Category Technology

May 27 2010

Texting etiquette and other electronic rudeness

With the advent of portable devices such as cell phones, netbooks, and self-contained video games, an interesting thing has been happening.  Users of these devices seem to be drawing inward and have less and less regard for the real world around them.

Texting (sending text messages via a cell phone) has really taken off in the last few years, especially with kids.  It may be that they are now so used to being able to contact anyone and anyone instantly that it’s inconceivable not to be able to do that.  As somebody who grew up without cellphones, this is amazing to me.

Is it really so urgent to toss off a text message that you can’t put the stupid phone down and talk to a waitress (who BTW is a real person and deserving of a measure of respect)?  After all, the main feature of sending a text instead of calling somebody is convenience.  You don’t get dragged in to a long conversation and you can respond or not on your own schedule, allowing things like … eye-contact with a bank teller.

It’s sad to see two people sitting in a restaurant, at the same table, totally ignoring each other and either talking on their cellphones or texting away.  What’s the point of being there together?  How rude can you be?  What you are really saying by this behavior is “you are unimportant – some other person is more deserving of my time and attention even though I’m stuck here with you”.

Kids do this at home in spades.  It used to be that when company came over, kids either were out playing in the yard (I’m not sure young people are even familiar with this concept, so let’s change that to “playing on the computer in their room”), or joined the conversation and interaction with the guest(s) in the living room.  These days, it seems acceptable for said kids to be present in the living room, but totally absorbed rapidly pushing buttons with their thumbs.  Rude much?  Personally, when this happens to me, I think that if the brat isn’t interested in whether I’m there or not, then I’m not interested whether he/she is there or not and would prefer to do without their presence.

Part of being a parent is showing your young how to behave with other people.  It’s called “social skill development”.  Too many times these days, electronic gadgets are used to keep kids quiet and out of the parent’s hair.  I have to wonder, if that’s the goal in life, then why have the kids in the first place?  If you really want to abdicate your role as a parent, then don’t BE a parent.  It’s very simple.

May 24 2010

GoDaddy hosting – garbage!

I have been using GoDaddy as a registrar for years, and have always been very pleased with the service.  So, then I thought I’d give their hosting a shot.  Bad idea.  The performance is consistently horrible, and their dumb server throws errors for no good reason.

I finally got fed up with them and moved all my websites to PowerDNN.com and the performance difference was amazing!  I also just moved this blog to my own server collocated in Los Angeles.  Performance seems as good or better than GoDaddy, so that’s good.  Pretty Links were a bit of a pain to get working with IIS.  If you have the same trouble, look here.

So, I’ll fiddle around a bit and make sure everything is really humming along properly, then I promise to get back to posting, as I know my pithy commentary on life has been missed lately.

Apr 16 2010

I NEED a solar airplane (not want… NEED)

SOLAR IMPULSE – AROUND THE WORLD IN A SOLAR AIRPLANE

How cool is that?  As a pilot, I’d love to own an airplane like this.  One of the biggest barriers though is operation costs.  With fuel prices these days, it’s extremely expensive to just buy fuel, let alone any of the other mandatory maintenance.  Most light aircraft that I can fly get 8-12 gallons per hour.  They fly around 100 kts (115 mph), so at 10 gph that’s only  11.5 miles per gallon.  A trip from LA to Vegas is 270 miles, so that burns over 23 gallons of fuel.  Add that to the $100/hr rental fee for the airplane … Cha-Ching!

Apr 10 2010

Microsoft: complete inability to predict time

It never ceases to amaze me.  In windows XP, it was a common joke that Microsoft couldn’t predict how long something might take.  You’d get “4 minutes, 17 minutes, no wait, 2 minutes, no… 2 days 14 hours, no 30 seconds…”  Their estimates were so wildly off that there was absolutely no point in paying attention to them, unless you wanted a chuckle.

In windows 7, I thought they had addressed this issue, but apparently not.  Today, I got this on my screen.  I’m copying two folders simultaneously to a USB external hard disk.  Look closely at the times:

Microsoft's complete inability to predict task duration

So from this, I am to believe that it’ll take an hour to copy 2GB of data, and 6 hours 30 minutes to copy 193G.  That doesn’t seem very consistent.  A few minutes prior, the top one was indicating 23 hours to do the copy, and the bottom one was about the same.  The top one actually took 11 minutes to complete.

Come ON, guys!  This isn’t rocket science.  It’s a very VERY simple thing to sample how long it’s taking  you to do a task, and knowing how much more you have to do, it’s TRIVIAL to calculate how much time that will take.  Sure, you can make it more clever by doing moving averages and so forth to allow for fluctuations in resource availability or WAN vagarities.  Still, it’s NOT difficult to be somewhat close even if you don’t try to refine estimates in this manner.  Other software manufacturers are able to surmount this seemingly impossible task, as their progress indicators actually seem to be reasonably accurate.

I think that at this point, given years of demonstrated inability to accomplish this absolutely overwhelming programming task, Microsoft should simply remove the time estimates from their products.  They are not useful to the customer, and they are embarrassing for Microsoft.  Isn’t anybody over there even slightly embarrassed?  If it were my company, this would get fixed, or heads would roll.  I know there are a lot of smart people at Microsoft – give the problem to one of them instead of the morons who have been working on it to date.

Apr 7 2010

Watches vs cellphones

Since most people carry cell phones these days, and these have a clock on them, the trusty wrist watch has become mostly unnecessary from a functional standpoint.  It is still preferred by some, and others regard it as a fashion accessory, but for the most part I see less people sporting wrist watches.

