Why Does Hollywood Hate Their Customers?

Just before Christmas I was looking for some stocking stuffers and I came across a movie my wife and I had missed when it was in theaters: the remake of Total Recall. I went ahead and picked it up and placed it in her Christmas stocking. We planned to watch it on the 26th, after attending Jack Reacher in the theater and getting some dinner.

We had a lot of trouble simply watching Total Recall. I’ll detail it below. First though let me cover a couple of things:

• We’ve never pirated movies. We actually like big budget Hollywood movies and think the people working on the films should be compensated and that folks should not be violating copyright.
• The current copyright term lengths are absolutely ridiculous and get more ludicrous every time that Steamboat Willie gets close to going public domain. Copyright is definitely no longer what it was intended to be and is now a tax on society instead of a boon.

OK, that said, on to why Hollywood seems to hate us.

We open the box so we can watch the movie. Inside are two disks. This box is supposed to contain both the “Director’s Cut” and the “Theatrical Version”. At first glance, we can’t figure out which disk to put in.

One says just “Original Film” and “Unrated”. The other says all of this: “Original Film”, “Theatrical Version”, “PG-13”, “Extended Director’s Cut”, and “Unrated”. I make what I thought was a solid guess and go for the second one with all the words on it since neither disk says anything like “bonus content” or “behind the scenes” or “gag reel”. I put it in and it defaults to “Theatrical Version”. There doesn’t appear to be a way to change the little “dot” that tells you which one is selected. The “Director’s Cut” seems to be a different color, and although we can change the color back and forth, the “dot” won’t move. We give up and try the other disk. Nope, bogus bonus content that nobody wants.

Back to the original disk. I change the color again with the right arrow and press enter. Only THEN does the dot move over to show the selection changed. That’s right: it moves when you actually tell it to play – and of course only shows for a half second. It is very hard to tell which version you have selected.

We thought we were home free. We were enjoying the movie up until it got to 1:45:03. At that point the picture froze for about 5 seconds and the Blu-Ray player rebooted. What the heck? How can a disk be so defective right out of the box that it reboots the damn player? So, we fire it up again and get as close as we can to 1:45:03 by using the scene select. We start it up and sure enough, the player reboots at the same place. Boy these devices with an operating system and DRM are crazy. I never had this happen with old DVDs. If you got a problem one, you fast forwarded through any bad spots. But this one reboots reliably right at this same point. By the way, we had one outstanding software update on the player so we ran that and got up to date. Same problem. We ended up having to go past the area with scene select that back up until 1:46:00 so we could watch the rest of the movie.

All in all, between getting the right disk in there, getting the Director’s Cut selected properly, having the player reboot multiple times and having to get everything back to the right place we wasted about 30 minutes just trying to watch the damn movie.

Wait, what? Yes, 30 minutes wasted due to just stupid stuff like:

• Improperly labeled disks
• Poor implementation of DVD Menu
• Section on the disk capable of rebooting Blu-Ray players (probably something with the DRM scheme; who knows)

Now – how about the pirated version? From what I hear, you just search for it, download it and play it. No stupid unskippable region calling me a pirate and trying to claim that copyright violation is equivalent to theft (per the law, it isn’t). No preview trailers that I have to fast forward, no reboots, no problems.

Why does Hollywood insist on delivering a product that is inferior to that delivered by the folks pirating Hollywood videos? My only conclusion is that they hate their customers.

My “Three Screen” problem

I admit it: I have a first world problem. If you are reading this, you probably have some too. My first world problem is one of “too many screens”. I’ve got a notebook computer, a Nexus 7 (7 inch Android tablet), and an absolutely awful phone – a Motorola Droid 3 stuck forever running Android 2.3 even though 4.0 came out only 3 months after the release of this extremely lousy phone. In fact, Motorola wants to offer me a $100 rebate to buy one of their current phones since they screwed up so badly on the Droid 3 and their lack of commitment to updates. My three screen problem comes into play when I want to sit on the couch. Yes, the couch.

You see, I may have mentioned that I have three screens. And I need all of them there with me. I don’t want to have them all there. I’d prefer to have just the Nexus 7. But what if my phone rings? What if I want to edit my Google Docs Spreadsheet? I almost always end up carrying all three of these devices around the house because they just can’t seem to pickup each other’s tasks. For instance the phone. Why in the heck can’t I leave it on the charger and have it send the calls over to my Nexus 7? They are both Android and they are both on the same WiFi network. I mean I do Google+ hangouts (video calls) on the tablet all the time so I know it has acceptable hardware to handle a voice call. Get with it Google – set this up so that calls can show up on the most convenient device.

Next, I come in from running and showering and sit down. I browse the web a bit on the tablet and then want to enter my stats into my Google Docs Spreadsheet. Can I do that on the tablet? Well, sort of. It will come up. But it has an “Edit” button on each row that you have to hit to edit that row and then a submit button you have to click to save the row. It is a major pain to edit this way, so I grab the notebook and do it. Honestly Google – fix this. You’ve been saying you would for months. Please ship the update that allows normal editing on a tablet.

Three screens. This sucks. Google, you can fix this for me so that I only need to keep one of these with me when I am in the house. Please, please do so.

Apparently it’s bloat week for Verizon and Motorola

So, not only did Verizon and Motorola completely ignore this (and the multitude of other people telling them similar things), they seem to have decided that this is the week to piss off people by sending them an extra copy of the bloat. That’s right, not only the copy that we can’t delete from our own phones, but an “update” so that now there will be two copies taking up room on the phone. Here’s what greeted me this morning:

Yes, “My Verizon”, “NFL Mobile”, “V CAST Tones” (do they really believe people still think they have to pay for ringtones?), “VZ Navigator”, “Blockbuster”, “GoToMeeting”, “Slacker Radio”, and “Verizon Video”. None of these have ever been started even once on my phone. In fact, I use Launcher Plus and have the icons for these hidden so that I can’t launch them by fat-fingering.

