I Cannot Abide Thieves

I’m not just talking about the thieves that break into your car and steal your stuff, though I can’t abide those either. I’m also referring to those who do not give credit where credit is due. If I borrow a graphic from your website, I am going to ask your permission to use it before I download it and place it on my site, and I’m also going to provide a link to your website because you deserve credit for your original works. Likewise, I expect the same courtesy from others who reference my works. I should at least get an reference in the bibliography.

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This cannot be happening!

The word has come down.

I am horribly miserable about this.

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Regular People Do NOT Understand Geeks.

Let’s be realistic about how we get involved in relationships that work.

We find someone that we like the look of, we learn if they have things in common with us, and if we find enough commonality to build a foundation upon, we can have a successful relationship with that person. This is true of friendship, family and romance. It’s actually really very simple, but people get so wound up about romance and dating that they can’t see the forest for the trees.

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Top Ten Yahoo Searches

When I see things like this, I have to wonder what this says about America to the rest of the globe. The top ten yahoo searches of 2008 start off with Britney Spears and it only gets worse from there.

No wonder other countries hate us. We’re a bunch of losers with boring lives that have nothing better to do besides throw our money at mentally ill super stars, wrestling programs that we are well aware are fake, and of all things.. really crappy Japanese anime. (Sorry Viz, but your American production of Naruto is lame with a capital LAME).

Toyota Abusing DMCA?

I’m not sure how much stock to put into this article, that comes to you via /. But I will say this much, if this is true, then Toyota are a bunch of A-holes that are not worthy of the admiration of those thousands of folks who put up wallpapers of their Toyotas/Scions/Lexi.

I often have to wonder about the state of the world anymore, where people are constantly being forced to question weather they actually own a thing when they pay money for it, or weather they just own a license to use it. I would have a hard time spending the amount of money that it costs to buy a car, if I couldn’t take pictures of the thing and I couldn’t refer to it by its product name when telling others what I really think about it, and was only allowed to use it for as long as the company felt it was appropriate for me to use it. That would be precisely why I don’t buy songs on iTunes and why I still buy DVDs rather than downloading my video digitally via iTunes or some other service.

If I shell out money for a thing, I should be able to use it on whatever devices I choose, and fangirl about it in whatever way I find to be appropriate as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of the copyright holder. So if I take a picture of a debadged Toyota… okay, you know what, I can see Toyota pitching a beef, especially if I don’t identify the car as being a Toyota. But if I leave the badges in place and say, “This is my corolla!” Toyota needs to shut the hell up and call it free advertising.

If this is for real… the lawyers at Toyota really need to learn a hard lesson about alienating consumers and I’ll never buy Toyota again.

How my iPhone Became a 3g.

It was Monday.

Allow me to warn you, faithful reader, that no story that ever begins with the phrase, “It was Monday.” can possibly end well.

On Monday, the cable company sent a technician to our home to check out some problems we’d been having with our connectivity since Saturday night. The guy was here for a solid two hours checking over things before he finally concluded that it was our cable modem, and replaced it. But during this time, he needed to talk to my husband, so I called my husband on my precious 1st gen iPhone, that was less than a year old, and handed it to the cable guy. The cable guy gave it back to me when he was done, and thought it was in my grasp so he let go.

My baby, my iPhone, which is my entire life, hit the floor with a loud crack.

Come to find out, the cracking sound was the case that was on the phone. The screen was undamaged. The case was toast, but the screen was not broken, the aluminum back was unharmed, and it was not the first time I’d dropped the phone on ceramic tile before, so I thought everything would be fine. Then, I hit the home button.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

The home button is supposed to take you back to the home screen when you hit it. It’s how you close apps, access your apps during a call and it’s how you reboot the phone, without shutting it down completely.

I began to panic.

By the time all was said and done, I’d called Apple care and was told “We can either charge you 199$ to fix the iPhone you have. Charge you 199$ for a refurbished 1st gen iPhone, or you can go to your local Apple store and pay 199$ for a new iPhone 3g.” I almost told the tech on the phone that we didn’t have an Apple store, and in all reality, very few places that are not the top 20 major cities in this country actually do.

So I went to the AT&T store, the techs there looked at my phone and were amazed at the condition it was in. A guy in the store offered me to buy it off of me, even though I told him it was broken, because other than the home button not working, the phone was in pristine condition. He said he’d open it up and fix it somehow.

