Posts filed under 'rant'
I tried very hard to get one of my credit cards canceled. Finally after lowering my rate and agreeing to remove one of the two late charges on my card, I agreed to stay. Several days before, I had talked to someone else who agreed to remove the second late charge once I got my account current (paid the minimum necessary). In August I used this card by mistake for $40 (I have only used this card three times in the last six months). Now I owe that and $32.13 more in late fees and finance charges, almost doubling the cost of my purchase.
I didn’t look at the bills since I pay all my other credit cards online automatically and have them set to auto deducting the minimum so I never have to worry about missing and getting a late fee (a feature this card doesn’t offer). I forget about this one since I don’t use it. Their website sucks too which makes me even less likely to use the card. My pretty unique username (not jciv) that I used when I first signed up is now taken and can’t be used. It has to be a dead account I created, even though after 6 months you have to re-register. So now I have to remember to put a “1″ at the end. And they misspelled my mother’s maiden name so whenever I have to re-register or recover my password, I get locked out for 24 hours until I can figure out how they spelled it. How would you ever know they misspelled it? It still sounds the same when you have to give it to the phone people. One time I just decided to try some variations.
Once I found the problem I tried to pay online, but for people who are behind, they change the payment system. I have to re-enter my checking account number (I don’t have my check book with me either). So I have to try again later. When I get it, they require you to tell them why I didn’t pay, how many months has my financial situation been bad, etc. Idiots. I can see asking this stuff if I were thousands of dollars behind, but $72.
They have my email address, that is how I got notified about my Reduced Purchases Rate quickly after talking to the first person. Why was I not contacted by email about missing two credit card payments? I also got an email about filling out a survey on how my dealing with customer service was. That is where 90% of this blog post comes from. Clearly they have my email address. But notifying me that way would cheat them out of the late fees because I would have paid it instantly so they don’t use it.
Long ago I stopped using this credit card completely but never canceled it because canceling a card can hurt your credit score and I was lazy. I never called in to activate my new card when it arrived and eventually just stopped getting bills in the mail. Several years later they sent a new card, it looked similar to one I was using so I assumed that is what it was and activated it. Its all been downhill from there.
Mainly I use a Sony branded credit card and am saving up points to get a Sony DSLR. I don’t really want a Sony camera, but I was already half way there when I realized that. When the Canon Powershot S5 came out, I had to decide between paying $500 or getting the Sony H9 free. I chose the Canon and saved my points hoping Sony’s SLR would be better. For free I can live with it, but as soon as I get that camera or give up and get a huge TV, I plan to get an Amazon card. They send you gift certificates for stuff on Amazon. Amazon usually has good prices and I won’t be locked into one brand.
Plus, the Sony Card’s website’s improved security measures means every time my browser is upgraded, I have to go through a verification (by email or phone) step because they don’t recognize my computer. If I was using IE and it only updated a few times a decade, that would be fine. But Firefox updates frequently (a little too frequently sometimes). Every time the UserAgent changes, I have to go through the verification again.
December 21st, 2007
Last weekend I ordered an ATI TV Wonder Elite from Amazon for $77.99 for transferring some home videos. That was near the lowest price I found and was still cheaper than many after I upgraded from FREE Super Saver Shipping (5-9 business days) to Standard Shipping (3-5 business days) for $6.17 more. It was shipped Monday at 11:30pm. If you count that last 30 minutes of Monday, we are at five business days and it is still 400 miles away. But once I realized it was PM I guess I can’t be that upset with DHL. But Amazon’s delivery estimate said October 5, 2006 - October 16, 2006. October 16 is ten full business days from when it was shipped. It is hard to believe it won’t be here Tuesday (Monday is Columbus Day) since it is already in Texas, but if that estimate turns out true, I will have waited half a month for shipping less than 2,000 miles.
Looking into this a bit further I have discovered shipping begins with DHL, but through their DHL@home service, the package is actually delivered by the local post office. And of course, the post office is known for their speed and reliable delivery. DHL’s webpage says Standard Delivery is 2-4 business days and Deferred Delivery is 2-7 business days whatever that is. It appears DHL handles shipping up to your nearest (major?) post office so assuming you live anywhere near the post office, it should only take a day or two to make it the last bit to you.
