Once every few months, Windows 7 decides that it doesn’t want to charge my laptop while it is plugged in. Initially I thought something must be wrong my machine. A quick google search for “plugged in not charging” revealed that this is a problem with Windows Vista and 7 and happens to almost any laptop of all makes and models and the fix involves Uninstalling the “Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery” from Device manager and rebooting to reinstall it.
My 6 year old Thinkpad R51 finally died. It was a refurb then so in reality it is probably 7 years old. That reliability is why I always recommend Thinkpads. I replaced this a few weeks ago with a new T400. The new laptop looks jsut as good and seems just as sturdy but what the hell is it with new laptop displays?
My old R51 display was really nice with excellent viewing angles and really high resolution (1600×1200). The new display has ok resolution (1280×800, 1440×900 was an option but this was such a good deal that I didn’t mind) but the viewing angles suck, the brightness seems uneven. I was expecting the “LED lit” display to be something far better than what I had. But all it has is eyeball searing brightness. No matter what I do to calibrate it, it just doesnt look good and the contrast and brightness never seem to be at any setting that is good. Did I say the viewing angles suck. I mean they are really ridiculously bad.
It’s the same with the new Dell laptops at work. Where have all the good displays gone? Then I search online and all I can find is people complaining about not having the same resolution or quality on new laptops as they had previously. Even people willing to pay a lot for good displays can’t find any. So I guess the days of good displays are gone.
There was a time more than 5 years ago when I knew what pant size to buy. I blindly bought 31 and knew they would fit. Then I grew fatter. So I bought 32s. But recently, 32s have become too loose without my losing any inches (old pants fit perfectly). And today I found the reason why. Lying manufacturers.
I recently bought some pants online and they are just too big. So thanks to this stupidity which is not even consistent acreoss brands, I have to skip the convenience of online shopping for pants. I can understand the small/medium/large changing size as the population grows in size, but why lie with the numbers? Will men soon suffer the fate of women with pant sizes like 2 or 4 or 6 or 8, instead of the real dimensions, which really have no meaning?
Here goes my rant. As we have been passively looking for a new house we have found multiple occasions where real estate photos have been severly photoshopped. The photos were overly bright, very saturated and the photoshopping is plainly visible. We have even visited a couple of houses about a year ago just to see how reality compares. And I can tell you it was absolutely shocking. The houses were in bad shape with dark rooms.
I’m making this post for the real estate agents who think that buyers are suckers and can’t tell super enhanced photos. I think their real estate licences should be revoked. I guess they will learn the hard way when nobody shows up to see the houses. Generally I’ve found that photoshopping was only done in case of older houses that are probably in bad shape and once buyers see a few of those they will probably avoid all photoshopped houses. Photoshopping agents should probably take a photography class instead of just using some software to turn up brightness, contrast and saturation to make fake looking photos.
Yesterday I found this example of extreme photoshopping. I thought the photo was an awesome rendering for a proposed house. But the house looked very dated. It turned out that the photo is of an existing house built in the 50s
If you would like to look at the rest of the super enhanced photos click here.
I’ve been using Foxit for some time (maybe a couple of years) now because Adobe Reader had become a bloated piece of crap that slows down my machine, crashes browsers and uses way more resources than it should.
But now Adobe has gone one step beyond just making a crappy product – they want to covertly install other crappy products that you didn’t ask for. Click the image on the left for a screenshot of the Adobe reader download page. It wants to install “Acrobat.com on Adobe AIR” (no option to opt out) and McAfee Security Scan Plus (you can opt out by checking the box). Adobe has gone so far as to do this with Flash too and that even installs McAfee without giving the user an option to deselect it.
McAfee Security Scan Plus is just a piece of crap software that gives you the same information as Windows Security Center i.e. if you have your Antivirus, Firewall etc. turned on. If not (or sometimes even if you do), it tries to sell you McAfee stuff.
So do yourself a favor, uninstall Adobe Reader now and get Foxit Reader. Foxit also seems to have fewer security issues and it patches holes faster. It doesn’t annoy you with startup items, doesn’t install other crap without your knowing and is much smaller in size.