In looking at the content of SPAM emails, I notice that while the bulk of them are hawking some sex-related product, a high percentage of them are selling wrist watch replicas.  These are cheap knock-offs of brand name, expensive watches.  What perplexes me is that these folks are dumping a ton of effort and money into advertising into what I perceive as a dwindling market!

I did run across something rather spiffy which I would actually carry (I haven’t worn a wrist watch in many years), as is it is both functional and elegant.  This is a digital pocket watch called the Cobalt watch.  It has a touch-screen display, and appears to have an engraved silver-like case.  It doesn’t seem to be available on the market, but there does seem to be a lot of discussion about it, and the pictures, as you can see are gorgeous:

Apr 5 2010

HP Desktop Power button

Generally speaking, I”m a big HP booster.  I really like their servers, and have been using them in datacenters for years.  They usually have really good, well-designed products, and they are reliable.  Give me an HP over a Dell or whatever any day of the week.

Have you seen the new HP desktop computers though?  Here’s what they look like:

This is the Microtower 3000.  Looks nice, has decent specs, so what could be wrong with it?  Look closely at the picture.  Where is the power button?  Can’t find it?  Now that’s odd, isn’t it.  Usually the power button is front and center.  Where is it on this design marvel?  Why, it’s on TOP of the box, upper right in the picture, and as the bezel on top slants back, you can’t see it.

What’s wrong with that you ask?  Have you ever seen anybody put something (a book, a scanner, an external hard drive, etc) on top of a computer?  Of course, you see that all the time.  Well, with this clever design, you put something on top of the computer, or worse still have it sitting there for a while as you are working, and then you nudge it … <poof> the computer gets turned off in the middle of your work because you inadvertantly pushed the power button.

Now, this takes a special kind of brain damage to design a case like this, and have it go through testing, and approvals, and manufacturing.  I am astounded that nobody in the whole arduous process said “um, isn’t that a bad spot for the power button?”.  It’s probably the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome.  Whatever the reason, I’m sorely disappointed in HP for this horrible blunder.

Mar 15 2010

Two Inane things for the price of one

Here’s a rare treat, courtesy of my friend Jeff:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/add2/

This inane product is a plant soil moisture monitor that communicates with you via that inane Twitter system.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we see more of this sort of thing in the future.  I find it odd that people seem to view Twitter as a fixture which can be relied upon, free of charge, for all kinds of odd communication purposes.  I’m not convinced that their business model is necessarily viable in the long run, and if it is, it might not always be free.  This doesn’t strike me as something I want to put in the middle of a communication stream that I care about.  But then, I’m a control freak.

Mar 4 2010

GoDaddy support

For years, I have been using GoDaddy for my domain registrar and DNS host.  It has been nothing but a pleasant experience.  On the rare occasion that I have a problem, a quick phone call resolves it in minutes.  Ideal!

So now, I think that I’ll give their hosting a spin.  I have various “teething” problems, as one might expect, not having used their environment before.  I call support, several times on several issues, and the result is always the same; “we don’t provide that”, “we can’t help you with that”, “we don’t support 3rd party products”, “we don’t allow you access to that”.  So, while their domains/DNS tech support efforts get A+, their hosting support gets D-

Fortunately, I have been a programmer for 20+ years, and can solve things on my own (what’s a little hacking between friends?).  However, I have to wonder how other customers are able to deal with this.  Moral of the story: If you aren’t VERY technical, don’t use them.

Mar 1 2010

Boilerplate responses

Support for computers and software is notorious for being frustrating and ultimately not helpful.  Unfortunately, this isn’t just a stereotype, it’s a truism.  The two big problem areas I see in this realm are:

  1. Outsourcing – many companies outsource their support to cheap labor abroad.  Customers have to wade through knee-deep accents to try to get the person to understand the problem.  Typically, these people do not understand very much at all, but are reading from a knowledge-base “script” as they ask the pre-canned questions and have the user do things to try to solve the problem.
  2. Boilerplates – even domestic tech support suffers a similar problem.  There are stock boilerplate responses to incoming queries which are dispatched as quickly as possible in order to move on to the next problem.  Typically, support techs are rewarded for the number of cases they can resolve.  So, if they can get the customer to just give up and go away, the case is resolved, and this looks good for them.  Very little thought is put into the process, and frequently only one part of a trouble ticket will be addressed by the boilerplate response, and everything else is ignored.

The industry clearly needs to fix this as long-term, this could be very destructive.  It’s somewhat like loaning money to people who can’t afford to pay it back… does that ring a bell?

Feb 25 2010

Why Twitter Sucks

Here’s an interesting article I ran across: http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=925316

It hints at the dark side, but you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see a reader’s comment which I find to be really pealing back the skin of the little blue beast:
Posted 03/25/2009 8:45AM by Momra

What I have not seen addressed in the piece or in the comments is the self-violation of privacy that twittering entails. We are rightly concerned about the government accessing our library files or tapping our phone, but twittering relies on allowing, no encouraging! strangers to plunder your personal thoughts. Personally I find it a soul-shrinking prospect.

Phew! I thought I was the only one left who valued privacy.  I don’t want people to stalk me, track me, quote me, examine me, or dredge up something stupid I said years ago (so what on earth am I doing writing this blog?  Don’t go there).  Technology empowers us to do just this, if we allow it.  Frightening, isn’t it, that the “mark of the beast” should emerge as a cute little blue bird.