I think we can assume DHL is including postal service delivery time in their estimate. So how does a max of seven days (for Deferred Delivery) turn into a possible eleven? I am not very good at math so I will let you figure that out. Even if the estimate doesn’t include the time it takes the postman to deliver it, once it has reached your city, it should not take four more business days which would get you up to the Amazon estimate.
And for those who think the Amazon estimate is just being safe, read “Why DHL Sucks” about 3-5 day shipping taking 7 business days. When I pay for 3-5 day shipping it better arrive in five business days. If I was willing to wait that long I would have chosen free shipping like usual. When I order on the weekend and actually pay for 3-5 day shipping, that means I want to use the item the next weekend.
I remember back when 3-5 day shipping meant you often would get your item in three days and sometimes it might arrive in two days. Those days are long gone. When I track non-DHL shipments, they often reach my city pretty fast and then sit there for a day or two before they do final delivery even if it is Friday so they don’t over shoot their low arrival estimate.
October 6th, 2006
My Tivo has been trying to record UFOs: Seeing Is Believing on National Geographic all month. I really liked the show, but I have seen it way too many times since May 2005 when it was new. I cancel it by changing the channel each time I catch Tivo recording it, but apparently Tivo really wants it. Now that it finally got the whole thing it should be happy for a while. It is nice that Tivo will attempt to get a suggestion again later if you change the channel, but if I keep canceling the same suggestion you would think Tivo would figure out I don’t want it recorded.
Update Aug 27: Today, less than a week later, I caught Tivo recording the same suggestion again. I let it recorded the whole two hours again.
August 22nd, 2006
This is based on a email I sent to Google’s support for the Browser Sync Firefox extension. All these issues I have been having since 1.0 of the extension, this is at least the third version and yet I still cannot use it on my desktop. Since I only have it installed on two computers, I really don’t know what use syncing is if the second one can’t update. I would uninstall it, but I keep hoping they will fix it.
The first problem is the extension cannot ever finish updating on my desktop. Second is, it leaves gigantic log files in my profile directory, there are currently a total of 1.6 gigabytes of BrowserSync logs in there for the last three days.
I have 90 days worth of history (yes I know that is nuts) in Firefox so do not want to attempt synchronizing history, but the extension’s settings dialog will not keep the setting of what I want synchronized after a failure and since it always attempts to sync on pressing ok and fails, I am constantly returned to the default settings. Once I set only cookies and saved passwords to synchronize and hit ok in the settings dialog, it begins processing but eventually gives “Settings change did not complete, please try again later.”
From looking at the log files, it appears BrowserSync is syncing everything even though I told it only to do cookies and passwords. The log file shows “Sync Failure - 403,Forbidden,Update exceeds single upload limit.” at line 286301 of the log file I attached to the email and shows tons of URLs from history I would prefer not to store online much less synchronize. BrowserSync should not be uploading stuff the user tells it not to. That is a huge privacy issue especially since the history is not encrypted. Yes I know nothing on the internet is truly anonymous. I think you can tell from my willingness to use Gmail or this extension, I am not a privacy nut, but I don’t want a list of everything I do online sitting in one place on someone else’s server.
The log of just one sync attempt is 24 megabytes which only took BrowserSync a few minutes to create. Their logging is far to verbose and uses way too much repetitive text. It is insane to have such large log files and certainly to keep more than the current one if they are this large.
The total logs on my laptop though are only 21 megabytes total. There I only have 30 day history and since it doesn’t keep failing, it doesn’t have to repeat the same stuff every time. But 21 megabytes is still a lot for log files being stored in your profile directory.
I am using Google Browser Sync 1.1.20060711.0 with Firefox 1.5.0.4 - Build ID: 2006050817.
Update: After playing with things some more, I finally got the sync to go through. I went through my cookies and deleted all but the sites I login to where cookies are useful. I also edited the extension’s preference manually in about:config to include only cookies and passwords. One or both of those solved the problem. Of course now that I was able to sync with my laptop most of the junk cookies got put back. But at least now things are finally synchronized.
