Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

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The Snitch

By Chief Oddball on August 23rd, 2010 at 2:39 pm

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During our walk to the post office today, we spotted a guy who can only be…The Snitch.™

Not to be confused with The Stig, The Snitch is believed responsible for the variety of violation letters that the HOA sends out to the community residents. He was riding a basket-equipped bicycle, carrying a thick stack of papers scribbled with myriad arcane notes in one hand and a can of beer in the other. He would stop at random points on the street, pull up in a driveway and appear to be adding further notes to his paperwork.

It’s possible that the HOA hires this guy — or he volunteers his time with them — to catch people with driveways that are too dirty, walls that are starting to show mold, etc. Although this thought may be worthy of an eye-roll, even worse is the idea that The Snitch does all of this at the behest of no one because he enjoys sounding the alarm over every perceived fault.

You are requested to lock your doors, shutter your windows and shield your women and children from the watchful eye of…The Snitch.

(On a side note, the “Who’s Online” feature of this blog is broken after yet another plugin upgrade, so I’ve written that functionality out of the site because I no longer have the patience for the continuous fuckery it requires. A eulogy for this fallen functionality will commence at half past never. Thank you.)

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Well, That Didn’t Quite Work Out

By Chief Oddball on July 14th, 2010 at 11:51 am ··· 2 Comments

Today’s prospective home buyers showed up 45 minutes early (while we were still here), flustered us thoroughly and then decided they hated the place, turned around and walked out within literally thirty seconds. Nice.


The iPhone 4 Signal Loss Paroxysm

By Chief Oddball on June 24th, 2010 at 11:41 pm

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For the last week or so, I’ve been following the news of Apple’s latest generation iPhone: the iPhone 4. Since AT&T made most of the owners of last year’s iPhone 3GS eligible for upgrade immediately, I decided to go ahead and get an iPhone 4, then sell my 3GS to make up the difference. It was a potentially net-zero-cost transaction for me, so I couldn’t really lose.

Yesterday, however, as the first of the iPhone 4 pre-order customers began to receive their phones by mail, something strange and unnerving happened. There were lots and lots of complaints. I occasionally follow the discussion forums at MacRumors.com, one of the premier Apple fan sites, and the vitriol was really flying around in there.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Serious aficionados of just about anything, from electronics to fine wines to sports cars, tend to be the most vocal nitpickers. Accordingly, there are always complainers during every Apple product launch. Last year, for example, when the iPhone 3GS arrived, many people were complaining because the color tone of the screen was too warm compared to earlier models. Others pontificated that the sleep/wake switch was loose and rattly. I didn’t experience these problems, either that or I’m just not hardcore enough for them to affect me. Since I bought it a year ago, I would describe my experience with my 3GS as “outstanding.”

The iPhone 4 launch was different. I started seeing many threads of complaints, some about trivial matters as you would expect (“My speaker sounds tinny!” or “Does anyone else’s phone rattle when you tap on the back, like, really hard?”), but others about potentially showstopping problems. One thread that seemed to be gaining traction was the “proximity sensor” thread. The iPhone has a sensor so it knows when you’re holding it up to your ear to make a call, and thus shuts off the touch screen so you don’t press buttons with your face. Apparently, a handful of people received iPhone 4 units with faulty sensors and were pressing all manner of buttons with their cheek, even hanging up in the middle of calls. Ouch.

The worst issue, however, and by far the fastest-growing one, was the signal loss issue. Specifically: What happens when you hold your iPhone 4 a certain way, and your palm, thumb or finger happens to cover up the small black seam between the Wi-Fi / Bluetooth / GPS antenna band and the UMTS / GSM antenna band? Apparently, as some users were finding out, it causes their iPhone to lose almost all reception, drop calls and completely stall data traffic.

Now, to be fair, there are people who are reporting that they cannot recreate this issue. I happen to know one of them. But there are also way, way too many people reporting that it is a problem for this to be an “imagined” defect, or a case of PEBCAK (or PEBCAP, in this case). I mean, there are problems that aren’t really problems, like the moron who posted “Every picture I take with the iPhone 4′s flash enabled is all washed out!” only to discover that he had forgotten to remove the protective plastic sheet from the back of the phone (and, thus, the camera lens). But then there’s something like the antenna issue, where you have dozens of people posting YouTube videos demonstrating it. (Want more videos? Oh yeah, there’s more.)

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Chief Oddball to Experiment with Other Airlines

By Chief Oddball on April 6th, 2010 at 2:34 pm

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As I went out for my after-lunch walk to the post office, the ABC Radio News update at the top of the hour informed me that Spirit Airlines, usually my airline of choice, was going to start charging a fee for carry-on bags.

