Category: Uncategorized

A few weeks ago, Comcast jerked my chain one too many times and I resolved to dump them. Their latest offense is forcing all customers to use a set-top box for every TV in their house. You’re no longer allowed to plug your “cable-ready” TV into a wall socket. AND if you have more than two television sets, they will be charging $2 per set per month for the “privilege” of using these set-top boxes.

Crapcastic, indeed.

Incidentally, the Tuscaloosa News had the gall to run a Comcast PR release as if it were a news story–headlining it “Comcast upgrading Tuscaloosa service”:

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20100608/NEWS/100609669

No customers/customer support groups were contacted. So much for balanced reporting.

AT&T had run fiber optic cable into my ‘hood last year and I was curious to see if it was rilly fast. So, I signed up for it.

Let me tell you, it is smokin’ fast. I am lovin’ the ‘net access.

However, I am not lovin’ U-verse — the TV service that came bundled with it. I paid a premium to get HD service and to have it run in two rooms — off of one HD DVR, which is pretty sweet in itself. The one fly in the ointment?

AT&T has compressed the hell out of its HD signal. And it’s quite noticeable. I first saw digital artifacts in The Deadliest Catch‘s action scenes. Then I began to see them even in The Daily Show, which doesn’t have a whole lot of action. Were my eyes deceiving me? Could AT&T’s HD really be this bad?

I started Googling around about it and found forum posts on AT&T’s community forums about the poor picture quality. In one thread titled, “Why does U-Verse Suck So Bad??”, I found an explanation by SomeJoe7777, midway down on this page:

Every customer does indeed get the same (crappy, overcompressed) feed. The issue is that there are many factors on the customer’s end that make the compression artifacts either more or less visible than they are to other customers. The customers with large, really good TVs will notice the compression artifacts a lot more than customers with smaller, not-quite-so-good sets. Connection methods make a difference – HDMI can emphasize the artifacts, component can soften them. Bad digital processing can make the artifacts worse, good digital processing can hide them. LCD TVs can emphasize the artifacts, projection TVs can soften them. There’s dozens more factors.

But as far as the compression, the fact is that AT&T is attempting to deliver 1080i feeds in 6 Mbps of H.264 bandwidth. This is about half of what’s required for an artifact-free picture. It’s one-quarter of what is used on a typical Blu-Ray.

Sigh.

I had hoped to winnow my online bills down from Comcast (Internet) and DirecTV (TV) to just U-verse, but now it looks like I’ll need to keep DirecTV and just use U-verse for Internet.

Oh, and another crappy aspect of U-verse: It doesn’t carry American Movie Classics in my market (although it does in others). That means no Mad Men this summer. Just another reason to keep tapped into DirecTV.

Acquired a new Android Incredible phone this week as I wanted to escape the icy, DRMed grip of Apple’s iPhone/iTunes. Unfortunately, it appears the honeymoon may be very short.

Today, the phone spontaneously rebooted three times–each time returning the error message “SD card removed.” But I had not been messing with the SD card. I’d just pressed the icon for mail. The third time it rebooted, it appeared to be locked up. It seemed to be stuck at the “loading” stage. I started Googling around for solutions and before I could find out how to do a hard reset, it came back to life.

Sad to say, there are already posts on the Android forums about this issue. One in particular caught my eye. goatspanka (!) reports:

I live on the border between Mississippi and Alabama and I get random reboots when at home, but when I am at work, I don’t get issues at all. I have the 8gb card from my storm in it, so I don’t think that’s a problem.

I do live in a “fringe” coverage area so my phone is constantly looking for service. The tower switching problem sounds valid, but I have heard of reboot while using wifi only, so it may be a software problem. It seems all we can do is wait.

To which another Alabamian, kur1j, responded:

Damn didn’t want to see this…

I am in Alabama and have had the phone reboot 3 times today. I am in area where I don’t get great coverage.

I didn’t notice it before the OTA update. 1 day after the update and its done it 3 times. And this was posted today.

Guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on this. If the Droid Incredible becomes the Droid Crappy, I might trade it in for a regular Droid. I was intrigued by its sliding keyboard anyway…

Update 5/9/10: Verizon doesn’t exactly make it easy for you to find the user guide for the Droid Incredible. I finally tracked it down here after much Googling:

http://cache.vzw.com/multimedia/mim/htc_incredible/incredible.pdf

But that URL doesn’t look very permanent. You can get there by following links from

http://support.vzw.com/

Update 6/10/10: A month later… and I’m happy to say that the rebooting issue resolved itself within a week or so. Since then I’ve only experienced the “incredible” side of the Droid Incredible.

That is to say, I’m lovin’ it!

The iPhone did play a bit of catch-up this week with version 4, which contains some of the features of the DI — like multitasking. But still I have no buyer’s remorse. It feels good to be free of Apple and AT&T Wireless.

I am desperately trying to continue lovin’ Firefox, to not think of it as crappy software, but lately it just keeps a-crashin’ and a-crashin’ — like, about once a day on both Mac OS X and Windows 7. Plus, it keeps lagging and having trouble displaying pages quickly. Slashdot is particularly bad, but Gmail ain’t good either. On Mac, that freakin’ annoyin’ spinning beach ball has become the norm. I hate that damn thing.

And yesterday, something crappy and new happened: Tried to access Gmail through Firefox. It would not connect. Gave me the error msg: “The page isn’t redirecting properly.” Tried Gmail with Internet Explorer and got right through. Since I use Google for all manner of things — from email to Picasa’s online Web albums — not being able to connect to it is a major issue.

“I Want To Love Firefox 3.5, But It Keeps Crashing On Me“

XM satellite radio is the latest company to offer to “serve me better” by dicking me around.

Yesterday, I received a letter from Joe Zarella, Chief Service Officer, Sirius XM Radio. It begins positively enough: “Because you are a valued customer and you enjoy listening to XM Radio online, we are offering you a special opportunity to continue to listen online at no cost…”

Oh great! A special opportunity! Listening online! Nice! “At no cost”! Great!

“…if you renew your radio subscription now with one of our longer-term plans.”

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… Then the serious dicking around begins:

On March 11,2009, the XM Radio Online listening platform will be upgraded to a higher quality digital audio and no longer included as a part of a base subscription at no charge. If you renew now, you can continue to listen online, at your home or office, FREE for the length of term you choose-but only if you act quickly.

Zarella lures me in with “upgraded to a higher quality digital audio” and then drops the hammer: online listening, which had been free, will now cost me.

And, gee, I can avoid this new fee for something I was getting for free if I just agree to a longer commitment to XM than I had before!

So, let me sum up: I get degraded service and I lock myself into that service for an extended period of time.

What crap.

Instead of inspiring me to lock into XM’s service contract, I think I’ll just lock myself out entirely and move on to other less crappy options.

You can read the whole crappy pitch in this PDF file.

I hate it when an application I’ve relied on heavily and recommended to friends disappoints me with a new version that lacks key functionality found in older versions.

SplashID used to be a great password manager, until its iPhone version came along. In the good old days (back when I used it on a Palm PDA), it effectively stored passwords and synchronized them across numerous computers and the handheld PDA. All my passwords were always up-to-date on all the machines I used. And synchronization was a simple part of the Palm’s own sync routine. So, essentially, you didn’t have to do anything for this magic to happen.

Plus, SplashID would suggest new passwords to you and had other useful features.

I liked the app so much that I actually bought a low-end Palm PDA solely to run SplashID, even after I bought an iPhone last year. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I was joyous when I heard that SplashID was being ported to the iPhone.

I installed it immediately and was initially disappointed in the sync routine. Because of how Apple restricts applications on the iPhone, SplashID cannot simply sync through iTunes the way Apple’s apps do. Oh no, you’ve got to separately sync SplashID over a wifi network. That’s just as hinky as you might imagine. And if you’re in a work situation where your computer is on a wired, not wifi, network then you have to go through additional shenanigans to get it to work.

Okay, okay… I thought to myself, this is a downgrade from the Palm’s system, but I love SplashID so much that I’ll make do with it, clumsy as it was.

But then I noticed that changes to the passwords were not synchronizing across two computers. Each computer would overwrite the handheld with its version of the data. That can’t be right, I thought. So, I posted a note to SplashID’s support forum. They’ve always been very responsive in the past and I assumed that I was just not configuring things correctly.

