Customer Torture

Companies ought to call it what it is. It isn’t “Customer Service” by any stretch of the imagination. It’s customer torture, pure and simple. At this point, companies have given up the old school thinking about how valuable customers are. They must figure that if they treat customers just as crappy as the next business does that the number of people who leave do to the bad service will equal the number of people who join due to someone else’s bad service. A recent example would be the nightmare scenarios two arstechnica staff members went though just trying to move to a new house and get internet connectivity. Take a moment and read those. Can you believe this is the type of service AT&T and Verizon offer? (Cue Andy Rooney: I can.).

I recently bought an HP L2245wg flat panel for my wife for Christmas. We tried to hook it up today. What a mess! Turn it on and it displays a beautiful, crisp image – for all of 7 seconds. Then it displays nothing. Analog, DVI, a second computer – doesn’t matter, it is DOA. But, try to get any information out of the HP web site and you are feeling DOA yourself. Nothing at all about how a consumer who doesn’t have a service contract can get warranty service. No place to file a warranty service ticket unless you are either a business or have a contract. Several links to “contact us” that go to “I’m sorry, this page doesn’t exist” messages. I spent 35 minutes attempting to get something through the manufacturer and finally gave up and filed an RMA through New Egg. Supposedly this monitor has a 3 year warranty but HP sure doesn’t intend to let me ever use it.

Speaking of the Christmas Holiday I was recently in Napa visiting relatives. The “Map for That” from Verizon shows that they have 3G at the address we were going. But they don’t. At least, not usable 3G. Now, maybe Verizon considers it usable when you have to click “retry” 4 times from “no connection” messages just to load the google home page. But I sure don’t. At another location in Pittsburg, CA they also claim to have 3G – but the phone goes to 1X and even then looses its connection all the time. These are places WELL within the coverage zones shown on the “Map”. I spent 30 minutes today trying to find out how to tell Verizon about their coverage area map vs. reality (so they can either fix the map or fix the network), but there doesn’t appear to be any way to report this online.

Anyone else had it with Customer Torture?

You’re a noid and I’m a droid

Pithy line picked from Star Trek, I know. An update on my Motorola Droid situation: it is working just perfectly. It seems to do everything except BT voice dial. There’s huge threads on that lack all over the place, so no need to revisit fully here. As far as my replacement unit – it has been working just great. Emails, satellite photos, Google Voice integration, YouTube, and the awesome Google Navigation – all working and no more lockups or freezes.

Droid Update

Well, I was about to publish that the new Droid phone I received (after I swapped out the one that randomly rebooted and locked up all the time) was just perfect. However, 10 minutes ago it wouldn't turn on. I was expecting a text message from a coworker (I had watched him send it) and after 4 minutes or so of not receiving it, I thought I would turn the phone on and look. It wouldn't turn on. Removed the battery and put it back. Still wouldn't turn on. Held down the camera button and the power button until it powered up and rebooted. Then the text came in right away. When this type of thing happens, you can't receive calls or texts - so you are looking at an unreliable phone. Not good!

It hadn't done this for 24 hours or more after I got this replacement. I started thinking back to what I had changed. This morning, I had added the built in power widget to the home screen - so I could easily turn Blue Tooth off and on (I only need BT in the car). I wonder if this had anything to do with it. I have now removed the power widget from the home screen and will see if it does this again.

Droid Redux

Well after a hard reset (master reset), the rebooting robot – that automaton of lockups – kept locking up. In fact while driving to work, with the phone sitting on the passenger seat, it rebooted twice. Then once more in my jacket pocket while walking in to the office. I tried to show it to some folks in the office and it locked up and rebooted on them too.

I emailed Verizon customer support back with the news and asked if I could take it to a local outlet to have it replaced. I got some awesome service here and I want to give Kudos to Verizon on this – a rep checked for the closest store, called them and checked availability on the devices, then called me and let me know the address, who she spoke to at the store, and that they had some in stock and currently had quite a line of folks (so expect a little delay). All this from my email note. Well done Verizon.

I went to the store after work and only had to wait a couple of minutes. I now have a new Droid – and I expect this one will work fine.

These aren’t the Droids you’re looking for…

If my sly waving of my hand before my face while I said that didn’t work, perhaps you are Jabba the Hut. Anyway, I got my Motorola Droid phone yesterday! It seemed pretty nice, but locked up a few times almost right away. After having it for a couple of hours, and only using it with the screen on for perhaps 25 minutes it had locked up 10 times. Sometimes just turning on the screen and attempting to do the “swipe” motion that unlocks the phone would result in a lockup. Other times it would be in the web browser or just at the home screen trying to tap the “settings” icon. It would either freeze for 20 seconds then reboot itself (the bat signal Motorola Logo followed by the Red Eye – which is cool the first 3 times you see it). Other times it would just freeze and I would have to turn it off. On these occasions it would not turn back on without the “hold the camera button pressed while hitting power” trick.

It seems the hardware is pretty slick, and unless the reviews I have seen on this phone are extremely highly edited I must be the only person having this problem. I contacted Verizon support via email and they got back to me right away (Kudos there). The suggestion is to try the hard reset (also known as master reset), then setup the phone again and if it doesn’t work – have the phone replaced for a hardware problem. I’m going through setting it up again now. I’ll post back on progress.

Windows 7 Failed Install Reboot Loop Explained

As per my previous post, I spent the weekend upgrading my son’s and daughter’s Dell Latitude D820 notebooks. These were running Vista Ultimate 32 bit edition and I was upgrading them to Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit using the in-place upgrade method. I had previously done my own Dell D820 quite some time back. My son’s machine went fine. My daughter’s – not so much. It would start the upgrade, do the Copying Files, the Gathering programs and settings, the Expanding files, the Installing Features, and then at some point during the last phase (restoring programs and files) it would reboot and say “The upgrade was not successful. Your previous version of Windows is being restored. Do not restart your computer during this time”. This was after about 2 hours of “upgrading”. For those who have not been privileged enough to see this screen, it looks like this:

This would be on the screen for about 20 seconds or so, then the computer would reboot and do it all over again – to infinity and beyond as long as the power held out. Once I figured out the cause I reproduced this in a VM and left it doing it all night. In the morning it was blithely rebooting away. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. On reboot, it would show these choices:

Note that there is no “Windows Vista” option – and both of the listed options result in the same thing – that failed upgrade screen.