I want this absolute rubbish off of my phone. I don’t want updates to it.

Once CyanogenMod 9 gets everything working for the Droid 3, that will be going on my phone for sure. This foistware is just ridiculous.

Have you “bought” into the e-Book model?

Do you buy e-Books on say an Amazon Kindle or a Barnes and Noble Nook or other e-reader?

If you answered “yes”, you are wrong – and you’ve likely been fooled. You’ve actually only “Licensed” the book. Here’s what Amazon has to say about it from here:

Upon your download of Digital Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Other Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.

They go on to say:

…you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party…

As you can see it is a license. Are you beginning to see that you didn’t actually buy any books from these stores? Of course, it might look like you bought them.

It does clearly say “Buy” on that button. Confusing, right? In fact, at some later time, a court may need to decide whether this is deceptive or not. After all, there are plenty of more descriptive words that could be used here such as “License” or perhaps even “Rent” or “Lease” instead of “Buy”.

I had personally stayed well clear of the e-Book market for some time due to my concerns over permanence and use rights. However, I recently had a birthday (darn it) and received a Kindle Fire. It’s a very nice device I must say. I did go ahead and license a couple of books and also download a couple of free (out of copyright) books as well. Now, normally I keep my books on a bookshelf. Well, to be fair – several bookshelves. In fact, they are all over the house. I keep most of them and read them over and over. I have several that I acquired from library sales when I was a kid – some of these are 50 years old and still in decent condition. Because I bought (or was given) all these paper books, I have first sale rights to them. The doctrine of first sale basically holds that once a copyright owner has sold you a copy they have no further interest in that copy and cannot restrict the trade of it. So I can bequeath them to my kids, sell them at a used book store, ship some via the postal service to a friend in another state as a gift, donate them to a charity, etc. Pretty much all of the things a license prevents me from doing. With the paper books I buy today I may read them, then hand them to my wife, daughter, or son to read. They end up back on the bookshelf afterwards. With a license, I cannot let them read it. They have their own Kindle with their own account and transfers aren’t allowed.

In fact, that bookshelf is a good analogy for what Amazon calls their cloud storage. A place to keep the book where you can go get it again when you want to read it later. However, with the paper books I can buy a new bookshelf and the books can move to it. I can buy a new house and the books come with me (damn they are heavy!). With the license model though I can’t take my books to a new bookshelf. Let’s say that in a couple of years it is time for a new device. Perhaps the battery no longer holds much charge or there is a much better shiny new one available now. What if it happens to be a Barnes and Noble device? Or a Google one? My books don’t go to the new bookshelf (the new cloud). In fact, as we’ve established, they aren’t my books. They are just licensed. So, I now can’t really access them anymore. At least not from my nice shiny new device. Oh, sure there is a reader for the computer and one for a phone but that just isn’t the same thing.

So, if I can’t gift them, loan them, take them with me (to a new cloud), or sell my rights to them they must be licensed at a much lower price than what the paper books which do come with those rights are sold, right? Wrong! Many or most are the same price. Here’s a sample:

Wow, they are the same price! Now, the convenience of being able to have them on your Kindle and not have to carry around the (heavy) paper books is worth something. But, the fact that there is no printing, binding, shipping, inventory management, destroyed copy accounting (where stores get credit for unsold copies by tearing the covers off and throwing the book in trash), etc. seems like it is much more of a convenience for the publishers and purveyors of these digital works than it is for the consumer. I know most reasonable people I’ve talked to are quite sure that e-Books should be less expensive than paper books. The only real question is by how much.

How should this market look?

First, we should indeed be buying a copy and not licensing it. That would immediately open up the protections of the first sale doctrine. Next, we should have the ability to transfer these e-Books just like ordinary paper books. I can even see companies like Amazon and Barnes and Noble getting recompense for the transfer since they would have to facilitate it and develop and maintain the software to enable it. It should not be a percentage of the book price; it should be a fixed fee – something on the order of 25 cents – to transfer the book to another. So, if I wanted to gift a book I’d read to a friend it would cost me a small amount just like it would if I had to send a paper book through the postal service. There should be a used book store on these services where I can sell my book back for some small amount and then others could buy it from there. If I decide to leave one cloud service and go to another, all that content should be removed from the first cloud and moved to the new one with no loss of “my books”.

Of course, the publishers don’t want this. They, like the movie industry, seem to prefer that we purchase the same content over and over. Want my daughter to read it? Buy another license. Done with it and want to send it to a friend? Another license. Not cool. And – the bottom line – it has to be reducing the market for e-Books. I was chatting with a coworker about this the other day and we came to the conclusion that we two could not be the only ones who would buy far more e-Books if we were sure we could keep them between cloud providers, transfer them to others, etc. Far more.

Call to action for Verizon and Motorola

After about a month using the Droid 3 from Motorola / Verizon and comparing it to my prior Droid 1 (which was a Google Experience Device or GED), I’ve got some friendly advice for both Motorola and Verizon. First, here’s a look at the Verizon pre-installed bloatware:

Notice that most of it cannot be uninstalled, and some of it is actually running all the time.