So in the end, I got an iPhone 3g and I have to say… I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

The previous iPhone was heavier, it felt like you’d spent a decent amount of money on this thing. There was something about that that was just, right. Especially when those of us that bought them, spent 300$ or more on these phones. The weight of the 3g makes it feel chintzy and cheap and not at all unique from any other cell phone that I’ve ever owned.

The plastic back is a fingerprint magnet. I’d wanted to get the white one, but to be honest, I don’t need 16 gig of storage, I only wanted the white one because it didn’t show fingerprints as badly. This has always been one of my beefs with Apple’s electronics too. So let me get this off my chest:

Apple, quit making color choices cost your customers a premium!

The white iPhone simply made more sense for someone like me who can’t stand smudges on her phone, but was not worth the additional price tag, and if I hadn’t had a first gen iPhone, I would have skipped this one based on that distinction alone. Black is boring, and I want to be able to choose what color I want without having to pay for the privilege.

The internet speeds are quick on 3g, but I never cared about that. People who want to tether their phones to their laptops may care, but I don’t see the need to pay an additional 10$ premium for 3g service, then a 5$ premium to add text messages (which were included as part of the old phone plan) and then spend an additional 30$ a month on TOP of those increases, to have the ability to tether my phone on the 3 or 4 occasions a year that I would actually use it. It’d be cheaper for me to pay a 30$ flat fee every time I used it.

Further complaints include the fact that I hate the cases that are currently available for the 3g. I do not blame the phone for this though, and that’s really something to write about in another article. It is larger than the first gen phone, noticeably. It feels bigger in your hand and in my hands, it feels less secure because I am not able to grip it as easily.

My biggest beef with the 3g though, is this:

It has the crappiest battery life of any cell phone I have ever owned.

I’m getting about 2 hours of talk time before the battery is drained to 20%, and then I can open a couple of apps once or twice before I have to charge the phone. Yesterday, my phone didn’t even make it to 6 pm before it complained about only having 20% battery life remaining.

After the joy of owning a first gen iPhone, this thing… to me, is really a huge disappointment.

The 3rd gen phone had better be nicer than this, because otherwise, I think I’ll skip it, get an iPod Touch and run of the mill Nokia phone. Then I will have everything I need, a great phone that gets decent battery life and the internet in my pocket at any WiFi hotspot.

An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer

Dear Mr. Ballmer,

I understand that at the MVP Conference in Seattle this weekend, you referred to Windows Vista as a “work in progress”. As a daily user of this operating system, I have no idea how it is that you can even begin to assume that this phrase gives me confidence for my future use of this OS.

We could argue about the finer points of Windows Vista and all you have learned for as long as you like, but the reality of this situation is that I’m an end user of a product that you’re selling. I expect products that I pay for to work. There are many products I’ve passed on because they simply don’t work. With my OS, I have not been given the option to choose one that works. Windows Vista came with my PC. I called my hardware manufacturer and requested a downgrade to Windows XP one week after I purchased this machine. I told them that I’d gladly pay for the new copy of Windows if they would just send me the discs and could assure me that my machine would still be under warranty. I was told that if I removed your OS from this machine, that my warranty on the hardware was considered void. Weather I like it or not, I am being held hostage to your OS.

So when you tell me that this OS that I’m enslaved to on my own computer is a “work in progress” all I have to say is, “are you friggin’ kidding me?” I’m forced to use this operating system every single day and you’re telling me Microsoft hasn’t even finished the thing yet? Your company worked on this OS for six years and the end result of that is an unstable, unfriendly POS that you are calling a “work in progress”? Your programmers are well-compensated for their positions at your company. What possible reason could they have for allowing your company to release a “work in progress” after six years of software development on this operating system?

I’ve long thought that windows programmers were inconsiderate and incompetent. The fact that the OS only grows in its monstrosity with each iteration is just the start of it. Good programmers tighten down their code, they write a command in the simplest way possible. Good programmers wouldn’t leave so many holes in an OS that the thing looks like the source code equivalent of swiss cheese. They’d try to put holes in the thing for months or even years before they ever considered the idea of releasing their software to the public, and they wouldn’t release that software with a whole bunch of last minute add-ons to please some industry cronies because good programmers know that good software is their life’s blood. Apparently, there aren’t very many good programmers at Microsoft.