But then I got an official reply from Justin of SplashData:

Synchronization with 2 computers is not supported in the iPhone version. This is a completely different sync mechanism from the Palm sync.

Oh, fuck me! Now I will have to stop using the iPhone version of SplashID and either revert to the Palm version or move to another password manager altogether. I have been a loyal user of SplashID for years and have frequently recommended it to friends, but I won’t be able to do that anymore.

In sum: I am very irritated at this crappy “upgrade” of SplashID. And I think it’s misleading of SplashData to advertise this feature thus:

Synchronize data between your handheld and Mac or PC using the desktop software

It should be corrected to read “between your handheld and a single desktop computer.”

Every once in awhile, we here at the Institute for the Elimination of Crappy Software (IftEoCS) come across non-crappy software upon which we feel the need to remark. The Mozilla Firefox browser is one such piece of non-crappy software.

The staff of the IftEoCS has been using browsers since NCSA Mosaic came out in 1993. Hell, we’ve been using them since they were all text. We’ve been using them since they were competing with U of Minnesota’s Gopher. And if you have to ask what Gopher was, then you must be a n00b or a whippersnapper or an upstart or something.

The point is, the IftEoCS knows from browsers and our browser of choice is Firefox. Mozilla is just about to release a new, improved version of Firefox and they’ve decided to mark the occasion by going for the record of the most downloads of a piece of software in a 24 hour period. Plus, they’ve got a cute little fire fox (I guess) logo promoting the record-breaking attempt.

I’ve already gone to their Website and “pledged” to help break this record. What’s stopping you?

The actual date of the release has not been announced yet, but it must be close because Mozilla is already providing “release candidates” on their Website. If you pledge to download it, then you’ll be notified via email when it’s available.

In the past, I’ve had good luck with DirecTV’s customer service, but a bizarre series of billing errors has made me change my mind and I must now characterize its customer service as crap.

Due to these billing errors, almost $800 of incorrect fees were added to my account. Yes, you read correctly: $800!

The short version of this story:

1. My HD DVR unit was defective. Let me rephrase that: My second HD DVR unit was defective (as was the first one, which DirecTV replaced).
2. A tech dude came out, saw it was defective and replaced it with a new unit — telling me that DirecTV would send me a “recovery kit” with which to return the defective unit.
3. The recovery kit never shows up.
4. DirecTV bills me $300 for a “lost or damaged” unit. (My unit is neither lost nor damaged; it’s defective.)
5. I begin a long series of phone calls to DirecTV. Sometimes I’m cut off in the middle of a call and have to call back, retelling my long story all over again.
6. DirecTV promises to send me a recovery kit and remove the $300 charge. It takes them over three weeks to remove this incorrect fee.
7. The recovery kit arrives; I immediately send my unit back.
8. Two weeks later, DirecTV charges me over $400 for not returning the unit.
9. Phone calls resume. It takes two weeks to remove this charge. Consequently, for several weeks there is almost $800 of incorrect charges on my account.

Now that is crappy customer service.

…Service.

(I could have included “Service” in the title, but I couldn’t resist all the “C’s” in “Circuit City’s Crappy Customer.”)

Circuit City frequently annoys me. Usually, it’s just some little crappy thing that builds on another little crappy thing that builds on another… You get the idea. Before you know it, you’re drowning in Circuit City’s crap.

One frequent problem I’ve had there is having to wait for service. This week, I thought I’d circumvent my wait time by buying an item (an external hard drive) online and picking it up at a local store in Tuscaloosa — taking advantage of their “24-minute in-store pickup” guarantee. They proclaim on their Website, “If we don’t have your order ready for you within 24 minutes of your confirmation email, a $24 gift card’s yours.”

Of course, the guarantee’s disclaimer is that it “excludes customer wait time in store lines.”

See, you can’t just walk up to a cashier, show him/her your receipt and an ID and be gone. Nope. You’ve got to wait in the customer “service” line before you can get your merchandise.

The first time I tired to pick up my drive, there was a single customer “service” representative. The line wasn’t too long, but in 10 minutes it did not move at all; and I had a limited amount of time as I needed to pick up my son from day care. So, I had to go.