CARRY-ON BAGS.

CNN’s headline on the story reads as such: “Spirit Air to experiment with carry-on bag fees.” That’s okay, because from now on, I’ll be experimenting with other airlines. Spirit has cut their last corner, and I am done. DONE!

My family and I started flying on Spirit in the late ’90s when I first moved to Florida. They had a lot of cheap and easy flights between Detroit and Orlando (and later, Fort Myers) that were more affordable than similar flights on the major airlines, like Northwest or Delta. They also had far better service — Northwest, in particular, had become infamous back then for being one of the worst airlines in the country. Ten years, however, is a long time, and Spirit has officially worn out their welcome with me.

Spirit’s new fleet of aircraft is filled with cramped, uncomfortable and poorly-designed Airbus A319s, where the seats are anything but ergonomic and the legroom is appropriate only for a midget. Like most of the other airlines, they charge for everything — checked bags, a morsel of food, water, just about everything but the toilet (and I’m sure that’s coming) — and they’ve recently started “experimenting” with plastering advertisements all over the inside of their planes. Crass doesn’t even begin to cover it.

And now comes the fee for carry-on bags. If you’re a member of Spirit’s $45/year “$9 Fare Club,” you can carry a bag on for the low-low price of $20. If you’re just a regular shmoe, you can pay $30 when you reserve a carry-on bag online when you buy your ticket. And if you bring a non-prepaid carry-on to the airport, you’ll be paying $45 at the gate. I should note, in fairness, that these fees only apply to bags that go in the overhead compartment, and that anything you shove beneath the seat in front of you is still free. (For now!)

I don’t much care, though. I’m done. I’ve had it. I’ve paid Spirit my last “this fee” and “that fee.” I also understand that most (if not all) of the other airlines are charging similar fees, but this carry-on bag fee is the last straw. I’m fucking serious. Let me guess, I should check my laptop computer? I’m sure it’ll come out undamaged. Or maybe I should take it and stuff it under the seat in front of me, so that my feet have absolutely nowhere to go because Spirit’s fleet is a bunch of fucking A319s. I refuse to have a continually more uncomfortable and more unpleasant flying experience because I refuse to give in like a good consumer sheep and pay Spirit their ransom money every time I feel the apparently unconscionable need to take something with me on a trip.

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Facebook Frak-Up

By Chief Oddball on March 27th, 2010 at 2:39 pm

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At times I have felt like the last person on Earth who does not have a Facebook account. Not long ago I learned that both of my parents have their own Facebook profiles, and my wife recently signed up for one at the request of a friend. Seems like everybody is keeping up with all of their acquaintances this way. Until recently, I assumed Facebook and MySpace were mostly useless sites wherein self-aggrandizing people would write about how ghetto they were and post gratuitous photos of their sexual conquests. However, since essentially everyone I know is on Facebook, and have recently been inviting me to look at photos that I can’t even see without signing up, I decided today to give it a try. If nothing else, I might even reconnect with old friends or colleagues whom I hadn’t talked to in a while.

I gotta tell you, though, I’ve just spent the last 90 minutes getting royally screwed by Facebook’s incompetently programmed administrative system, and if this is any indication of how well the rest of the Facebook service has been coded, then I fear I may be in for a world of shit.

To begin the process, my wife sent me an email invitation to Facebook so that I could just click a link, sign up and become one of her friends right away. I’d asked her to send me that invitation to my Gmail account, just in case Facebook decided to start spamming me there. For my actual Facebook profile, though, I created a new Facebook-only email address on my domain name for security reasons (and so that I could compartmentalize my Facebook communications). This decision, unfortunately, appeared to create a rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum.

When I clicked on the link in the email invitation that my wife sent me, Facebook detected that I was using Gmail and offered to automatically use my Gmail account as my Facebook email. I didn’t want that, though, so I clicked the “Use another email address” link that was provided. I went through the Facebook signup process, using the custom domain email address that I’d created, and all seemed to be well. The final step of the process asked me to upload a profile picture, which I did, and finally I arrived at my account’s home screen.

Facebook wanted me to confirm my email address next. At the top of the screen was a ribbon indicating that a confirmation email had been dispatched to me. Sure enough, I received it. But when I clicked the confirmation link in that email, I was taken to a Facebook page that said “An error has occurred.” Ohhhhhhh-kay…so I can’t confirm my account, then? WTF?

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Three Rings to Screw Them All: Another Xbox Dies

By Chief Oddball on March 20th, 2010 at 4:24 am

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Crap. My 360 died. Part Deux.

