Archive for the 'Rants' Category

In the past year, we’ve blown through four routers. They keep failing on us, usually right around the same time we have a cluster of outages with our cable modem service provider.

Is it possible that the cable modem is somehow damaging the routers plugged into it? I have no idea, but it seems hard to believe that so many routers — each a different brand — would be defective.

My cable modem service failed last night around midnight and is still not back up. Frustrating, to say the least. Right now I’m trying to work at my mother-in-law’s house, where there’s Internet access that works.

I’m starting to wonder if the fact that I keep having trouble with Charter is because searching Google for “hate Charter” finds this blog as the top hit…

In more directly Mozilla related news, I hope to have the new MDC stuff into version control so that localizers can work on the skin. I have detailed instructions for how to go about doing it, which I’ll post prominently once the SVN access is ready.

This product annoys me.  It’s one of those static-cling type clear sheets that you put on the screen of a device to protect it from scratches.  I’ve used them for years on my Palm OS devices (including my current Treo 750P), so I figured I’d get one for my iPod touch, whose screen gets a lot of manhandling.

That’s all well and good.

Here’s the problem: despite saying on the package that this protector is for the iPod touch, the overlay is too small to cover the entire screen.  I’m not just saying that it doesn’t cover the entire front of the iPod (which is what I’d rather hoped it would).  It doesn’t even cover the entire display area of the screen.  It’s a good quarter-centimeter too small in both dimensions.

Don’t waste your money on this thing until they fix it.

Does anyone make a protective iPod touch screen overlay that covers the entire front of the unit?

So I installed the Parallels 3 update on my iMac yesterday.  Let it update my Windows XP VM, because, like a moron noob, I opted against backing up my VM before starting this process.

Have yet to actually successfully run Windows XP on Parallels 3 since then.  Crashes 100% of the time during or immediately after startup.   And of course the updated VM won’t work in Parallels 2.5, so even though I’ve reinstalled 2.5, I’m now having to install and set up a new VM from scratch.

As I write this post, XP is rebooting after installing its second batch of updates.  I’m not sure how many more there will be.  Then I can start installing the apps I need on it.

Tedious.

It’s the first time a Parallels update (including betas) hasn’t worked flawlessly for me.  Frustrating.

On October 6th of last year, I blogged about the gas leak coming from under the ground across the street from our house, that the local gas company had at that time ignored for well over a year.

On Friday, a couple of their trucks were across the street. They left after a while, having spray painted some stripes here and there.

My question is: are they actually planning to fix the leak, or were they just trying to get our hopes up.

It continues to astound me how long it’s taking to fix this. The stench of leaking gas is nearly overpowering at times. It’s been getting gradually but steadily worse for the past several months. There are days when I’m a little afraid to start my car for fear of blowing something up. It’s completely ludicrous.

So I’m trying to sleep this morning, since things will be crazy today doing family stuff, and I just can’t do it, because I’m thinking about the fact that tomorrow I’m flying off to California for the quarterly MoCo all-hands meeting.

Previous remote jobs I’ve held that “required travel” required a lot less of it than this one. I don’t mind traveling, but I sure hate the means by which I have to do it. The last few years have turned air travel from a minor inconvenience into a major pain. Increasingly much of my travel time is spent on tiny little planes that are ill-suited for someone my height (and to be frank, width). And I get to spend increasingly ridiculous sums of money to do it (more accurately, I suppose, the company does).

This seems counterintuitive to me. I know the airline industry is having rough times, but making your customers uncomfortable and unhappy doesn’t seem like the smart way to go about fixing your industry.

A year or two ago, I realized that my travel was a lot more pleasant if I scheduled my trip with a longish layover in some airport along the way — say two or three hours. Enough time to stretch my legs, get a bite to eat, surf the net or play a game for a while. This plan worked well until they started moving all flights under around two and a half hours to regional jets. Now if I try to break up my flight into two roughly equal length parts, I wind up on regional jets the entire trip.

So I’m back to using Atlanta or sometimes Cincinnati as my plane-switching point. Which doesn’t lend itself all that well toward taking a nice long break, since it’s only about 45 minutes away from home. Not a ton of benefit in taking that long break that early on the way out, or that close to home on the way back.

I miss the old days before airlines used hubs, and you would usually just fly nonstop between whatever two cities you were traveling between. Might have been inefficient for the airlines, but man did it make air travel nice.