So, I restored the original configuration of the machine using Windows Home Server. (Yes, we did a backup immediately before starting the upgrade – didn’t you?) The restore took just about an hour and worked beautifully. This was the first time I have actually restored a backup with Home Server and it was flawless.

Now, even the first time we went though the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and uninstalled the few things it didn’t like (Learning essentials for Office, Microsoft Math, iTunes). I resolved to keep trying, so we went through preparing again and also removed printer drivers this time. Started the upgrade and waited about 2 hours. Would it work this time? Of course not. It did the same thing.

Restored the machine again (2nd time). Ran through the uninstalling of programs again, printer drivers again, and this time disabled some non-default services (some Windows Mobile connector ones). Started the upgrade and – same damn thing. This time I booted into WinPE and went through all of the Panther logs (setupact.log, setuperr.log, rollback.log). There wasn’t actually anything listed as a real “Failure”, but I did find one “warning” note about a redirected Documents folder. Just to be clear there are LOTS of warning notes even in the cleanest of installs, but this one made me wonder since the problem was NOT during the install phase. The problem was happening during the restore of profiles, programs, and files.

Restored the machine again (3rd time – way to go Home Server). This time after uninstalling programs, printer drivers, stopping non-default services, etc. I checked the folder redirection. Sure enough – the Documents folder was redirected from the normal “C:\Users\<user name>\Documents” to “C:\Users\<user name>\Documents\Documents”. Yes, that’s right – it was a subfolder of where it would be by default. Thinking “There’s no way this is going to work”, I changed it back to the default and ran the upgrade for the fourth time. What do you know? It worked.

Not content to simply leave it at that, I had to know if this is something that can be reproduced (and possibly happen to other people). So I fired up a Virtual Machine to test it Sunday evening. For this, I used Enterprise Edition as that was what I had handy. The steps were something like this:

1. Install Vista Enterprise Edition
2. Create a Documents folder under the Documents folder
3. Create a couple of files and folders there
4. Redirect C:\Users\<user id>\Documents to C:\Users\<user id>\Documents\Documents using the “Location” tab on the Documents folder properties dialog.
5. Apply Vista SP1
6. Apply Vista SP2
7. Apply the 31 other updates from Windows Update
8. Start the Windows 7 Enterprise Upgrade process
9. During the last phase, it reboots and you get the same problem as we had on my daughter’s machine

I let this go all night and this morning it was still rebooting and saying it was going to put the prior OS back. After several thousand reboots I gave up waiting for it to accomplish this miracle. So, anyone else have this problem? I know I spent mostly all weekend on it with four tries at the upgrade, three restores from backup then a repro in a VM.

Windows Home Server saves the day when Windows 7 upgrades fail

I’ve had Windows 7 on a few of our machines for quite some time. My wife’s machine got it right after the Beta ended (one of the free copies some Beta participants got), my test / dev machine got an MSDN copy the day it showed up on MSDN, etc. I upgraded my main notebook the first day it was available and I upgraded my son’s notebook yesterday. Then I tried to upgrade my daughter’s notebook. (Mine, my son’s, and my daughter’s are all Dell Latitude D820 machines with identical hardware configuration and Windows Vista Ultimate). Her machine went through the gathering files, expanding files, installing updates etc. just fine. It would get to the last phase where it moves the files back in place and would fail and then go into a reboot loop. It would say that the upgrade failed and it was restoring the previous version of Windows – then reboot in 10 seconds over and over and over and over – well you get the idea. It wouldn’t stop rebooting. This isn’t the “62% hang”, it isn’t the "BSOD” one, and doesn’t seem to have a solution yet.

Fortunately, I always make sure we have a current backup on Windows Home Server. We restored this (first time I have needed to) and it was right back to Vista running fine. Tried the upgrade again (after first making sure the upgrade advisor was green) and got the same problem. Restored from Home Server again and went to bed. This had taken the whole day.

Strange how both of our other D820 machines upgraded just fine.

I am an Idiot

If you patronize amusement parks, you too are an idiot. For example, today I plunked down $53 for the privilege of standing in line for 2 hours and 55 minutes for a 2 minute and 12 second ride. Let’s do the math here. 2 hours and 55 minutes is 10,500 seconds. 2 minutes and 12 seconds is 132 seconds. So my ratio of standing in the heat in a long line of people to time spent zooming around a roller coater was 98.7%. That’s right – I spent 98.7% of my time STANDING IN LINE (or for those not from the USA – standing on queue). I paid good money for the privilege of standing in that line too. Hence, I am an idiot, doofus, dork, you name it.

In fact, this Monday and Tuesday I have been a double idiot. That’s right – two amusement park visits in two days. Two bad experiences. Let’s see how those visits worked out:

Not Merry Farm

The first visit, on Monday, was to Not Merry Farm – a staple of the Greater Smog Angeles area. This area is so smoggy in fact that on the rare occasion that you get out of line and onto a coaster you can’t tell the difference between the sky and the ground when you go upside down because the sky is almost the color of asphalt. Think of your lungs and stay home. Anyway, we first went to the Not Merry website and checked out any special events. They showed that they were open from 10 AM to 10 PM. A quick check of the full events list for the day showed “yep, open 10 to 10”. Nothing else. At the Not Merry Farms gate, there is no indication of any problems. Yet, you go in and the two biggest attractions – the Coors Light (Silver Bullet anyway) and another big coaster are “not running today”. Also the BMX / Skateboard exhibition doesn’t run on Monday or Tuesday. Since the web site didn’t say this, and there was no sign at the gate saying “the following attractions are closed today” BEFORE you pay your money, we call bullshit on the operators of this park. We actually went there JUST TO RIDE THOSE COASTERS.

