What Were They Thinking? — Houston, We Have a Problem

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Back in October, I was purchasing a flight to Houston for an event there.  The American Airlines website handily recognized that I had been on their site in the past couple days, looking at pricing.

Having your website follow up on a search query to try and make a sale: that’s nice customer service.

Unfortunately (and you can’t tell it completely from the snippet of the second email shown here), I had completed the purchase of the trip the day before.

Having your website follow up on a search query to try and make a sale that has already been made on that same wesbite: that’s braindead customer service.

Bloggenfreude (definition)

Taking joy in adding to the pain of others via exaggerated and even ridiculous online comments.
A portmanteau of “blog” and “Schadenfreude”

Consider:

• Whatever the latest Apple story is, the “Apple haters” dogpile on, tearing things down with increasingly ridiculous claims and theories.
   
• Right-wing pundits jumping on the birther “Obama was born in Kenya” bandwagon, even though probably none of them really believed the concern was legitimate.
   
• People ripping into Rebecca Black’s song “Friday”.  The lyrics might be simplistic and the Auto-Tune-ing a little bit obvious, but did it deserve that level of attack?  (Kudos to Glee for salvaging the song!)

Sure, when you feel compelled to comment on the latest trend or meme, you have to have your own spin, but if there’s truth in the Thumper Rule (“If you can’t say something nice… don’t say nothing at all.”), then there needs to be a corollary: “If you must say something mean, you don’t have to be meaner than everyone else.”
 

…And RealPlayer Loses a User

I got a notification about an update to RealPlayer today, so I accepted it and waited for the install to occur.

And 10 minutes later, I uninstalled the application and started this blog post.

• In order to install, it insisted I quit my browser.  That’s so 2005, that I have to quit one app to install another.
   
• After installing, it asked for my password.  No idea why it didn’t have my previous one saved, but this happens.  Maybe a wipe of saved browser passwords at some point wiped this, too.  (Most likely, when they mirrored my content over from the previous laptop, info like that wasn't preserved, and I just haven't used RealPlayer since then.)
   
• This is a work system, so my password has to change every few months.  After trying a couple that I could remember, I gave up and used the “Forgot your password?” link.  The page that came up asked for my email address… twice.  Twice on the same page.  These double-ask fields are done during sign-up scenarios to ensure that people have entered the right email address (no typos) or have typed their password (in blind text) correctly.  That use case doesn’t apply here.
   
• After getting the email to reset the password and clicking on the stupidly long URL, the resulting web page asked for the last four digits of my credit card.  I don’t recall having a credit card attached to that account — why would I have, since I’m not going to buy anything through them? — and why would you need me to click a link, enter an email address twice, check my email, click on another link, and then provide even more info?  Seems like overkill, when other applications can do the reset in fewer steps.
   
• But okay, which credit card?  I’ve used several over the nearly five years this account has been around, and I have since closed most of those accounts.  I tried the one I think I recall from my checking account; that’s the one I have on file at various retailers and such.  But no, that’s not the one they were looking for, and there was no means for entering other info, etc.  (Actually, that was the one from a checking account I recently had to close due to a fraud claim, but I’ve been using it for a few years.  Although as I think of it, I got that one after the RealPlayer account was created, so it would have likely been wrong regardless.)

(Note the big sin they have committed here: credit card usage changes over time.  The card I prefer to use now may not be the same one I used last year, and that account may be closed and the info not accessible to me any more.  Values which change over time should never be used as a security measure because they are neither memorizable nor retrievable.)

So I need to sign in to complete the install, but I can’t remember my password, and they won’t reset my password without me entering digits from a credit card for an account I no longer have?  Plonk!

Control Panels > Add & Remove Programs > Uninstall

[Note: I used to work for RealNetworks.  Does that make me more forgiving of them or more critical?  I’m not sure.]
 

Stuff I Read: “The Daily Dish” (Andrew Sullivan’s blog)

For a while now, I’ve wanted to highlight some of the blogs and websites and webcomics that I read, both to examine for myself what I get out of them and maybe turn a few other people on to them.

This week is the 10th Anniversary of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, “The Daily Dish”.  You can read his biography here, but in summary, Sullivan is a well know gay conservative writer, notable in his writing for several books looking at homosexuality from a positive-but-conservative viewpoint, especially Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con.  On the blogging front, he started out quite pro-Bush and has drifted more moderate over the years as revelation after revelation about the directions of the the Republican party have come out.  (Or perhaps he didn’t drift, everything else did in the opposite direction.)  And don’t get him started about Sarah Palin.

Years ago, my father taught me that the best way to beat something was to understand it, and the best way to understand it was to pay attention to it.  As an example, he was on the board of Planned Parenthood and he was a member of the Christian Coalition (I imagine they were really pleased that he was a minister); as such, he got access to huge doses of everything the theocratic right was up to, practically by the shovelful.

I’ve put that policy into effect in my own life over the years, listening to Dr. Laura and Michael Savage and Michael Medved and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin on the radio — often shaking my head at stuff I couldn’t quite believe I was hearing.  It’s been especially interesting to listen to conservative talk radio in Seattle over the years as they’ve moved through these people one at a time, eventually kicking each to the curb and moving on to the next voice.  And where convenient, I at least open my ears to other sources of information and opinion, just to see what’s up on the other side of the fence, to see what the “easy” channels of information are not telling me.

(Really, it sometimes surprises me how much people — especially ostensibly liberal queers and techies — like to live in their own little bubbles.  They say they want to be up on politics and current events, but no, really they don’t.  Just like people addicted to Fox News, they want to get their news only from narrow, supportive avenues, ones which will feed them more of what they want to hear and nothing to challenge their world views.  If you try to balance their viewpoints, they will often fight to death to keep from learning stuff which will imbalance them.)

I initially started reading Sullivan’s blog (back in about 2002, I think) for much the same reason — to see what these “gay conservatives” were up to.  Initially, as a good fag living in a very blue city (Seattle), I was repelled by much of the pro-Bush content and such, but I muscled through.  (And “muscled through” is right: The Daily Dish has many screenfuls of content on its front page, and sometimes will fill more than one front page in a day [although less so today than in years past], so it takes a dedicated block of time to consume it.  Sullivan [and his assitants/substitutes] isn’t quick reading.)