I don’t want compensation from you. I don’t really care about all of that. All I want, is to be able to enjoy using my computer again. I want everything that Microsoft took from me when they released this shoddy excuse for an operating system to the public returned to me. I’m not an idiot though. I don’t believe that this will ever happen. I don’t believe that I will ever again be able to use a windows machine and expect to get things done on it. This makes me sad, and reminds me why I so seriously considered a Mac before I decided to get a windows machine that was 400$ less. I now realize that this 400$ discount wasn’t worth the savings.

Sincerely,

Stacy Jones

Author and Administrator - Random Gemini Weirdness

I Love my AT&T Store.

So this morning, after 3 weeks… I received yet another anonymous text message from some person looking for some guy named Dave. It started a while back. My husband and I were watching House, and I was getting phone calls from this dude who sounded like he was stoned saying, “Eh… is Dave there?”

The problem is, I know several guys named Dave, and in an emergency situation, I could see one of them giving a stoner my phone number if he had no one else to turn to, so I always asked, “Which Dave, I know two and none of them live with me.” Stoner Dude (not his real name), hung up after saying, “Well it was his number this morning. Aww man!” After three days of this, I finally managed to convince Stoner Dude that this was not his phone number, and that he was going to have to come up with another way to get in touch with his friend. I figured… the guy was a stoner. It’s entirely possible he just mis-dialed a lot, or wrote down the wrong number for his friend. Fine. I let this incident go.

All was quiet for like a week. Then I got a phone call from this gentlemanly gentleman who asked me very nicely if “Dave” was there. I told him that he had the wrong number, and that I had already talked to Dave’s friend Stoner Dude, and apparently Dave is giving out my number for some reason. I asked him if he would mind asking Dave to stop giving out my number, and he said that he would as soon as he tracked him down, and apologized for bothering me. I never received a phone call from this gentleman again.

Over the course of the next two weeks, I would randomly get phone calls from catty girls, looking for Dave. I told every single one of them that Dave wasn’t at this number, one of them even called me a b-word before she hung up on me.

By this morning, I had had enough of Dave and Dave’s friends, so when I got a text message from a phone number I didn’t know, I snapped. What you see below is a recaptured conversation from my iPhone, with names and numbers changed.

From Weird Number: “Hey”
Me: “Some guy named Dave has been giving out my number for 3 weeks. Looking 4 him right? Would you mind telling him 2 stop? I’ve had this # a long time and don’t want to change it. Thnx!”
Weird Number: “Who is this?”
Me: “The person who’s tired of Dave’s friends calling her at 3 am. Who also doesn’t know who you are or why you txt msg’d her. Just assuming u are a friend of Dave’s.”
Weird Number: “I didn’t text anyone!”
Me: “Weird. I got a txt from this # Sorry to bother you. No caffeine, little sleep due to phone calls all night.”
Weird Number: “And you got a text from this number? When? Who is this?”
Me: “9:10 am. I’m (random gemini, of course!), you are?”
Weird Number: “Wilson. I am sorry you are getting calls but I have never texted this number before, nor do I know who you are.”
Me (at this point, seething and ready to call my provider and scream… ): “No prob. I’ll call my provider about it.”

Wilson could have let it go there, but this bothered him for some reason, so he kept asking me questions. While he was trying to trouble shoot, it came out that he worked at an AT&T store. So we made arrangements for me to head down there so that we could figure this whole thing out, and then I found out that Wilson’s phone is security locked… no one else could have texted me from his phone. He was confused by all of this, then he asked me to just call the store instead, because he was concerned someone had doubled up my phone number with another customer’s number. I agreed to do this, made my coffee and got ready to call him when I received the following text from Wilson.

Wilson: “Oh wait! LOL! You are not gonna believe this! I did text you! This customer who was in here just now has almost the same phone number as you! He said his texts were not working, his number is 555-1213 (mine is 555-1212) and he gave me the wrong number! I apologize!”
Me: “Thank you so much! Glad it was something simple. You’re awesome! What days do you work? I want to bring you cookies.”

It turns out, Dave had been mistakenly giving out my phone number since getting his brand new cell phone, and didn’t understand why his friends never called, and his phone never rang and why he wasn’t getting his text messages. Wilson straightened the guy out and after giving me his work schedule, he offered to help me any time I had problems with my account.

