Advertising is an assault. Don't let the hyperbole put you off. This is a well-considered piece on the essential hostility of modern advertisements.
I have a movie that comes with four minutes of previews you can't skip. Well, I borrowed it from a friend. I am never buying that movie. I liked it. I woulda been happy to pay twenty bucks for the option of watching it whenever I wanted. But see, they won't sell me that. They'll only sell me the option of watching it five minutes after I want to. Fuck 'em.
So, about two years ago, I bought a G4 mac. And it was a demo model, or possibly a return, so I bought AppleCare for it. There was some trouble; they had the machine marked as sold in August of 2002, not March of 2003. But I sent the receipt in, and they said it was covered.
Fast-forward to today, when the service guy (it's in for a broken firewire connector) says it's not covered. So. I'm >1000 miles from my paperwork and the machine. Argh! My instinct of distrusting companies kicks in; this is gonna be a nightmare and take weeks to work out, and I can't even start on it 'til I get home on Wednesday. But then I think, hey, Apple's sorta cool sometimes.
I call Apple.
Sure enough, they are able to find and fix the problem. It does help that I wrote down my "incident number" when talking to support about the machine before. Using that, they find out that they've got me with a service plan on a machine whose serial number ends in NFMMA, and I'm trying to get service on a machine whose serial number ends in NSMMA.
So they fix it. Right there, while I'm on the phone.
That's sorta cool. A lot of companies do not take service that seriously, and the quality of support is one reason I like Apple.
BTW, on a related note: That new G5? Incredibly quiet. I love it to bits. It was crashy, but I replaced the cheapo memory I got for it with some slightly better memory (at a net cost to me of $0.86!) and now it's flawless. OS X Server is teh b0mb.
I'm doing more Apple-related work these days, so I decided it was time to go ahead and get a G5. I got the second-cheapest G5 Mac they sell, the dual 2.0Ghz. (Dual-processor is a big win.)
It's not been entirely an easy path. The new machine has only one open drive bay (the older machine it's replacing had four), only one slot for an optical drive (the older one had two), only three PCI slots (the older one had four), doesn't support 5v PCI cards (which loses me my SCSI controller and serial port card, both of which were 5v only), takes DIMMs only in pairs (and I didn't realize this and got a singleton)... In short, it's pretty much consistently inconvenient to me. I need to go get more memory. I need to get a serial ATA drive or another external FireWire case if I want to add disk space to it. In short, at every turn, I need to do extra stuff to make the machine work.
So. Why do I use a Mac?
Let me tell you about my Windows machine. Every so often, it stops booting for a while. The symptom, which you can find hundreds of pages about on the net, is that it will hang during the initial "fade-in" of the Windows logo. If you try to boot in Safe Mode, it hangs right after AGP440.SYS.
Last time it did this, I spent a few days shuffling parts and reloading. Then it suddenly got better without explanation.
A few months later, it's doing it again. I have a deadline to meet. I am supposed to be writing. What am I doing? Waiting 15 minutes to see whether the Windows install CD has hung or is just painfully slow so I can try to get to a recovery console and try a variety of cargo-cult tricks picked up off of web pages that might make this machine work with the exact same set of hardware and software it was booting with before I moved it from the right side of my desk to the left side of my desk, or possibly even with a few things taken out.
This is why I use a Mac; because you can get the Mac to tell you what it's doing, and it generally doesn't just inexplicably stop booting for a while then maybe start again.
Needless to say, outside of specific projects that require Windows-only software, I don't run Windows. (Well, I do. It's a good games machine... When it boots.)
Edited to add: The cargo cult people were right. Even the Windows install CD couldn't boot, so the solution was to go into the BIOS, not make any changes, and select "Save and exit". Some people think this means I may need a new battery for the motherboard.
I have a credit card through US Bank. They recently announced that payments over the phone will be subject to a $10 fee. They used to be free if you did them automatically, and only cost money if you needed to talk to a person.
I called and asked why. They said that this is a policy change. I agreed that it certainly was a change, and I was wondering why. The service representative cheerfully acknowledged that there was no particular reason for it, that there is no underlying cost involved that they have to recover, and that it's simply a way to gouge extra money out of customers.
I mean, not that these are good things. But it's refreshing, I guess, that they didn't feel the need to lie to me about it.
So, I got a call, from "David Collins" (305-971-4149).
He asked what company this was. (??) I told him it's not a company, 'cuz he called my personal line. He asked if we have a web site on the computer, and mentioned plethora (presumably referring to plethora.net, the ISP/consulting thing I run), so I said "sure, what do you want", and he asked what we do. What we do? He was just at the web site. I have no idea what to make of this. So I asked him why he wanted to know, and he mumbled something and hung up.
So I called back, and asked for more information, and he said "I axed you what you do, and if you're that smart, I don't think I wanna do business with you, don't call me back." And hung up.
WTF?
Is this related to those emails we always get from people who want to use a credit card to order a thousand pentium 3 processors for shipping to Eastern Europe?