So, we decided to eat and then try some of the tamer rides. I decided not to get the pulled pork because they wanted $8.50 for it as opposed to the $7.50 for the cheeseburger – without fries. $4.50 extra for fries. Total for my wife, son, and I for a couple of pulled pork sandwiches, a burger, some fries, and a couple of sodas? $50.57! Can you believe the rip off? I’ve got news for them too – their fries suck. We rode a couple of rides but never got over the disappointment of the two main attractions being shut down.

Sick Flags Tragic Mountain

Mark me down as a double loser. Here in Santa Clarita is where I plunked down $53 in order to stand in line for 98.7% of my time. It’s no joke and no exaggeration. A full 2 hours and 55 minutes in line for the Excema 2 (they call it X2 for short) – and did that ever leave me scratching my head. It was a Tuesday, but the park was full so of course out of three cars they have they were running only one with the other two sitting there on a siding teasing us. There was no evidence anywhere of the little “wait is two hours from this point”, “wait is 45 minutes from this point”, etc. signs that other parks have. So we just melted along in the heat with a bunch of other drones all standing in line singing choruses of “I’ll stand in line and melt with you”. And standing, and standing. To break this down, we arrived at the park at 10:04 (they open at 10), parked the car where the guys in uniforms specified, made our way to the gate, plunked down our $53, ran for the bathrooms (shortest line all day!), then ran to the Excema 2. By this time it is 10:50. We wait 2 hours and 55 minutes, ride for 2 minutes 12 seconds, walk to the exit and it is 2:00 PM already! I guess you could ride the thing 3 times and that would be your entire day! All along the ride they have somebody in marketing’s interpretation of a “Type A Personality” which is NOT what I learned from psychology or from TV (That marketing droid needs to go back to school!). So we gave up on that and went to ride the log ride as it was a hot day. That line was only 26 minutes, with about a 3 minute ride. That brought my total to 97.4% of my time waiting in line!

I did notice that this park would like you to pay an extra $50 to get a flash past which lets you cut in line. Apparently bad manners are OK with them as long as you pay for the privilege. We decided that since they purposely only had one car running on the Excema 2, their business model must be “let’s frustrate everyone into paying for a flash pass”. Everyone else was scratching their heads too.

All in all a staycation would have been better than this, and my lawn would have gotten mowed. I think we should all avoid these amusement parks until they find a way to hold lines to a 30 minute maximum. I’m starting my boycott today.

I paid to stand in line – have you? Better yet, are you going to do it again?

Apple adds Security Vulnerabilities

Say what you want about Microsoft including Internet Explorer 8 in its Windows Update. At least you already had Internet Explorer installed and IE 8 is a more secure version than what you had. Sending version 8 to computers as part of Windows Update seems a reasonable and necessary thing. What’s Apple’s excuse? Why does Apple want to add security vulnerabilities to my computer and that of my wife, kids, etc.? That’s right: even after many months, nay a year, of outcry about Apple including Safari and MiniMe (sorry – MobileMe) in their “Updates” for iTunes the worm ridden ones are still at it:

Note the title bar says “Apple Software Updates”. Now, sure – they do say somewhat farther down that "Safari 4” and “MobileMe Control Panel” are new software. However, for folks used to Mozilla Firefox updates every few weeks, Windows Updates once a month (sometimes more), and other security updates – this looks like a needed security update. Never mind that its real purpose is to block Palm Pre owners from accessing the iTunes store. Yesterday I noticed my wife running her updates. Yes, she then had Safari and MobileMe installed. Thanks Apple for ADDING security vulnerabilities to her machine!

That’s right: adding vulnerabilities. Check Secunia here and see that Safari has its share of them – some not patched yet. Any time you add new software – especially a browser – to a machine you are adding vulnerabilities. Apparently Apple is so worried about getting some market penetration for their lame browser that they need to attempt to disguise it as a needed update and then must hope to trick unsuspecting users into clicking it. Not cool Apple! In fact, if your darn iPods didn’t require iTunes in order to update them correctly I wouldn’t have any of your software on any of our machines.

Fortunately in this case, Safari was installed for all of 10 minutes. Here’s hoping that Apple will come to their senses and stop trying to pass off this foistware on folks.

Digital Gouging

An update on our forced conversion to Digital cable – after another 25 minutes on the phone with Comcrap they did indeed get all of the boxes working and no longer showing the silly “problem with your service” or the “available shortly messages from the prior post. Now, we had been assured back when they shipped these 5 boxes to us that there would be no change to our bill. However, we were informed by this agent that not only did we have an additional $6.99 monthly for that second box (you know, the one they advertise that you can switch your “on demand” movies to when your wife or husband is snoring too loud and never bother to mention that it costs extra for the extra box?) but we would also have to pay an additional $1.99 for the silly little DTA box. So $108 extra a year to have one less tuner than we had before this silly conversion. Still Craptastic. It took a couple of hours, but I finally did get up the nerve to take the little DTA from the garage (making that TV back to only getting 2 – 30) and hooking it up to the TiVo. So there is one Comcast DCH70 sitting there hooked to the TV and a DTA sitting right next to it for the TiVo. It was a pain getting the IR receiver to accept the TiVo’s channel changing codes. Fortunately, the code is 10104-B for these Pace manufactured DCX50 boxes and if you peruse the internet long enough to learn how to put the TiVo into advanced selection mode you can select that code easy enough. If it wasn’t for House, Psych, and Burn Notice being on channels that have been “converted” by Craptastic to digital only we would call them up and say come get your stupid boxes. As it is, we will be calling their bilking dept. to find out why they insist on substantially charging more for less service (and asking for our two days of time spent on this back).

It’s Craptastic

Or is that Comcraptic? I never remember. All I know is on June 29th, we had the TV service we wanted. All 5 TV’s (4 in the house, 1 in the garage for workouts) could view any of the channels from 2 to about 70 or so. The Series 2 Humax branded Tivo could record any channel, and I could watch a different channel by using the tuner in the TV itself. Pure analog bliss. We could get a “season pass” to House on channel 42 (I am still catching up on older years as I just discovered House this year). We could even watch TV in the kids rooms upstairs if we wanted to. It was the American Couch Potato Dream.