I wish there was some way to view and edit what is stored online so I could clean things up. Or maybe even a way to specify which cookies not to sync. Though I do not think cookies are a major privacy issue, I still prefer not to make it easier on advertising companies to track me. Why synchronize stuff that isn’t necessary? While cookies are small, they still take up a bit of bandwidth to update.
So, it doesn’t really suck (once it is working). But I got you to read this post didn’t I.
July 21st, 2006
I have been looking into buying a new laptop. My current one, an HP Pavillion ze4530us isn’t bad, but I need something more powerful. I originally got it on sale site unseen. I was looking for any relatively cheep laptop to replace old Dell (bought used) I had that was physically falling apart. The one I wanted sold out but they said they had this one and I said ok. I had never bought an HP before, but it has been a really good laptop. I know nothing about their support though, I have been lucky enough not to have needed it.
While I bought that one without much research, this one I planed on getting exactly what I want. As I found out, that isn’t at all possible. In my search for a new laptop I have used a lot of gas. I have been to about six electronics/office supply store (some more than once) to see what is out there. Most everything about laptops is going in directions I don’t like. Lots of extra buttons, wide screen, glossy screens, and tiny touchpads are on most every notebook on shelves.
I can live with extra buttons or a widescreen monitor, but glossy I think I would get sick of quickly (pretty, but too much glare). But the worst is the mouse. What part of the computer do we most interact with? Lets see how small we can get it then. And to make things even harder to use, why not recess it. Thankfully at least Sony, Gateway, and maybe Dell (but they don’t sell retail so I can’t actually look at them in person) still make reasonable sized touchpads. The MacBook wasn’t bad either, but not good enough to overcome my fear of OSX and/or WinXP under BootCamp with a one button mouse.
Well, the real reason I decided to post this was when I got finished configuring what was likely to be my next laptop, it was a bit expensive. So looking to shave a few dollars here and there, I looked at what I upgraded. First being Windows XP Pro for $100. XP Home and Media Center Edition add nothing to the base cost. I know Home sucks, but I couldn’t find any information on exactly what the difference between Media Center and the others were. I tried Google and had little luck.
Then falling for all the TV ads I have seen lately, I tried the new Ask.com. I asked “what is the difference between Windows Media Center Edition and Home Edition.” The first result was a pretty helpful forum post pointing someone to the Wikipedia page on Media Center. Maybe I just got lucky with that result though, since others on the page weren’t as factually accurate or not direclty on topic, but Google just wasn’t getting it done. The best I could do with Google was this thread.
For anyone else wondering what the difference between XP Pro and Media Center, it seems to be that Media Center is based on Pro and has most of its features. I am not 100% sure about all the differences, but it seems that it will do what I want. According to Wikipedia, other than not being able to join an Active Directory domain (which there are hacks availble for), it “retains most other Windows XP Pro-specific features, such as Remote Desktop and the Encrypting File System.” Some place even said the setup screens call it Windows XP Pro.
Anyway, I am going to give Media Center a shot. I hope it isn’t a mistake. If it is I will update this post.
I had two very similar setups from Gateway and Dell and was having a hard time choosing. One of the final deciding factors came when I used each site’s online chat to ask questions about the systems, most important being touch pad dimensions. Gateway didn’t have them. Dell did, but was not sure if those dimensions included the buttons as well. From the size I doubt it did, the measurements seemed close to what I was estimating for Gateway. That didn’t help me decide, but the sales people and chat programs did. Dell’s chat window sucked (I was using a Firefox 2 Alpha/Bon Echo nightly so that could be partially to blame), it kept refreshing and scrolling back up to the beginning of the conversation.
Plus, after I pointed them to the system I had configured, they were pushing upgrades on everything. Bigger hard drive, faster hard drive, surge protector, etc. When I asked if the faster hard drive would use more power and create more heat, she said no. At the time I thought that was clearly wrong, a bit of Google research shows that might not be/isn’t always true anymore.