I mean, what am I supposed to think? He calls me maybe wanting to do business, but he has no idea what we do? He isn't willing to say who he is or what he wants, and if we ask, that means he doesn't want to do business with us?
I post the contact info so anyone else who gets similar calls can maybe provide additional data points, and/or to let them know that, yeah, that guy's always like that.
FWIW, he seems to be in Miami, FL.
Now, I get to drive to Chicago, for Anime Central. I enjoy anime conventions, but acen has a special place in my heart -- it was my first con. It's also, so far, one of the best-run. The Artist's Alley director is active and competent; these are both rare traits in an Artist's Alley director. We're looking forward to it.
On the down side, our new comic isn't gonna be available, because I can't make FrameMaker stop "fixing" graphics. The comic has a lot of high-contrast black and white graphics. When I do test prints, they look great. If I try to make a PDF file from the original FrameMaker document, though, they become grungy grey. As in, the bright-white backgrounds, perfect 0xffffff white, suddenly come out about 20% grey. No idea why. I think we had this problem come and go with the previous one (target down), although we finally did come up with a greyscale PDF of it which can be printed reasonably.
This seems to correlate to attempts to get the document scaled down enough to fit at least a page or two in the 36MB of printer memory available to us... But I don't see why. Most graphics programs, if they were to scale down a white image, would come up with a smaller white image, not a grey one.
Frame is full of behaviors which probably made sense to someone, but that someone isn't me. Say you've got a picture you loaded into your document. You can't enter numeric sizes and have it preserve the aspect ratio; you have to hand-calculate the corresponding height for your width. Also, when you import a graphic, you get an "anchored frame", which is a document object, containing the graphic, which is another object. You can't just import the graphic as an object. Also, in my sample document, the newly imported graphic tended to show up on another page. I think this had to do with page breaks. If I could just import the image without anchoring it to the text, that'd be fine, but so far as I can tell, that can't be done.
Nightmarish program. There's things it does well, but frankly, I'm more productive hand-coding DocBook. In fact, I may just go ahead and do this project in DocBook when I get back from Con. Another reason to loathe Adobe, if you were running low.
Illinois Department of Transportation
2300 S. Dirksen Pkwy.
Springfield, IL 62764
Dear Department of Transportation:
In late April, I had occasion to take the Illinois tollway system from Wisconsin to Indiana, and then from Indiana to Wisconsin. I must assure you, the experience was remarkable. I have used your tollway before, mostly for trips to Chicago. I was immediately struck by the observation that the toll rate had jumped from $0.40 per booth to $0.80 or $1.00 per booth. At one of the last tollbooths I reached, I attempted to exchange an extra dollar for quarters, but the booth attendent nearly returned the extra dollar to me; in fact, he donated it with good cheer to the wind, trusting its fate to whatever agency governs the elements. However, he very kindly gave me four quarters for it anyway, a guesture I certainly appreciated.
On the way out, the tollway seemed mostly unexceptional. On the way back, however, we came through Chicago between roughly 3:30PM and 6:00PM. I don’t mean to imply any imprecision about when we were there; we were there that whole time.
I was particularly struck by the design of the “express” lanes, where incoming traffic had to merge through the express lanes to reach exits four lanes away. This innovative design, completely unlike any other express lanes I have seen in any state, gave a sort of “we’re all in this together” feel, where the express lanes were in no way singled out for special efficiency or speed.
Now, for perhaps the first hour and a half I spent on the Chicago portion of the tollway, I was unable to figure this out; why was I in the only traffic I’ve ever seen which was actually worse than San Francisco rush hour, and yet, being asked to pay for access to this road? Elsewhere, badly-maintained roads are generally covered by state taxes or federal funds, and toll roads show better than usual design and traffic flow.
However, somewhere during the estimated 62 minutes (according to the conveniently located signs) it took us to reach Edens Crossing, it occurred to me that a simple explanation was available; this was satire. Seen as satire, the entire experience makes sense. The oasis structures “closed to serve you better”. The express lanes with cars merging across them, frequently actually slower than the local lanes. The unpredictable and ever-rising toll costs. The whole thing is, of course, a deeply incisive commentary on the essential futility of modern commuter lifestyles, demonstrating the fundamental absurdity of our notions of “transit”. In a world full of comedians asking why we drive on the parkway and park in the driveway, the Illinois Department of Transportation has offered us the sensible alternative of parking on the parkway.
Needless to say, performance art on a scale like this cannot be cheap; it is obvious that it imposes substantial costs, and recovering them through the “toll booths” makes sense. It might be easier for people to handle if the costs were more predictable; perhaps, say, having all costs be multiples of $.25 would be better than the current system which virtually guarantees that a typical booth will require at least two, and often three, distinct types of currency -- and yet, even this is probably social commentary on the inevitability of a single world currency.
It is worth mentioning that, in fact, due to the mysteries of wind and the impossibility of driving more than about five to six feet without coming to a complete stop, I was able to recover the wayward dollar bill about a minute (and perhaps fifteen feet, as the crow flies) from the tollbooth where it was offered up to whatever winds would carry it. I enclose it (or perhaps another; I regret that I cannot easily tell them apart) for your perusal and enjoyment.
