Posts Tagged ‘stupid’

Comcast upgrade suckage

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.

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Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, tech stuff | No Comments »

Seriously?

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

I’ve been thinking about replacing my car. At 11 years old, it can’t stay perfect forever. Eventually I’m going to have to start spending serious money on repairs, sooner or later, I figure. Then I get a robo-call from the dealership I would have used, harassing me during dinner time, about some lame service special. Well congratulations, I will never get my car serviced at Carter VW again, and when I do replace my car, it won’t be with them. I don’t care how desperate your business is, we have a national do not call list for a reason, because people don’t like getting stupid calls from a machine. Even if you have a legal loophole that allows you to contact prior customers, it doesn’t make sense to deliberately antagonize someone you want to give you money.

“fuck you, give me money”
“um, no.”

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Posted in cranky, seattle | Comments Off

I Think Not

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

When a cop is giving you just one ticket, even though you’ve obviously done two tickets worth of stupid, you really shouldn’t try to argue the first ticket then and there. And you really really shouldn’t stand around advertising your catering business’ lack of professionalism by doing so in front of your customer’s business, while acting like a misogynist. Or maybe that’s just my opinion. I hope she went ahead and wrote you up for both tickets.

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How important is that EQ to you?

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

I generally love Rhapsody’s music service. The price is unbeatable for the breadth of music it gives you access to. Most of the time, things just work. But not always. I noticed the other day, they have an “EQ” button on their software, so I go to try it out. It comes with a bunch of pre-sets, but you can manually adjust the sliders as well. Great, except nothing I did affected the music being played. It didn’t matter if it was a stream from the service, or a local mp3, the sliders did nothing. I contacted their support website, and found someone else had already had the same problem, so I flagged the issue as one I was having as well, and included details on operating system and client. A short while later, I get a response from a Real employee who states the issue can be resolved by running their client software in Administrator mode. Sure enough, if you start the app with “run as administrator”, the EQ does start to work.

Of course this is completely unacceptable on so many levels. It’s a significant security risk in of itself, made all the more worse by the fact that they have a basic browser built into the client, so all it takes is one external link and welcome to drive-by-download-hacking central.

My first thoughts were that it must be some DRM restriction built into Windows 7, but it makes little sense given that the EQ code is coming from the same place as the rest of the client code. You end up having to trust both halves of the same code.

Whatever.

I’ll just use the EQ built into my amp at home, and live without at work.

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Stupid Like A Lemon Man

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

This ranks right up there with the guy who put lemon-juice on his face, because he thought it would make him invisible to security cameras….

A motorcyclist in Seattle got a ticket for driving in bicycle lane, so he went back the next morning with spray paint and a camera, and wrote “motorcycles only” in the bike lane, and took a picture. Like when he went to court, the judge was going to say “oh, there’s your evidence of a brand new class of lane that has no legislative history”…I’m pretty sure what he is going to say is, “oh, so you committed vandalism and fraud, as well as riding in the wrong lane, eh moron?”…but that’s just a guess.

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Posted in cars, funny-haha, mis-cognition, seattle, wonderments | Comments Off

Jeff Bezos, what were you thinking?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

So, I was explaining the kindle to my mom recently, and she asked me a question, “If I buy a book for your kindle, is amazon’s website smart enough to prevent me from buying something you already bought?”.  I assured her that Amazon wasn’t that stupid, and that I was sure it would manage my wishlist sanely.  Then I went home and started looking into it, and discovered that Mr Bezos, in all his crack-whackery, decided that kindle users don’t have friends or family that love them,  I guess.  It seems that you CAN’T give a kindle book as a gift to someone who owns a kindle device.  

Frankly, I’m aghast with flabergastery.     Books as gifts is hardly a corner-case scenario.  It seems like the kind of functionality an e-book system shouldn’t ship without on day-one, much less at the half-year mark.

DRM headaches, I can deal with, but such a moronic decision as to deliberately not allow people to give you the money they’ve decided to spend?   That’s the kind of thing that pisses me off.  You don’t want people to give me gifts, Mr Bezos?  Well then fine, I’m not giving anyone a gift thru your system ever again.

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