Then, on July 1st, (in some areas) Comcraptic decided to change all that. Down came the dreams of watching House chow Vicodin while humiliating some clinic patient. Channels above 39 just up and went away. Not even a “hey idiot, you need a new box now, bwahhhaaahaha” on the screen for those channels. The reason? Who knows – it could be that they want to free up bandwidth on their cable infrastructure so that they can get more people to buy on demand movies. It could be that they just want people to have to pay them more to have more TV’s in the house. It could even be that they want to take over the DVR market from Tivo. I don’t know, and I don’t care. A few months back they had contacted my wife and told her that this would happen. At the time, they said they would send us “boxes” that would allow us to survive the changeover without losing access to Gregory House and Cuddly – oops, I mean Cuddy – in the process. They also stated that it would not change our billing (which was a lie – check our bill and see!)

These boxes turned out to be a couple of DCH-70’s with M-cards in them. M-cards are cable cards that allow multiple streams, but these boxes are locked to one stream. They also had three of the "DTA” boxes which I believe is short for “Doesn’t Televise Anything”, while DCH must be “Disturbingly Crappy Hardware”. We spent a couple of hours hooking all these things up yesterday so we could get back to watching Thirteen spar with House. As with anything to do with Comcraptic, I figured, “It’ll never work”, but tried it anyway.

So, we followed the directions to hook all the stuff up. We wrote down all the serial numbers of the boxes, the host ID’s, and even the MAC addresses. We turned them all on. We went to the website and it only listed the two DCH-70 boxes. Not only that, but they didn’t even show a serial number that was even close to the same format as what we wrote down. It appears that, even though the instructions say to get the serial numbers of the boxes – they mean the serial number of the m-cards somehow. So we clicked to activate them and were rewarded with a “thanks, now go wait 45 minutes” message.

After we waited, and waited, and went to dinner, and waited, we finally decided – OK 6 hours should be more than enough. My wife called the number which was proudly displayed by all of the TV’s hooked to the “DTA’ boxes:

Appearances to the contrary, this means that “at least the device can output an NTSC signal over cable”. Its even a useful one as it gives the phone number. Hurray!

So she got “Agent J” on the phone who said, “There is an outage in your area and it may take 24 hours”. This translates from the fairly opaque helpdeskese into “My shift ends in 5 minutes and I know our shit doesn’t work but I want to go home.”. Needless to say it has been over 24 hours now and it still doesn’t work. The two TV’s hooked to the DCH boxes show this:

We press “OK” and get this rewarding message:

According to the instructions, you press OK and it will activate. Actually no, the instructions say to push the “on demand” button and then go buy an on demand test movie that is supposed to be no charge but will “activate” you. However you can’t do that – you have to get past this blue stuff first – and I think we may have worn out the batteries on the remote pressing OK. It’s nice to know that I can watch thousands of free shows whenever Comcraptic gets around to saying I can though.

Now, the channels seem to work on those two main DCH boxes. At least 2 – 42 or so for sure as I have tried those. But since it won’t “activate” the other three TV’s just say to call Comcraptic. We’ll do that again later, hopefully before shift change is due. If we do get it fixed, we’ll have to then be transferred to the bilking dept. so we can request a pro-rata refund for this lack of service.

Oh yeah – and then I need to go to the store and buy a newer Tivo that can handle a cable coming from the back and getting glued to the stupid DCH box’s infrared receiver so the Tivo can change channels again. At which point I will have ONE tuner instead of two so can only watch what the Tivo records. Progress at its best, in fact, its Craptastic!

Cover Flow – lots of notes

Yes, I know I’ve already told you that Apple hates me and my family. However, they are at it again. The other day, my son mentions that all of his Rise Against albums are missing their cover art – both on his computer and on his iPod. So I fire up iTunes on my computer. Sure enough, Apple has deleted the cover art PAINSTAKINGLY added to 39 of my 160 albums. Yes, 25% of the album art gone – replaced by these:

Yes, Apple must think that we all want 1/4 of our albums to look like this in iTunes and our iPods – it is just so cool looking who wouldn’t want it to look like that, right?

So – I check my backup copies on the server. Sure enough, iTunes has decided to “update” the afflicted files. The modified date/time is much newer than the backups on my home server. Figuring that if I restore the backups, Apple will decide to “update” them again, I resigned myself to going back to albumart.org (which got me most of them) and Google images (for the rest) and painstakingly tell iTunes to USE the images again.

Fun, Fun, Fun ‘til Apple Takes our Album Art Away.

Apple: please learn to write software that doesn’t suck like this. Eating your customer’s data is “not cool”.

Buying shoes – a pain in the sole

I hate buying shoes. I’m a tightwad anyway, and lately I have been running on the treadmill in my old, old, “basketball” style shoes – the ones that are leather all the way around. The only problem is that they also had holes in the soles and also the insides were so worn out that the plastic inners were showing through. So, I decided it was time to only use those for mowing the lawn and time to get some running shoes for the treadmill.

I went to Sports Authority to look at some the other day. I was amazed at how many brands and models of running shoes they have! A veritable smorgasbord to choose from. The only differentiator seemed to be price and color, because all any of them said was “man made uppers”. Nothing about “stability”, “cushioning”, etc. Nothing about for “over prontators” or “under pronators”, etc. Not only did the boxes and labels on the shoes themselves not say, but there was no literature explaining it either. How the hell was I supposed to pick from this morass? So I came home and looked at the manufacturers web site for one of the brands that was well represented at Sports Authority. I started with ASICS. These folks had a decent site and good information about their shoes and which were meant for which type of foot, etc. However you couldn’t print the list of their shoes with pronation range because they put it in some stupid little sub-window with its own little non-standard scroll bar. (ASICS – fix your site; this is a great resource – we need to be able to print it). So I had to pick a couple of models, print them, and head back to the store.