What really got me though, I did not type back fast enough to Dell’s (probably automated) are you still there question and the chat session was ended. I was in the middle of chatting to Gateway and researching things on the net at the same time. Isn’t that an important feature of chatting over the internet, you can do more than one thing at a time. Cutting a prospective customer off is certainly not the way to make a sale, so they didn’t. I ordered the Gateway NX560XL shortly after that.
June 6th, 2006
Firefox 2 Alpha, branded Bon Echo, was just released. As usual with Firefox releases, it was announced on a number of big websites before it was officially ready. I downloaded it a day early too, but I knew what I was getting. This is an Alpha release meaning it is for testing, not for most users. It is not near Beta quality as previous Firefox Alpha releases have been so be prepared if you try it.
I know it is an alpha, but the new stuff is a mess and the old stuff isn’t improved much if any. If Mozilla is hoping to get the final 2.0 out before or around the same time IE7 and Vista are released I fear it is going to be pretty rough and not going to stand up to IE7’s advances.
I read a comment that compared this to a version 1.6 Alpha rather than 2.0 Alpha because of the few improvements over 1.5. He was optimistic that by the final release it would be worthy of a .5 version increase. The currently planned features would do it for me, but are they going to be done in time or will features be thrown out to make the release date?
So far it appears to use less memory than FF 1.5 but I haven’t used it heavily. If it does, that is a really good thing since that was a frequent complaint about 1.5. It still uses a lot, but at least it doesn’t go wild eating up whatever free memory it can get.
I thought part of the point of moving Bookmarks and history into an SQLite database with Places was so having a lot of Bookmarks wouldn’t slow down the Bookmarks menu. It is still takes several seconds to display the menu after I click on Bookmarks just as FF 1.5. I have a lot of bookmarks, over 2000 bookmarks which is still more than 600 KB after removing embedded favicons and some other meta data.
But so far Places is very rough, it currently doesn’t even have as much functionality as the old Bookmark system they are replacing. But supposedly it only landed on this branch two weeks ago. For two weeks work it seems pretty good, but that isn’t how things work I am sure. It has surely gone through a lot of development before it landed. I have high hopes for Places though. I liked having my Bookmarks in HTML format, but that just isn’t efficient.
A simplified version of Places should open up in a sidebar by default. Users of IE7 are going to like their Favorites Center dropdown menu that can turn into a sidebar. I have seem several older users that like to have their bookmarks or history sidebar open all or most of the time in both IE and FF.
How about the biggest mistake of all? Close buttons on every tab. There are two major problems with that.
First, you can accidentally close a tab while switching to it. I could live with the close buttons on tabs if the buttons weren’t active when the tab isn’t active. Currently even though the buttons are still active when the tab is not, they are grayed as if they are not active. I know you will be able to undo closing tabs, but you shouldn’t have to. Opera 8.5 does the exact same thing and it is pretty annoying in the little I used Opera. I closed a bunch of tabs by accident while switching. Opera already has the undo function built in as the usual Edit, Undo. That is easily discoverable and something Firefox developers should think about copying. Current FF extensions that provide the undo function I think are too complex for most users. They are great for advanced users, but for most people a whole lot of undo close choices such as window or tab and which ones or all going back several actions is too much.
My other complaint about having close buttons on tabs is because each takes up valuable horizontal real estate. The more windows you have open the worse it will be. Currently the solution is to hide the close button on tabs when you reach a certain number of tabs (or maybe it is by tab width but it doesn’t appear that way). For my setup, after 7 tabs the close buttons hide on inactive tabs. I am sure it is just a bug, but currently when you close the 8th tab they don’t come back though, you have to get back down to 6 tabs. Not considering that, this is an inconsistent interface. Either the close buttons should always be on inactive tabs (which is not a good idea) or they should always be hidden. It is an inconsistent UI feature otherwise.
There is all kinds of discussion on handling tab overflow but there just is no good method. So preventing the overflow condition as long as possible is important. Clearly that is why the inconsistent UI is meant to solve, but a much better solution would be to only show the X on the active tab.
It is hard to believe, but Microsoft does pretty much exactly what I want with tab close buttons in IE7. In addition to them only being shown on the active tab, they stand out less. Firefox’s are big and bright red so along with the favicon the page title is surrounded by graphics. I wonder how many people will make their site’s favicon into FF Xs just to throw people off.