OK, on to the advice:

 

Verizon

Don’t install bloatware, junkware, trialware, etc. on our phones. For example this ridiculous “City ID” that pops up when you try to make a call asking if you want to pay for their silly service. It popped up on me while making a call in bright light out of doors. I think I answered it with the correct button for “Go Away”, but I could not really read it since phone displays are generally hard to read outside in bright light conditions. I just wanted to make a call. I don’t want to be interrupted by stupid trial ware. Honestly, if we wanted these applications we know how to use the Android Market or the Amazon AppStore for Android to go get them. Since you have chosen to make them un-removable, we can’t get the junk off of our phones. And, if there is an update to one of them in the market, the space for the pre-installed one is still used up since it cannot be overwritten. Here’s a couple of hints:

• If you really think these applications are so great, put them in the Android Market and sell them or offer them to people who don’t have Verizon phones. If people really wanted them, you’d make money on them.
• If you insist on installing them, they need to be un-installable. Can you imagine what would happen if say Dell or HP or Lenovo installed some crap that we could not remove?
• Don’t try to trick people into using VZ Navigator at $9.99 a month when the free Google service meets almost everyone’s needs. Yes, you have a few features they don’t. But, for most people, nothing worth paying for.
• People know they can create their own ringtones on their computer or using something like Ring Droid from the market. Don’t try to confuse them into buying them from you.

Do you think I want these applications cluttering my app drawer, using my memory, and sometimes running and using my limited RAM?

Not even a little bit.

 

Motorola

(This first part about Android skins could apply to HTC with their Sense and Samsung with their TouchWiz as well). So, you don’t believe your hardware is enough of a differentiator. You believe you need to differentiate yourselves with a software “Skin” (MotoBlur or just Blur). Well, here’s some news on that: For technical phone users it just pisses us off and for non-technical folks they don’t even notice the difference. Like with some of these Verizon apps above – if you think Blur is a great differentiator, offer it in the Android Market for other devices and make a few bucks on it. If it is really that wonderful, some people running Nexus devices will buy it. Maybe a couple running HTC and Samsung devices might too. There would be your differentiator right there. The only problem? Oh, yeah – we hate Blur.

Looking at Blur, what does it bring to the table on the Droid 3?

• Lots of bugs. Here’s just a couple of samples:
• Won’t show pictures of contacts when dialing using Google Voice
• AirPlane mode causes random reboots and if you have WiFi and BlueTooth off you can’t even exit AirPlane mode without rebooting
• Camera app that doesn’t allow the user to set white balance for outdoors, fluorescent lights, incandescent lights, etc. and causes most indoor pictures to have a terrible blue tint.
• SMS timestamps, even on restore from backup, are the time received and not the time sent
• Home screen redraw lags (caused by Blur high memory usage and device low RAM)
• Undocking from the media dock causes automatic brightness to be turned off
• Nice widgets for favorite contacts and calendar
• Slow performance

I don’t think anyone minds Motorola spending time developing Blur. However, you should separate this from the hardware device and either:

• Pre-install it, but allow removal
• Don’t install it at all, but put it in the Android Market. Possibly free for Motorola devices and with a charge for other devices?

Oh, and you should take the few widgets that people do like and make them into real widgets that can be used by all launchers. Sell them in the market if you want.

Both Verizon and Motorola

It is pretty clear with the popularity of replacement ROMs for other devices that users don’t like being tied to this pre-installed junk. We’d really like the ability to run AOSP (Android Open Source Project) deliverables plus the Google apps and Android Market. This should be easy for you to do. If you simply give us an option to choose “Blur + Verizon Bloat” (you can call it something like “Motorola and Verizon enhanced experience” as I know your marketers would want to promote it) or “AOSP” we’d mostly be happy (obviously there is a smaller niche who would still want custom ROMs but less folks would need to try unsupported / unsupportable methods if you offered a working AOSP we could use). Offering us AOSP + Market would allow those of us who want this better experience to have it without warranty killers like overclocking, etc. that come with some of the other ROMs.

Don’t just think about it – make this happen, and do it now.

New Windows Home Server Installed

Over the last couple of weekends I installed a replacement Windows Home Server. I was moving from Windows Home Server v1 (based on Server 2003) running on an old Dell Dimension 8400 (a Pentium 4 660 running at 3.6 GHz) purchased in February of 2005 to Windows Home Server 2011 running on a newly purchased HP Pavilion 1080-CTO with a core i5-2500s quad core processor running at 2.7 GHz. Yes, the Dell was 6 and a half years old. It had been modified (by me) to hold 4 drives and was pulling between 228 and 288 Watts as measured by my UPS. It was getting to the point where that old space heater was going to die of old age and it needed to be replaced.

Since the new Home Server had recently shipped and was now available through NewEgg, I thought it would be a good time to upgrade from the also dated Windows Server 2003 based Home Server v1. I knew about Microsoft’s oft-decried decision to drop Drive Extender, but thought I could make do with hardware based SATA raid and just go with a pair of 2 TB drives in a mirror set (RAID 1). The old server had two 1 TB drives and 2 500 GB drives and it still had plenty of free space so this should have worked out fine, right? So what did I learn in this process?

First what I learned about HP’s consumer Pavilion line

HP makes it a bit difficult to figure out what you are buying and what is in it. For example, the machine I bought was sold as a “HP Pavilion p7qe series”. It said this on the page I ordered from, the receipt that they emailed me and the packing list that it came with. However, the support site will not admit that this machine exists. I figured I could wait a few days – as they said this was a new product and maybe the support site had not caught up. What I was wanting was to download the drivers required since I was not going to be running the supplied Windows 7 Home Premium. By the time the computer arrived, the support site still disavowed all knowledge of the p7qe’s existence. However, I managed to figure out that the support site wanted me to look up a “Pavilion 1080-CTO” instead. I did this and found only a modicum of drivers. Not even all the ones you would need to load a plain vanilla Windows OS on the machine. I downloaded the 7 or so that were there. It was obvious that HP doesn’t plan to even update these as they were all called “original driver” and appeared designed for you to use to revert to older drivers that came with the machine after some disaster in updating occurred. I powered on the machine, went through setup and proceeded to make sure all the supplied hardware worked. I also copied the c:\swsetup folder from the machine to a USB flash drive in case it had some of the drivers needed.