Well, I found those models actually hurt my left ankle. The right one was fine, but the left on both models hurt. I tried a couple of pair of each to be sure it wasn’t just some strange defect. OK, back to the web sites.

Next, I tried the New Balance web site. Not as well organized as the ASICS one, and didn’t easily offer data on what type of foot/gait their shoes were designed for – you had to dig for it. About this point, I found that the Sports Authority site gave better info on these shoes than the New Balance site. Between the two sites, I picked two more models of shoes and went back.

Of course, the Sports Authority brick and mortar store didn’t carry either of those two models. About this time I was getting tired of this and just picked a New Balance model that seemed to have the right level of arch for my near flat feet and looked to me to be a stability shoe. Bought them, came back and checked the web sites, and sure enough they were the right type.

I got to run in them today for the first time and they felt fine.

But I have to ask: why in the hell do they make this so hard? It should have been EASY to go to any of these manufacturer web sites, click “men”, click “running”, click “compare” and get a printable list of what foot type / gait type each of their shoes is made for and what its key characteristics are. How can they NOT do that? All I can think of is massive incompetence on the competitive advantage they could get by making this easy and by placing such information clearly on their boxes and in stores.

Apple Still Hates Me

Today I woke the computer from sleep mode a few minutes after I resumed from sleep. My computer usually resumes a little better than I do: most of the time in a happier state and it doesn’t even need to shave. Anyway, this morning after the computer woke up the Apple Software Update came up. I figured, oh, there must be an update for some critical vulnerability in QuickTime! Possibly they released a new firmware version for the iPod and want me to update iTunes. Something at least marginally in my interest was bound to be there, right? Wrong! All they had in the list was a lame-oh also ran browser aptly named “Safari” and some silly thing called the MobilMe Control Panel. Of course I didn’t want to go on Safari as FireFox (default browser) and IE 8 are good enough for me and I sure didn’t want to become Mini-Me or MobilMe or whatever.

Revenge of the turds

So I simply hit the quit button as their disingenuous attempt to get me to load useless crap had once again been foiled. However, they managed to extract their revenge: for the next hour – until I killed it in Task Manager – the Apple Software Update program managed to take an entire core (causing Task Manager to show 50% utilization). Good thing Apple didn’t write it to take both cores or the computer would have become completely unresponsive.

Apple – stop trying to foist your silly crapware on me. I could understand advertising it on your web site. But just because I am required to load your excuse for a media player to manage the music on my iPod doesn’t mean that you should get to advertise junk neatly disguised as updates. Take a hint from say Ubuntu. Their software updates are just patches and upgrades to the THINGS I ALREADY HAVE INSTALLED. Same thing for Microsoft – critical updates and recommended updates are just for what is already installed. Get with the program guys.

I am in Hell, sir!

Or at least I’ve just been there. Dell Hell that is, and the line from Mr. Christian in The Bounty sums up that mephitic place of perdition nicely. For those that haven’t heard “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” lately, Dell Hell is where you are when your machine won’t work and support doesn’t seem to respond. I’ve actually been there twice recently.

The first time, my son’s machine was going into thermogenic shock. Yes, it was overheating. This was a Latitude D820, and it would reproduce by playing an MP3, booting from a memory key into the diagnostics and running them, or just entering the BIOS screen and moving around between items for 30 seconds. After several emails back and forth with Dell “technicians” (all of which told them the specific of an overheating machine and that it would do it in their diagnostics), I got a suggestion back from them: reinstall Windows. I figured, gee – that may somehow miraculously cure Windows (how I sure don’t know), but it won’t do a whole lot for the machine overheating and turning itself off during their diagnostics. I finally got nasty and sent the “flame note” asking them what part of Windows was running when booted from their diagnostics on a memory key and insisting on escalation to a supervisor.

That got a new mainboard installed. However the problem remained. We then got a new board again, a new fan, a new heat sink, new memory, and a new processor. Problem solved (it was apparently the heat sink all along).

I thought I was out of the Dell Hell, that Latitude Limbo, that processor purgatory. Alas, no – next my machine (an identical Latitude) started on the journey to Gre’thor to see Fek’lhr. I came down to use the notebook and found it on a Blue Screen – something about memory management – and it had hung at 0% on the dump file. I powered it off and it would not come back on. At least the screen wouldn’t show anything. No post test, no logo, no boot, nada.

So I took it out of the dock and opened the screen, but that produced nothing better. It would have on solid green LED, two blinking ones and then would power itself off after 60 seconds. Not good. I look up that particular combo of blinking Christmas Tree lights and it is something to do with memory. So I swap the memory with another machine that is working. The bad machine is still bad and the RAM from mine is chugging along great in the other box. I then try just one stick of RAM (1 GB instead of 2) in mine. Low and behold that works and it passes the diags. Put any 2nd stick of RAM in and the machine is useless. OK, needs a mainboard.

Back to the email with Dell Support. I have next day on-site service so this should be a snap, right? Send them a note on a Sunday (3/22/2009) and again, and again, and then finally get a reply on Friday. Still in Dell Hell like this guy. A couple more emails back and forth and they dispatch the mainboard which gets installed on Tuesday. OK, so that’s 9th day on-site support.

Every been in Glade Gehanna, Trough Torment, or Dell Hell yourself? Well I have! (I can just see Andy Rooney starting out with that one…)

Apple Hates Me

I'm not sure what I've done to Apple, but whatever it was it must have been something major. They either really, really hate me or iTunes is just a piece of garbage. Heck, it could be both.

For Christmas, the kids, my wife, and I all got new iPod Nano's - the 16 GB Gen 4 variety. These are pretty sweet little devices. I think Apple pretty much knocked it out of the park on the hardware for these new Nanos. However, the software is another story. In fact, the software is abysmal. (Even the OS on the Nano itself isn't perfect as the Nano locked up on me after about 15 minutes of use). The real problems didn't start though until I wanted to actually PLAY some music.