I discovered hitting “Use Current Pages” as Homepage adds all the open tabs. Clearly the button text says that but last time I did it in 1.5 I didn’t have more than one tab open. As currently displayed all on a single line, a user may think FF is adding only the first tab in the window as the homepage. I did and I even knew FF could have multiple homepages.
What is with swapping the Stop and Reload buttons? Neither are likely frequently used when compared to the back button. And if you are putting them in order of most use, I suspect the forward button is used less by common users. But that would clearly be dumb. My point is, don’t swap buttons just for the sake of moving them. Consistency in placement is also important (just look at the huge mistake IE has made with IE7’s toolbars). Every time I go to hit stop now I end up almost hitting Reload. I am currently using large icons which I don’t normally do so that proves to me that my brain looks for the stop button in Firefox as the third button from the right, not the distance and clearly not first looking at the image.
I have also read that the Home button may be on the way out (by default). Maybe that was just discussion or a planned “feature” since it is still here in 2.0 Alpha. Based on usability tests the home button may never get used, but does that really reflect actual usage? I don’t think so. I know there are a lot of people that probably never use it, but a lot of people don’t use Bookmarks/Favorites either and that isn’t being thrown out. When I am using one of my computers I use the Home button pretty frequently. I have a custom homepage with most of the links that I go to frequently. The default homepage is just a Google search page. It is not necessary to go Home to run a search since we have the search box. IE7 hasn’t gotten rid of the Home button though they did move it in their scattering around the toolbar buttons.
The Home page is where a portal site makes sense. When I setup someone’s browser for them, I usually choose Google News or Yahoo News. My Yahoo or Google’s Personalized Home are great choices even if the user doesn’t have an account. The page non logged in users get already have a good selection of information (more so on My Yahoo).
Back to the Bookmarks and History menu, why do we have two options in each that do basically the same thing. Bookmarks has “Search in Bookmarks” and “Organize Bookmarks” which both bring up Places just the same. History does exactly the same with “Search in History” and “View All History.” Not only is this pointless, it takes up space and is are just more menu options you must read through. Even if they are intended to do a slightly different thing eventually it seems a waste to include both. The idea of places is to have everything in one place. Searching and managing. No need for menu items for both.
One reason the wasted space in the Bookmarks menu bothers me is because the overflow scrolling sucks a whole lot. If you have a ton of bookmarks and don’t have them in a well organized hierarchy using the scroll up and down “buttons” is horrible. It is very slow to reach where you want, but too fast to actually see where you are going. Clearly those are contradictory needs, but that is where the problem lies with this implementation. It doesn’t meet either need because it tries to meet both at the same time.
I don’t have a good suggestion how to fix it though. Something like Microsoft’s Personalized Menus would certainly be possible now that Bookmarks and History are in the DB, but I hate that in UIs. A scroll bar would be a bit more usable, but not consistent with what users expect from dropdown menus. K-Meleon uses submenus to deal with this. At the bottom of what Bookmarks could be displayed on the screen it has a [more] “folder” that expands into another row of Bookmark items. It is an easier to use solution than what is currently in Firefox, but it is not a great one.
And a longtime annoyance is the Add Bookmark menu items scroll with the bookmarks. It is a major pain to scroll back up to the top to bookmark a site. I know Ctrl+D bookmarks the page, but I had to look that up, I don’t remember it. Why would I, they letter ‘D’ has nothing to make me think bookmark, favorite, or add. Too bad ‘B’, ‘F’, and ‘A’ already have pretty standard uses.
I have read that Bookmarks/Favorites aren’t used by many people. My observations of others show the same thing. As for myself, I bookmark a lot of stuff but I don’t often go back to them. I bookmark them mostly just in case. Of course, part of the reason I don’t use them is the UI sucks and is slow when handling lots of bookmarks. The other reason is because I built my own custom homepage with most of the links I go to regularly.
They also badly need to get Native Theme Rendering done. FF menus just look horrible on Windows other than those using the Luna theme on XP. It is listed as one of the “Nice to Have” features of 2.0. Meaning we still probably won’t see it till 3.0 if ever.