Over time, well, the abyss gazes back: even as Sullivan’s tune shifted some, so did mine toward him and his blog.  Being confronted by opinions on the other side of the fence — opinions which are generally well written and well rounded, as opposed to the shrill name calling from talk radio — expanded my views.  Not necessarily changed my views; expanded them.  (It’s interesting to go back and revisit my blog posts from 6 and 7 years ago.  Can I see some influence from Sullivan in there?  Maybe.)  I agree with some things I read, and disagree with others, but most of all, I can’t help but respect Sullivan.

And that’s probably really all he asks for.
 

Flash! Aaahh! Destroyer of the Universe!

I’m a big fan of tabbed browsing when using a web browser.  I tend to launch tabs for a dozen or more webpages at once — for a weekly calendar I do, currently more than 50 tabs at a shot.  This allows me to go through several pages in a row (I just close one tab and the next shows) without having to constantly pull up a new bookmark.

For a couple years, I used Firefox on Windows, but I increasingly had problems where my entire computer would grind almost to a halt.  Task Manager would show Firefox eating up 99% of the CPU, which would force me to kill it and relaunch.

I eventually switched to Safari on Windows, because I found that it would load a set of tabs sometimes as much as 25% faster.  But I ended up with the same CPU spiking problem.  Sometimes I could painstakingly go through each tab and close it until I cleared whatever the problem process was, but this could take a few minutes and only worked some of the time.

I then switched to Chrome on Windows.  It puts each of its tabs into its own process.  In theory, this allows one process to stall or crash without bringing down the entire browser.  (In practice, though, when Shockwave crashes, it crashes across the browser, on all tabs.  But on the up side, I can reload each of those tabs and it will relaunch.)  I still had the CPU spiking, and while I could then narrow it to a single tab’s process, I still couldn’t identify which tab that was or kill just the one tab; killing the tab from the task manager would kill the entire browser.  But on the plus side, Chrome will remember what tabs were open when you quit (or crashed) and will generally reopen them on next launch, so recovery was that much easier.

I’ve also had some of the same problems on my Macintosh, with Safari.  Not as bad and not as often, but still now and then.

By now, I knew what the problem child was: Adobe Flash.  For whatever reason, seemingly at random, a Flash process will go bonkers and eat up all my CPU.  I don’t know if it’s truly random or something I could predict if I knew more about Flash, but it doesn’t really matter.  The take-away is “Flash has problems.”

This is the core of why Flash is not enabled/permitted on the iPhone and the iPad.  It is simply known to cause problems.  Some reports say Flash issues cause like 75% of browser crashes.  I note that even without it, Mobile Safari on my iPhone crashes now and then (as often as a couple times a day, depending on usage), usually when I’m trying to close a page.  I can certainly picture adding Flash into that would increase the likelihood of those issues.

Fortunately, there is a solution!  Block Flash!

Well, no, preventing all Flash on your computer is a stupid solution, a scorched Earth method.  So much of the web has components in Flash that there are things you simply miss out on, as any iPhone user can tell you.  (But on the other hand, much of it is stuff you don’t really need.  One social networking site I’m on uses Flash to make a bit of text pulse when you’ve got a new message.  Talk about something that doesn’t need Flash!  Not to mention all those website intro pages!  And the flashing noisy ads!)

So instead of outright blocking Flash, we can put up a gate.  This prevents Flash from loading when you open a page, but it also gives you the opportunity to load selected Flash elements, such as to view an embedded video or to show the site’s navigation bar (grrrr).  You end up with a far less cluttered page view as a side effect.

On Chrome for Windows, I use FlashBlock.  Firefox users also have Flashblock.

On Safari for Mac, I use ClickToFlash.

My browser CPU spikes have all but gone away (and when they happen, it’s because I’ve disabled the extension!), and my browser crashes and needs to kill/relaunch the browser have dropped by 90%.  (I now have to relaunch a couple times a week, rather than several time a day.) That’s a massive improvement.

Highly, highly recommended!  Use Flash at your leisure, not at theirs.

FlashBlock is not a perfect solution, though.  I’ve found that some of the Apple movie trailer pages use an embedded Flash player (rather than QuickTime, why?) which won’t play when I click it, so I have to disable the extension, reload the page, and then re-enable the extension.  Similarly, YouTube recently made a change which presents a message falsely telling you to upgrade your version of Flash, but again, what you need to do is disable/reload/enable.  I’m hoping that either these sites or the FlashBlock extension maker will be able to repair these issues.  (I haven’t hit them with ClickToFlash, so maybe there’s hope.)

(With apologies to Queen.)

(Kudos to Daring Fireball for a lot of useful thought on this subject.)

---

Updated on March 22, 2010

Check out this Foxtrot strip.  Great gag!

New Zealand: Christchurch to Seattle (Monday, February 22)

Written at the international terminal at Los Angeles International Airport at 5:35 pm (Los Angeles time) on Monday, February 22; and in Seattle after returning home

Today, we went out to Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, a wildlife park on the outskirts of Christchurch.  All we really knew was that they had kiwi there.  It turned out that they are a three-part walk-through wildlife park/zoo.  One part for introduced wildlife — freshwater eels, wallabies, ostriches, lemurs, gibbons, capuchin monkeys, assorted birds.  Then a part for New Zealand farm life — chickens, cows, pigs, rabbits, and horses, many of them rare breeds only found in New Zealand.  And the third part was mostly native wildlife (although some introduced, mostly hundreds of years ago) — kiwi, tuatara, possums, ferrets, ducks, etc.

Willowbank has the most successful kiwi breeding program in New Zealand.  They have a nocturnal house, which allows the kiwi to be available for viewing during the day.  (If you can call it “viewing” when it’s very dark in there.  We were able to visually observe two kiwis in the house, though.)

While we were viewing the capuchin monkeys, Mom leaned her cane against the banister and >splash< into the water it fell.  The park staff was able to fish it out and hose it down for her, though.  To keep parity, I proceeded to drop my sunglasses into the eel pond (and recovered them).