Came back a few days later, determined to wait it out. This time, there were two reps and only four people ahead of me and still it took 15 minutes to make it to a rep. Now, I know 15 minutes is not that long a wait time in the grand scheme of things, if we were living in Soviet Russia, for instance. But had I bought a drive at, say, Office Depot, I could have parked, walked to the shelf, picked up a drive, gone immediately to a cashier, and gotten out of the store in maybe 10 minutes tops.

So, the “convenience” of Circuit City’s in-store pickup is a complete fraud, because one must suffer through a customer “service” experience. Heck, if I had just had it shipped to me I wouldn’t have had to spend any time waiting in line.

When I finally did get through to a CC rep, I politely asked her to tell her manager that I was frustrated by the wait time and that I would never use their in-store pickup service again. The clerk was unrepentant. All she said in reply was a snippy and condescending remark: “I’m sorry there were people ahead of you in line.” Obviously, she didn’t intend to pass my comment along to her manager.

Consequently, I send this complaint out into the ether. Who knows? Maybe a CC customer “service” manager will read it one day and, for a brief instant, feel sorry that they’ve lost (another) customer.

For quite some time, I’ve been a fan of Adobe Premiere Elements (APE). It’s the best low-cost solution for editing video on Windows and it’s just as good as iMovie. Even does some stuff that iMovie cannot do.

Since APE is relatively inexpensive — compared to the full, professional version of Premiere — I’ve happily upgraded it each time a new version came out. So, when version 4 appeared recently, I was one of the first in line to buy it.

Now I’m wondering if that was a good idea.

First, its interface is slightly different than version 3 and I find it a bit dark and it puts functions where I don’t expect them. I guess that’s gonna happen with a new UI and maybe I’ll get used to it. But it also does not maximize properly. I have a two-monitor system and I put my quick launch bar vertically along the left side. When you maximize APE, part of it slides under the quick launch bar and it does not fill the left monitor completely.

More significantly, APE does not do YouTube like it claims to do. In a review on Amazon.com that was posted just two days ago (10 October 2007), carlamari explains the YouTube-APE situation well:

I purchased this product because I wanted to upload better quality videos to YouTube. The item description for this product states – “Broadcast far and wide by uploading your movies directly to YouTube or your personal sharing page. Adobe Premiere Elements 4 takes care of optimizing and formatting for the specific destination so your movies always look great.” Unfortunately, that is completely untrue. The product’s presets for YouTube result in a final video stream that is inferior in quality to most of the videos that are currently on YouTube. It is definitely inferior in quality to the MP4 files that I had been previously using. Therefore, it does not optimize for the specific destination. In addition, it does not allow you to adjust the YouTube presets so if you want to upload your file directly from Premiere Elements 4, there is no way to make any adjustments to improve the overall quality.

On top of this, I am completely unable to directly upload any videos to YouTube, bad quality or not, since the program keeps giving me an error message that says “Online service encountered an error. The service will now be terminated. 10: unable to send HTTP request with GetLastError of 12002”.

Over the past two days I have spent hours on the phone with their technical support staff trying to troubleshoot this connection error. After trying many many different configurations, the problem has not been solved and I can escalate the case to a higher level of tech. support. But of course, why should I bother wasting my time on all of this tech. support if even after the connection issue is fixed, it uploads such poor quality videos? The tech. support staff even agreed with me that the YouTube preset is not of the highest quality or what it should be. Since they are unable to answer alot of my questions, they have referred me to filing a “feature request” on the adobe website and/or emailing their corporate office. So I can waste more of my time being a beta tester on this new product. They really should have worked out all of these bugs BEFORE they released the product.

The first time I uploaded a vid to YouTube, it worked okay — although, like carlamari its quality was inferior to other uploads I’ve tried — but the second time I tried it pooped out on me and I got the “GetLastError of 12002” message. It must be a new issue as carlamari’s post is the only thing that turns up on a Google search and there’s nothing on Adobe’s support site about it.

More to come on this…

Updated, 10/30/2007:

Still no luck uploading to YouTube, but now the error message has changed. Instead of the cryptic, “GetLastError of 12002” now it just says, “Sorry, unable to connect to YouTube. Please try again later.” Not quite as cryptic, but no more explanatory.

Clearly, this aspect of PE4 is not ready for prime time. Anyone who upgrades thinking PE4 will facilitate their YouTube uploads is going to be disappointed.