Everything worked, but it turns out that HP consumer level machines don’t bother to continue the very nice job their corporate focused line does on providing extra screws and mounting hardware. I had a second drive to mount, but could not mount it due to:

• No power connector. The power supply in this box has 5 molex connectors, 2 SATA power connectors, and 1 floppy drive style connector. Of course the two SATA power connectors were in use by the existing hard drive and the DVD drive. Shipping a machine like this is silly as new drives do not have molex connectors. It is an option on the HP site to add a second optical drive (although why you would do so is a mystery). If you added it, they would have needed to use an adapter to connect the power. Fortunately a co-worker had such an adapter in his stash, so I used that.
• No supplied mounting screws. I’m spoiled here by HPs fine corporate machines where the extra screws needed to add storage are nicely arrayed in the case by default. Not so on the consumer line. I scrounged several different types of screws from the old Dell and got the drive mounted.
• No SATA cable. In the old IDE days you used one cable for the drive and most everyone shipped those cables with two connectors on it. In the new SATA days, I don’t think any of the vendors ship you a second cable. Had to get one from the old Dell.

One I got the drive mounted, I went into the “BIOS” (actually UEFI on this machine) and attempted to setup the RAID 1 mirror set. Alas, I could not do so. I’ve done this before on several different work machines so I didn’t think it was just the computer being smarter than me. I looked more closely at that support site now that I knew I could find it by the 1080-CTO moniker. I drilled down on the mainboard. I don’t know why they make their own mainboards instead of using an Intel or ASUS board, but apparently they do. This one was a “caramel” board. It has an Intel H61 chipset. No more information than that. So, I went to Intel’s site and much to my chagrin found that the H61 does not support SATA based RAID. Since I had been using that at work for about 5 years I didn’t think there would be any new chipsets that couldn’t do it but apparently there are. So, the SATA RAID was out. I decided automatic folder duplication would probably work for this and moved on. It wouldn’t protect the OS from a drive failure, but should work for the data.

I went ahead and installed Home Server. During the install it decided that I didn’t have a network connection and wanted me to load drivers. I fed it the USB key I had made and it was happy. Later I had a whole bunch of devices in Device Manager that needed drivers. These ran the gamut from video to sound. I tried the drivers I had downloaded from HP. Unfortunately, even though Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (upon which Home Server 2011 is based) run the same drivers, HP had locked the installers so that they would only extract on Windows 7. Imagine going out of your way – spending money even – to prevent people from running free drivers on an operating system on which they work. Would you do it? Does it even make sense? I can’t see any way in which it makes sense for them to do that. It is almost like these crazy cell carriers who try to prevent you from using the features your phone software originally came with. Hell, if the machine wasn’t working and I wanted to extract the drivers on an old Vista machine so that I could put them on a memory key why should they stop me? Ridiculous. So it was off to Intel, RealTek, etc. to collect drivers. HP – fix this. Make drivers available so that a clean install of Windows has all the drivers it needs and don’t lock them to just a single flavor of an OS. You know as well as I do that Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 use the same driver binaries.

What I learned about Home Server 2011

During the installation I mentioned that it wanted me to load network drivers. Fine, I did that. Then it would only allow a reboot. What? A reboot to load a network driver? I’m sorry – this install is based on Windows PE and you can dynamically load drivers all day in it. Even Windows Server 2003 on that old Dell which required a driver from floppy disk for the ICH6 based disk controller would load that storage driver and go on without a reboot. Not sure what someone at Microsoft was thinking there, but it smacks of just being lazy. Once I got the server up and running I realized that even though I knew Drive Extender was gone, that it also meant that automatic folder duplication – that amazing feature by which each data file is automatically written to at least 2 spindles – was also gone. I decided that I would go with some robocopy scripts to sync the data to the second drive for recovery purposes and resolutely moved on. At this point I was getting a bit frustrated with the new software since it was so many steps backwards, but was pretty committed to getting off of the ancient Server 2003 platform to something that at least supported SMBv2.

Next, I tried to access the Home Server from work. This was something I had done periodically before and it always worked well. I had my machines at home go into sleep mode, but I had written a Wake On LAN add-in for Home Server 2003 and used that to wake them if I needed something that was only available on my home machines and not just on the server. However, this new version of Home Server no longer lets you access the server “Console” from a remote session. (They call it the “Dashboard” now). But you cannot access the Dashboard remotely. After some digging, it looks like I need to write a “Gadget” for Wake On LAN that can be hosted in the Home Server web page. I’d have done that already but the SDK is a crock of crap. The documentation on MSDN isn’t in sync with the downloaded SDK at all – it tells you to install files that don’t exist (they are there, but with completely different names), tells you to do things in the wrong order, and doesn’t really provide a step by step “hello world” example that goes from start to deployed. Oh well, I will figure it out over time. For now, no more Wake On LAN for me.

Next I setup the backup. It was a simple matter to setup my robocopy scripts as scheduled tasks to do the work that automatic folder duplication should have been doing. But, I needed a real backup since there was no hardware based RAID. The new version has a backup – and it insanely requests that you run it twice a day. In fact, their documentation suggests that you tailor it to the needs of “your organization”. Did they forget that this is Windows Home Server and that your organization is your family? Anyway, I originally went with their recommendation for twice daily backups. Then I realized that the backups fail all the time, randomly. This appears to be a problem others share. The backup program was apparently some sort of last minute bolt on that doesn’t work well. In fact, with only 500 GB of data, the backup often takes 7 hours to complete. Imagine if I had maxed it out at 2 TB. Let’s see that would be 28 hours to do a backup. That’s when it doesn’t fail. I found that it fails almost all the time if it runs during the same window when client PC backups happen. Unfortunately the log will just tell you that at least one file wasn’t backed up successfully. It won’t list the ones with problems. So I cut the backups to once a day and moved them to 8 AM. Sometimes they finish at 3:00 PM. Other times they finish in 23 minutes. Other times they fail. Sometimes they run until 3:00 PM and still fail. This part of the product is really bad and needs a lot of help.