We bought souvenirs at their gift shop — I got some paua shell stud earrings, a tocque with a Māori design on it, another Kiwi country CD (this one with older artists, I think), and a book on New Zealand foods (descriptions of foods, essays on New Zealand food producers, and some recipes, mostly for desserts).  We also had lunch there, and as beverage, we had Elderflower Sparkle sodas (one original and one with black currant); got to keep trying those local items!

We then got me to the airport for my return home.  Alas, I got to see absolutely nothing of downtown Christchurch in the process.

I bought a chocolate croissant at the airport with the rest of my New Zealand money, leaving me just a few coins.  I had also forgotten that I hadn’t finished the bottle of Southern Comfort I bought in Auckland, so it got tossed at security, as did the jar of Nutella-knockoff spread (which should have gone into the checked luggage, darn it).

Retracing the steps from 10 days ago, I flew Emirates Air back to Sydney and finished Julie & Julia.  Our plane was a Boeing 777; nothing special about the flight, but an ugly landing.  I swear the plane bounced twice.  Had a 3-hour layover in Sydney.  Pulled out my leftover Australian money and looked around for a small souvenir, something warranting the 6 hours total I spent in the Sydney airport, and bought a shot glass with kangaroo silhouettes on it.  That took just coins, so I have an AUS$10 bill left for some future conversion.

Then it was back on V Australia to Los Angeles.  finished an episode of Heroes I had brought with me (from December, we’re slowly catching up on it), and then watched The Hangover.  Sleep was difficult, and I have no idea how much I caught; probably just 3-4 hours, I think.  After waking up, I watched the recent version of Fame.

In Los Angeles, customs wasn’t too bad; in fact, the wait to get my suitcase was the longest part.  I found a table in the food court at the International Terminal and worked on the trip report, plus sent a few texts and a short phone call to my boyfriend.

I mentioned early in the trip report bringing an episode of Lost with me.  Well, I never got around to watching it until I was back in Los Angeles.  I thought about watching it on the Syndey-to-LA trip, but that would be just a bit too much tempting of fate.  (What, you forgot that the show started with a Syndey-to-Los Angeles plane crash?)

I read Bill Willingham’s Fables novel on the trip, Peter & Max.  A good light read, with a surprising and yet well preceded finale.  Completely in line with the comics, and hopefully with the upcoming television show.

I’ve also been reading the second omnibus volume of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (followers of previous trip reports know I read the previous volume on my trip to Europe last summer; I guess my next overseas trip will have to cover Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, and Michael Tolliver Lives?), having finished Babycakes and almost done with Significant Others.

When I dug the book out, I discovered a picture from when I worked at Frame Technology, over 15 years ago, which must be when I last (first) read the books.  I only recognized about half the people, it’s been so long.  I’ll have to put that pic up on Facebook.  (Which also serves to remind me that my Facebook contacts are people I currently know and those from high school.  I need to look up folks from college, grad school, and when I lived in the Bay Area.  For all that it’s great for having some form of contact with people I’m otherwise lost on the wayside, there are huge chunks of my life not yet connected there.)

I’m feeling quite ready to be home.  On Sunday, I found myself almost snapping at Mom at one point, due to one of her personal speaking quirk (explaining things way too much).  My neck is hurting, mostly because of working on the netbook in the car, bending my head down.  My $50 pair of headphones broke at the airport; I compressed them too hard when putting them in my bag and a plastic tab broke off, so one earpiece doesn’t stay on the bridge when they are stored.  (Still usable, just annoying to store and fish out again, becoming a jumble of cables.)  And on the plane, the waist button came off on my shorts; just a tiny thing, but still, one more thing.

Which brings me current.  Now to watch another episode of Desperate Housewives and call the trip good.

As with the trip to Europe, I’m several days behind in posting these updates, but I’ll just plod through them during the coming week, one or two a day (rather than churning them all out at once).  I’ll need to go back and do some second drafts on some pages, too.  And once they all get posted, I’ll revisit each page to correct place names and add a myriad of links.  And some day, I’ll edit together the photos and videos and get them posted to Flickr and YouTube, and then I’ll revamp the entire thing into its own set of web pages on my site, rather than a series of blog posts.

(Of course, I haven’t done the pics/video or web pages steps with either the OutGames or Dublin trip reports just yet.  Sigh.)

My boyfriend is picking me up at the airport.  I haven’t had sex with him in two weeks.  What do you think will happen tonight?  (Yeah, probably collapse into bed and sleep.)

---

Updated on May 14, 2010

Updated on June 15, 2010

Added links.
Added travel map.

Apple Tablet Predictions: After the Announcement

Okay, the Apple iPad has been announced. How did my predictions fare?

• Screen of 10–11" — big enough for reading or viewing video, but not any bigger than a regular sized magazine.
  — I hoped for a larger screen, more toward 10.5"
• Very minimal hardware interface, just an on button and a headphone jack.  No power jack, no USB ports, nothing much to mar the feel of it being an encapsulated item.  Definitely no battery access.
  — Nailed this, but it’s easy to nail: look at the iPhone and extrapolate.  I failed to note the volume buttons from the iPhone, but they were obvious as items to include.
• Bluetooth and WiFi.  Duh.
  — Duh, but correct.  3G is also an option, for extra cost and extra monthly fee.  Hmm, I wonder if the reason AT&T hasn’t yet turned on tethering is that it was aimed at this device, so you can create a mini-WiFi zone with your iPhone and use its 3G.  That would be cool.
• Runs a variant of iPhone OS that is geared for the larger screen but still works with the same UI mechanisms familiar to iPhone users.
  — Yup.
• Apps for the tablet can be obtained from a version of the AppStore.
  — Remains to be seen just how this will work.  I expect the iPad and the iPhone will each connect top the AppStore, and will only see content appropriate to their hardware.
• Existing iPhone apps will work on the tablet, in iPhone sized windows.
  — Yup.
• Has all the features of an iPhone: multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.
  — Yup.