A long time ago in a not-so faraway land, my launch day Xbox 360 console bit the dust, killed by GPU failure. Tonight, the refurbished console that Microsoft sent me as a warranty replacement for that original unit also bit the dust, also killed by GPU failure. It was a new design, sporting a new chipset, a quieter DVD drive and, most importantly, an enormous heatsink inside. And it failed anyway.

Ironically, I turned on my Xbox tonight because my friend Forster suggested some online gaming. He was undoubtedly in the gaming mood, having just received his warranty replacement Xbox from Microsoft this week after his original console suffered the exact same problem as mine. So we decided to try some co-op in Borderlands, a pretty cool hybrid shooter/RPG that I just got my hands on last weekend.

On our first game, we got about three minutes in before my Xbox locked up hard. Forster was in the midst of telling me something over the chat headset when both he and the game sounds completely cut out. Most unnervingly, I could immediately hear my console’s cooling fans spin down, as if the system had been returned to the dashboard, but it was completely unresponsive and required that I press the power button on the console faceplate to turn it off.

Upon booting it back up, I once again fired up Borderlands and was about to start the game when it abruptly crashed again, this time displaying a solid screen of black and white vertical pinstripes. First tangible sign of GPU failure, CHECK!

Forster and I tried three more times to start a co-op game, and each time I encountered a hard lock a couple minutes in. I was starting to get a little pissed off, so I suggested we try another game — Forza Motorsport 3 — to see if the problem would manifest there, or if it was just something goofy with Borderlands.

So we started up Forza, got into a 5-lap competitive race, and proceeded to finish without any hiccups whatsoever. Hmm.

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2009: The Year Entropy Accelerated

By Chief Oddball on November 6th, 2009 at 2:51 pm

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As the ill-fated 2009 starts to wind itself down, it’s making it more clear than ever that it’s not going to let us forget how much pain and suffering it inflicted on us all. Some more than others, obviously, but by-and-large it’s been a pretty depressing year. My family in particular was hit harder by more cataclysmic events at once than at any point in my lifetime, with my dad losing his job due to the slowing economy, the deaths of two family members (just a month apart, no less) and a myriad of other problems besides.

Although Apple and I have fared pretty well in comparison to many other Americans — even other members of our families — we’ve still received a disproportionate amount of negative reinforcement from The Powers That Be. This week, in particular, was like a microcosm of that very idea, presenting us with one out-of-left-field event after another: breakdowns, unforeseen events, ridiculous instances of lightning striking twice. The Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to have conspired against us to accelerate entropy to an almost comical level.

I used to do a lot of bitching on this blog. Not so much anymore. But today is one of those days where I feel like if I don’t get it off my chest here, I’ll take it out on someone who doesn’t deserve it, so away we go with a little old-fashioned rant.

Forfeiting the Comcast Battle (But Not Quite the War)

My seemingly eternal struggle with Comcast over the billing and service for my TiVo HD came to an anti-climactic end early this week. (You can follow the history of the saga here.) After apparently getting a solution from corporate to the two HD service fees I was getting charged — one for each CableCARD in my TiVo — the celebration came to an abrupt halt last weekend when my second tuner lost all HD service. Again.

Sick and tired of it, I bypassed phone support altogether and filed another corporate complaint. This time, however, despite the corporate head office’s agreement with my position, the “corporate liaison officer” at our local Comcast department gave me a call to say there was nothing that can be done. In my area, she explained, the billing system requires that a separate HD service charge be assessed on each single-stream CableCARD. So, if I want HD service on both tuners of my DVR, I have to pay for it twice. And that’s that.

So I asked her, if Comcast would offer me a multi-stream CableCARD to replace my two single-stream cards, would I only pay one HD fee despite getting the exact same service? She said yes. Of course, Comcast still doesn’t have multi-stream CableCARDs here. As a result, I pay twice as much for the same service, because of their lack of equipment. Oh, that’s really nice; I’m so glad I could help. Is that extra money I’m paying you going to finance, say, acquisition of any fucking multi-stream CableCARDs, by any chance? (The woman did say that multi-stream cards were currently being tested and would be offered to us early next year, but I’ll believe that when I can hold one in my hands.)

As a consolation, the Comcast corporate liaison officer told me that they’re already crediting me for the extra $6.95 HD service charge by lowering our second CableCARD fee to $1.50, because it’s normally like 8 bucks. Huh? According to Comcast’s own CableCARD FAQ, the second card fee can be only “up to $2.05.” They’re saving me 55 cents, not $6.95. And if you check that same link, you’ll see that I wouldn’t even be paying a second card fee if I just had a multi-stream card. That’s another $1.50 I wouldn’t be paying if Comcast could offer current equipment.