The new “Dashboard” is a mess. For example, if you are on the page that shows computers and backups while a backup of either a client or the server is happening the dashboard screen will flicker and redraw (changing your focus each time) so often that it becomes very difficult to right-click a machine and choose something from the context menu. I know it is written in .Net, but my god it is slow – even on a quad processor machine with 8 GB RAM. Apparently the developers don’t use the “InvalidateRect” function when they need to update their percentage complete on the backup and just redraw that small rectangle. Instead, they redraw the entire frame (which is silly and wasteful).

So, to sum up:

• No drive extender
• No folder duplication
• Backup program is broken, and can only back up 2 TB max
• No access to the “Console” (Dashboard) from the remote access page

All in all it looks to me like they are trying to kill off the product. Too bad to as it used to be really nice. If it wasn’t for the automatic backups of all the client computers, I would just go with a NAS setup like a Drobo or something.

Gawker sites latest to destroy themselves in search for elusive “new hotness”

I’m not sure what they were going for, but the Gawker sites (such as Gizmodo, LifeHacker, Jezebel, io9, etc.) have updated to a new format that is just unbearable. They used to have a fairly simple layout where you could just scroll down the page and see all of the articles / posts in a synopsis view and easily decide which of those were interesting to you, middle click the ones that were and they would open in a new tab for your reading pleasure. As all folks have different interests, I would typically find 1 in 6 interesting on say LifeHacker, maybe 1 in 8 on Gizmodo, etc.). Now, with their new layout, they have only one story per page. You have to go through a rigmarole of arrow keys to get to the next story – which probably isn’t even one you are interested in. They’ve added a “pane” on the right side that supposedly shows the latest stories, but lacks the size and impact of the previous blog style (pictures are tiny and synopsis too short). That pane on the right was taking over a minute to load earlier this morning, but it seems like maybe they have it fixed or at least implemented some sort of temporary workaround to get it to load more quickly.

Like the Digg users abandoned Digg in droves with the last redesign (I’ve rarely been back to that site which I used to use daily), it may be Gawker’s time to lose a lot of users. For now, they all seem to be supporting a “classic” view which, while not as good as their original view, is less of a pain than the new view. Classic doesn’t have the large size images and full synopsis that was available on the original sites.

I had tried to post my thoughts on the design as a comment on the Gizmodo article about the changes, but it looks like they removed Facebook Connect yet again (which you don’t find out until you have spent some time creating a thoughtful comment – only to find you can’t actually post it.

Here’s hoping that Engadget won’t follow the trend of making their properties less valuable to users; for now I can still visit that site and get a blog style view that works.

Evil DRM preventing access to our purchases

The other day our xbox 360 stopped reading disks. It had done this before, but none of the usual tricks (like dropping it from 6 inches) or trying different titles worked this time. It was almost three years old, so unfortunately it was time for a new one. We got the new Kinect bundle with the xbox 360 s 250 GB unit. So far, so good. Next, we needed to transfer all the songs we’d purchased for Rock Band 2, the map packs for various “shoot-em ups” like Call of Duty: Black Ops and the like (I don’t know which titles they bought these expansion packs for, but I know there were quite a few of them). We purchased a transfer cable and transferred “our” content. I say “our” content because apparently it isn’t actually ours. Instead it is “ours” (you say that with those cute little air-quotes). There is some nasty form of Digital Restrictions Management on them so simply MOVING them isn’t enough. You need to “transfer the licenses”. To do this, you go to a flaky Microsoft web site (flaky in that for two days it showed various “not working” messages both from Live sign in, and later from the site itself – only to turn out that it worked in Internet Explorer). We finally got onto the site and found we had 161 items to transfer. We did that. It claimed they would download automatically. 24 hours later – no download. So we had to go to the flaky web site and painstakingly click “add to queue” for each of the 7 pages of items (161 in all). After a bit, it would start saying “queue is full” and we’d need to wait for the xbox to catch up. Since theses were just licenses, the xbox would show it was about to download say 160 MB and then – poof – it would be done since the content was already there. The real evilness of DRM reared its head on several of the titles. These were WORKING FINE before, and in fact one was purchased LESS THAN A MONTH ago. However, these items said “no longer available” when we tried to add them to the queue. Basically, since we’d transferred the licenses they were no longer available to us even though we “bought” (those cute little air-quotes again) them. This is the type of crap that should not be allowed. Any form of Digital Restrictions Management that not only gets in your way this much (if we had to transfer these there should have been a “do all” button and it should have taken 2 minutes), AND prevents you from using what you paid for is criminal. The other strange thing? We had better not accidentally break our xbox in a way that isn’t covered by warranty because we can apparently only transfer the licenses once per year. Why? No idea. It isn’t like we can copy the stuff and have it work. We should be able to transfer it to any xbox (or other platform) we want to. 

Microsoft: Where’s my universal updater?