And then some more interesting predictions:

• Induction charging and synching.  As I said, no power jack.
  — Darn.  But understandable: if the existing power/synch attachment hardware is working fine, no need to reinvent the wheel.
• A netbook-type base which provides the induction charger base and a MacBook keyboard, a la the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.  Tablet body can be inserted into the docking base in each of the four directions (but not backwards!).
  — Sort of yup, although I was expecting something quite a bit more like a laptop base than the keyboard dock they have announced.  But I note that the third-party company could provide exactly what I was anticipating, which would also serve as a protective cover.
• When docked, can switch from the iPhone-style UI to a Mac OS X-style UI.
  — Darn.  Partially defused due to the creation of iWork for the iPad, but there are certainly major things you won’t be able to do without a full OS.  In particular, no mouse (which is better than finger pointing for some things).
• The docking base has additional solid-state memory, plus the various ports and such.  Comes with iWork and iLife software pre-installed, and other apps are available via the cloud.
  — Nope for the additional memory, but that was tied into the OS X item above.  Yup on iWork, nope on iLife (although it will be interesting to see if a Brushes app makes its way into the next desktop version of either suite, targeting Adobe apps as well as Microsoft).
• Has two cameras: decent quality video/still camera on the back (a la iPhone 3GS) and webcam on the front.
  — Darn, and a major puzzling lapse.  Presumably some third-party will make a rotating camera that plugs in to the headphone jack to fill this niche.

Again, this, I would so buy.  Will buy.  It will make a nice birthday present to myself in seven months, don’t you think?  Especially after reviews are in and maybe some OS patches are done to correct early problems.

I’m pleasantly surprised by the pricing structure.  Some will still complain that it’s too expensive, but they are mostly serial complainers ("free" would probably still be too expensive) or Apple haters (anything Apple producers is over-priced because Steve Jobs is a money-grubbing bastard).
 

Apple Tablet Predictions

Assuming that an tablet-like thing is actually announced on January 27, of course.  (And what would the reaction be if one were not?  Apple would need to be announcing some other fantabulous game-changing device instead, just to distract people from what they didn’t announce.)

So given the idea of something tablet-y being announced, what will it be like?

I think people are putting a lot more stock in the idea of it being a Kindle competitor than it’s worth.  I think that eBooks will be a secondary focus, but not a top tier one.  (Think of the iPhone announcement, where they touted Phone, Web, and iPod as the top items.  Stuff like texting and calendar and e-mail were second tier, important and even the things that really interested some people, but not the primary focus.

I think a lot of people are fascinated by the form factor idea of the walk-around tablet without much consideration of how that will actually be used.  If you’ve got an iPhone and you’ve got a desktop or laptop system, do you need a tablet?  The answer is “No… except when you do need one.”  This is what people are missing, in my opinion: when do you need a tablet (vs. those other devices) and what do you do with it when you don’t need it.

So here are some predictions, none of them surprising:

• Screen of 10–11" — big enough for reading or viewing video, but not any bigger than a regular sized magazine.
• Very minimal hardware interface, just an on button and a headphone jack.  No power jack, no USB ports, nothing much to mar the feel of it being an encapsulated item.  Definitely no battery access.
• Bluetooth and WiFi.  Duh
• Runs a variant of iPhone OS that is geared for the larger screen but still works with the same UI mechanisms familiar to iPhone users.
• Apps for the tablet can be obtained from a version of the AppStore.
• Existing iPhone apps will work on the tablet, in iPhone sized windows.
• Has all the features of an iPhone: multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.
• OLED screen

And then some more interesting predictions:

• Induction charging and synching.  As I said, no power jack.
• A netbook-type base which provides the induction charger base and a MacBook keyboard, a la the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.  Tablet body can be inserted into the docking base in each of the four directions (but not backwards!).
• When docked, can switch from the iPhone-style UI to a Mac OS X-style UI.
• The docking base has additional solid-state memory, plus the various ports and such.  Comes with iWork and iLife software pre-installed, and other apps are available via the cloud.
• Has two cameras: decent quality video/still camera on the back (a la iPhone 3GS) and webcam on the front.

In other words, two questions answered:

• When do you need it?  When the walk-around nature of the iPhone isn’t enough.  For reading, for browsing the web better, for watching video larger, for apps that haven’t been invented yet which take advantage of the tablet nature.
• What do you do with it when you you don’t need a tablet?  You turn it into something you do need (if you need one), a netbook/laptop.  Something that you can write on, edit photos with, do web designs with, etc. — all the things that the iPhone isn’t really geared for.

This, I would so buy.

---

Updated on January 19, 2010

Updated on March 1, 2010
 

What Were They Thinking? — Meds for Cross-eyed and Possessed Pets

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

You probably saw these website ads for 1-800-PetMeds early this year: when the mouse passes over the ad, it turns into a bone or a fly, and the dog or cat’s eyes follow it.  Cute, huh?

At least until you move the cursor to extreme points — such as between the pet’s eyes — and the eye-tracking algorithm breaks, turning the pet into some hideous monstrosity, either a cross-eyed cat that probably can’t aim to find its litter box, or a possessed pug (ugly enough to start with).

(Maybe the dog is having visions of the future and is about to paint?  Or spray?  Or spray paint?   Where’s Mr. Muggles when we need him?)

Seriously, test your Flash ads before you deploy them.

 

New blog

I’ve finally buckled down and done it.  Started a formal blog, using real blogging software (as opposed to maintaining it all by hand).

I have had two blog-like sites in the past, both manually constructed and maintained.  The first, from 1999–2000, was called “An Opinion About Everything” — so-named because someone in a mailing list flamewar once accused me of having an opinion about everything, as though that were a bad thing.  The second, from 2003–2006, was called “Bouncing Off the Walls” — it was at the site attached to my personal e-mail address, “rubberize”.

This blogging software allows me to backdate posts — perhaps controversial, but less so than with stock options — which I am using to bring in my posts from those other two pseudo-blogs and repost them here, in chronological order, while still being able to post new items as well.  (Some of the original posts themselves got updated at some point, so as best I can, I am posting them with their original dates, and adding notes at the bottom indicating updates.)

Despite backdating the entries to put them in the right context, I am not going to rewrite the entries.  What I originally wrote and posted for all the world to see (if they happened to trip over my site) should still be something I’m happy to have people read today.  (I had better be okay with it, since the web never forgets.  Anything I ever posted is archived somewhere.)  There are exceptions to that, though: (1) if I spot a typo or puncutation error or HTML coding gaffe, I will fix it; (2) if I had links to websites and those links are no longer valid, I will fix the links or remove them; and (3) if a removed link means that an entire paragraph no longer has valid content, I will remove the paragraph.