I already had 146 albums on my computer organized in Windows Media Player in pretty standard fashion as Artist \ Album \ Song. Many were MP3, but a few WMA's accidentally snuck in there too. I installed iTunes 8.x and told it to import the C:\users\GIL Dude\Music folder. It complained about the WMA's and said it would convert them (all other players I have used handle WMA fine). It seemed like this worked. The operative word is seemed like. I went ahead and synched my new Nano and that worked fine. I tried the new "Cover Flow" and saw just silly "Music Symbols" and no album art. Funny, every single album there has a folder.jpg, albumartsmall.jpg, and zunealbumart.jpg - iTunes could have taken its pick. But, nope, it just wanted to show silly little music symbols.

Next, I told it to go get album art. This requires signing into the Apple Store (which I did). This also brings up how my kids are supposed to get album art on their machines. In order to create an Apple Store account it requires a credit card. I am NOT giving my card to 12 and 14 year olds. Sorry Apple, another strike. So, it retrieves the album art (supposedly). It turns out that Apple only lets you download the album art for albums that it sells. (No other music software I have used has this restriction). It further doesn't identify some albums well, so you end up with something that looks like this:

Looks like it got 10% of the album art. So, I had to learn to right click the album and hit "Get Info", then drag and drop or paste the album art (that is already in the folder with the album damn it) into a little box, and then iTunes goes and rewrites the mp3 with the JPG file inside it (a huge waste of space since it should only need one copy of it, not one copy per song). So, I go through that, and sync the Nano again. Now the cover flow works! Sweet!

I had helped the kids and my wife get this far too and it was time to take a trip to my Mom's house. We took the Nano's with us. On the trip, we find that many of the MP3's won't play. Generally it was entire albums. It would play 1/2 second of the song, then immediately display that it was at 8 seconds of the song and then stop. If you hit the "rewind" (back) button it would actually then go and play the song. But there was no way to just listen without fiddling and hitting back all the time when it would stop playing. When we got home, we noticed that iTunes had a similar problem with the same files: it would play 1/2 second and then skip to the next song. There was no way to get them to play at all in iTunes.

Jack the Ripper

I had to test each album and found that about 1/2 - about 73 of them would not play. I spent some time searching the Apple support site. I spent more time with Google. I found reports of this on all types of Apple hardware dating back to 2005. Many folks had tried "fixing" their ID3 tags, etc. but there wasn't a consistent fix. I went ahead and used a stripper (no, not that kind - an ID3 tag stripper) to remove the tags from some sample songs and they still wouldn't play. I then resigned myself to re-ripping all 73 albums using iTunes to do it. Remember, these songs played fine in Media Player, fine on Zunes, and fine on a Creative Zen Micro. Only Apple (did I mention they hate me?) wouldn't play them.

So, I start the re-ripping. Apple is really helpful there. You get some strange dialogs like this:

As far as I can tell, this mean exactly squat. If you want me to pick between two options, at least show something unique about them. iDorks!

Another issue I kept hitting is the accuracy of the CD database being used by Apple. It did have some songs and album names correct that Windows Media Player had gotten wrong - but overall it was far worse than Media Player. Apple's DB had typo's galore, as you can see here:

(The correct entry is left there after I copied the iTunes ripped versions.) I had a lot of manual correcting on things like this. Other times, the software just up and did a WTF. For example seemingly randomly renaming items like this:

This last were some of the WMA files it "converted" and nicely jacked the numbering all up.

As if that wasn't enough, I couldn't find some things at first after the re-rip. Then I realized that it decided that both "Night Ranger's Greatest Hits" and "ZZ Top's Greatest Hits" were "Compilations" and should go under "Compilations\Greatest Hits" (yes, the album name was just "Greatest Hits". It actually threw both artists albums into the same folder:

As I said, WTF. As in WTF were they thinking when they built that? So, more manual corrections. In fact, I spent HOURS on manually correcting this junk - all because Apple can't be bothered to play 1/2 of my MP3 files that work on all other hardware.

All told I spent over 30 hours on this (mostly with the corrections - it doesn't take that long to do the rips). So, you get to decide - does Apple hate me or does their software just suck? It's not an exclusive or either, so you have three options:

• They hate me
• Their software (iTunes) sucks
• They hate me and iTunes sucks.

I'm leaning towards the latter.

How green is too green?

It seems you can't pick up a computer or IT related magazine without having the word green somewhere on the cover - generally accompanied by an article about what vendor xyz is doing to increase the 'greenness' of their product or service or by what provider abc did with their data center to lower the carbon footprint. In general this is great. We get devices that suck less power, operating systems (like Vista) where sleep works better and interim power states save more power, a cleaner planet, etc. That's gotta be a good thing? Right?

That's where my concept of 'too green' comes in. I'm not talking about 32,255,7 although that is too green to. Just like how you can have wood that is 'too green' to burn right, you can have something that is just 'too green' for its own good and doesn't really work right. (In this sense, you can just about think of green in both the 'earth friendly' and 'new' terms and you come out about right - almost like a puppy dog; trying to please but not necessarily doing it right). In fact, that is the topic for this post - we'll call the example today:

Stupid notebook tricks - or the green that was too green.

Take a nice new notebook - say a Lenovo T400 series machine. A nice box certainly. And some of the things I mention here will reproduce on other machines like current HP ones. However, I have personal experience with some stupid T400 tricks, so I will call them out in particular.

Build your T400 with a nice corporate image of Vista Enterprise Edition, complete with the latest drivers in the driver store. Place it on a port replicator and connect it all up. Sign in to your favorite Instant Messaging program (we're still using Office Communicator 2005). Walk away for a meeting. When you come back, the screen is blank. Cool, that's green! Move the mouse to wake the screen up and you notice you are no longer signed into your IM program. If you look quickly enough you see the little 'network' icon in the system tray shows that you lost your network connection momentarily. Hmm. Time to check into that you say? So did I. Next, I set the screen to turn off after just 1 minute. Started up a ping from another machine so I could watch the responses (either ping -t or a custom tool). I also stuck a mirror behind the T400 port replicator so that I could see the indicator lights on the NIC connector. Sure enough, when the screen blanked the NIC lights went out for a second then back on. The PING application noticed - it showed a couple of failures before continuing. Move the mouse, and the lights go off again. The PING fails again, and then comes back.