Now that ladies and gentlemen, is what I call customer service. I was rude to this guy. He didn’t have to help me, and he did anyway. I will be taking him some home made Oatmeal Scotchies tomorrow because he deserves them for putting up with the way I treated him. The customer service hotline for AT&T sucks, but I love talking to the people in the stores where I live. They really care about making sure that I’m happy, even if I’m a bitch.

Vista, Nvidia and iTunes, Again.

So today, my wonderful geek husband got fed up with my laptop being unable to sync video to my iPhone directly from my hard drive. He put in a phone call to HP and asked if it would be possible for them to provide us with Windows XP recovery discs. He was told they would have to contact a supervisor to authorize it, and waited for the call back. The call back didn’t assist us at all. Not only would HP not be able to provide us with XP recovery discs, but if I choose to downgrade my machine to XP from Windows Vista, my warranty on this machine is void.

WTF?

As I have pointed out many times before, my phone is my life. If there were one other device in my life that were second to that, it would have to be my laptop. For the past five years, I have been very happy with the HP and Compaq machines that we have purchased, and have gotten a great deal of use out of them. Ninety percent of that happiness has derived from the fact that I’ve never had to call HP customer support with a problem, but this is too much. Not only did the customer support staff not speak English very well, but “John”, “Mary” and “Mary” told us that reinstalling Windows Vista would solve this issue, which is positively insane. The problem is the driver for my hard drive, which has not been updated by the manufacturer. How exactly will re-installing the OS fix this problem? Whatever they’re on at HP customer support, they need to start sharing the love.

I didn’t expect HP to actually be able to fix this issue. It’s really not HP’s problem because this is a known issue with iTunes specifically, and everything else works great. What irks me is that I have been told that I am stuck with Windows Vista, and its random BSOD’s from now until my warranty is out in July. Hopefully by then, Microsoft will have updated Windows Vista to the point where I can stand to use it, and this will be a non-issue, but if not, as soon as the warranty is up, you better believe this cookie is downgrading.

To switch targets a bit, I am supremely irritated at Apple right now, far more than I am that my husband had to speak to a customer support center in India that is filled with idiots who don’t speak enough English to diagnose technical support issues. My hard drive controller’s manufacturer, Nvidia, states that there are no problems with the hard drive or the controller and that they have referred this issue back to Apple’s application dev team for iTunes, who has done absolutely jack about the problem.

At least one other guy on the planet is just as irritated about this problem as I am, and has posted a comment on CNet’s boards regarding it.

And here’s a thread about it from SIX MONTHS AGO, regarding the exact same issue I am now encountering.

And here’s an article on a blog about a similar issue with Quicktime, dating back to July of last year, with comments as current as January 6th. I promise, none of those comments are mine.

And finally, this is a thread on the Apple discussion forums regarding the problem.

If this doesn’t show that there’s some extreme neglect going on here, I don’t know what does.

Windows Vista Woes.

Now, I am a gadget girl, but I’m not sure that you could truly call me a computer geek. I keep my husband around to fill in those shoes, still, today I managed to prove that I am geeky enough by pointing out that the only difference between his computer and mine was windows vista and the only known issue that caused a disaparity between his ability to sync his iphone, and my ability to sync mine is windows vista.

According to Apple, Windows Vista machines with SATA hard drives on board have problems transferring pictures and video through iTunes. Lord only knows why, this is just what Apple says. But when I hopped on to see if there was a driver update for my SATA hard drive, guess what? Nada. I followed all of Apple’s suggestions, including disabling some features in Windows Vista that I don’t use anyway (all of this was directed by my wonderful geek husband) and still nothing.

If this were my only problem with Windows Vista, I wouldn’t complain, it’s just that on top of that file transferring across my home network is painfully slow. Connecting to wireless networks via my laptop is painfully slow. Sometimes, when the laptop is sitting here idle with no applications open, it just blows up into a giant ball of BSOD. But more than anything else… Windows Vista and iTunes really don’t seem to get along, which is sad because my cell phone is my life. Also, I’m horribly afraid that my ancient version of Adobe Photoshop will cause Vista to pee all over itself, so at least 65% of the functionality of my laptop is lost to me (especially since Gimp and Windows Vista have major pointing device issues). It’s just a crappy situation.

Am I wishing I’d bought a mac now? You bet. Especially after getting my iPhone.

Am I seriously considering downgrading to XP?

Abso-friggin’-lutely.