Enjoy, and please add comments where you like.

(Oh yeah, and comments: a few of the original posts had manually inserted comments added to them.  I’ll do something like that here, when I get to those posts.)

---

Updated on July 22, 2007

I’ve now completed bringing over the posts from “An Opinion About Everything”.  The other blog will take a lot longer to port across.

Updated on July 29, 2007

As I’m starting to move through the old blog post, I see some items that are notes about pages I added to the other website, or “Hey, this is my 100th entry!” posts, which don’t have any content worth preserving. I’ve decided to not bring those across into this blog.

Updated on December 15, 2009

I’m slowly reposting everything another time following the re-creation of the blog.  This time around, I am allowing myself to make a few more adjustments to the content.  Entries posted years ago are still a product of their time, but I’m doing a few in-place edits for clarity, and sometimes adding new notes to the end of an entry.  I am also unifying the format for the update notes.

Clubs, Forums, and Beta Wolves

I am or have been involved in a number of clubs, online message forums, and other groups over the years.  If you have as well, you’ve seen them ebb and flow.  You’ve seen personalities clash.  You’ve seen people drop out, and others never really participate — sometimes because they have nothing to add, but sometimes because they fear being attacked.

Cartoonist Donna Barr makes some good commentary on the matter in this article.  Here is a pertinent quote:

They taught me what groups were all about — internal politics, single-minded subject matter, petty squabbles, and attempts to direct everybody and anybody involved with the Point of the group interest into each little leader’s personal camp.  For this I am grateful &mdash but I'll be damned if I’ll let ’em get near me again.

There are people who seem to survive well in these sorts of environments, though.  (Survive, not lead!)  Maybe these are the “Beta Wolves”: the people who recognize the politics for what they are and don’t let the politics control the people.  They are people with no more than a minimal agenda, but who are willing to give as good as they get: they aren’t afraid of getting barked at, but no “alpha” attacks them without getting bit himself.

---

Updated on April 12, 2011
 

Best Deal for Travel

I don’t want to get in the habit of touting one business over another, but…

When I need to get airplane tickets (and this is fairly often, as I’ve been in, let’s see… Palm Springs, Long Beach, Seattle, Houston, Nashville, Paducah, Vancouver, Kansas City, New Orleans, Chicago, Las Vegas, Columbus… at least 11 metro areas this year, with at least three more to come before the year is over), I go to a variety of websites looking for the best price.  Most of my cross-country flying is on American (for the miles), and my West Coast trips are usually on Alaska (again, for the miles), but I also check Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia as well.  You never know which might have a Web Deal or even just a fare a few bucks lower.

Twice in the past year, poking around for best fares — both times going to Texas, oddly enough, and gasping at the prices — I’ve found my best deal to be through Travelocity, with their “Search Flights + Hotels” option.  They partner with area hotels — anything from a 2-star Comfort Suites to a 4-star Crowne Plaza — and get you a package deal which is below the cost for the items separately.  This has proven true even when I was staying at the host hotel for an event at what should be a cut price off the standard rate.  For my upcoming trip to Dallas, the net savings will be about $80 off the separate pieces, a bit more than one night free at the hotel.

(Of course, I have to be a good consumer of the event as well, and call the hotel to confirm the reservation and make sure they record it as being in conjunction with the event.  Events and conventions need room nights at the host hotel to ensure that they get ballroom and exhibition space at as low a price as possible.)

---

Updated August 11, 2004

I need to downgrade the above recommendation somewhat after my trip to Dallas this past weekend.  I realized as well that I used Travelocity for my hotel on a trip to Las Vegas back in June, and I’ve used them now and again in the past just for airfare, and that helped establish a pattern.

Both of my airplane seats on this last trip were “E” seats — middle of the right side — and my memory says that this is a pattern.  That is, as a bulk seller of airline seats, they put you in the less desirable middle seats (or perhaps those are the ones made readily available to them; can’t put all the blame on them without knowing all the details).  On both legs of my Dallas trip, the plane was packed to the gills (even on a mid-afternoon flight out of the hub on a Monday!) and there was no availability to change seats.

Worse, though, is that they do the same thing (perhaps) with hotel space.  When I got to the Sheraton in Dallas, I was greeted by “I see you’ve requested a Smoking Room.”  I most certainly did not: with my asthma, it’s bad enough going to bars and dating a smoker, I sure don’t want to breathe leftover smoke all weekend while I sleep.  I had the same situation with the hotel in Vegas; I don’t recall about Houston last October.  Fortunately, I’ve been able to change to a non-smoking room each time, but it was no sure thing in Vegas.

Again, it’s impossible to say whether this is an intentional thing, that the hotel partners offer up smoking rooms because they are less able to fill them, or if it’s just a bad web interface which doesn’t ask about smoking preference and the lack of info gets pushed through to the hotel as a default preference for Smoking.

Whatever the intent, caveat emptor: you can get a better deal this way, but there may be hidden bits of undesirability.

Updated on March 4, 2011

I no longer use this mechanism when I’m going to events where I plan to stay at the host hotel.  The hotel sometimes isn’t able to retroactively apply your externally done reservation to the room block, and getting those rooms sold is often vital to the host club.  (They are on the hook for unsold rooms if they don’t meet a certain percentage.  It is really bad form for you to save $60 over the course of three nights but cost the organizing group 3 x $129 in the process.)

My current recommendation for travel is Kayak, for their combination of aggregating from multiple airlines along with their decent UI experience.  But I do still go to other sites before making the purchase, just to be sure I’m seeing all the options (often I’m not).

 

Buggy Rubber Baby Bumpers

Professionally, I do software testing for Adobe Systems.  (No, I can’t tell you on what product or get you a free copy of Photoshop.)  I’ve been doing this for almost 14 years, for three different companies.  On a mailing list I’m on (dedicated to FrameMaker), we had a thread on how companies address errors in their documentation, and how they get that information to start with.  My response below goes for giving feedback about all sorts of software problems, large and small.