When running the operating systems that Microsoft hilariously called “hobbyist”, I get a central program that manages updates to all of my installed applications. It looks like this:

 

                                   Above: A real updater

Now, I’ve heard that Microsoft may build an app store into Windows 8. I imagine (hope!) that it will include updates. But updates are something we need now. With the plethora of application level attacks, especially against Adobe Reader and Flash Player, it behooves Microsoft to make updating easier. Today, I think I have about a bazillion (OK 14) updaters on my system. Some of these run automatically and slow down logon. Others run as a scheduled task “every Saturday evening at 9:11 PM” (Apple) while my computer is asleep and so never actually run. In fact, since users rarely reboot anymore and just use sleep or hibernate many of these “run at logon” updaters don’t keep you very up to date either. Some updaters are built into the applications themselves and don’t pop up until you actually want to do some work in the app. Some, like the Adobe ones, seldom even work.

One good thing came about as part of this last round of Adobe Reader exploits being used by malicious advertisements served up on legitimate sites by ad networks. That’s right: both my boss and my brother in law were infected with unknown variants of some awful fake anti-virus product (variants of aVsoFt AvSuiTe) via drive by installs using a Reader exploit that was patched on June 29th. I had to submit samples to Sophos, Microsoft, and Symantec to get definitions that would detect these (both were different and the def that came out after the first one did not detect the variant a week later). The good thing that came out of it? Other folks who heard about their issues went back and updated their machines! However, they did NOT have an easy time of it. There is no single place to go to check to see “am I up to date?” As I’ve said, the various updaters are disjointed, often dysfunctional, and obtuse. For example some don’t work through authenticated proxy servers. Others try to foist crapware, foistware, and spy toolbars on you in addition to the updates. In all cases, each vendor is re-inventing the wheel (some well, some not so well) on things like update detection, update validation, downloading, and installing.

So, what should we do?

We get to continue slogging through these ridiculous hoops to get updated in the short term. In the long term, let’s lobby Microsoft hard to get these things done:

• Create a “Windows, Applications, and add-ins” updater and evangelize it with all the ISVs in the Windows ecosystem – small and large.
• Publicize how vendors need to create their updates and help some initial volunteers through the process.
• Make it secure, but easy and free for the ISVs. They have their own QA / test / publishing rules already – Microsoft just needs to be able to have non-repudiation that the source of the updates is actually the vendor in question. If you can give me 25 GB on skydrive for free, you can give these updates some space too (I know akamai in bulk costs more than what you are absorbing for skydrive but still – this is needed). Get out your wallet.
• Make it work with add-ins for programs like Outlook, IE, and Firefox – not just major application installs.
• Go do it today; get it done!

Once this service exists, lobby all of your vendors to get on board ASAP. If (for example) Oracle or Open Office doesn’t want to play that counts as a point against them in a product evaluation. If Adobe signs up early and has it working well – that’s a point in their favor when doing an evaluation.

Update overkill

Here’s a sample of the updaters on my machine. This is a simple test machine that doesn’t have a lot loaded. Hard to believe, but it is true:

Perhaps all updates should be through the above interface?

 

Silverlight needs its own updater?

 

At least Picasa is up to date!

 

Paint.Net’s updater doesn’t work through a proxy server

 

 

Great, advertisements in the Lenovo updater.

 

I would be that Oracle won’t sign up to have their updates done through Microsoft. Users however will see that as a strike against them.

 

As you can see, the Adobe one tries to come with the Google spy bar. Quit that!

 

Like I said, the Adobe Flash Download Manager fails all the time.

 

This was the Farmville update and had nothing to do with security.

 

 

 

Note the “foistware” – a lousy browser.

 

 

Boy is that a lot of updates and updaters or what? After awhile, you realize that a lot of other applications that you use need updates too, but don’t have an updater at all. Here’s just a few of them from my machine:

Darn, no updates for these.

 

Wrap up

So why are you still here? If you are with Microsoft, go get started on this now. If you aren’t – find the nearest Microsoft representative and hit them up for this. Feel free to send them a link to this blog entry if you don’t feel like typing it up for them.

Flash: Hey Adobe, learn to write an updater!

As we all know, Adobe Flash has had more than its share of security vulnerabilities and the concomitant flurry of updates recently. I’ve recently seen several machines where the Flash updates just don’t work. It seems to screw up on all kinds of things:

1. People tend to only reboot once in awhile now that sleep/resume works well. They’ll now reboot at maybe monthly intervals. Up comes the flash update message and they tell it to update. Who knows what the logic is in the updater, but it will pick one (Firefox or IE) to update. It updates that one and leaves the “other” Flash vulnerable. Fail.
   
2. A person goes to the Adobe site to update Flash themselves. After they get through the screen where they need to turn off unneeded security scans from McAfee, spyware toolbars from Google, etc. and actually get the download it wants to install the Adobe Download Manager (or DLM). This wondrous tool loves to install, download the update, then randomly show that it failed. Convince it to try again and it says something to the effect that “no, I said I failed you moron”. So then you try to update your other browser and that one works. But the one where DLM failed doesn’t even have flash anymore. Well, at least it is secure. The other part of this is that Adobe is doing their best to hide the download links for install_flash_ax.exe (ActiveX) and install_flash.exe (NPAPI) so that you can only get things with their busted-ass DLM. Fail.

Please, Adobe: Put the links to the actual EXE downloads back at a higher level on your site with text like this, “In the all to common event that our DLM fails to update your install of Flash, download the appropriate updater here.”

Oh yeah – and fix your DLM. While you are at it, make the updater that appears when users logon to their machine update ANY and ALL versions of Flash on the machine.

Learn to F’ing Drive

There, I said it. I’ll say it again: Learn to f’ing drive! That’s right – this is directed at 80% or more of you out there. As my daughter graduates from online Driver’s Ed to getting a learner’s permit and signing up for Driver’s Training I’ve been noticing more and more of you out there who, to be kind, need a refresher in said courses. Lots of you want to hit her (no, not that – get your mind out of the gutter). I mean many of you have a plan to hit her car with your car.

