time I got to Nickerson Street Saloon for lunch, it was dead of the worst sort.  PC doesn’t recognize any sort of device being plugged in.  sigh.

UPDATE:  I would swear I had done all the possible combinations of the two buttons available to me, for the standard 10 seconds.  Then again, he said it was 15 seconds of holding down both home and power.  So far, looks OK again.  All things crash.

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.

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.

Lead411 a scam? – Probably not

Friday, September 26th, 2008

They claim to have a lot of info available if you sign up, but turns out they don’t actually have the info they claimed.  Unsubscribe email address listed in their signup process isn’t even a valid email address.  One can only assume that even if you did manage to get thru to them, they wouldn’t bother doing the job of unsubscribing you any better than they did at putting together a list of contact info.

UPDATE:  As you can see below, the founder of Lead411 has commented with a  certain level of explanation that certianly mollifies my inability-to-unsubscribe-related angst.  I don’t remember the exact info I used to sign-up, to validate his comment about temporary restrictions on “fishy” accounts.  Given that my corporate charter lapsed years ago, I could buy that as being marked “fishy”.

 

UPDATE2:  I had further off-line discussion with Tom, and feel that his explanation for my trial-signup’s limitations was reasonable.  More impressively, he immediately added a proper “abuse@” address to their mail system based on my suggestion.