User #1:

We put a tech pubs email address in all the books, but people hardly ever use it.

User #2:

Nobody is going to give feedback unless you contact them directly and ask for their feedback.

Is that because people aren’t willing to give feedback, or because we’ve trained them not to?

We (not just software developers, tech writers, etc., but the software company) don’t fix the problems they complain about.  We often don’t even acknowledge that we’ve received their feedback.  We sometimes charge them $40 a pop to have us look and see if we already know about a problem they encounter, whether we have a solution or not.  We sometimes don’t provide a contact method at all.

I’ve been reasonably happy that Apple has a Report Bugs to Apple menu item in Safari.  (They originally had a bug report button in the UI.)  And Provide iCal Feedback in their calendar program.  I’ve never received anything back to indicate that they have received what I sent (much less will act on it), but it’s at least a start.

I use Eudora in “sponsored mode,” which gives me no support mechanism.  Twice now, I’ve dug through their website and sent a message to their Sales e-mail, for lack of any other way to contact them… and both times I got a response!  Woo!  (I really should reward them and go to “paid mode,” huh?)

On the down side, I’m now seeing a new trend in software development: bugs found and not fixed (deferred) during the development cycle will never get addressed.  This was the case in FrameMaker 7.0: due to tight schedules and limited resources, they cherry-picked a couple dozen high-profile bugs already known (and frequently complained about by high-profile user sites) and that was all the bugs fixed from previous releases.  There was just not the ability (time and resources) both to fix more and to address the new ones which would come in.  The party line was basically “People are already working with or around those issues, so they don’t need to be addressed.”  (The ideal answer to this is “Add more time or resources.  Making the product better is more important than making it hit the street in Q2 of next year.” But sometimes the date — and the money associated with it — are more important than the product being “better”.  More important to the bottom line, not more important to anyone who actually uses the product, of course.)

I’ve now worked tangentially (not directly) on another project where a similar tack is being taken: the only bugs from the last version which will be addressed in the next one are those which customers complain about (as opposed to which the test team identified).  The logic behind this — “If it’s important, they will tell us about it” — only makes sense in a world where customers are willing, able, and encouraged to tell.  I imagine that this mechanism for prioritizing work (and cutting development costs; it’s always all about money) will only accelerate.

(It also leaves the test team wondering what we are there for.  If you’re only going to address the issues users complain about, why have a test team?  Just push out a release and react to the feedback, right?)

So… do not sit on your butt as a user and hope that some issue will be addressed!  Even if it’s just a typo, or a preference that doesn’t get saved (my pet FrameMaker peeve: two spelling checker prefs on Mac don’t save between sessions!), or of course a repeatable crash, you have to tell the company, or you should expect it to never get fixed.  Find a user forum.  Find an e-mail address.  And maybe tell them over and over and over again, to make sure they listen.

Save both yourself and us test engineers some grief.

---

Updated on January 16, 2011

Several generations later, Safari does still have a “Report bugs” option.

Eudora is dead now; I use Mail on Mac and we now use GMail at work. No idea at the moment if there are feedback mechanisms in Mail, but GMail has an online Help Center, including listings of Known Issues and such.  You have to root around in there, but you can find out info about many issues and notify them through some channels if you find something new.

I encountered a phrase a couple years ago which covers this entire matter pretty well:

“Broken gets fixed.  Shoddy lasts forever.”

Bloody Vikings!

On some level, spam e-mail is just like junk mail.  Why can’t people just use their Delete key and get rid of it, just like tossing (or recycling) paper junk mail?  That’s what I do.  (And it doesn’t even waste paper.)

On the other hand, let’s look at some of the negative issues which surround it:

• There’s an awful lot of it.  I have a half-dozen or more e-mail addresses I deal with every day, and I get a minimum of 50 spam items a day, probably closer to 100.  But I also make use of spam blockers at work and with my home e-mail ISP.  The former blocks maybe a dozen a day, while I check the latter every three weeks and clear out more than 1000 items each time, making for another 50-plus items each day which I don’t have to delete directly.
   
• I have DSL at home and a LAN at work, so the impact of getting a single spam message — or even a few dozen — is minimal, a matter of seconds to download it all, usually in the background while I do other tasks.  My mother, on the other hand, uses dial-up with a 56K modem, so the impact for her of getting spam is 10 times as much or more.
   
• Spam items are usually just a text or HTML message, but some contain graphics.  Again, for me with high-speed connections, downloading a 100K spam e-mail is a matter of a few seconds, but for someone on dial-up, it can be a minute or more for each message like that.
   
• I’m on a lot of e-mail lists and Yahoo! groups, so I get a lot of legitimate e-mail every day, probably 4-5 times as much as the spam I get.  As a result, dealing with the spam is a small part of my e-mail time, especially since I don’t need to reply to them or otherwise deal with them in depth.  If my daily amount of real e-mail was in the range of only a dozen or so items, a couple dozen spam e-mails would drown out and hide the real stuff.
   
• I’m a very process-oriented person, and I’m quick to pick up on patterns.  (Dealing with a couple hundred e-mails every day, you have to be.)  As a result, I can usually tell just from the subject line that it’s spam and thus never have to open it.  (Anything saying “girls”, “viagra”, “xanax”, or with no subject at all is spam.)  Less savvy people may open every item to be sure it’s not legitimate, and thus take half a minute with each item where I take half a second.
   
• Many spam items come as HTML with embedded graphics, content which doesn’t come with the e-mail but gets downloaded from a server at open time, just like visiting a web page.  Thus, what takes 2K to download as e-mail can then load hundreds of KB more when you view it, making people wait wait wait that much longer.
   
• Once the item is in your Inbox, it appears to take the same amount of space as anything else (one line per item), but if you look more closely (and have the mail program UI set to show it), you can see the size listed for each item.  Comparing to junk mail, that would be like seeing your mailbox stuffed with envelopes, but when you pull them out, finding that some have cleverly concealed bricks inside.
   
• HTML-coded spam sends a request back to a server, especially is the graphics are server based rather than embedded.  That request may be able to carry the e-mail address the message was sent to, and thus just by opening the message to see what it is, you send a message saying “We’ve got a live one!  Send more spam!”
   