Now try this same thing when you are undocked (maybe in a meeting using Netmeeting or something similar). In this configuration - undocked - you notice that when the screen blanks nothing changes. That's good, right? We stay connected. But, then you move the mouse to get your screen back and then it disconnects and reconnects. That's got to be the stupidest thing it could do. Leave the network running great while the screen is blank but when the user wants to do some work - let's shut it down and restart it. Did you notice you lost your Netmeeting?

After you start looking into this (I needed a couple of peers to help), you find it is some new 'green' built into the latest Intel networking chipsets and drivers. It only works on Vista, because it relies on being notified by the opeating system that the screen is blank. It's called ''System Idle Power Saving" or SIPS. You can read about it in this PDF from Intel. (It claims that it 'renegotiates' when the screen blanks and again when it comes back on - but you can test this and it only does that in the docked state: when undocked it only bothers when the screen comes back on.) Looking at the charts they provide, it shows that it could go from say 22 mA to 4 mA in certain scenarios. Sounds good until you realize you lose your network connection. What if you were on VPN? How about a WebEx or Netmeeting?

I checked the event log, and like the documentation says it does renegotiate to the slowest it can. When connected to my 1 Gbps hub, it renogotiated down to 10 Mbps. So, if I were to - for example - connect to my machine using Remote Desktop from home and attempt to build a new image and copy it to a network location it would do so at 10 Mbps (because the screen is still blank). That nice new 4.8 Gb Vista image copying at 10 Mbps? Epic Fail.

Now, to be fair - I haven't yet tested what happens when you are on VPN or NetMeeting. I do know that the Intel documentation claims to only do this if the network is idle. They don't seem to define what idle means to them. What it certainly does NOT mean is that 'there are no TCP connections' - because it definitely doesn't seem to care about that. It drops you. Hence the signed out IM program. It may have some arbitrary packet rate that it is figuring 'less than x per second means idle' or some such. Whatever it is doing to calculate idle, I'll call it 'Fail'. It's just too green.

Cue up Captain Kirk and Scotty:

Capt: Scotty, emergency beam out!
Scott: Captain, I canna do it; the transporter system's gone into power save mode. It'll take two minutes to get back ta full power if'n it doesn't blue screen.

You see? Too Green!

The case of the Irritating Ibex

This past weekend I decided it was time to do maintenance and updates on my test systems. Both the notebook and the desktop are setup dual boot with Ubuntu being one of the operating systems. Both were running 8.04 which had been upgraded from 7.10. The 7.10 -> 8.04 upgrade had gone flawlessly on the notebook, but on the desktop (after an over the network upgrade), Ubuntu decided that my wired Ethernet adapter did not exist. After RTFM'ing noob (searching the internet) I had resolved the problem. I figured this time it would have to be better.

(For those that don't know, Ubuntu's current practice is to name releases in alliteration with animal names. Hence the 8.04 release was "Hardy Heron" and the 8.10 is "Intrepid Ibex").

I started by reading the upgrade readme available here. It seemed that I was going to be OK going to 8.10, as my video card is an nVidia FX 5500 which is not on the list of cards for which support for 3D was mysteriously withdrawn. It claimed that my card would be upgraded to the 173 or 177 driver (whatever the hell that meant). So I started both the Desktop and the Notebook upgrading. There was a simple, well documented procedure to tell the 8.04 LTS version that it was OK to upgrade to a non-LTS new version, and they were off and running.

Painless, right? Ubuntu has a fairly well deserved reputation as being easy to install and working on a lot of platforms (as they are not obsessed with not shipping non-free binaries - hence they have a 3D driver for nVidia included). However, this upgrade was worse than the last one. It installed that new "173" driver for my nVidia card, then promptly told me that it wasn't working.


So, be sure that there is a supported nVidia GPU in the system. Check - I did that before installing. Duh! Like I would wait until after the install to check that. OK, next - ensure that the nVidia device files have been created properly. Great! We'll do that! Uhm, how do we do that? Now, I know that on Linux and Unix IO is almost always to a file but what the heck am I supposed to do to check that they were created correctly? Maybe this should offer to fix it for me? Oh, wait - they have a link to the nVidia Readme. Or not. Instead just a vague reference to consulting the nVidia Readme and not a link. Where is this mystical file? Wait, this was just a less snotty way of saying "RTFM noob" wasn't it?

Even worse, on my system I could not even read the dialog as it was positioned off to the left so far that half of it was not even on the screen and it could not be moved (sync problem - it would not sync properly to my 20" 1600x1200 panel). I had to use a different screen just to read the message. Once I clicked OK, it would then show me some options. One of them was something about fixing the problem and reconfiguring. Great! I figured I don't know enough to boot to a console and go edit xconfig.org or some shit, so I would let the GUI do it. That worked great if what I was looking for was a blank screen. However, I was figuring even the normal drab brown Ubuntu default desktop would be better than a blank screen.

I gave up, and decided to try a different video card (an nVidia 6800 GT I had laying around). After finding that the new card took more power than my supply would put out (yes, the power supply actually emitted an over current alarm - a loud screech!), and finding out that the only bandaids in the house were some Disney ones (I always get cut plugging and unplugging molex connectors), I put the old card back in. I figured - I will just update the Windows XP partition and give up for now and re-install Ubuntu from CD (which I had downloaded).

I had already set XP to "standard VGA" in preparation for swapping cards. Since I didn't really end up swapping I just updated XP to the latest driver for the 5500 FX from the nVidia site. That was easy, just run setup. I then thought, well - one last try for the current Ubuntu install. Wham! It came up correctly. No warning about video not working, checking for supported GPU's or running sudo someshit.conf. It's up!

About this time I decided to check the notebook. It had survived the update pretty well. It has no sound now, but otherwise it worked. In fact, it has "some sound". The Ubuntu "enter your ID" sound works, and so does the login sound. But no apps can play sounds. Flash can't, and even the audio configuration applet only plays beeps. I give up on that one for now.