So far I haven’t been forced to get anything with Flash upgrades but it that happens, Flash is next to go. And thanks to Steve Jobs and his hatred for Flash, more and more websites are begining to move to HTML 5 or at least begining to offer that option. Adobe really needs to get their act together. I’ve been hit by a fake antivirus at work from what was possibly a flash (or maybe pdf) exploit and it is nasty. If McAfee suddenly appears on my machine out of the blue along with Adobe reader, how does one tell it apart from the Fake AV software?
One small company in Norway can produce a browser that is lightning fast works on almost any Operating System including most mobile phones but a giant like Microsoft with nearly limitless resources can’t even produce a browser in over 8 years (IE6 came in 2001) that is even remotely comparable to anybody else?
Now the IE Blog claims that IE9 will be better and they show a graph of how IE9 is worse than any browser out there (though better than IE8). They claim that it will be better in the future but how much better will everyone else be by the time IE9 comes out? Both Safari and Chrome use Webkit. Firefox and Opera use their own rendering engines.
Web apps are the present and the future. Everybody knows that. Also all web developers know that IE sucks so none of us use IE for anything except testing. IE is so bad that Google needed to launch a plugin that would make IE use Chrome to render web pages because there is no way some of their new and upcoming stuff would work in IE.
Back to the point. Why we web developers hate IE:
If you read the comments, the most common comment is that Microsoft should give up on their rendering engine and just use webkit. I’m sure every web developer will jump for joy and host a party because the worst nightmare of their job – trying to be compatible with IE – will be gone. That is never going to happen so somebody summed it up in the comments:
IE is fairly analogous to the cockroach. You can step on it, blow it up and irradiate it, but now you have an annoyed radioactive abomination that’s going to go breed more annoyed radioactive abominations.
Thankfully a lot of major websites are dropping support for IE6 which hopefully will make those IE6 users out there upgrade or switch. But with IE9 there will be one more thing to test for. All of us developers want is for Microsoft to get out of the browser business. Why does Microsoft even bother spending millions of dollars to make an inferior product that is full of holes? Why can’t they just adopt the Google and Apple path of using a standard freely available engine and just improve the user experience? It can still be IE, but at least it will be a good one.
The only reason I can think that MS still works on IE is that it is integrated into everything – Windows, all their development tools and most Microsoft software somehow depends on IE. While I’m complaining here is one more – even Microsoft has a hard time developing complex apps that work in IE and other browsers. That’s why they have separate applications for Outlook web services for IE/non IE browsers.
I have more than 100 “Available” movies in my queue and here is what CS says in an email
Since you have fewer than 10 “Available” movies in queue, we may wait an extra day or two to ensure we’re always shipping the titles you want most.
To ensure consistency in shipping, we recommend keeping 10 or more available movies in your Queue. You can also set your preferences for shipments based on speed vs. Queue order. Go to My Account; Manage Account Settings; and choose Speed vs. Queue ship preferences. We’ll ship your next movies within 1 to 2 business days once your queue meets our recommendation
While Netflix has started shipping on Saturdays, Blockbuster has mostly stopped shipping on Mondays. In my experience, if I return all three movies on Friday/Saturday, one may or may not ship on Monday, one or two ship on Tuesday and one ships even later. I’ll update in future posts if selecting “Speed” changes this stupidity.
If an item is checked in on a weekend (including Friday) the next expected business day for a new shipment would fall on the following Tuesday with limited shipments on Monday.
To ensure consistent, prompt shipments please keep 15 or more “available” titles at the top of your queue.
Blockbuster recently updated the Queue options ending a longstanding complaint about the requirement to have available movies at the top of your queue.
But now their store return system is busted. I exchanged an online rental for a store rental. I returned the store rental the next day. 30 hours later the disc is still in my queue.
So I click the report button, and what I get is a notification to call the store.
So I call the store and their system says I returned the movie yesterday and also have a 1$ credit for returning it in one day.
Anyway I sent in a complaint to Blockbuster both on twitter and via their Customer service contact.
I’ll update this post when I get a response. But I’m sure this is a throttling method where they don’t want you to get discs very fast. I was hoping to test that that the “Speed” option really works and I run into this. I would switch to Netflix in a heartbeat if they didn’t charge extra for Bluray and I would stop hearing complaints about new movies not shipping to heavy users. At least Netflix doesn’t lie about throttling. They are intentionally vague but at least they admit it. Unlike BB, which just comes up with lame excuses.