• Paper junk mail is often legitimate on some level: it was sent by a real company which is trying to sell you a real product or service (admittedly, sometimes a scam, but typically real), but they are doing it basically blindly, since they don’t already know you are someone who might be interested.  Some spam is like this, but most has false return addresses, subject lines intended to mislead (not that “check enclosed” or “date-sensitive information” on junk mail aren’t in that class, too; if the envelope says “this is important!”, it probably isn’t), and spam messages point to sites unrelated to what the message is about.
   
• There’s an awful lot of porn flying about.  Really, my mother isn’t interested in making her penis larger or in seeing Suzy do it with a Great Dane.  (Frankly, neither am I.  I’m gay, not into animals, and my a penis is already long and thick enough, thank you very much.)  Imagine if junk mail delivered by the post office had such text splattered all of the envelope!

In the end, most (99.9%) spam is intended to mislead, to block the ability of ISPs to send and deliver legitimate e-mail, and generally to bring down the infrastructure of the Internet.  Somewhere between malicious and terrorist, frankly.  (Yeah, that last term is extreme, but realize the effect these spammers have.  While not intending to cause fear and terror, they sometimes are attempting to disrupt international communications and destroy legitimate commerce.  That ain’t the equivalent of jaywalking.)

I met one of the spammers (as he called it, “e-mail direct marketing”) who was active around 1997 or so.  He tried to use marketing “Dilbert-isms” to explain why his sending unsolicited and unwanted e-mails was a good thing, but in the end, he was unconvincing: the spammer was just a scammer.  The ones today deserve to have the book thrown at them.  (Make it a heavy one, please.)

[Weblog title reference: Monty Python’s Flying Circus did a sketch involving the breakfast meat SPAM.  It involved Vikings in the background singing about how lovely and wonderful SPAM is, until they get so loud and abundant that they drown out the rest of the sketch.  And thus junk e-mail is called “spam”.]

---

Updated on November 2, 2010

These days, I’m up to 10 or so e-mail accounts I get mail from every day — different types of messages go to different accounts.  I no longer check the spam filters (my old ISP no longer even makes viewing the filtered spam doable), except at work when I know something I sent there form one of my own accounts didn’t come through.  (Those are usually messages with just a picture or a URL attached — high on the list of potential spam, although of course they aren’t, but the computer can’t reliably know that.)

I removed a bullet point above which implied that virus packages could come with HTML e-mails.  I don’t believe that was ever true.

An additional term has been created for e-mail messages which you in theory expect to get, but which clutter your Inbox because while you want them, you don't want them now: bacn (“bacon”).  Things falling in this class would be Facebook updates, specials from your favorite airline, ads from the candy company you ordered from last Christmas, etc.  (I get at least three a week from Shepler’s western wear, which results in me never reading any of them.  If it was one every two weeks, maybe I would order something, but why would I ever bother with this frequency?  I complained once, but they said they couldn't change the setting.  Really?)

Scott Adams is Listening

A friend of mine (who I won’t name), who works for a large Bay Area-based software company (which I also won’t name, but it’s not the same large Bay Area-based software company I work for) told me that he has filed a complaint with his human resources department about his manager, claiming that his manager ordered him to lie to a customer, telling the customer that a desired feature was in the current version of the software when it isn’t.

I think back across my career in the software industry and come up with some lunatic tales, too.  If you’ve ever worked in a high-tech company, you know these (and worse) are all true:

• T-Shirts with targets on them, for a product initiative called “FATE”.
• Management directions that change every two weeks, and then change back.
• A project gets cancelled, the staff gets laid off, and then the project gets resurrected when a major customer complains.
• Mergers where the sales force of the smaller company is canned, and then sales on that set of products tank.
• Continuing to use a Microsoft product company wide despite a merger having acquired something which competes in the same space.
• Producing a mass consumer product, but laying off the user interface designer.
• Canning telecommuting employees to avoid having to do payroll for the states they live in, despite the company already having employees and subsidiaries in dozens of states.
• Artwork in a conference room featuring a gutted fish, or by the elevator featuring what looks like scabbed over wounds.  Or another with a grid of faceless people, some of them X’ed out.  (We had layoffs soon after.)
• Company-wide e-mails which announce a mandatory meeting and then ask employees not to gossip about the meeting in the halls.  (So we went to the break room instead.)
• Quantity Assurance, where the quality is determined by the number of bugs posted and fixed, the number of tests run, and apparently the number of employees working seven days a week all summer long with no added pay.  (But they got a few t-shirts and lunch
  on the weekends.)

The San Jose Mercury News long ago put Scott Adams’ “Dilbert” in the Business section rather than on the comics pages (as some papers did with putting “Doonesbury” on the Op-Ed pages).  They know that “Dilbert” isn’t comedy… it’s documentary.

[Weblog title reference: From the catchphrase for THX sound, “The audience is listening.”]

---

Updated on March 14, 2003

Updated on October 21, 2003

Updated on June 23, 2010

Updated and added some links.

Avoid: Pagoo.com

Pagoo.com is one of the new companies running an Internet answering machine service.

It’s a great idea.  What happens is that they set up a voicemail box for you.  You then contact your telephone company (or they can do it for you), and set the Busy Call Forwarding to go to that voicemail box.  Then if someone calls while you are online, instead of getting a busy signal for hours at a shot, they get redirected to where you’ve left a message — “Hi, this is Jim.  I’m probably online right now, but leave a message and I’ll get it over the Internet!”  You then get notified of the message they left and can listen to it right there, without dropping your connection, and then act on it or not.

As I said, great idea.  (Unless, of course, you’re not online, but are talking on the phone instead.  Then they leave a message and you don’t get it until the next time you connect.  If you’re online frequently, that won’t be a problem.)

When Pagoo first started, they were a Windows-only product.  (No surprise there, these days.)  But they intended to add a Macintosh version.  I asked to be notified of such, and was invited to take part in the beta program for Mac Pagoo 1.1.

As part of the signup for Pagoo (at the time; details may have changed since then), they will set up the voicemail box for you for a 30-day free trial (after which it is $3.95 per month), and they will spring for the fees for setting up the Busy Call Forwarding switch and your first month’s fee for that service.  (Very cool.  Assuming you stick around, they’ll get that cost back in a couple months.)