Let’s start with a quick quiz:

The lever that sticks out of the left hand side of the steering column is:

1. It has something to do with the cruise control only; I’ve never used this mysterious lever.
2. It’s the wiper control. It also turns on my emergency flashers.
3. It is the turn signals.
4. It must control the satellite radio or something.

From my observations of your driving skills, most of you probably answered something other than the correct number (number 3 was correct). For those who missed this question, you are supposed to use the signal before making a turn or a lane change. Note that I said BEFORE making a lane change. Not letting it flash once or twice while you are in between lanes, thinking it is oh so cute. Before. Get it right and use it. If your turn signals are disabled, you are supposed to use the alternate hand signals. Some of you know this one – it looks like this below:

Others of you have not quite mastered your alternate hand signals and seem to use the following instead of your turn signal:

I do see this used from time to time although strangely the people using it seem to only manage to get one of their fingers up. They must just be lazy I guess. They do seem a bit confused, too, though because they often stick their head out the window while performing this signaling operation.

Choose a lane and stick with it:

Many of you, especially those who haven’t mastered the simple art of the turn signal, seem to randomly change lanes – seemingly with no cognitive process involved – whenever you feel like it, or whenever the song changes on the radio. Many of you aren’t old enough to have ever gone to a roller skating rink, but if you had you would know that “you are going too fast if you are passing more people than are passing you.” That was a common refrain at the old rink. Even though it speaks of a poor understanding of math (with an odd number of skaters, only one person would be going the right speed and with an even number none would be going the correct speed), it is a decent enough guideline for driving. If you find yourself weaving around: STOP IT, you are going TOO DAMN FAST. Learn what the other drivers around you (who you are passing) seem to have grasped: the proper speed. Get in the correct lane and stay there. Do you have an off ramp you need to take in the next couple of miles? Get to the proper place. Does the freeway split and you have to go towards the left fork? Be in the correct lane. And STAY THERE.

Proper following distance:

Many people out there on the road believe I am possessed of either magic or supernatural powers and can somehow drive faster than the car in front of me. They probably think Angelina Jolie can curve a bullet too. Nothing else adequately explains why they are constantly “drafting” about 8 inches off of my bumper. It is amazing how they believe this – I think they need to take a basic physics course and learn both their reaction time and the distance it takes to bring a car to a stop. (Between reaction time and the coefficient of friction on a good day that is about 345 feet at 65 MPH). The time, in seconds, for them to hit my daughter’s car when following about 1 foot behind when she brakes suddenly? About 0.1 second. Please remember: you need to be back at least 3 seconds and preferably 4. Start counting seconds as the car in front of you passes a stationary object or marker along the road. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand. Most of you didn’t make it all the way to two. Those few that made it to four – congratulations and keep it up. Either that or, more likely, the road was empty.

Turn correctly:

First, don’t cut the corner. On a right turn (left turn for you Brits), you need to keep as close to a right angle turn as you can reasonably do in a car with round wheels. That’s right – get the car out into the intersection before turning. Otherwise you will scrape the curb or hit the parked car around the corner. Also, if you are in an intersection where two lanes can turn to the right into a larger street with four lanes – you can’t turn from the left most of the turn lanes into the right most of the lanes on the larger street. Conversely, you can’t be in the right most turn lane and end up on the left side of the larger street. You can turn into the lanes shown only. See below for a diagram (I can drive, but I can’t draw worth beans!):

Master these simple things: Learn to f’ing drive!

Google Voice: Support? What’s that?

As with several of Google’s free ad-supported services, Google Voice doesn’t have a support staff. Well, they say they do – but there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that said support staff does any support. They may do a wonderful job of keeping on top of the servers and various components that make up the service (as I haven’t personally experienced the service itself being down when I wanted to use it), but they don’t respond to any help requests from users as far as I can tell.

My Google Voice account works perfectly. My wife’s, not so much. Hers won’t route calls and won’t store messages. For example, if you call her you immediately get the “the Google Voice subscriber is not available” message that you should get only when the subscriber didn’t pick up one of their forwarding phones or when the person is set to “do not disturb”. The call goes straight to what sounds like Voice Mail – it even prompts you to leave a message. Said message never shows up in her inbox though. Her account is, to use a technical term, “borked”. We’ve looked through the help and found the support request form that emails the supposed support staff. We’ve filled that form out with the relevant info four times now over four months. Not once has anyone ever gotten back to us or fixed the problem. I’m forced to conclude that if they do have anyone, that person is either four months behind on support requests or perhaps has been on sabbatical. The unlikelihood of that leads me to believe that Google Voice doesn’t actually have any user support.

It really sucks that my wife can’t use her Google Voice. I’d like to be able to call that number and ring her cell phone and work phone at certain hours and cell and home phone during other hours. That works well for me. But nope, can’t use hers.

BTW, we do know how to use the service and it is configured properly to forward to two phones currently. We deleted all the phones, then added them back and went through the whole “service calls the potential forwarding phone and asks you to put in the security code” stuff for each. There is no schedule currently set and she is not set to “do not disturb”. She doesn’t have a block list and call presentation and screening are set to off. It is as simple a setup as it gets, yet it only worked for one month and has been “borked” since.

I’d imagine other users have had problems getting support from Google too. Perhaps it is time they started charging us a small fee and hired some support staff?

iPAD Makes the Internet Useless for the Weekend

Boy the newly released Apple iPAD has sure taken over the technology sites on the internet on this launch weekend. Try reading Engadget, Gizmodo, or even BGR. Most (in some cases all) of the articles are about the iPAD. Best apps for the iPAD, your charger won’t work on the iPAD, guy destroys an iPAD with a baseball bat, iPAD optimized porn. OK, the guy with the baseball bat was pretty funny – he probably got tired of the internet being useless all weekend too. But the rest of it? Tech folks, get real. This thing is a 768 x 1024, Flash ignoring, keyboard less, apps more expensive, Star Trek ripping off, expensive magazine reader. That said, if it ran LCARS like the one faked up here, I’d buy it.