But by this point I had had it. I’m sorry, I really had. I just can’t do this fucking song and dance anymore. I told the woman to just go ahead and restore service to my second CableCARD, and I’ll pay their extra $6.95 monthly fee. What else am I gonna do? At some point you have to recognize that it’s just seven fucking dollars. I will be hounding them next year to make sure I’m one of the first people to get a multi-stream card — assuming that wasn’t just a line of bull — but until then, I have more important things to deal with.

Speaking of which…I’m just getting started.

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Apple (Computer) is Starting to Piss Me Off

By Chief Oddball on August 6th, 2009 at 11:56 am ··· 2 Comments

Today comes news that Apple has started blanket-rejecting third-party eBook reader apps, claiming that because those apps can be used to read illegally obtained copyrighted content, they will no longer be published in the App Store. So what happens to eReader, Stanza, et al? I use both to read PDB eBooks that I have hand-built from my own written works.

Rumor has it that Apple is about to launch a 6″-8″ tablet-sized device which could compete with Amazon’s Kindle eBook device. This could be Apple’s way of clearing out the competition in the eBook space before launching their own solution. If that’s the case, it’s extremely distasteful and takes my opinion of Apple Computer down a huge, huge notch.

Edit: I should mention that the eBook reader ban rumor is apparently false. The reader app that touched off this firestorm was rejected because it allowed iPhone-to-iPhone sharing of eBooks, which could have potentially been a copyright violation.


What a Pain

By Chief Oddball on July 29th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

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I thought I’d wrapped up all of my side jobs, but one came back to haunt me this week in the form of some changes that needed to be made to something I did a couple weeks ago. A whole lot of changes.

Actually, let’s just say that the client’s entire frigging site design is broken — and was from the get-go — and I must fix it. By the end of the week.

I’ve been trying to put in a couple hours on this job each evening this week, at least since Monday when I received the changes. I’ve made some progress, but not nearly as much as I expected given the nature of the changes. On any normal website, these tweaks — “fix gaps here,” “align these blocks there” — would have been fairly simple. But on this website, they’re not simple. Because the site was designed in ImageReady (yeah, that old Photoshop companion program before it was merged into Photoshop itself). And then cut up into ImageReady slices. And then saved automatically into HTML by ImageReady.

If you’re not a web designer, you won’t understand the significance of what I just said. Let me put it into layman’s terms: What I described was an old-fashioned way for inexperienced people to quickly throw a web page together. The problem was, the method resulted in a badly-coded web page that was assembled using the most inflexible HTML known to man, and which looked fine as long as you didn’t touch it, but which quickly went to hell in a handbasket once you started trying to fiddle around.

Worse, somebody started fiddling around before I was even brought on board with this project (yes, the design and its assembly have been done by someone else who remains unidentified). So what once probably looked like a very nice design on ImageReady’s canvas has already been rendered a jumbled, gap-filled mess. Now the client wants me to fix all these little things.

That’s hard enough on the face of it, but there are additional factors working against me, to wit:

  • I’m having to make all of my changes in a Remote Desktop session where I have access to only Notepad. (This is because the site has built-in ASP.NET dependencies that have stymied my efforts to get a local copy running on my machine.)
  • I don’t know what the original design looked like (in ImageReady) before it got sliced up, nor do I have access to the master files.

I’m rapidly discovering that this is going to take a lot more time than I’d hoped, to the point where I’ll likely need to spend Thursday and Friday evening, followed by all day Saturday, to meet the deadline. I am also starting to think that I should email the client tomorrow and let him know that the hours involved are going to result in what may be a bigger charge than he thought. This guy is usually very laid-back when it comes to money, however — being rather flush with it himself, as I understand — so that probably won’t be a concern, but I don’t want to drop a bomb on the guy.

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I’ll Never Give You My Money

By Pooch on July 19th, 2009 at 8:43 pm

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You may have heard: the Beatles’ albums are being re-released.

On the surface, it’s a Beatle fan’s wet dream: the new discs have awesome packaging, (apparently) superior sound, and best yet — there will be mono releases, just like fans have been wanting for years! It’s a dream come true!

Hardly.

Being the hardcore fan I am, I’ve been salivating over these new remasters…but also dreading them. Dreading them because I know Apple Corps and EMI would not waste such a glorious opportunity to stick it to fans with outrageous prices, and I’m glad (?) to see I was not wrong: the new CDs will retail at the same old, gouge-tastic $18.98 MSRP the old, circa 1987 Beatles CDs were priced at. Oddly, though, The Beatles (aka The White Album) gets $10 knocked off its MSRP, and is now $24.98 (also, Past Masters is now a single, two-disc set that also retails for $24.98). So, I guess $35 for two CDs is ridiculous to Apple Corps, but $20 for one CD isn’t. Gotcha.