This was all fine, until the beta period extended beyond the end of the 30-day free trial.  Presto!  My voicemail greeting was replaced by “This user’s 30-day free trial has expired.”  (No indication that they had got the right phone number, nor why [or that] they had been transferred to what had been a voicemail box.)  As a result, my use of the Pagoo system and participation in the beta program was instantly over (if no one could leave a message, that kind of reduces the feedback I can give, no?).  The fact that some outside modem had called up my phone and locked up my line into always-busy (and scrambled my answering machine, too) while I was away for a four-day weekend only made things worse, as I couldn’t retrieve my own messages, only get that damned message.)

So I tried to contact the company.  I started with my e-mail contact person, Philippe Piernot (vice-president of Product Development at the time), asking for an extension of my “trial period” through the end of the beta program.  (After all, there was nothing for me to buy yet, since the Macintosh version wasn’t publicly available.  I don’t pay to take part in beta programs.  [Mmm, but that OS X public beta is awfully tempting!])   No response from him.  So I go to the company’s web site, looking for customer support information.  I found a FAQ document, but what didn’t I find?  Any telephone number or even an e-mail address for customer support, that's what.   (What great customer support!)  I eventually sent an e-mail to their “Suggestion Box” address, indicating a deadline: in two days, they needed to resolve the matter and contact me (I gave my work number), or I would cancel the service and not be able to recommend it to anyone else.

I ended up giving them three days, and you can tell from this essay what they failed to do.

In conclusion, the idea is great: voicemail for while you are online, which you can retrieve without losing your connection.  Only about $7.00 per month, far less than the cost of a second phone line.  There are apparently several companies offering variations on this idea.  Check one of them out, though, because Pagoo is one to not deal with.

---

Nine days after the deadline elapsed, I got an e-mail from the company, saying “Of course we’ll extend your trial period!”  Too little, too late.  The Busy Call Forwarding had already been shut off, and the software deleted; three-plus weeks of the service being inactive and thus giving people a negative impression of me is three-plus weeks too many.

I’ve requested that the company remove all contact information about me from their files (twice: in my “I’m gone” message and in my response to this one).  Any further contacts by the company are going to be turned over to the Better Business Bureau, and then treated as harassment.  (A year later, no such contacts have come.  I guess the threat did its job.)

(I really, really don’t like service companies who don’t serve.)

---

Updated on October 11, 2000

In the year since I originally wrote this, search engines have picked up this page, and hardly a week goes by that I don’t get an e-mail from someone thanking me for warning them off from a potentially bad company.  In one case, I got an e-mail from someone else who had had a bad experience with Pagoo, possibly even beating out my own, where they completely screwed up his phone service.

And a year later, there is still no e-mail contact method on their web site for dealing with customer issues and complaints other than “Suggestion Box.”

Updated on July 19, 2007

In the process of posting this on the new blog, I thought I would go check out the current state of Pagoo, since I still get one or two notes a year from this piece on the old website.  Pagoo is still around, and sure enough, still with no contact info for the company on the website.   Can’t even tell what country it is based in.

Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Updated on December 11, 2009

Still no contact info for the company on their website<. I notice that the Mac version only runs in Classic, so no new Mac from the last several years can use the service, which indicates that they probably have very few Mac customers. Of course, this is also a service that is increasingly of little use: broadband, WiFi, and cell phones greatly reduce the need for the service. I still get e-mail comments on this blog post every few months, despite the blog now having moved twice!

E-Mail Petitions

You’ve probably received one or more of these in the past.  You know the sort: some social evil is occurring (like the Religious Right trying to crack down on an airline that sponsored a gay event at some point, or Congress about to let the Post Office charge you for sending e-mail, or something like that), so someone starts an “e-mail petition.”  You are then to add your name (and sometimes your city) and then send it to everyone you know via e-mail.

What purpose does this serve, beyond sending lots of e-mail?

The early versions of these didn’t even give any way for the petition to get to the people it ostensibly needed to.  The petition would just somehow magically “appear” on the desk of the president of the airline, perhaps?  More recent versions have had provisions for every 25th or 50th signer to send the petition to some e-mail address, from which they will presumably be distilled and delivered to the right person.

Let’s think about this a moment.  Imagine that you get the petition and are #19 on the list.  You send it to 10 people.  They are all #20, and they send it to 10 people.  That’s 100 as #21, 1000 as #22,… and 1 million people each listed as #25, all of them dutifully mailing a copy of the petition to the requisite e-mail address (and to ten more friends).  I imagine that the receiving e-mail address would get rather swamped quite quickly.  (And indeed, if you’ve ever tried sending such an item in, you probably found that the e-mail address listed was defunct.)

Now imagine someone — even a computer program — trying to process hundreds of thousands of these e-mailed petitions, trying to extract names from which to compile a master list, in order to find out just how many people really did “sign”.  The way e-mailers warp these human-readable messages, with line wraps and “>” quoting and such, heck, a human would need to look at many of the items just to find the names.  Yeah. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of them.  I don’t think so.

Suppose, though, that a list of names was able to be extracted and the duplicates (more than 99% of the names, probably) removed.  What good does a list of names with no addresses attached do?  Anyone could have loaded the petition up with names pulled from a phone book; there is no way to check that any person on the list ever even saw the petition, much less wanted their name attached.  (Or heck, that they even exist!)  No, even if any of these petitions ever do get to a corporation, they are of no use to anyone there, and they will only get tossed out as unsolicited e-mail.

Do you really want to have an effect?  Trying visiting the company’s corporate website, find a contact address (e-mail or regular mail), and write an individual, original letter — even just a two-line note.  This is much more likely to have someone read it, and pay attention to it, than some alleged “petition” to which you can just blindly add your name, send on, and pretend that you have tried to make a difference.

Also consider visiting MoveOn.org.  Started in late 1998 as a reaction to the Clinton impeachment trial, this is a web site intended specifically for the electronic gathering of petitions.  It allows you to enter your name, e-mail address, and zip code, and an optional individual comment, and then a compiled petition with your name included only once (and thus effectively) can be sent to the right people and have an actual effect.

---

Updated on October 10, 2000