Update: Blockbuster online customer service already responded (in less than two hours) that they have cleared the movie from my queue and I got the usual free rental coupon that I get every time I complain about Blockbuster screw-ups. An interesting thing in the email that the rep sent me is this
For consistent and prompt shipments, please keep 15 or more “available” titles at the top of your queue.
That totally sucks
Update: (Sat Oct 24) The Speed option is bogus. To test the speed option I put some future and long wait releases in the top 15 in my queue. That still didn’t cause anything to ship on Friday (previous movie returned to store Wednesday, system glitch caused it to be marked as returned on Thurdsay after complaining). And if the limited shipments on Monday is true, I’ll have to wait at least 2, maybe three business days for the next movie to ship.
Update: Somehow my update to this post got lost? I got a call from BB customer service on Oct 26/27 after complaining about this problem on Twitter. It seems that the speed issue is now fixed. Since then I’ve seen my movies ship on time until now. So if you see no more updates to this BB has fixed the issue.
My last few posts about Blockbuster have all been complaints. I’ve often reached a point where I wanted to just cancel and move to NetFlix because of stupid policies at Blockbuster such as delays in shipping of as much as 4 days if you don’t have 15 available movies at the top of your queue and excuses about distribution center problems etc.
But I just heard from BlockbusterCC on twitter that sometime this month, BB will give us the option of speed vs priority. Here is the exact quote
BlockbusterCC Thanks for the inqry. We are rolling out new options sometime 10/2009. U will have the option to ship by q order or by speed
What keeps me away from Netflix is no in-store exchanges/coupons etc. and they charge an extra 4$ for Blu-Ray on their three at a time plan. Also there are as many people complaining about Netflix throttling, which I will definitely face as a heavy user. It seems Netflix throttling is much worse than BB.
Since Blockbuster started its new policy of not shipping new movies until you return your in store rentals, things have been much better. Movies shipped as soon as I dropped my discs back in the mail. But this week blockbuster is back to it’s usual tricks of not shipping. Generally when I returned all my movies together, Blockbuster would ship at least one movie instantly. But this time not a single movie shipped for two days.
As usual I have complained and as usual they will probably reply back with some lame excuse about keeping lots of “Available” movies at the top of the queue. I have more than 500 movies in my queue and many of the top ones are alwyas available.
Update on Aug 29: No movies have shipped yet. That is 4 days of no shipments!! Here is what Blockbuster has to say about it:
I sincerely apologize that we have yet to ship the next available titles from your queue.
We are aware that some customers who receive DVDs from our Richmond distribution center have recently experienced a slow-down with their check-ins and shipments. This is in line with the system enhancement that is in place to better provide quality service to our customers such as you. We are addressing this situation and it will be corrected as quickly as possible.
I also see that some of the movies at the top of your queue are on a “Short Wait” and “DVD Releases” status. We want to send you the movies that are most important to you as reflected by the priority you’ve set in your queue. If your top selections do not show an “Available” status and you have fewer than 15 “Available” movies in queue, a shipment may be skipped.
I would recommend keeping more than 15 “Available” titles at the top of your queue at all times. Once you take a few moments to do so, I’m certain you’ll see something shipped by the end of the next business day.
Since we value you as our customer, I would like to offer you 2 extra e-coupons good for free movie/discounted game rentals. Just click the link and print them which you may redeem at any participating Blockbuster store. You can expect a separate e-mail within 24-48 hours. We recommend to please check your spam or junk folder as well.
We appreciate your patience and understanding.
Should you have further questions, please let me know.
So I emailed back saying that it is ridiculous that I’m expected to constantly monitor my queue and their stupid system can’t just send me the first available movie form my queue. Here is what I got back:
I understand your concern about the movies availability and managing your queue. I also understand your inquiry about your e-coupons.
In line with our system enhancement that is currently on going, we really recommend that you keep more available titles on top and consistently monitor your queue. Once we are done with our upgrade, we will ship whatever “Available” titles eventhough it is not at the top of your selections.
In the meantime, we appreciate your patience and understanding while we work towards serving you better.
Your e-coupon was sent thru a separate e-mail. I suggest that you also check your spam or bulk folders. Some e-mail providers will not allow e-mails to your inbox unless you previously approve and set it up.
Should there be anything else, please let me know.
So now I have to keep on checking that the titles at the top of my queue are available or not and never get new releases from Blockbuster the day they release.