I then wanted to compare round-tripping some docx and xlsx files through OpenOffice with the latest Ubuntu. Whups! 8.10 comes with the 2.4.x branch and not the new 3.0.x series. I went to go upgrade, but Ubuntu won't upgrade it until 9.04. So I thought, the Backports - that'll have it. Apparently I am too early for that. So I went hunting on the internet and found this. Read it and weep. Weep for the "setup.exe" that I downloaded and installed in moments on the Windows XP partition. Apparently to install this Deb package I need type about as much text on the command line as this blog. I think I'll just go play with Open Office on Windows, Ubuntu had sapped enough productivity already this last weekend.

Comcast - royal screwups or just criminals?

I've heard nothing but bad things about Comcast customer service. I generally haven't had to call them for anything the last few years, so I had no real experience of my own to go on. However, we recently got really tired of having two seperate accounts - one for cable TV and one for internet access (which started way back when it was ATTBI). It wouldn't have been a problem having two accounts, but Comcast's online systems seem incapable of accepting automatic monthly payment when a phone number has two accounts associated with it. We could get on account on auto, but not the other. We just had a simple request - here are our two account numbers that match our phone number and address. Please merge them so that we can automatically pay. Sounds like a 5 minute request, right?

Well - you'd think so anyway. My wife called them and after a few minutes of wading through the phone trees, told me that our internet access would be down for a few "moments". I then heard her let the Comcast agent go. Red Alert! Battle Stations! I told her, "you don't let them off the line until it works because they usually do something wrong and I hear they are clueless." Since I was planning to work from home the next morning, internet access was going to be important. Well, we stopped for dinner and an hour later - no access. We rebooted the cable modem - no access. We could ping Comcast's DNS servers, but not get out to anywhere else. So it was some sort of software block - some blockhead in customer service twiddled the bits wrong.

My wife called them back and got another agent. This agent told her that the people in "billing" went home and there was nothing she could do. We called back. Got a helpful person this time. It took 20 minutes, but he got our access back. Had to refresh the DHCP address in the router - but then it was working. However - open Outlook, and get prompted for a password. Shields Up! Arm Photon Torpedoes! That's right - they deleted all of our accounts as part of this. No more master account (can't logon to to the web pages, can't access email) and all 4 of us had our accounts / access deleted.

Now, we are back on the phone again. The next rep's computer "wasn't working" so she transferred us (it must have been time for her to go home). We are now on the line with YACI (Yet Another Comcast Idiot). I'm sure we will be told that there is nothing they can do and that the people who can do anything just went home. I just can't understand how such an inept company can be in business. It must cost them a bunch to take extra calls (hours now!) when their agents don't handle simple calls without cutting off their customer's accounts. I guess it must just be due to their area monopolies (I am 15,000 feet from a DSL CO). Otherwise, I can't explain it. I'd leave if they weren't the only game in town.

Who knows? I've even heard that you can't get your email addresses back. Maybe I'll end up being JDude123987@comcast.net after this. In fact, I had a picture of myself on my profile that showed up on this blog. It is now gone - it was hosted at http://home.comcast.net. I'm leaning towards criminals.

Update - after that last call the accounts were all restored from backup. So we got our correct email addresses back and even my photo for my profile here on Blogger came back. So, hours later we are back up. A simple request to customer service results in this. I can't even imagine how long we would have been down if we didn't work in technology. For example, if my Mom had this happen - when would she have noticed that her primary account had been deleted and her email didn't work anymore? Maybe the next day or the one after that? I still need to decide the main question though: does Comcast just hate their customers or are they just incompetent? I know, I know, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". But still - it makes you wonder...

Global Accounts Infrastructure Deployment Council

Wow, that title is a mouthful. It's also where I've been for the last several days. That said, the rest of this post is under NDA. That's right: all two of you who read this can't tell anyone what you read here. Wait - that must have just seeped in from the last several days of presentations - all of which started with some NDA slide or another. After a bit you get tired of hearing about Nonsense Dispersal Agreements anyway. We all know that conferences spew nonsense: no need to have slides about it.

So, this was another conference that tires you out to no end. Reception the first night, then up at 5:00 to do email before sessions, sessions until 5:45, then back on the bus and a dinner from 7:00 until 10:30 then finally back to the hotel and to bed. Next day, up at 5:00 to do email before the sessions and sessions until 5:45 then a steering committee dinner from 6:30 to something late. About the same the third day. At least the stuff is all interesting - it just gets to be tiring after awhile. All that said, I wouldn't change it: we need all that time to get everything in.

One of the funniest happenings was the network there at the Executive Briefing Center. Anyone who has been to Microsoft's Redmond campus lately has probably gotten a print out of an ID and password for accessing the "MSFTGUEST" wireless network. You try to open say www.cnn.com and get redirected to a place to logon - similar to how most hotel networks are setup. Nothing new there. However, in this case - for the first two days - Internet Explorer wouldn't display the site. Firefox would work fine! Now, as embarassing as that must have been for the hosts, it does show that Microsoft does not make web pages that only work in Internet Explorer. It happened to be on Firefox download day, so I needed to use FF 2.014 to connect to the MSFTGUEST network so I could download FF 3.0. That just sounds wrong when you are on an MS network. Worked fine, but then VPN wouldn't work. Its amazing how one of the largest and most successful software engineering firms can't run a wireless guest network that - well - works. Most people using classic VPN solutions such as Cisco, Nortel, or the built in MS VPN L2TP could not connect. Only the people using SSL VPN's or RPC over HTTP (which my company doesn't allow) could get their mail. I finally got in part time by using a Citrix connection to remote desktop. At one point that wouldn't work either and I had to use OWA. I guess they had to take the folks who would normally create a working network and devote them to fixing Vista?

Other than the wireless snafu, the rest of the conference was engaging and fairly interesting (as usual some sessions more so than others). Thanks to Paula, Joseph, and Karen for making the conference a successful and interesting experience.