For their next Star Trek rip-off, they can make the iCorder (and I’d buy that one too; as long as it could tell me where all those life forms are).

How about on Monday, we get our normal tech sites back on the internet and maybe only one iPAD story per day please?

Firefox 3.6 went crazy

For several years people have complained vociferously about Firefox and memory leaks. For those same years, I have wondered what they were on about. They’d say things like, “once Firefox gets to about 1.2 GB RAM usage, I have to reboot.” All this time I have been thinking, “what the hell are you doing to get a web browser to that kind of memory utilization?” I figured they were ad-in junkies with fifteen different ad-ins running and that they had a leak in one of them. I only run adblock plus and I had never seen this problem. The other day, Mozilla released the 3.6 version of Firefox and I upgraded immediately. Today, my machine started running extremely slow and very obviously paging to disk. I checked task manager (which took about 30 seconds to start), and to my surprise found Firefox using almost 1.2 GB RAM – just like those other users have been reporting for years. Interestingly, Mozilla’s web site says they fixed many memory leaks in Firefox 3.6. My experience today and the graphic below would seem to indicate that they caused at least one new leak:

Wow! That’s a lot of memory to be consuming on a 2 GB Windows 7 machine! If anyone else is getting this type of result from the new 3.6 I would expect there will be an update pretty quickly.

Customer Torture Part II

Since I was thinking about the terrible customer service offered by most tech companies these days, I decided to compare the current “customer avoidance” dance that they perform with the tenets of a bygone era (the late 1980’s as best as I can determine based on mergers, company name changes, etc.). Here’s a link to the actual tenets of customer service as posted on the wall at a major company. (Portions of the image are redacted and the title removed so that the company remains unidentifiable). Let’s compare some of these tenets with the way customers are treated today.

A Customer is not an outsider to our business; he is a definite part of it. In today’s world, try to find contact information for a company that will take you anywhere except their marketing department. For example, spend time searching the Dell site for how to email in a service request. Try to search for how to actually use your warranty on HP’s site. It becomes obvious that we, as customers, are no longer a part of tech companies business. We are numbers and any interaction with us is too costly to imagine so they avoid us like the plague and relegate us to phone queues whose options have “recently changed” and whose operators (if you can get through to them) are powerless to actually help anyone.

A Customer brings us his wants. It is our job to handle them properly and profitably – both to him and to ourselves. In other words, not like this. I’d imagine it isn’t very profitable for either the company or the customer for the customer to have to call 5 different “customer service” representatives, all of whom either give different information or make different technical mistakes. It would probably be more profitable for both parties if the customer service people were trained to know when they can handle something or have to escalate (and soft transfer) to a higher level technician. It would definitely make folks like me have more customer loyalty if I knew the company actually cared enough to have decent customer service. I shouldn’t have to think, “ah, damn – I need to call support. Well let me clear my calendar for the next 8 hours and expect my service to be broken for 2 days.”

Retail companies deserve a call out here too as the news seems to be full of items like this where companies seem to be low-balling the pricing in their advertisements to get “chumps” or “marks” (how they must see us in order to act this way) into the store only so that they can push their overpriced “services”. Often times I have heard that although the companies themselves “don’t condone” deceptive sales practices, their quota systems mean sales folks either use deceptive practices like in the Consumerist article linked above or they get fired for not meeting quotas.

Many of these types of business will happily sell you a USB cable for $25.00 that you can get online for $2.00. Now obviously paying for retail space, having stock people, cashiers, and salespeople costs money so that $2.00 cable needs to be more than $2.00 in a retail outlet. The convenience of not having to wait for shipping does need to be worth some price difference. But 1250% markup of an already not wholesale internet price doesn’t seem to be a proper balance of profitability between customer and company.

A Customer is not someone to argue or match wits with. He deserves courteous, attentive treatment. It isn’t only the tech companies that violate this one. A few years ago, I went on a camping trip with my family. Unbeknownst to me, the prior day I had eaten some contaminated food. While on the trip, I got severe food poisoning and was losing fluids at an alarming rate. My wife got on the phone with the HMO’s advice line. She had to call twice only to be told rudely “he has INFLUENZA” and get hung up on. Now, since the normal symptoms of influenza (this is before bird-flu, swine-flu, or other “new flus”) don’t include intense diarrhea, crazy nausea, 5 minute variations from freezing cold to sweating, etc. we knew this was wrong and my family took me to a regional medical center. I was hospitalized, injected with anti-nausea drugs, put on a double saline drip and kept overnight. Oh, and by the time I was examined my temperature was down to 92 degrees and I could no longer move my fingers. Influenza, right.

A Customer is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. This seems like an easy statement to agree with. But the practical treatment of it today seems to be along the lines of “attract as many customers as possible, while doing little to nothing to keep them.” Well, other than doing things like doubling the early termination fees or other things to confuse the customer into staying.

My advice to companies? How about training your support folks and sales associates? Perhaps you could have clear contracts that don’t hide large fees in 20 page agreements that customers are pressured to sign without reading? Maybe rethink spending so much money on marketing, segmentation, and advertising and a bit more on actual customer retention. People shouldn’t have to complain about companies on blogs and twitter in order to get service. That’s right, several companies have staff paid to help get them better PR by going through Twitter and Blogs and resolving the customer’s issue – hoping that they will get better coverage in the blog press because of it when the real issue is that their normal channels such as phone, email, etc. refused to solve the problem in the first place. Think about it…

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.