There are also two box sets being released: one with all the stereo CDs, and one with the albums in mono (God forbid they actually put the stereo and mono albums together, like with the recent Capitol Albums box sets — the only albums you couldn’t do that for are The White Album and maybe Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). In true, Beatle-price-gouging fashion, the stereo box set — 16 discs in all — is barely worth it: at $260, it’s only $17 or so less to buy the box set than to get all the albums individually (though this is better than the first Beatles CD box set from the late 1980s, which actually cost more than if you bought all the CDs separately…which would seem to defeat the purpose of a box set in the first place).

As for that mono box set, filled with mono mixes fans have been anticipating? It’s the only place you can get those mono albums — no single discs will be available. Better yet (?), the mono box set is limited to a whopping 10,000 copies, meaning the majority of fans who wanted these mixes most likely won’t get them (not in a store, anyway — watch Apple Corps claim piracy is killing the music industry when fans start trading the mono tracks online because they can’t buy them in stores). Better still (?), the mono box set will retail for…$300! No, I’m joking — it actually retails for only $298.98. What a bargain! But wait — not every Beatles album was mixed into mono, so the mono box set will only have 12 CDs in it. So…a 16 disc stereo set retails for $260, but the 12 disc mono set is $40 more. That makes perfect sense! It is a limited edition, after all!

I was pretty angry when I first read about this, because I wanted the mono versions of the albums…but for $300, Yoko, Paul, Dhani and Ringo can keep them. I’m sure $300 is a drop in the bucket to the Beatles — billionaires all — but to those of us living in the real, recession-hammered world, it’s not such a light sum of money. Eventually my anger subsided, and now I just feel sad. Sad because I’ve forever read about how the Beatles — in the 1960s — were always conscious of giving their fans “excellent value for their money.” Sad because that obviously no longer holds true — today, the Beatles & Apple Corps are just as money-hungry and greedy as everybody else in the business. Who cares if one in ten people in the U.S. doesn’t have a job — this is the Beatles! Sell your car, jackass! Sell your kids! They’ll understand! This is THE BEATLES! No price is too much for the greatest music ever recorded!

I’d seriously love to meet Paul McCartney and ask him to his face if he really thinks, say, Yellow Submarine is really worth $20. $20 for four Beatles songs, essentially, because “Yellow Submarine” (the song) and “All You Need is Love” are on other albums, and no one really cares about the George Martin orchestrations on the second half of the album. Is that excellent value for my money, Sir Paul? Is Let It Be — an album you have ripped quite a bit over the years, and which the other Beatles have all said is lackluster — worth $20? Are your mono albums really worth $25 apiece, which is flat-out ridiculous, no matter how you look at it? Is Apple still being run like in the ’60s, with people walking out of your offices with supplies left and right, and this is the only way to stay in the black? Whose idea was it to make the mono albums a limited run? If Apple wants money so badly, you’d think they’d offer the mono albums as separate, non-box set entities, if only to get your devoted faithful to buy the same albums over and over and over again. But that might be pushing it, right?

And before anyone brings it up, yes, I know the stereo CDs all have QuickTime documentaries about the making of each album on the disc. And the album art will be faithfully reproduced…blah, blah, blah. That doesn’t matter. I’d rather have (reasonably priced) mono/stereo two-fers than a freaking QuickTime documentary. And CD packaging isn’t that expensive. I’ve read various interviews with people associated with the Beatles and Apple Corps, complaining that the Beatles are losing money in this age of digital music. Whose fault is that? Who are the ones reacting so slowly to changes in the music industry (the Beatles are still one of the few major acts to not be on iTunes, largely because Apple feels Beatle music is worth more than 99 cents a track), slavishly clinging to the old way of doing things? We’re no longer in the bubble economy, guys, and if you think the Beatles name is enough to get people to plunk down $600 on your CDs, no questions asked, I have a feeling you might be in for a bit of a surprise.

It used to be about the music, guys.

PS – I really feel sorry for whatever schlub decides he (or she) wants to buy both CD box sets and The Beatles: Rock Band on release day (9/9/09!). All You Need Is…$850 or so. Unless you want to get the replica John and George Rock Band guitars too, in which case add another $200. Or you could take that $1100 and put a down payment on a car to enjoy your old Beatles CDs in while driving (or not, because you probably couldn’t get financing to buy the car).

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