I wish we had high-speed trains in this country. I’d so much rather travel by train. The seats on Amtrak are so comfortable, with good legroom, footrests, and you can recline and relax very nicely. Not to mention that you can get up and find a table to sit at to eat, and so forth. Just not a particularly time-effective way to travel when you need to be somewhere. Looking quickly at Amtrak’s web site, I find that it would cost around $380 to get from here to San Jose, California, but would take a little over two days.

Now, on the other hand, if I could get Internet access on the train, then I’d be able to work and so forth along the way. In theory I’d be able to use my cell phone as a modem most of the time at least.

It’s an interesting notion. I don’t know how reasonable it is, but it’s something to think about trying once to see how it goes.

Our Charter DVR box ceased to function yesterday evening. I called Charter and after about 45 minutes on the phone with them they set me up with a service call to have it replaced.

Next Tuesday. That’s six days, just to get a cable box replaced. Awesome.

If they had a local office, I could go in and swap it out, but they shut down the local office here, so there’s nowhere I can go, and I’m totally at their mercy.

I hate, hate, hate that company. With a depth of conviction you wouldn’t believe.

On Friday, I was at the “Department of Safety” in town to get my driver’s license renewed. Behind me is a teenage boy and his dad, there to get his very first driver’s license. The kid is filling out the application, reading the questions aloud and asking his dad questions about them.

There were two questions he had that floored me, leaving me wanting to shake this kid and whoever has been responsible for his education.

The first question was this: “Dad, what’s an A-P-T number?”

Oh my God. How do you get to be fifteen or sixteen years old and not know common abbreviations? When I was a kid (and I don’t really think that was all that long ago) we actually studied abbreviations in school. It was part of our English curriculum. Had to learn the common abbreviations you see in everyday life, and the abbreviation for the word “apartment” was surely one of them.

The second question was: “What does it mean when it asks if I’m a U.S. citizen? I don’t know what that word means.”

Holy cow. This kid shouldn’t even be allowed to have a driver’s license. How can you possibly be a high school age American and not know the word “citizen?” Was this kid raised in a barn?

Well… maybe.

Regardless, how is it even remotely possible not to have learned the word “citizen” by the time you’re applying for a driver’s license? Has he not had to study government, civics, or even history in the presumably ten years or so he’s been in school? Ever? Really?

Pardon me while I go beat my head against the wall for a while.

So I’m at the supermarket yesterday to pick up some eggs, and as I’m walking in toward the entrance, I see they’ve got firewood on sale. Right next to that they have a huge stack of bundles of small bits of wood. Above which is a sign that says “KINLIN.”

When did it become appropriate to totally botch the spelling of words on signs at a place of business?

This, to me, is right up there with naming businesses things like “EZ-Mart”. For goodness’ sake, just spell it out as “Easy Mart.” Seeing “EZ” makes me think the person that runs the place has to be a clueless moron.

This is related to another massive pet peeve of mine. While I have no real problem with using shorthand when doing text messaging on a phone (especially when you’re using a keyboard the size of a saltine), I have a huge problem with people that send real email or even snail mail using abbreviations like “u” and “r” instead of spelling the words out. Are the words “you” and “are” really that hard to type or write?

I’ve been offline for about three hours now. I tried to call their customer service (ha!) but on top of their horrible support they’ve added an obnoxious automated system that insists on making you jump through the hoops you used to be able to demand they not make you jump through (admittedly with varying degrees of success).

So let’s see. Take some of the worst Internet service in the country. Mix in the stupidest support people on earth. Then take lousy infrastructure, incompetent technicians, and a new automated support system designed for the sole purpose of preventing you from speaking to a real person. Nice.

On top of that, their system insists that my modem is fine, when any idiot can look at the fact that there are two solid lights and no blinking ones and see that it’s totally not connected to jack.

Ironically, the only reason I called was because they used to have a recording that would tell you about any known outages, and I wanted to see if this was a known problem. That recording appears to be gone now. If they’d had it there, I’d have been okay with this whole mess for now.

I just now as I was typing this got a call from my mother-in-law down the road. She’s having problems with hers too, so at least it’s not just us.

Still — Charter is completely worthless, and I’d like to use someone else — except there is no alternative in this town. Argh!