I also decided to give a Trunk build with Cairo a try (Trunk is where work on the road to Firefox 3.0 is done). Cairo is much better than I imagined. I figured it would still be pretty slow but it wasn’t bad. There are display bugs with it, but my main concern was the speed. Don’t know about slow machines, but it runs fine on my laptop which isn’t the fastest anymore. Other than Cairo there aren’t many visible differences from the Firefox 2 Alpha.
Update: Mike Beltzner, user experience lead for Mozilla, posted a bunch of info on the direction they are planning for Firefox 2. This comes from open discussion with users in their newsgroups. This is a very good sign and I like most of what is planned. But we will see how much actually makes it into Firefox 2.
March 22nd, 2006
I haven’t used WordPress much, but so far so good (mostly). The install page mentioned “the Famous 5-minute install.” I didn’t time it, but I bet it was pretty close to that. I am pretty amazed at how easy it was to setup. And the options and customizability is great, far better than blogger.
I was very surprised by the number of plugins available. I knew WP had plugins, but you can find one for just about anything. The only problem is many are not up to date with the latest release just like Firefox’s extensions. But unlike Firefox extensions, nothing blocks the install of non-working extensions except the PHP errors you will get when you try to use it.
I am finding the “rich” post editor a bit annoying. In Firefox the cursor is a bit jumpy sometimes. I am used to writing post HTML by hand so I have switched to the non-rich mode. In rich mode I keep having troubles with extra tags or not enough tags and constantly have to edit the raw HTML to fix it.
I already mentioned what I think of the default WP themes in my second post. Since there is only one decent default theme it is way overused by bloggers so it gets boring. And I wonder why the Dashboard skin is nicer than the default blog skin anyway. I like the simple blue theme of the admin pages.
And where is the spell checker? I was pretty surprised to not be able to find the spell check button when I first started using WP. I figured it must be there somewhere. How could they release it without one? My spelling isn’t that good and I would prefer not to look like an idiot who can’t spell when I post. Firefox not having a spell checker I can understand (but in 2.0 they are supposedly adding one), but this is like Thunderbird not having a spell checker. That would be insane. It probably isn’t as critical to spell correctly on your blog as it is in business emails, but still any publishing tool should have a spell checker installed by default.
As I said before, there are lots of plugins for WP so now I have Live Spell Checker. It also works on comments which is pretty nice. But it doesn’t work quite right with the rich editor. It was about the only one I found that said it worked with WP 2.0. It uses Google for spell checking so the spell check interface is very similar to Gmail. But it wrapped lines and caused the raw HTML to display in a box above the rich text editor. At least the comment checker part doesn’t even work right on the author’s webpage (with Firefox). It does work ok with non-rich mode though.
March 15th, 2006
Is anyone else tired of the default WordPress theme “based on the famous Kubrick?” I can’t stand it anymore. Its not that it is a bad design, it is that so many blogs use it. It gets boring after a while. There are lots and lots of themes available to choose from. But the only other choice by default is even more boring (not just from over use), it is now known as WordPress Classic and was the default on older versions. The default install should at least throw in a couple other nice skins for variety.
I noticed MediaWiki has a similar problem. They have several skins to choose from in the default install, but the other choices are all very plain. And there is a pretty obvious bug in the only other half usable skin, Cologne Blue, it says “The Free Encyclopedia” at the top. Not that it matters though, almost everyone that uses MediaWiki uses the default skin, MonoBook. That bugs me too, MediaWiki is getting so common and most everyone’s wiki look just like Wikipedia. Is that by choice or because there is no real choice?
I understand why projects don’t want to include many skin choices. Once you include a skin, users are going to expect it to continue to be in future versions. POPFile has a bunch of skins installed by default ranging from very nice to hardly usable. All but one skin author has abandoned their skins. That skin author happens to be me and that has evolved into a larger role as a developer which includes keeping the other skins up to date. In the next version though, we are finally going to drop some of the least popular skins. That should make the project look more professional and make maintenance easier.
March 15th, 2006