Regards,
Peter Seebach, traveller.
p.s.: Next time, I am considering driving through Lake Michigan. It might be faster.
Yes, I really sent this. And yes, I really enclosed a dollar bill. Could even be the same one.
My house has been home to a variety of do-it-yourself people. There's a light in the basement which can be disabled by unscrewing either of two fuses. We don't know exactly why. The blinds on one of the windows upstairs are spray-painted -- strings and all. The house is full of patchwork corrections on top of originally ill-considered things. We've found grounded outlets where the ground wire just ran a couple of inches into a pipe to run into... Well, nothing. The lamp over the upstairs kitchen sink has a pair of wires (of the same color!) coming out of the wall to it, and then has a ground wire running around inside it, not connected to anything.
A while back, one of the handles on a kitchen cabinet came loose. We finally figured it out; the bottom side of the handle was never even screwed on! It was just shoved into wet paint which had dried around it to hold it in place lightly until it came loose. So, today, I took it off, went into the basement, found a matching screw, knocked the paint out of the hole, and put the screws in... Only to discover that the hole was about 1/8" off.
Now, it turns out... It is not very hard to get the holes lined up with something like this. What this means is that whoever put that together just plain didn't care about measuring.
A bit of work later, it's at least screwed together. Wouldn't hurt to repaint the cabinet and maybe fill in the rest of the hole (I enlarged the hole a bit so the screw could line up), but it works. I just hope the next owners are patient with our house full of weird things, upside-down connectors, and the like. It's not our fault!
Most of my junk fax cases have settled. Once, we actually got summary judgment on liability (but not on damages) before settling. But we have a new example. Complex Capital Mortgage bounced a settlement check. (With the amount of money involved, I think this is technically even a criminal act.) We went to court to ask for enforcement, and... Well, it was funny. To make a long story short, CCM was ordered to pay up within a week, or at least to make sure their bank account could provide the money.
They didn't; in fact, they stopped payment on the check (which the judge had asked us to present to the bank again).
So now we have judgment. They owe money, and there is a real, live, legal injunction against them sending more junk faxes.
Next up: Collecting. Collecting money from companies is fun, because they don't have all the exemptions and defenses individuals do. We may well just get handed our money by their bank without trouble. Woo!
So far, they're down $570 on the deal; they have to pay various costs, and we may actually be awarded another $500 or so of costs, to say nothing of the costs we incur in collection, which are also legitimately added to the amount owed. In short, they may be able to stretch this out until we get over a thousand dollars of extra money as reimbursement for them being bad.
Woot!
Well, Sprint's finally managed to get me to rethink keeping my four cell phone plans (I share minutes with friends and family) with them; not only did they not shift their "insurance" thing to the expensive phone when I asked them to, not only will they not insure it for any reason now... they won't even credit my account for the charges for the "insurance" on a really cheap phone I didn't need insured at all.
I am in the market for suggestions about where to get good cell phone service. Key feature is some way to provide high-speed networking to a laptop -- actually, Sprint doesn't officially support this, because they want to sell their piece of shit "connection cards" instead of just selling bandwidth like a real phone company. *sigh* Biggest priority, really, is a company that won't consistently lie to me when I call customer service. This may be harder to find than I'd like.
Lots of carpet cleaners use prerecorded calls. Well, at least one does; they might just be very busy. Every so often my phone rings, bearing only a prerecorded message from some guy named Mike, who wants me to know about carpet-cleaning specials. Last two times, he's told me that "Electronic Coupon Code B1" qualifies me for special pricing. Caller ID is blocked. The only way to talk to them is leave a message for a callback.
First time I tried it, I got hung up on as soon as I tried to get any information beyond their alleged name - "C&R Cleaning" or "Carpet & Restoration Cleaning".
Second time, I got them to give me a callback number. 651-264-9616. It's in the wrong area code for the 264 prefix, but that's okay, it's disconnected anyway. They also said they were in the phonebook, but the only C&R I could find in the phonebook claimed to be no relation. They called back this morning, and gave a new number -- 952-264-9696. Also disconnected, but long distance! And, when I started asking for confirmation that they were for real, "Brenda" hung up on me.
All of their calls come with caller ID blocked; it says "private caller". So. We have the information that this is a carpet cleaning company, doing both regular cleaning and water damage, and also upholstery. People there have identified themselves as Mike, Brenda, and (I think) Lisa. They've violated the TCPA a couple of times, but what's really interesting is their absolute commitment to lying about everything. A search of the Secretary of State records doesn't turn them up, unless they're one of the handful of assumed names, or the "domestic corporation" which doesn't provide even a street address, not even to the secretary of state! Neat.
So. What to do? Looks like I have to initiate a John Doe suit against them, to do subpoenas, to make Qwest stop actively shielding fraudulent entities from being identified by their potential victims. Woo!